Television: 'Comrade Detective' Is A Double Agent For A Pro-America Perspective

Titus Techera, The Federalist

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The main characters in ‘Comrade Detective’ play enforcers for a totalitarian tyranny, but you cannot distinguish their lines from those of latter-day irate progressives.

Excerpt:

“Health care is a fundamental human right. Believing in some imaginary God is a form of insanity.” This is the tough rejoinder of a Communist cop to an American ambassador trying to save a priest from torture. The new six-episode Amazon series “Comrade Detective” is supposed to mock American propaganda—a murderer in a Reagan mask is the bad guy. But really it’s a send-up of liberal pieties. ...

The conceit of the show: Channing Tatum and his friends find an old 1980s police drama from Communist Romania and overdub the dialogue. The police drama format offers an ideal combination of earnestness and outrage, and an outlet for violence: you get to see the Left’s view of tough love in paradise. ...

Perhaps more realism about the regime and about the effect of Communism on Romania would have been useful, but it is not necessary. The comedy works here because of the confusions of our age of media. Consider that this show fakes a fake show, a parody of an American show, itself a kind of fake inasmuch as it was not true to the American situation. ...

But the work the comedy does is not supposed to limit itself to pointing out that confusion by perpetrating it on an unprepared audience. Instead, it’s supposed to show that the conventions of manly cop drama, silly as they are in America, really do speak to being American, and simply could not work in a totalitarian tyranny. None of the assumptions about human dignity that the genre relies on fit the other context.

That is ultimately the reason American movies were so influential even behind the Iron Curtain. In fact, seen from the side of deprivation, misery, indignity, and terror, American manliness, a form of individualism, looked much better than it would in America itself. It’s worth asking why Americans never made good movies about Communist situations. But it’s also worth asking why the most prestigious artists in America could not make movies that recommended themselves to audiences so desperately hungry for what America had to offer.

In some strange way, the genre productions especially were both true to America and true to the promise of political freedom, however mediocre and artless they often are. The best public diplomacy out there was not propaganda. It was confidently and unselfconsciously American mediocrity. It is much underrated and very hard to find nowadays.