The Smell of Satire in the Toy Room

The media text that is Small Soldiers invites children to play and learn for themselves why some adults prohibit war toys. Satire requires trust in one's audience: if viewers read the text straight, it will offer morally unsound examples.

The movie opens with the parody of a commercial for Globotech Corporation, “long recognized as the world-wide leader in high tech weap­onry.” Under the leadership of CEO Gil Mars, Globotech is expanding its interests into “tomorrow’s most exciting market sector. Introducing advanced battlefield technology into consumer products for the whole family.” Even if the commercial’s dialogue does not have great meaning to young viewers, they will be savvy enough to know that the typical advertisement does not combine images of military tanks, missiles, and warships with the style of cliched family scenes—on the beach, in the living room, with a new baby—that this commercial presents.²⁰ Thus, from the opening minutes of the film, viewers are introduced to the idea that the military and home spaces are combining in strange and unexpected ways. The binary opposi­tion between the military and the domestic is dangerously resolved via dia­lectical synthesis, and two new entities are created: the domesticated-military and the militarized-domestic.

The first four characters introduced are CEO Gil Mars, his female assis­tant, and two bumbling toy developers. In addition to being able to recog­nize the disconnect between military hardware and domestic space, most children will also be sophisticated enough to recognize who the formulaic good guys and bad guys are: the boss who has fired all the people, who would be sitting around the large wooden table, is the bad guy and the two toy makers are the good guys. However, the narrative begins to play imme­diately with viewers’ identifications; the bad guy is tired of commercials that lie to consumers, promising more than they can ever deliver. Mars also knows that kids do not want to be tricked into learning by their toys. Even though Irwin Wayfair is the more gentle good guy, his concept for the Gorgonite toy line that helps children learn and do research shows his nerdy naivete and questionable understanding of his target market. Mars seems to know what children want and insists that his company produce cool toys with batteries included that are capable of lasting a lifetime. Again, from the very opening of the film, the audience is introduced to a dynamic that is significant to the entire text: the ability to shift identification with and expectations of characters. Mars, who seems like a bad-guy boss, leaves the brief scene speaking on behalf of kids and their desires. Whether or not young audience members will be able to balance the side of Mars they are bound to like with the side that is dangerously cavalier will depend on the child. For example, Mars states:

We can make a missile that can hunt one unlucky bastard 7,000 miles away and stick a nuclear warhead right up his ass. I don’t think we’re going to have a problem with this [the technology to make the toys interactive].

It is difficult to resolve the interests of giving some children what they want while using technology with the same capacity to possibly kill other chil­dren who live those 7,000 miles away.

The most startling shift in audience identification occurs once it is clear that the Commando Elite, the toy stand-ins for the U.S. military, are the bad guys. Viewers who have been in synch with the movie’s satiric position­ing from the opening segment will have expected the Commandoes’ violent behavior, but younger and more naive viewers used to seeing U.S. soldiers convey redeeming characteristics may be shocked as the Commandoes bind and take the Fimple children hostage, drug Mrs. Fimple, launch flaming tennis balls into a civilian home with no regard for collateral damage, and mutilate an extensive collection of female fashion dolls. This is not the kind of viewer identification for which popular media has prepared U.S. chil­dren. Siding with the Gorgonites who are mutant, monstrous freaks who fight (albeit reluctantly) against U.S. soldiers is the stuff of propaganda, not mainstream, summer blockbusters made for the family-viewing audience. The irony of a mainstream product delivering such a marginal critique is compounded by the fact that the film was produced by Dreamworks, a motion picture studio cofounded by Stephen Spielberg, who, due largely to the making of Saving Private Ryan is favored in the U.S. populist view as the most renowned and reliable teller of war tales alive today. The movie subverts populist knowledge and positioning by making Mr. Fimple, a likely fan of Spielberg’s work given that he claims his favorite war is World War II, one of the film’s humorous fall guys rather than a valued consumer patriot.

The pure evil of the Commando Elite was what threw off the moral balance of the film for Roger Ebert, leaving him feeling as though the movie “didn’t tell me where to stand—what attitude to adopt.”²¹ I am unsure how to reconcile Ebert’s moral confusion with Scott Rosenberg’s claim in Salon.com that the film is marred by its “fairly heavy-handed message about The Evil That Is War Toys and a cautionary invocation against corporate domination of the entertainment market,” both of which he recommends ignoring in order that audiences may “simply enjoy the filmmakers’ skill at creating carefully contained mayhem in a microcosm.”²² The movie makes it quite clear that the Commando Elite are ruthless and treacherous. After all, it is they who destroy two suburban homes and endanger the men, women, and children in two families just because they have been programmed to hunt down and kill the Gorgonites. One might argue against blaming the toy soldiers due to the fact that, unlike actual military personnel who commit atrocities, the Commando Elite never had the power of free will because they can only act as their program dictates. Small Soldiers disrupts the mes­sages conveyed by typical war toys without shaming or blaming anyone. The movie makes it clear to viewers of all ages that killing is not fun when you are the target and that fighting seems like a terrible option to resolve conflict when you are the weaker combatant positioned to lose all. The movie turns the tables of morality so that its U.S. audience can imagine itself not as the righteous victim of an evil enemy’s violence, as it most typically does, but as complicitous perpetrators whose militarist investments at last cause us to shoot ourselves in the foot.

Although the only logically sound response to the Commando Elite is to destroy them, Gil Mars has a different plan. After paying huge sums of money to the Fimple and Abernathy families in order to buy their silence and prevent lawsuits, Mars holds the following conversation with his two toy developers:

“What were we charging for these things?” [asks Mars as he looks at the severed head of Chip Hazard].

“$79.95.”

