‘South Park’ Creators Expand to All of ‘America’

With the election looming and the success of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 inspiring an army of young documentarians, it’s been a busy year for propaganda. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park, know their place in such a climate, and with their new puppet movie Team America: World Police, they remain as incisive and furious as we’ve come to expect. Their job has always been to drive the swine out onto clear pastures, exposing the liars and mocking the jerks who hog our airtime and control our country—and with Team America, their satire reaches a more global scope than the duo ever has before.

The key to expanding their scope is, surprisingly enough, simplicity in storytelling and process.

“I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about considering a target as much as trying to tell the story from the lead character’s point of view,” says Stone, who co-wrote the script. Though many filmmakers earnestly espouse a similar philosophy, rarely do they make their lead characters puppets.

It is a surprising choice that Stone explains away with characteristically surrealist abandon. “Thunderbirds came on TV a couple of years ago and it really had such an interesting feel, but the stories were so boring and shitty so we started talking about how great it would be to do a movie like that,” Stone says. “It’s one of those things that was never intended to be funny, but now is really funny so it was kind of watching Thunderbirds and then kind of combining that with wanting to make fun of big Hollywood movies, big event movies, big action movies, big Bruckheimer movies.”

Charmingly, the rough edges of the team’s production aesthetic are just as obvious as they are on South Park. The puppet strings are visible, the mouths don’t move very well, and the movements are stilted. That said, the movie looks very good, and the realistic explosions, detailed atmospheres, and expressive faces keep each scene visually interesting.

The jokes, particularly those that reference real life and geopolitics in Team America, are both subtle and obvious—depending on how much you know, and in some cases, which side of the political spectrum you consider home.

Yet according to Stone, the idea driving the movie was always to remain as non-partisan as possible.

“I really don’t know anything about politics more than anybody else, and truthfully I think Trey and I are like most people—we’re kind of down the middle with our personal political affiliation,” he says. “We tried to do the honest thing, the more emotionally and intellectually honest thing—that most people, unless you’re just a complete rabid partisan, [have had] mixed feelings about where America’s place is in the world in the last three years.”

It freaks him out, Stone says, to think that anyone might be influenced to vote a certain way after seeing his movie.

“Politics is the theme and the back drop of Team America, but it’s more about the emotions behind the politics. We really don’t take a hardcore stand like ‘you should think this.’”

Their goal is an honorable one, and as a result, the film is refreshingly even-handed in its satire. Stone says he hasn’t even seen any of the recently released polemic documentaries, and although he was something of a keynote interview in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, the controversial filmmaker gets lambasted in Team America with just as much, if not more, vitriol as the Bush administration.

The action starts out on the sunny streets of Paris, France, with street vendors selling, artists drawing, and in a characteristically hilarious bit of self-reference, a puppeteer working a marionette to the amusement of schoolchildren. Meanwhile, a young smiling boy walks down the road eating a chocolate ice cream bar when he spots none other than Osama bin Laden and a group of his cronies holding a beeping, blinking metal chest.

Like all the Arabs portrayed in the movie, bin Laden speaks to his men in gibberish, emphatically barking orders that sound like little more than “durka durka durka” and “akarabaka.” That about boils down all the Arabic “spoken” in the movie, but Parker and Stone’s tradition of equal-opportunity offense should keep them immune from any accusations of racism.

“You in the robes,” someone suddenly shouts from off screen, “put down the WMD and get on the ground! You’re under arrest.” All hell breaks loose, and as bullets fly, buildings explode and the Eiffel Tower topples onto the Arc de Triomph at the hands of a misfired American bazooka, we are introduced to the good looking men and women of Team America.

Not long after the chaos, we meet the film’s main villain—a petulant Kim Jong-Il who sounds like Cartman and sings a song about being “ronery.” His character resembles that of Satan in the South Park feature film, in that his notorious evil nature is softened and made absurd by an overblown sensitive side.

“I’m so ronery,” the dictator sings from atop his balcony, having just sent UN weapons inspector Hans Blix into a pool of sharks to be decapitated. “No one takes me seriously. When I rule the world maybe they’ll notice me.”

It’s pretty close to the same joke as in Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, but it’s nevertheless effective. As Stone puts it, “it feels like one of our movies” and audiences should respond. Indeed, as South Park continues to get smarter and quicker, Parker and Stone—a couple of former waterheads from the University of Colorado—have accidentally become the elder wisemen of our time. Despite the TV show’s superficially immature bag of jokes, the American public—or at least the young, loud left—has more or less come to realize that the show’s creators are straight shooters when it comes to right and wrong.

When Stone is asked about his vote in the upcoming election, he responds, “I don’t know. I don’t think that’s important to the movie so I really don’t want to talk about that.”

The point is that Parker and Stone have no political agenda to propagandize, and as a result, they avoid didacticism. As it stands, Team America is the only political film of 2004 whose strings are pulling their own weight.

—Staff writer Leon Neyfakh can be reached neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.