Emma Peel Sessions 13 – How do you solve a problem like Mr. Freedom?

“Hey, Captain America is alive again, this is front page news… OF THE ARTS SECTION BECAUSE OF THE IRANIAN ELECTION.”

Marvel, you fucked up something major there thinking that you’re at all newsworthy.

But hey, Daredevil‘s been really good lately.

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EMPTY WALLETS, EMPTY PARKING LOTS, THAT’S NOT MY STYLE

So anyone ever see Mr. Freedom?

Well if you haven’t – five minutes in Mr. Freedom shoots some black kids in the face for no reason. No fucking reason.

This is that kind of movie. The kind of movie you feel like shit for watching, let alone enjoying. It’s transgressive in a really ugly, nasty way that only the best satire is, and it is designed to make you feel disgusted with nearly every aspect of American culture. It’s also really dated – in that the critique of Charles De Gaulle doesn’t even show up now (at least to me). But beyond that – it’s funny, it’s violent, and it’s great looking.

I first heard about it in the Gorillaz’s oral history book, where Jamie Hewlett compared it favorably to Death Race 2000 and Rollerball, and have heard it mentioned a few times since. Weirdly enough, it seems that I knew more about it than I thought. Beck completely ganked the style and costuming for his “Sexx Laws” video, and had a pre-fame Jack Black work in some quotes from the Friends of Freedom rally. Hewlett referenced it in the “Rock the House” video, and I’m pretty damn sure that Frank Miller watched it at least once before working on The Dark Knight Strikes Again. So coming to it 30 years later I’m probably more prepared for it than someone who was living through protests in Paris in 1967. As amazing as it is – it’s contemporary and the work that Mr. Freedom is most compared to – Dr. Strangelove has been assimilated into popular consciousness. Not just through the Simpsons, but the most right wing gung ho fuck you Michael Bay Jerry Bruckheimer movie ever has Steve Buscemi doing a running schtick off of Strangelove. It’s maybe the best, most accurate piece of satire that’s ever existed, but it ain’t shocking anymore. Not really. In the intervening years there’s been a lot to dull any sensitivites you can have for this sort of thing – Starship Troopers and Coonskin saw to that. But Mr. Freedom still has teeth, it is hateful towards absolutely everything and knows exactly what it’s targets are. The closest thing I can compare it to isn’t Strangelove, but Mills and O’Neil’s Marshall Law. Only instead of hating superheroes and all the bullshit that they stand for – it’s at the entire United States and the other world major powers while it’s good and pissed. It is unflinching too – if you watch pretty much any scene removed from the film its a jingoistic nightmare. And like… 85% of the movie is just that. Which is what makes it so subversive is how Klein really isn’t interested in winning anyone over, and therefore doesn’t tip his hand. So you might watch the film as an example of 1960s satire at it’s most extreme, but in reality you will probably only watch Mr. Freedom if you want to gape at fucked up shit for two hours. It’s high cultural rubbernecking. I’ve felt better gawking at an accident.

In the first five minutes, Mr. Freedom changes costume from a surly Dirty Sherrif to the Mr. Freedom costume (which changes scene-to-scene, but  always seems like a combo of football quarterback, baseball umpire, Captain America, rodeo clown, and fighter pilot) to a trenchcoat and hat (looking like a grotesque caricature of Lemmy Caution) to a bolo-tie wearing Texas oil-rich magnate. In every outfit, Freedom (who has no other name) looks like a fucking evil son of a bitch. The way John Abbey, who plays Freedom, stalks through the frame is so watchable because you’re waiting for him to hurt someone. Which of course, he does. In reading online I’ve seen people comparing Mr. Freedom to George W Bush, and I see where they’re coming from. But Mr. Freedom only comes off as stupid in a couple scenes, and really it’s played more as naivete. No, Abbey plays Freedom as a supervillain. He’s crafty, ruthless, and a disturbingly able orator. He’s not stupid. In fact you can watch him playing stupid, which makes it that much more sinister. And it’s in no uncertain terms that Mr. Freedom represents America, and the word “freedom” is completely meaningless by the time we get through the big speech.