“Tell you what, add a few zeroes to the end of that number and get in touch with our military division. I know some rebels in South America who are going to find these toys very entertaining” [says Mars as he returns to his helicopter to be whisked from the scene].

The satire of Small Soldiers’ is comprised of more than simple inversion. The film pokes explosive fun at the lie that the domestication of militarism will benefit the private sector consumer. Gil Mars, the very man who claims that he is tired of commercials that make promises they can never deliver, is the film’s spokesperson for the hucksterism that is militarism. Globotech professes to turn swords into plowshares when, in reality, the narrative exposes how defense industries resell military products to the domestic consumer in order to increase their profit—turning swords into only slightly duller swords for domestic consumption. The private sector increases the defense industry’s market, driving down the cost impact of research and development, and increasing sales. For the defense industry, consumer sales are a winning proposition; civilian consumers get to fund the defense industry first with their federal taxes and again with their pur­chases, paying dual support for war whether they are aware of it or not. The resale of military goods is especially prevalent in high-tech products like computer games and Global Positioning Devices.²³

The destruction of the Fimple and Abernathy homes is an exaggerated representation of the downside of the conglomeration of industries under the military umbrella, yet it does use exaggeration effectively to make the case against the domestication of militarism tangibly clear.

In Small Soldiers, children are not innocent victims in need of paternalistic protection but are actually invited to see how they may hold some respon­sibility for the mayhem created by entertaining themselves with these pro­militarist narratives. The film also illustrates the tensions between giving children what is “cool” and struggling both personally and financially to maintain a moral antiwar and antiwar-toy parenting stance. Alan Abernathy means well when he brings a full set of Commando Elite and Gorgonite toys into his father’s toy store, The Inner Child, but he also knows he is going against his father’s strict policy against war toys. Alan is bored and embarrassed by his parents’ new-age lifestyle. As a new kid in school, he knows the cool guys drive motorcycles and is not above cultivating a bad- guy persona even if he knows it is not truly who he is. When he sees the chance to bring cutting-edge technological toy soldiers into his father's struggling shop, he convinces Joe, Globotech's driver, to “lose” a full set of toys. Although I do not agree with the Christian commentator Israel Canlapan's view of the film, his list of grievances do all take place:

There are ideas about setting a moribund business on fire to collect insurance, conniving to retain merchandise in violation of proper business ethics, and paying people enough money to silence their indignance. If that weren't enough, this movie is filled with many negatives of present society: a cut­throat business magnate who has little regard for moral values, a co-worker who undermines his partner's trust in the name of business success, a trouble­making kid in a dysfunctional family, and a neighbor who rudely violates his neighbor's property.²⁵

Alan does indeed sarcastically suggest that the only way his father's toy store will make money is if he burns it down, and this is how he justifies his unethical decision to take stock bound for another store and break his father's “no war toys” policy. What Canlapan fails to appreciate is that Alan learns his moral lesson without a harping moralizing authority figure shaking a finger in his face. Life unfolds a world of hurt that teaches Alan that war toys are hazardous to all he cares about—his home, family, girlfriend, and even his own life. All of the bad behavior that has offended Canlapan is punished by the film's end, and it is the Commando Elite, the metaphorical face of unchecked militarism, who deliver the discipline and punishment.

Quite unwittingly, the two toy developers, Irwin Wayfair (perhaps the only character who, from start to finish, is a way fair good guy) and Larry Benson, harness the defense industry's will to control life and death when they put artificial intelligence into their electronic toys, making Small Soldiers a modern-day Frankenstein. Trapped in a system that demands innovation and excitement yet refuses to make the necessary expenditures for product safety and testing, Wayfair and Benson create the monsters that are the Commando Elite. In order to keep their jobs (Mars has gutted the labor force from the company that was Heartland Playsystems), Benson and Wayfair have three months to bring the Commando Elite to the market­place. Hooked into the database of Globotech's military division, Benson orders military surplus microchips to animate the toy line, thus setting in play the catastrophe that will wreck the two suburban homes. Benson is a morally suspect character; however, like Alan, he is simply trying to survive in a competitive toy industry where action and violence sell and educational inner-child-strengthening toys earn you a place on the unemployment line. To Benson's credit, once he and Wayfair learn that something has gone wrong with their inventions, they learn how to dismantle the toys and go to Alan's assistance.

The key to the Commando Elite's destruction is found in property­destroying, war-loving, technophilic, obnoxious neighbor Phil Fimple's house. The embattled suburbanites turn on all of the electrical equipment in Fimple's house and then short-circuit the transformer on the power line outside, creating an electric burst that shuts down the Commando Elite and offers an example of a story in which the master's tools really can dismantle the master's house. With the Commandoes thwarted, Alan is free to feel the remorse he has brought on himself by knowingly breaking rules. Because he has felt the danger militarism brings into domestic spaces and has witnessed its destruction, his understanding is more likely to remain with him. Having lived through the fear and life-threatening reality of combat, war is less likely to appear as a child-appropriate game. Thus, in the end, Alan has taught himself to understand and share his father's rejection of war toys.

While I am confident that Alan will remember the lesson he learned about militaristic war toys, I cannot be as confident that the Small Soldiers viewing audience will be equally affected, especially when they are exposed to aisle upon aisle of Small Soldiers products. Given that I have claimed that ade­quately negotiating the interpretative challenges of a satiric text is difficult and requires a skill set that few consumers have honed, in all likelihood, once the movie narrative moves from the movie screen to the playroom, dominant promilitarist narratives will have their opportunity to reclaim any territory lost to Small Soldiers' satiric critique. When Chip Hazard and Archer mix it up with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, Power Rangers, and the like, old patterns will override the inversions practiced in the movie. However, when children replay their favorite scenes from Small Soldiers, the film's text at least opens the opportunity that they will create alternative storylines, oppositional muscle memory, and ironic literacy for themselves.