This Means War is an example of what Hollywood refers to as a “high-concept” movie — and what French critics often place under the heading la haute poppicocquerie.
The concept is that two CIA agents find themselves dating the same woman. They are both very “into” her, and this leads to a competition for her affections. Thus they must cycle through a set series of personal displays, like human peacocks, as mandated by the American code of interpersonal relations. This includes showing that you have an adventurous side, a sensitive side, and so on — as well as, in a touchingly blunt confrontation with reality, that small “T Rex” hands don’t mean you’re necessarily all that small in the area politely known as Down There or, as the French have it, le panti.
The fact that none of this is particularly cute or funny points, in my view, to a subtle satire of American mores, only apparently encased in the glazed shell of the narrative. But let us not get ahead of ourselves and go, as shrinks say, too deep too soon.
Chris Pine plays FDR Foster, hilariously named for the great American president, and Tom Hardy plays Tuck, even more hilariously named after a cosmetic-surgery procedure. They are brothers-in-arms, so close as to be practically two halves of the same person. Their bromance has reached a peak of mutual empathy, though it will be shattered by their conflict over Lauren (Reese Witherspoon). Tuck, actually, is British, but I see this as a quiet yet penetrating comment on how Britain has, in matters of diplomacy and war, become a mere appendage of the United States.
Manly yet metrosexual humour
Their CIA offices look like a cross between a space pod and a call centre, which is appropriate; they have the latest surveillance technology at their disposal, and they use it (on each other).
The Patriot Act, which allows intrusion into citizens’ privacy, is invoked with no solemnity. Rather, it is simply a passing joke in this cavalcade of manly yet metrosexual humour. George W Bush would be proud.
These agents of the state are also casually willing to torture suspects, which is, I feel certain, a sharp comment on the role of the CIA in the Bush administration’s hacking away at civil liberties.
This is a lesson of which we, in South Africa, should take special note. From state secrecy on “national security” to torture is but an easy step and, as This Means War so cogently shows, it can be taken with a light shrug.
I must mention, too, that the object of FDR and Tuck’s strained affections — Lauren — is a high-profile consumer journalist, so she gets to test all sorts of products in interestingly cinematic ways: throwing, splashing, and so forth. Lauren’s job I take to be a way of foregrounding, as we critics say, the whole complex of contemporary consumer-society and thus the tottering edifice of Late Capitalism, giving the film an entirely new level of embedded significance. We are directed (in a non-coercive way) to read the story in this context and, as Marx and other famous sociologists taught, context is content.
Thus the film shows how the “crisis of masculinity” that has been going on since women got the vote is, in fact, a product of the neoliberalist fetishisation of competition. Lauren is presented trying to make some hard decisions, with the help of a female friend, which is a lesson in how the subaltern can learn to speak against the disempowering mechanisms of the ideological state apparatus.
Realms hitherto untouched
But I have kept the best for last. In one key respect, This Means War goes beyond a mere sociopolitico-economic critique and into realms hitherto untouched by cinema. Untouched, perhaps, but foreshadowed by the famous comment on Samson and Delilah, a 1949 vehicle for Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr: to wit, that it was the only movie in which the hero had bigger breasts than the heroine.
The perspicacious viewer, while watching This Means War, will note that Hardy’s lower lip demonstrates a fullness unseen since Brad Pitt was in his mid-20s. Pine, though not nearly so lavishly endowed, is hardly to be sniffed at in the lip department. Contrast such labile riches, however, with the female mouths on display. Tuck’s ex-wife has lips that would not shame a shark — that is to say, if they were not outlined in lipstick, she’d have none at all. And Witherspoon, the double love interest, disdains even the simulacrum of lip that would be provided by a dab of Clarins Joli Rouge.
Here we see a striking inversion of the usual gender stereotype — and another way in which the movie provides a staggeringly acute insight into the state of American love, as (over-)determined, of course, by the nefarious mechanisms of consumer capitalism and the mendacious power plays of the “war on terror”.
One more thing. It will be seen that Witherspoon’s smile displays a tendency to wander all over her face, as though it were the detached trace of some authentic emotional capability. Sometimes it’s high up beneath her nose, showing off chompers of startling “whiteness”, and at other times it seems to edge downwards in a desperate attempt to jump right off her chin. In all cases, it is entirely free of any supposed reference to a real person having real feelings.
This, perhaps, is the mobile punctum at the heart of the extraordinary web of signification that is This Means War. But I must not over-interpret, and I leave it to the perspicacious (and no doubt now perspiring) viewer to decode that one.