2005's Homecoming, Joe Dante's Brilliant Satire About the Iraq War, is More Timely and Relevant Than Ever
Great satire is perpetually timely, even when explicitly rooted in a time, place, and specific cultural context.
The classic terror tale “It’s a Good Life” began as a 1953 short story by Jerome Bixby. Rod Serling adapted it into a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone. Joe Dante then adapted it for the big screen as the standout segment in 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie.
The story of a child with God-like powers who dispatches adults who displease him in any way to a cornfield that alternately suggests purgatory and hell has been with us for over three-quarters of a century, yet it’s never been more relevant.
I wrote about the uncanny commonalities between Anthony Fremont, the all-powerful child from It’s a Good Life, and Donald Trump, the powerful man-child currently destroying the world’s economy out of arrogance and a child-like refusal to concede that he’s wrong, in 2020, in the aftermath of Trump’s loss in the presidential election.
A lot has changed since then. Even in defeat, Trump remained powerful. Oh sure, some Republicans has the testicular fortitude to criticize the reality television bozo after the unsuccessful insurrection of January 6th, 2021, but he retained more or less complete control of the GOP even after two impeachments, thirty-four felony convictions, and clear-cut signs of mental decay.
Trump was powerful in his first term. He sees himself as all-powerful this time around. He’s filled his cabinet with billionaire neophytes chosen for their loyalty to Trump and willingness to put his needs and wishes above those of the country rather than qualifications or experience.
Before Trump 2.0, a series of checks and balances kept one branch of the government from becoming too powerful.
Trump does not see the three branches of government as equal. He thinks the role of the legislative and Judicial branches is to execute the executive branch’s will.
If Trump thinks that a congressman or judge is being insufficiently deferential, then he engages in the political equivalent of sending them to the cornfield. If a Republican senator, congressman or judge votes against him then he threatens to have Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, use his vast fortune to fund challengers who will do whatever Trump wants, even if it’s illegal, immoral, impossible or some combination of the three.
For Republicans, criticizing Trump in any way constitutes political suicide, so, like the traumatized grown-ups of It’s a Good Life, they have to pretend that everything says and does and wants is innately good and wise, no matter wrong or clearly insane.
Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, has to pretend that Donald Trump wanting an unconstitutional third term in office as president is a very good idea that he should definitely pursue even if it means that a clearly senile and foggy 78 year old man who can barely form a coherent sentence remain the powerful man in the world seven and a half long years from now, when he’d be in his mid 80s.
Republicans who do not wish to find themselves in the cornfield alongside Nikki Haley, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence and every other Republican who displeased Trump feel obligated to act as if it is a wonderful idea to antagonize Canada by simultaneously treating them like a hated enemy pumping Fentanyl over the border and robbing us blind and our fifty-first state.
Most recently, MAGA die-hards had to pretend that, actually, it was a good thing that Trump’s tariffs caused the stock market to crater, resulting in trillions of dollars in losses in mere days and risking a global recession.
Conservative columnist Benny Johnson wrote of the historic stock market crash, “Losing money means nothing. Digital ones and zeroes. In the end, you won't miss any of it.
Losing your country costs you everything. You will never get that back. Your kids will be slaves to foreign powers who hate us.
Without America First policies, we become slaves.”
Johnson knows that it’s a good thing to treat every other country in the world like our hated enemies, including our closest allies. How else will we keep Canada from enslaving us?
Trump is doing everything in his power to ensure that our country is widely hated by treating everyone else in the world like deadbeat pieces of shit who better pay up or we’ll make life very hard for them.
TV personality Jeanne Piro agreed with Johnson that losing a fortune in an instant was a sign of strength, arguing, “The uncertainty in the stock market isn’t necessarily a negative. It can be an indication that things are going to work out. It’s just that things are uncertain right now.
“I don’t really care about my 401(k) today. You know why? Not that I can afford it. Not that it isn’t important. Not that I’m not at a point in my life when I should be worried about my 401(k), because I am, but this is what I believe: I believe in this man, and I believe that what we’re seeing now with his bringing in a trillion dollars in business and manufacturing, and companies moving back to the United States, and seeing what we saw during COVID when we had all those supply chain problems. We couldn’t get medicine in this country, other countries were prioritizing themselves before they were sending stuff to us.”
