THE A-TEAM

Uncanny twin of The Losers, since both concern a covert military unit, begin with a Latin American misadventure, weave a motif of booths and coffins and containers, turn on a betrayal by a snarky CIA suit (Jason Patric, Patrick Wilson) and, most strikingly of all, climax in a showdown at the Port of Los Angeles (Hi, Jane!). So what’s up? Studio feud? Disgruntled screenwriter? I don’t mind, since these echoes crystallize questions I might not have otherwise understood as fundamental, i.e., Are the members of a team friends? And are friends a team? Ishmael and Queequeg cuddle in bed, of course, but neither has more than a working relationship with Starbuck. I have a Co-op shift in the morning.

The MacGuffin is treasury plates—absurd, with the dollar what it is, but it’s 80s flavor, pure and uncut, despite the Baghdad-and-Blackwater plot. The tangled caper is beside the point, the point being meta all the way, as witness the two or three elaborate action sequences intercut with scenes of the team, beforehand, hashing out the plan (using little toys) whose recital we now watch unfold. So Hannibal’s the director, Face the star, B.A. the stuntman, and Murdock cinematographer. I love it when a plan, etc. Then there’s the part where they bust Murdock out of an asylum by mailing him a tape of a 3-D movie, he coaxes his fellow inmates to watch it (they don the old-fashioned red-and-blue specs), they see a truck speeding towards them on screen and as it reaches the horizon of the room wham, the real getaway truck comes crashing through wall and screen and into their midst. A complicated reference to the onscreen train that is said to have scared shitless the audience at an 1896 screening of the Lumière brothers’ L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat. And of course B.A. is an homage to Maya Deren, who is supposed to have once lifted a refrigerator over her head when someone crossed her at a party.

Why should cinema call attention to itself, here, so strongly? Is it just that The A-Team has always lived in awe of it own narrative power, as evidenced by the original series’ famous ban on killing—they knew they must protect us from even the picture of our true, lethal nature. Which explains why the two tweens behind us, overwhelmed, chatter away in vain hope of comforting themselves until Jenny turns around: “Either be quiet, or move.” Fuckin’ A, we’re trying to watch this movie! Or, more precisely, watch for it, the screen the scarred, shining back of the white whale glimpsed before it dives and a minute later shivers our vessel and leaves us floating on the sidewalk, dazed and with an unspeakable tale to tell.