Follow-up tiem baybeeeeeee
Detective Heart of America: The Final Freedom is an independent film made by Jason Steele AKA Filmcow. It acts as a follow-up to a series of two shorts he filmed about the titular character and his attempts to save America from absurd criminals. I'll revisit these shorts eventually, but I'll mostly be focusing on the film itself. I love this film to no end. It's a ridiculous, fairly stupid story, but it's genuinely very funny and full of meaning. Assuming my internal ramblings are accurate. Spoilers for the whole franchise, of course.
At first, the movie is fairly similar to the shorts, Heart of America is given a job to save America from someone buying its debt from China using Bitcoin. A normal Filmcow plot if I've ever heard one. He chases various leads, encountering characters from the shorts, until he comes face-to-face with the mastermind behind the whole plot: The time-traveling, reality-warping robot Ouya. Ouya erases America from existence, replacing it with the infinitely worse country of Fug. We all hate Fug. Heart of America tries to bring America back to existence, going through what America used to be, what it stood for, even how it came into existence. He learned from the Native Fugmericans, about their knots, their bugs, and their carrots. Then the aliens invade, and after the resistance group he joins is attacked, he and Ouya make their way to the alien's base of operations: The local JW Marriott. After locating the source of the aliens' power, the two discuss what must be done with it, Heart of America electing to make the entire world America, forever. This includes making Africa the US, but larger. The Eiffel Tower was replaced by The Statue of Liberty (funny, given the statue was created by the French government). And even the Moon, our dear sweet Io, was made into the US. Thus America was saved forever.
Okay the plot is batshit insane, so why do I love it so much? There's obviously the overwhelming amount of Jason Steele charm. Awkward conversations between characters, funny voices, random bullshit that occasionally stuns the characters as much as the audience, and a healthy amount of frankly juvenile jokes about Nazi boner germs and the like. There is also, for me and many, the notable political angle.
Jason Steele has always (kinda) been one for political commentary. Some of his oldest videos are about mocking Barack Obama for loving Mr. Mime, or John McCain for being kinda crazy and talking to vegetables and such. His video about the 2012 presidential debate is awfully apt, given recent events. Recently, his finale to Charlie the Unicorn has been pretty thoroughly taken to be a criticism of capitalism and its lack of desire to actually do anything about changing the world in any way that would prevent us from dying horribly. And I think its fair to say that a movie about trying to save America from being erased has some notable things to say as well.
There's of course the Native Fugmerican culture segment, which serves to mock people who appropriate native cultures without understanding them. The beginning and ending of that segment touches on how America, as well as all the other countries that Ouya has created and destroyed, began with the genocide of native peoples.
Most of the political commentary, however, comes into play near the end of the film. In the last 10 minutes or so, we're given a bit more detail as to what Ouya is and what its goals are. To keep it brief, Ouya is a device from the far future who can manipulate reality at will. It has repeatedly created and destroyed country after country in order to draw out the future overlords of Earth, the "aliens" from earlier, who have a similar device of their own. The aliens' device is different, though. It makes permanent changes, and Ouya aims to use it so that devices like it and Ouya can never work in the first place. Otherwise, the universe will be ruled by a tyrannical government whose reach and scale of oppression is so overwhelmingly monstrous, that the people who created Ouya deemed it an infinitely worse alternative to what they recognize as repeated genocides. What this means is that Heart of America, in making the entire world America and preventing Ouya from completing its mission, has doomed the world to being eternally dominated by tyranny.
This raises a few points of commentary that I think are worth examining. First and foremost, Heart of America is the bad guy. Jason Steele is no stranger to writing protagonists who are world ending monsters (see Llamas With Hats for another example), but Heart of America is interesting because he truly believes that what he is doing is right. Something I've neglected to state in this post is that Heart of America is portrayed by a statue of a Bald Eagle, one of the most potent American symbols, and a fitting choice for someone literally named "Heart of America." HoA (not a home owners association) is meant to represent the classic American patriot who really doesn't know anything about America, but believes in the liberty and freedom crap wholeheartedly. When trying to list all of the states, he's only able to put down Florida, Texas, California, Wyoming, New York City, and Vermont. He's generally uninterested in the other countries that Ouya destroyed, as well as the natives that died because of American colonists. All he truly cares about is the idea of America and American freedom. This is highlighted most directly by Ouya in the climax when it states, "No. But if you care about freedom, true freedom, this is the only way." This is responding to HoA asking whether preventing these devices from working will bring America back. And in response, HoA makes the entire world America. This is very clearly the worst possible outcome, and Ouya reacts as such. America is doomed to become the very oppressors that Ouya was trying so desperately to stop. This is supported by the credits, of all things, which shows the American flag changing, as it presumably adds more and more worlds to its intergalactic empire. It bares a striking resemblance to the masks the aliens have.
Not a one-to-one, but close. Enough to evoke the idea that what America inevitably becomes is exactly what Ouya feared most.
The idea that America isn't exactly the most freedom loving nation shouldn't be a controversial take to those within the proper circles. Enforcing our will on others for the sake of material and political gains is a common trend in American history. From our numerous wars with Mexico, to Vietnam, to leveraging our business relations for pressuring other countries into economic servitude, America has its fingers in almost every pie on the global stage, and it's usually to the detriment of the pie. Heart of America, then, is the blind fool, who believes America to be a nation without fault. Well, mostly, he does acknowledge that subprime lending is a problem. The point is that Heart of America is the kind of person (bird?) who goes to bat for America at nearly every turn, maybe acknowledging the odd thing here or there as bad, but never in a way that challenges the systems America is built upon. He's the perfect American exceptionalist, believing that being more like America will be the solution to every problem facing the world. Very literally, he makes everything America and just considers his work done. He blatantly ignores the idea that Ouya's warning might have any actual weight, charging ahead anyway, creating the world that Ouya came from to begin with. It's with this in mind that the HoA line, "I know you come from a place without America, which is the saddest thing I can think of, but that won't be a problem for anyone ever again!" becomes so much more ironic. Ouya did come from America. America was the only thing it ever knew. And Heart of America is the progenitor of all that pain and suffering. Another detail sticks out to me, that being the aliens' reality writing device. Ouya notes that it was designed by slaves, and that its appearance was, "... a small, final act of defiance" that was not understood by their oppressors.
This is the device. It is shaped like a heart. Assuming that Ouya is from America, that would make this the heart of America. The device responsible for endless tyranny, endless oppression, endless suffering, is Heart of America. Poetry.
Detective Heart of America: The Final Freedom is a movie about a lot of things. Sunny D, Shark Councils and Shark Powers, Merman Jesus, a German space elevator, and a 5th Dimensional Demigod. But it's also about the brutality that good intentions can create. How if you live life without questioning the system, even if you like that system, you could cause unimaginable pain. How the most devoted to an idea may be the ones to betray it most brutally. And how we, as Americans, owe it to ourselves and the world to ensure that we don't contribute to a regime that can and will destroy everything so that the ones in control can live unopposed. Freedom is non-negotiable.
I have other thoughts about this movie that I might share later. Some act as counters to my main mindset surrounding this movie, but are other potential takeaways that I haven't fully thought through. I should probably sleep for now tho, lol.
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