I appreciate the exquisite irony of Pirro bitterly complaining that other countries prioritize their own needs over helping the United States when the essence of “America First” is that we must prioritize our own needs over everyone else’s. The key difference is that when we do that, we’re smart, strong, and right, but when they do the same thing, they’re greedy, evil, and wrong and must be punished.
A little over two decades after Twilight Zone: The Movie, Joe Dante directed Homecoming for the Showtime horror anthology series Masters of Horror.
Dante’s adaptation of Dale Bailey’s “Death & Suffrage” casts Jon Tenney as Dave Murch, a cynical political operative in the Lee Atwater mode. If this were a classic movie, Fred McMurray or William Holden would probably play him.
When confronted by a grieving mother about why her son had to die, the slickster said, "Believe me, if I had one wish, I would wish for your son to come back, because I know he would tell us how important this struggle is.”
The anti-hero regrets uttering those words when they come true in the most morbidly literal manner possible. Iraq veterans sent to die in a senseless war over a cynical lie come back as zombies with a mission: to elect an anti-war candidate in a presidential election.
That might sound silly, glib, or cartoonish, but Homecoming has a surprising emotional depth. Dante has accomplished the impossible in creating zombies with dignity, undead ghouls with nobility, and a sense of purpose.
They don’t say much because they are dead, but what they say matters. One unfortunate victim of both Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Posthumous-Traumatic Stress Disorder talks about the tragedy of men and women with families and futures and dreams dying for lies.
There are different kinds of warfare. There’s the military variety, of course, but there are also culture wars and trade wars. They also have their casualties.
Countless people have suffered and died from Donald Trump’s lies. Hundreds of thousands of MAGA cultists died preventable deaths because they took their cues from a president who wouldn’t wear a mask because he thought it would make him look like a dork and thought Ivectum worked just as well as the vaccine pushed by Dr. Fauci.
People are going to die because of DOGE cuts. They won’t be able to afford life-saving medication and operations because our social safety net has been set ablaze to pay for tax cuts for billionaires like the nineteen in Trump’s cabinet. Veterans are going to die because Trump, who professes to revere our military, yet consistently works against their interests, fired 80,000 employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs. More recently, Trump chose to go golfing at his country club rather than attend a ceremony for four soldiers who died in a training exercise.
Trump loves troops in theory. In actuality, he’s not about to let their deaths affect his golf schedule.
The zombies in Homecoming, a potent allegory at once profoundly cynical and deeply idealistic, act in their self-interest and the interest of humanity. They know the ugly reality of war and the carnage and devastation left in its wake.
They’ve paid the ultimate price for our country’s insatiable lust for oil and don’t want their brothers in uniform to die for the same worthless reasons. So they cross the barrier separating life and death for the best of all reasons: voting against Republicans.
People liked George W. Bush. His whole deal was likability. But Trump’s die-hard supporters love him. They worship him. They ascribe God-like powers to someone who barely seems human most of the time.
I suspect that if Trump supporters who died directly from his actions were to die and then come back as zombies, they would vote for him all over again.
If the MAGA mob met Jesus, who told them that Trump was a rapist and a thief, a fake christian who knew damn well that he lost the 2020 election even if he pretended otherwise, and a dangerous narcissist who knew that masks and the vaccines worked, and saved countless lives, I suspect they wouldn’t believe him.
Despite being Christians, they’d probably tell Jesus that he was a radical, far-left Marxist Trump hater with a clear case of Trump Derangement Syndrome who was pushing fake news, a hoax, and a witch hunt who can’t be trusted.
If these zombies made it back to earth, they’d undoubtedly vote for zombie Trump to win his fifth term. They’d blindly support deadly wars in Canada and Greenland.
These undead cultists would continue to vote against their best interests, the country’s best interests, and the interests of humanity and for the interests of billionaires who don’t care if they live or die or if they come back to life after dying.
The world has gotten much darker in the two decades since Homecoming aired. The devastating satire now feels strangely hopeful in its conception of an America where honor, decency, and humanity matter, and we remain principled citizens who believe in democracy and fair elections even after death.
What seemed dark and despairing at its release now seems oddly optimistic. Reality has proven darker than even the darkest of comedies.
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Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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