“Iron Man” is a great movie for a lot of reasons, not the least of which are the action sequences and pyrotechnic displays. Ultimately, though, the themes go deeper than this, and the informed viewer can sense their complexity beneath the surface of the film. Behind the character story of a young Playboy taking responsibility for his actions, and beneath the technological tale of a hero being born out of a medical miracle, there’s also the story of a war of technological innovation… a sort of a clash of engineering titans… and there’s a metaphor for military force. It’s this last theme that I’ll address, for the time being.

A lot of ‘Iron Man” is about Tony Stark’s life’s work, and a lot of Stark’s legacy is based on military power and a relationship to hegemony. Stark begins the movie with his finger on the big red button, trusting in absolute power and overwhelming coverage as an ethical way to keep the world safe. This is truly a Cold War mentality, an international survivalism staked on the fact that America will always have the biggest stick. Stark’s work in the world is designing massive military weapons that “you only have to fire ONCE.”

Of course, Stark discovers the downfall of this approach when he’s kidnapped in Afghanistan. When military power gets big enough, it can’t be controlled or contained any longer, and it becomes as much the enemy’s tool as it is our own. He sees that he can’t even trust his own company with this kind of power, and he sees that this isn’t just a flaw in his company… it’s a flaw in this whole approach to power. For this reason, instead of simply taking back control of his company’s weapons distribution, he decides to shut down Stark Industries’ weapons division entirely. Complete military dominance is no longer Tony Stark’s thing.

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The following is a new article by Tim Mitchell, published in the “depth” section of PopPolitics magazine. Mitchell analyzes how critically discarded “versus” horror films can tell us a great deal about how we see conflict in the post-9/11 world.

Horror is like any other genre of film: The most popular titles of a given era often gain their notoriety by striking a chord in audiences that is somehow related to the collective fears and hopes of that particular time. Along those lines, when critics associate horror films with modern social and political fears in post-9/11 America, they usually cite films of an apocalyptic nature: films that portray a community (or the entire world itself) as irrevocably unraveling at lightening speed at the hands of a monstrosity that is equal parts unexplainable, unstoppable and unavoidable.

Films released during the last several years such as “The Host“; “Sunshine“; “28 Weeks Later“; “Right at Your Door“; “Cloverfield“; “Land of the Dead“; and “Diary of the Dead” fit this trend. So do recent remakes such as “Dawn of the Dead,” and literary adaptations such as “War of the Worlds“; “30 Days of Night“; “I Am Legend“; and “The Mist.” These are akin to earlier films such as “Them!” (1954) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) that reflected the public’s fears of atomic weapons and communism back in the 1950s.

There is another kind of horror film that complements and yet contrasts this end-of-the-world sub-genre of horror, a kind of horror film that most critics dismiss. Unlike many of the apocalyptic films, these films do not so much depict a supreme battle between good and evil, but instead plague their characters with nothing but damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t choices.

Fears of vicious attacks and random massacres are not the product of some aberration of the natural order but an honest reflection of how the universe actually works. Thus, fears of this type of world do not center on vanquishing monsters to save others so much as on just surviving in a pre-determined situation. What kind of horror film is this? The crossover film that has the word “versus” in the title — namely, “Freddy vs. Jason” (2003), “Alien vs. Predator” (2004) and the recent “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem” (2007).

Continue reading “A Look at Iconic Versus: The Post-9/11 Significance of the Freddy vs. Jason and Alien vs. Predator Movies.”

When dealing with the NCAA, you can be certain that there will never be a shortage of hypocrisy. As March Madness gives way to April Sadness, two wonderful examples came flying out of the NCAA cupboard.

The NCAA has, over the years, condemned the practice of scalping tickets at their events. Now the folks at the NCAA have found that they, too, can be scalpers, while still pretending they are not in such an unsavory business. But make no mistake about it — there is no difference between scalping online and street hustling at the arena.

