Twilight Animal: Red Dawn

Colorado means "red" and Aurora means "dawn."

We are entering an alternative reality, of sorts. In case you missed it, we have experienced a red dawn event.

In The Dark Knight Rises, Selina Kyle says to Bruce Wayne: "You think this can last? There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."

Let's briefly examine a motion picture, politics aside and reality asunder, which contains strange coincidences of place and words, with a subplot of a name game with "red dawn."

"It's easy to make fun of a movie about a high school football team led by Patrick Swayze single-handedly defeating the Soviet army....[but] it might be the most anti-American movie made outside of the Middle East," wrote Philip Moon reflectively in 2010.

It is time to look at this film in a new context. I do not make any logical linkages to this film from the events of July 20, 2012. I merely show you the data, and assume together we shall discover tomorrow.

Red Dawn is a 1984 American war film directed by John Milius and co-written by Milius and Kevin Reynolds. It stars Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen and Jennifer Grey.

It was the first film to be released with the MPAA rating of PG-13. At the time it was released, Red Dawn was considered the most violent film by the Guinness Book of Records and The National Coalition on Television Violence, with a rate of 134 acts of violence per hour, or 2.23 per minute.

Red Dawn is set in an alternate 1980s in which the United States is invaded by the Soviet Union and its Cuban and Nicaraguan allies. However, the onset of World War III is in the background and not fully explained or engaged in this narrative fiction. The story involves a group of American high school students who resist the occupation with guerrilla warfare, calling themselves the Wolverines, after their high school mascot.

The film focuses on a fictionalized version of Calumet, Colorado, not as the actual small ghost town but the city as a fairly vibrant community with a substantial population, as depicted in this 1984 war film, Red Dawn. Calumet is the movie's attention point. This created town of Calumet was chosen to be the film's central location so that it could be related to almost anywhere in the US, an ambiguous American township with deliberately vague landmarks and names, you know, sort of like Aurora, Colorado. Red Dawn was actually filmed in the town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, the "stand-in" for the fictionalized version of Calumet.

Much of the movie's story is set in the Arapaho National Forest, and a group of Soviet soldiers refer specifically to the Colorado War (1863-1865), which was fought there between the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indian insurgencies and the occupying U.S. government. Aurora, Colorado is located in Arapahoe County.

The leading villain in Red Dawn is Colonel Bella, a Cuban officer. (See here for more on the Bell name game.)

The Aurora, Colorado shooting appears to be a "red dawn," a milestone awakening event of which we can only guess what it might really mean in the near and distant future.

I went to see The Dark Knight Rises with my 22 year old son, at 3:15 pm, on Friday, July 20, 2012. One of the first visuals that stuck me, before the film, was what I saw in the preview to the forthcoming James Bond movie, Skyfall. At the about the 39-40 second mark of the trailer, quite readable on an IMAX screen, a frame appears with a vivid skyline. Right there, up front is a building with a red sign that reads Aurora. (This is the Aurora Plaza building in Shanghai, China.)

"The night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn is coming."

~ Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight, 2008.

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The list

Here are some recent postings, gathered in one location, to be found mostly on blogs, by my synchromystic friends, fellows, and familiars, who have shared their thoughts on the recent July 20, 2012 incidents in Aurora. Highly recommended, although the opinions expressed are theirs, and not necessarily my own (unless noted).