Infiltrating Camp Commando

The unbelievably futuristic aspects of Globotech’s Commando Elite toy soldiers seem less futuristic and unbelievable once we begin to study today’s toy industry. The new smarter, more militarized toys of today demand more intelligent modes of interaction.

Camp aesthetics disrupt or invert many Modernists’ aesthetic attributes, such as beauty, value, and taste by inviting a different kind of apprehension and consumption.... A camp aesthetic delights in impertinence. It likes to chal­lenge rather than satisfy. Its satisfactions derive from a sort of puissance of acceptance.²⁸

In his influential study of gay and lesbian military personnel in World War II, Allan Berube described not only the lives of gay and lesbian peo­ple but also the performances of queer gender and sexuality that took place in many GI shows. Cross-dressing and playing with gender were vivid aspects of military life during this war and can offer a slantwise view of militarized gender today. The ability to disrupt militarized masculinity’s dominating control over strength, courage, and patriotism lends camp a certain interpretive and cultural power. By exposing hypermasculinity as a performance, camp attests to the fact that there is nothing natural or normal about the alignment of militarized masculinity with the qualities it professes to control. With humor and impertinence, camp drives a wedge between militarism and hypermasculinity. This splitting is core to camp’s influence as a cultural force.

Small Soldiers invites a camp reading in a number of ways: with its absurd exaggeration of military masculinity in the personas of the Commando Elite; its winking nods to Hollywood war films by referencing To Hell and Back, Patton, Apocalypse Now, and The Dirty Dozen; its grue­somely playful weaponization of the mundane in the combat scenes; and with its reference to the campy mockumentary Spinal Tap, by using the cast members from this film as the voice actors for the Gorgonites.²⁹ Added to this list of elements, Alan Abernathy's point of view with regard to the nar­rative invites viewers to entertain the notion that combat is not a perfor­mance of courage or patriotism, but a mindless destructive performance set into play by anonymous forces far behind the scenes who stand to profit from the show. Alan's viewpoint offers a third position for the children who may identify with him—neither perpetrator nor noble victim but witness to destruction and collateral damage survivor.

Alan does not disrupt the programming of the Gorgonites, who set out like noble savages turned colonizers on a voyage to find their homeland, Gorgon. Whether in their quest they will displace metaphorical toy equiva­lents of Palestinians or will model a life of allegiance to a truly fictional mother country, perhaps the ideal example of Benedict Anderson's notion of an imagined community, is up to the collectors who buy and put into use all the Small Soldiers play sets and toys. What the movie has done is left a narrative base that is wide open and ambiguous in which children can explore and experiment. More experienced players can enter this world of play and introduce those with less experience to some of the issues contem­porary global citizens must negotiate without lecturing on imperialism, militarism, or current events. Over time, play within this narrative will generate questions and connections that can be answered and developed as situations warrant without dampening fun or compassionate awareness.