The NCAA has an exclusive agreement with RazorGator, as its official “ticket reseller,” to handle the online resale of its tickets to high-demand NCAA events. Final Four ticket strips with a face value of $140 to $220 were selling online for $2,500 and up. There is also an official NCAA travel agency, which offered Final Four packages, including game tickets, for as much as $4,495 per person, according to the Los Angeles Times. Oh, those beautiful revenue streams!

The NCAA also has a long standing policy against the sale or advertising of alcoholic beverages at NCAA sponsored events, with one loophole: Alcoholic beverages of less than 6-percent-by-volume can be advertised on telecasts of NCAA events. There is a time limit of 120 seconds per telecast, but that limit was exceeded by 150 seconds during the recent NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship game.

Drew Faust, president of Harvard, and 100 other university presidents, signed a letter calling on the NCAA to revise its policies and initiate a ban on all alcoholic beverage advertising. According to industry reports, beer companies rank second in advertising at the NCAA tournament.

None of this is particularly surprising, as we have come to expect these forms of avarice from the NCAA. What is surprising is a change that was made at West Point in what has been described as a desperate attempt to resurrect its football program.

Until recently, the long-standing policy meant that such star athletes — such as Roger Staubach and David Robinson — served for five years before joining the ranks of professional sports. Now, however, the star athlete at West Point has a very different career path to follow.

As reported in SI and the Dallas Morning News, the new “alternative service option” implemented in 2005 for cadets blessed with “unique talents and abilities” means that the five-year commitment that cadets make to the Army will no longer be equally applied to all cadets.

The first two years of the five-year obligation will now be spent recruiting and working in public affairs. Cadets playing professional sports can then buy out the remaining three years with six years in a reserve unit. While classmates go off to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, star athletes will avoid the front lines and be able to take up their professional sports careers three years earlier than under the previous policy.

It is believed that this change will enhance the recruiting appeal of West Point for blue chip athletes and contribute to an upgrade of the football program. This is certainly a reassuring step by the powers that be at West Point, and it bookends nicely with an admissions policy that has a special track for recruited athletes.

The power of intercollegiate athletics has become irresistible and the need to win on the field grows stronger with each passing day, even at the service academies. In some ways it is reminiscent of the sports powerhouses that were created at army and navy bases during World War II.

David Zang, in his brilliant analysis of sport in the ’60s, saw a link between the overemphasis on winning in sport and the growing awareness that the nation was not winning the war in Vietnam. It was Vince Lombardi who offered the antidote to the war protesters and the long hairs. It was the football teams on many campuses who were encouraged by their coaches to attack the war protesters — their fellow students.

Could it be that we are faced with a similar situation as the nation stumbles on in the Iraq morass, seemingly far from what anyone could call victory? Is the Army itself being seduced into the pursuit of victory on the gridiron, while being frustrated in the conduct of Bush’s Folly?

Or is it a more simple matter than that? Could it be that the powers that be at West Point are still steeped in the traditions of the “Playing Fields of Eaton,” and Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s faith in the lessons of football? The vocabulary of football might also suggest the persistence of such a linkage in the hearts and minds of those who train leaders at West Point. One can only wonder how Gen. MacArthur, who was so fond of the West Point Motto “Duty, Honor, Country,” would feel about the new policy.

In a world in which athletes are routinely described as warriors, in which an athletic event becomes a war, where sides clash and teams do battle, and where “whose number one” is a national obsession, nothing should surprise anyone. Intercollegiate athletics is in danger of truly becoming a mirror of our world in which there seems to be no bottom.

It has been about two weeks now since the news came that Ereck Plancher, a University of Central Florida football player, collapsed and died following a grueling conditioning workout leading up to spring football practice.

He was 19 years old and had been an honor student in high school. He was just starting his second year at UCF. Having graduated from high school one semester ahead of schedule, he enrolled at UCF early hoping to establish himself academically with a 4.0 GPA before starting football.

These are always shocking moments and it is difficult to find words that can encompass the grief and the tragedy, and offer explanation and comfort to the living. In this case it is no different.