The big, shining, genius scene in this movie – the reason to watch it – is when Mr. Freedom goes to the US embassy. Which of course is a massive supermarket staffed entirely by dizzy gogo girls and CIA agents.  Freedom and the Ambassador walk around discussing the state of political life in France, followed by the girls who never stop dancing, and key phrases of the Ambassador’s dialog repeated by an announcer (such as”Freedom is Slavery”). Then he gets a shopping bag full of atomic weapons and goes to pick a fight with the giant inflatable SUPERFRENCHMAN and kills his henchmen with hypnotic glasses, and issues a 48 hr warning for all of France if he doesn’t get what he wants. Everything after is just as crazy, but feels diminished. Then Freedom goes to his rival  Moujik Man – who looks and acts exactly like a Rocky and Bullwinkle drawing of a Cossack – and it’s a French subway station full of Red Propoganda posters. Freedom and Moujik start off talking like old DC comics rivals but quickly slide into a conversation of two businessmen divvying up land contracts. The fact that this sudden move doesn’t screw with the tone of the film should tell you something. Then Red Chinaman (a giant inflatable dragon, constantly shifting and spitting white mist – and shouting in a stereotypical Chinese voice), who tries to convince Moujik Man not to deal with him. Then Jesus and his mom show up. Freedom is shown to be occasionally clumsy, he’s also shown murdering his own accomplices. He’s too dangerous not to be taken seriously.

The other characters are sparse – most are just flat characters given alliterative Stan Lee-style names. Really, only Marie-Madeline and Dr. Freedom played by a top-of-his-game Donald Pleasance. Freedom is shown as a face on a slightly detuned television, flickering in and out as he intones fatherly speeches about The Reds, The Blacks, The Jews, The Maybes, and the Don’t-Knows. He’s the kind of talking head boss that became cliche in superspy stories taken to it’s most extreme – if it weren’t for the final scene, you could argue that Dr. Freedom is just a voice in Mr.Freedom’s head telling him what’s what. Delphine Seyrig plays Marie-Madeline as as a woman so sexually aroused she can barely stand up straight, let alone think. The confused glassy stare and darting tongue in her introduction of Freedom to the F.O.F. rally – she looks like an animal shocked to find out it’s on a talk show set. Of course, this being a satire of America by way of comics… of course she’s betrays him. Of course she killed Capitain Formidable. Of course all women are not to be trusted.

Mr. Freedom, in his only moment of doubt, starts bleeding stigmata. Which he makes go away by eating cornflakes and going to the dentist.  I’ve never seen anything like it.

The F.O.F. training facility sequence is – something – Klein just jump cuts to a Boschian nightmare world of horrific violence , men in dresses beating the shit out of each other indiscriminately, women being brutalized, boxers getting shot, strongmen spitting blood, nazis on motorcylces – but then Freedom comes in and you see it’s a training room. Even here, with something this awful going in, Klein squeezes in jokes about Freedom’s speeches being so hard to follow that Serge Gainsbourg can’t transcribe them. Once again there’s a change midsentence for Freedom, where Cold War destabilization tactics turn into a sales pitch. There is no line between rape camps, cold war rallies, the Bay of Pigs, and selling shoes for Klein. It’s all the same – then we see Freedom firing randomly into a crowd of innocent people and his crew terrorizing the city with vandalism. In this sequence and the next – at Freedom’s super-high-tech command center (its a kind of Hall of Justice by way of nuclear facility stocked with dozens of people in ridiculous technicolor rubber costumes and naked dancing girls. But apparently they’re using it as a polling center and radio station) – the violence is played as ugly and reprehensible. But it’s still fetishized as if it were  60s Marvel comic. Klein is fantastic at shooting this stuff, so the gulf and unease between enjoying and being disgusted is being played all the time. Hell, Klein apparently had Abbey go out to demonstrations in character so documentary footage of real demonstrations is in the film un-altered. Freedom is there, circled for our convience. If there was an doubt that this is a reaction to real events that’s it – shots of these things actually happening. There’s about ten minutes of the film following  shots of Freedom in the crowds, but it’s less important once we see the real thing. This is really happening, and it’s pretty hard to ignore. Finally the bad guys blow the shit out of Freedom and kill all his friends. His arm is torn off too revealing circuitry, and Donald Pleasance tells him that he did nothing, and France isn’t fucking worth it., and that it’s time for isolationism once again. Of course, he goes out singing.

“Do not look back, do not brood, you need a change of scenery. Take a little vacation. Rest up. Meditate. Now let’s sing together: EFF ARR DOUBLE-EE DEE/DEE OH EMM SPELLS BOOM! BOOM!”