3 - Team America: World Police: Duplicitous Voices of the Socio-political Spy Musical

Summary

Team America: World Police (Trey Parker and Matt Stone, 2004) expertly subverts and redacts conventions of Hollywood and Broadway musicals, mixing parody and politics in a fertile intertextual landscape. The film employs an ambiguous voice, a complicated parody of both conservative and progressive politics, and uses musical voices to indicate or reference various racisms and ironies, as well as to provoke and bait audience sensibilities. The film became hugely influential, paving the way for other comedies such as OSS 117 Le Caire: nid d'espions (Michel Hazanavicius, 2006) and The Interview (Seth Roger and Evan Goldberg, 2014). While Team America's absurdist politics grabbed most of the critical attention lavished on the film, its implementation of musical numbers was groundbreaking, traditional, effective, reverent and irreverent all at once.

The story centres loosely around Broadway actor Gary, who is recruited by Team America because of the acting ability he demonstrates in Lease, a show-within-a-show parody of Rent. So begins Team America as something of a backstage musical, a tired subgenre rejuvenated by the incisiveness of the spot-on showstopper ‘Everyone Has AIDS’. But Team America progresses into a spy thriller cum action movie, parodied by the use of marionettes, in which situational musical numbers’ moderate pace, communicate emotional subtext and provide witty commentary, much as in a traditional musical.

Kim Jong-il's ‘I'm So Ronery’ subversively gives the ‘hopes and aspirations’ number to the villain, rather than the hero; filmmakers Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Pam Brady pioneered this gimmick in their earlier film, South Park:

Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999), with Saddam Hussein's plaintive ‘Up There’. Team America encapsulates every possible use of music, from underscore to diegetic music, to its self-referential ‘Montage’, wreaking havoc with a Rocky parody, breaking the fourth wall, and throwing everything into a fantastical gap, a liminal space confounding diegesis, genre and political posture.

BUT IS IT A MUSICAL?

Filmmakers Matt Stone and Trey Parker share a background in music, and musical theatre permeates virtually all their work. A cursory look at their creative partnership, from adolescence through past projects to the current day, shows consistent alignment, homage, deployment and subversion of musical genre conventions, show tunes and formal structures.