Well-liked by his classmates both at UCF and at his high school in Naples, Plancher was a hero to his 10-year-old brother. His parents, his brother and his sister were devastated by the news. His teammates were stunned. George O’Leary, the UCF head football coach said calling Plancher’s parents was the most difficult thing he had ever had to do as a coach. Plancher’s high school coach talked about what a great kid he was and how much he was loved by everyone who knew him. He had great promise both academically and athletically.

When a tragedy like this occurs on the athletic field it makes headlines. The local media devoted significant airtime and ink to the story. Friends and students appeared on the local news, giving their reactions. The coach held a news conference. The university issued a statement. Saturday’s memorial service in Naples saw a reiteration of the stories, the tributes and the anguish.

Again and again came the refrains: “He was only 19.” “He was cut down in his youth.” “There was so much promise and now it is gone.”

After a few days passed and having reread A. E. Housman’s “To An Athlete Dying Young,” I started thinking more and more about this young man of 19 and how his death was such a prominent event in the community.

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“24″ — the “real-time” TV series featuring Jack Bauer saving the world against all odds (and those pesky terrorists) — has been strangely addictive through its six seasons … and counting. It’s not a love affair. It’s more like being a voyeur on the Bush administration’s rugged individualist fantasy.

In any case, I thought I had finally kicked the habit after I only half-heartedly watched some of last season.

Now comes along Dr. Walter Gary Sharp Sr., an adjunct law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, who is teaching a class titled The Law of “24″ and using the show as a way to discuss real-world dilemmas:

In law school we use hypotheticals all the time: What we can?t pull from the real world, we make up. Pulling from a show on counterterrorism that?s chock full of legal issues would be a good way to make it entertaining to the students while they?re still learning.

Damn. “24″ sounds interesting again.

“The Kite Runner” is easy to love.

It’s a story written in elegantly simple prose that simultaneously humanizes and complicates a people and a region that, amazingly, Americans never — since their attention got quickly diverted to another place, another set of conflicts — had a chance to get to know, even if only in that shallow love-the-people-you-invade/hate-their-leaders kind of way that the American media likes to play it.

But the English teacher in me always thought it would make even a better movie than a book. Without giving away too much, let’s just say that there are story arcs aplenty — and there’s even an American angle to the whole thing.

When I saw the trailer in the theater recently, I was impressed. And from all accounts, the filmmakers have seen this as a labor of love, rather than a commercial bonanza — going so far as to make the film in Dari, an Afghan language.

So it’s incredibly sad to see those same filmmakers be forced to delay the release of the film because of fears that it could endanger the lives of Afghan child actors.

David Halbfinger of the New York Times has the amazing story — that still has a chance for a happy ending. In the meantime, as Halbfinger writer, the situation raises excellent questions concerning “the limits of corporate responsibility, wondering who was exploiting whom and pondering the price of on-screen authenticity.”

We’ve posted a new article in our online magazine: “Virtual Victories: Hezbollah’s “Special Force 2” by Allen McDuffee.

The article discusses the controversial new video game, which recreates — from Hezbollah’s perspective — last year’s July War between Israel and the Lebanese Shia militia group. It also compares Hezbollah’s efforts to the U.S. Army’s efforts to market itself through the “America’s Army” online game and commercial efforts such as “Full Spectrum Warrior.”

Read the full article here.

In what can only be seen as an act of desperation, President Bush has appealed to history to justify his misbegotten war. For a man who has never shown any interest in nor understanding of history, except that he once may have thought it would be fun to participate in it, his latest appeal came as a surprise.

What was not surprising was that most of his history is faulty, distorted or flat-out wrong.

The thing that caught my eye in his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention was not so much the bad history but rather this line: “[...] one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields.’”

In this matter of adding to the American language legacy, the president might have expanded his list. Vietnam, in fact, left us with may more instructive phrases than the ones he mentioned.

Such grand phrases as “light at the end of the tunnel,” or, “We are turning the corner in Vietnam,” quickly entered the vocabulary. The light, as the old joke goes, was that of an oncoming train, while we turned so many corners that we were finally spinning in circles.

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Charlize Theron and Tommy Lee Jones star in “In the Valley of Elah”

Speaking of pop culture and politics, Michael Cieply in the New York Times analyzes “a new and perhaps risky willingness in the entertainment business to push even the touchiest debates about post-9/11 security, Iraq and the troops? status from the confines of documentaries into the realm of mainstream political drama.”

