Add to these traits a preoccupation with show business--that is to say, an inability to distinguish pretense from reality--and the members of Team America may be summed up as dangerous idiots. Let all Nation readers say amen, and laugh themselves silly when the puppets strip down for their sex scene. Forty years ago, the great critic Parker Tyler argued that the avant-garde film was essentially a peep show, exposing to public view those aspects of life that society, by consensus, sought to conceal. Today, by consensus, Paramount Pictures can release Team America into the malls. What was left to conceal, so that the rating could be eased from NC-17 to R, I truly cannot imagine.

But then, despite the squawks of America's many God-botherers, our society no longer troubles itself to suppress the facts about sex, or most other subjects. Our consensus now maintains social equilibrium by the more refined method of suppressing forms of thought. Pick up a copy of USA Today--I dare you--and you will see this work done in plain sight, on the editorial page, by means of the terms "left" and "right." No matter how preposterously ill matched, the positions that are so labeled are presented as equivalent choices: the Coke and Pepsi of a marketplace of ideas that exists nowhere but on that same newspaper page. This is "balance."

And in a movie whose characters literally dangle from strings, "balance" turns out to be fatal. Because the members of Team America are reckless bozos of the right, Parker and Stone evidently felt obliged to invent an opposing group on the left. Enter the effective heavies--Moore, Sarandon, Robbins, Garofalo--who foolishly deny that real danger exists in the world and that real force must be used.

Of course, you will refuse to believe that I am taking this seriously. (Why would anyone think seriously about a multimillion-dollar commercial product with a political theme, marketed coast to coast just before an election?) If you are a South Park fan, you might also refuse to believe that Parker and Stone really mean to demonize something they call the "Film Actors Guild." Surely the guys are just scoring a satiric point about the news media's reduction of activist politics to celebrity gossip; surely the caricatures of Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn and Matt Damon are intended as further outlandish realizations of the Bush worldview. Besides, audiences can be counted on to feel some resentment of the good fortune of movie stars, and therefore won't mind seeing them get whacked with a stick. The leaders of MoveOn.org would make much less satisfying villains.

All true--and yet if you sit through Team America rather than hear it described, you can't mistake the filmmakers' great pleasure in torturing the Hollywood do-gooders. You can't overlook the vehemence with which Parker and Stone keep spitting out the acronym for "Film Actors Guild"; nor can you ignore their tilting of the balance toward the plot's designated good guys, who are ultimately no dumber than the heroes of a Jerry Bruckheimer film and who win out just as gloriously. For people who pride themselves on being irreverent, Parker and Stone give in thoroughly to convention.

They do it with reason, of course. The conventions work; they were boffo in sixteenth-century Italy, and they're boffo today. That's why, if you go to see Team America, you will probably walk out happily sated with laughter and humming one of the offensive show tunes. But if you see this movie on Election Day, you might recall that the real-life leader of Team America is responsible for the deaths of more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians in a war that need not have been fought. The worst that the real Tim Robbins ever did was mess up The Cradle Will Rock.

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