The list of films that touch upon such topical stuff — as well as the names behind them — is impressive: “In the Valley of Elah,” “Grace is Gone,” “Stop-Loss,” “Rendition,” “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” and “Redacted” — to name a few.

Belly Dancers, Billionaires and Bombers: William Booth of the Washington Post simultaneously reviews, interrogates and praises the new documentary “Reel Bad Arabs” — which “makes the case that Hollywood is obsessed with ‘the three Bs’ — belly dancers, billionaire sheiks and bombers — in a largely unchallenged vilification of Middle Easterners here and abroad.” The documentary centers around the work of Jack Shaheen, a retired Southern Illinois professor who painstakingly has cataloged decades of representations of Arabs on film. Ultimately, Booth explains, Shaheen is simply calling for balance — and a recognition of humanity: “Hollywood still shows black pimps and Latino gangbangers, but pop culture has also made some room for Will Smith and ‘Ugly Betty.’ ‘I’ve seen the Arab hijacker, but where is the Arab father?’ Shaheen says. What we need, he says, seriously, is a sitcom called ‘Everybody Loves Abdullah.’”

A Comical Cultural Divide: “Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean” is the very enticing title of an upcoming book-length analysis of the comics genre by Douglas Wolk. Serious comics criticism is, of course, much-needed and long overdue. Interestingly, though, the excerpt from the book on Salon is a pretty take-no-prisoners attack on a comics culture that is unnecessarily divisive: “The medium’s new enemies are internal: the much less casual snobbery of the commercial mainstream and the art-comics world toward each other, and cartoonists’ nostalgic yearning for the badness of the bad old days. Reading only auteurist art comics is like being a filmgoer who watches only auteurist art cinema, but more than a few art-comics enthusiasts wouldn’t dream of picking up a mainstream comic book, even as entertainment.”

YouWho?: Kathleen Parker of the Orlando Sentinel has a noteworthy response to all the YouTube political madness of late:

For a candidate little known outside of Alaska, for which he served two terms as a U.S. senator, Internet buzz about his weird videos beats no buzz. But has it really come to this? Presidential candidates making spoofy-goofy home movies to win votes?

To be fair, candidates are as much victims as benefactors of the YouTube age, trapped between two dimensions of reality that are fundamentally in conflict. One reality pertains to Americans who have neither the time nor the urge to “get” the latest hip thing. The other concerns the very real phenomenon of a parallel universe where younger, more technologically attuned Americans preside.

Candidates can’t afford to ignore either, but ultimately they’re forced to present two different faces to two different audiences — the plugged and the unplugged, the hip and the un-hip.

The question is: Which is the true face? Which persona will lead the nation? Come Election Day, it may not be so cool to be so cool.

That last question, of course, is a timeless political question — and one that requires a critical thinking electorate to answer.

YouInsurgency: While we might want to rachet down the “Internet buzz” on the presidential campaign trail, the mainstream media would like us to be very scared of how terrorists are manipulating the online world: “Al Qaeda and other terrorist factions are have all the media niches covered. The battle for hearts and minds has gone online and multimedia — and the more the rest of us know this, the better,” reports CBS. Apparently, the terrorists don’t actually see themselves as we do — in grainy, distorted streaming video. What a surprise.

It Wasn’t a WMD, After All: This one’s is a little dated — but we’d still like to give Mark Simpson the final word on “The Gay Bomb” (news of which we previously unearthed here): “The Gay Bomb is here already and it’s been thoroughly tested — on civilians. It was developed not by the U.S.A.F. but by the laboratories of American consumer and pop culture, advertising, and Hollywood. If you want to awaken the enemy to the attractiveness of the male body, try dropping back issues of Men’s Health or GQ on them. Or Abercrombie & Fitch posters. Or Justin Timberlake videos. Or DVDs of 300.”

Hey, Chloe, Upload the Schematics of This Post to My PDA: What is an action hero’s most important skill? Literacy. According to University of Louisville professor Bronwyn T. Williams, “the typically-male action hero is capable of reading and writing effortlessly, even under duress. His superior literacy practices give him an edge over supervisors, bureaucrats, and scientists, whose literacy skills may render them incorrect or narrow-minded, and allow him to outmaneuver the villain.” Unfortunately, literacy is simultaneously and somewhat paradoxically considered feminine and unnecessary at critical moments — and it’s left up to “literacy surrogates,” who can often be women, such as Chloe from 24.

The Little Red Empowering Machine: Speaking of male action heroes, they always seem to get the coolest cars. But Joanne Sasvari notes that for women in popular culture, cars are an escape and a symbol of freedom, even if “a woman’s car almost always means she’s fast — in more ways than one.”

Sex Surprises: Using a “high-tech eye-tracking gizmo,” an Emory University study reveals that men are more likely to look at a women’s face before moving to other body parts and that women (who were less interested in looking at faces) will look at pictures of heterosexual sex longer than men. The authors of the study offer a biological rationale: “Women can tell by looking at naked men whether the guys are in the mood [...] but women’s bodies don’t reveal much. Which is why men home in on their faces.”

“Style Your Hijab!”: So, the new teen magazine Muslim Girl is attempting to appeal to an underserved market but with more tack and taste than, say, Seventeen. While the magazine’s seriousness of purpose is certainly laudable, I wonder if simply toning down the sex and the sassiness makes the advice columns, celebrity profiles, and fashion dos-and-don’ts more palatable.

“I was drunk and bald way before Britney”: The obsession with celebrity and scandal in pop culture and politics has been — I guess it’s not such a surprise here — a big boon to the t-shirt industry.

Off the Mark: Iraqi performance artist Wafaa Bilal got a lot of press earlier this year for confining himself to a room with a paintball gun and allowing people around the world to shoot him by manipulating the gun through his website — all in protest of America’s approach to the war in Iraq: “To the Western media it?s a virtual war going on in Iraq — we?re far removed in the comfort zone. We?re allowed to disengage from the consequences of war. We don?t see mutilated bodies, we don?t see the toll on human beings.? Well, in the end, he got quite a reaction (over 40,000 shots were fired over 42 days), but it’s not clear whether the web visitors understood the political context or were just looking for a little shoot-’em-up fun. You might want to work your way back through Bilal’s unsettling video blog.

Twist and Shout: Last week marked the 21st anniversary of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Well, Erin Dionne was celebrating it — why weren’t you?

A Pundit Primer: In a possible lesson for the 21st Century, YouTube ended up giving James Kotecki a lot more than 15 minutes of fame. It got him a potential career. Kotecki, if you recall, was the Georgetown student who dispensed advice about presidential candidates’ online videos — from his dorm room, on YouTube. Two of those candidates, Republican Ron Paul and Democrat Mike Gravel, actually ended up visiting his dorm room — and most of the other candidates made it clear they were paying attention. Since he’s graduated, Democrat Dennis J. Kucinich and Republican Mike Huckabee have met him at more traditional locales around Washington — and CNN, NPR and others have come calling.

I Forgot About the Kids - D’oh!: A Marymount Manhattan College study reveals that, among the college students surveyed, fictional television fathers — think Homer, Raymond, etc — rated higher than the students’ real fathers. The reason, researchers and cultural critics agreed, was that the work demands on fathers are increasing — and they have much less quality family time.

Sidney Blumenthal — in his latest analysis of the semiotics of Bush administration culture for Salon — dissects Bush’s choice of artwork for the walls of the White House:

The notion that there might be an aesthetic that informs the Bush presidency would seem to be an unfair and artificial imposition on a man who prizes his intuition (”I’m a gut player”) and openly derides complication (”I don’t do nuance”) — that is, if Bush himself did not insist on the connection. Indeed, he appears on the official White House Web site, conducting a tour of the art and artifacts he has chosen to decorate the Oval Office, assuming the duty of docent himself. He holds forth on the large windows and the rug with rays of the sun emanating from the seal of the president and the provenance of his desk before getting to the artwork.

Although the “tour” Blumenthal is referencing seems to be just these comments to Trevor Kavanagh of The Sun (UK), they justify Blumenthal’s contention that Bush is surprisingly involved the construction of the artistic atmosphere.

Blumenthal ultimately sees Bush’s choices as evidence of his blindness to the limits of his idealism. Bush chooses paintings that most critics would define as overly sentimental kitsch — such as the cowboy paintings of Texans W.H.D. Koerner and Julian Onderdonk — and takes them seriously.

What is most disturbing, though, is that Blumenthal can connect this lack of self-awareness with the administration’s distorted justification for torture (which involves, Blumenthal points out, the strange belief of many conservatives in the verisimilitude of the equally kitschy Fox TV series “24″):

The distance between the cowboy paintings Bush proudly displays in the Oval Office and the secret-agent torture porn that his administration officials not so secretly watch with envy reflects a yawning chasm in the sensibility of kitsch. Koerner’s Western pictures depict an idealized past, where never is heard a discouraging word. At the Saturday Evening Post, he joined with Norman Rockwell to create the brush strokes of a warming nostalgia.

These enduring images infused Reaganism with its emotional culture. Ronald Reagan, after all, had been raised at the turn of the century in small-town Illinois and became a contract player in Hollywood’s dream factory. Communicating kitsch was second nature to him. The perfect representation came in the TV commercial for his reelection campaign in 1984. As an American flag was raised in a small town, the voice-over intoned: “It’s morning again in America.” The past was present and all was right with the world.

Now, kitsch has been radically remade. No longer evoking nostalgic utopianism, kitsch releases the compulsions of fear. Under Bush, kitsch has been transformed from sentimentality into sadomasochism.

On first impression, this sounds like an extreme interpretation — until we remember that this is an extreme presidency, one in which the confines of propriety and restraint have been broken again and again.

The movie “300” has already had its day in the sun, but I just ran across this belated assessment by M. Duss at Alterdestiny.

Duss avoids seeing the film through the simplistic swords-and-sandals/freedom-vs.-tyranny lens through which most critics, whether they liked or not, have viewed it. Instead, he believes it is “as good an illustration of Edward Said’s ideas about Orientalism as I ever expect to see on film”:

I find Said’s work most compelling when he focused on the use of literature and art in the production of knowledge and the maintenance of Western popular assumptions about the Orient. 300 could function as Exhibit A in this regard. The Greek (rational, well-organized, frequently bathed, and white) and Persian (prone to magic, a horde, much less frequently bathed, non-white) ethnic and cultural stereotypes are so blatantly offensive that they come very near subverting themselves. There were parts of the film that really made me wonder if the filmmakers were indeed winking at the audience, such as the Spartans’ “Before we sally forth in defense of reason, let’s consult the Oracle!” bit, but I don’t think so.

[...]

I find it interesting that quite a few people I’ve spoken to have criticized the movie’s representation of the Persians in terms that that I can only describe as Saidian. That is, they recognize the role that popular culture plays in reinforcing assumptions about the Other, and the way that these assumptions service certain political ideologies. The fact that some tech dudes at a party, who had never heard of Edward Said, were casually pointing these things out to me between tequila shots can, I think, be seen as a victory for the better parts of Said’s work.

I’m a sucker for a good allegorical reading.

I missed Jamie Stiehm’s analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s continuing — and apparently increasing — cultural significance when it appeared in the Baltimore Sun last month. But in PopPolitics efforts to be the main intersection where politics and pop culture meet, I thought it deserves a mention, however belated.

Inspired by the references from many of the presidential candidates — especially Obama when he officially announced his candidacy in Springfield, Ill. — Stiehm catalogs all the ways Lincoln still matters … and maintains an eerie influence:

“Problems seem intractable, like war, corruption, cynicism and the influence of money in politics,” [Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold] said.

But, Leopold said, such problems can be overcome by the sort of shrewd pragmatism Lincoln brought to his politics.

His military mettle remains so respected that Army Col. Kenneth O. McCreedy, installation commander at Fort Meade, keeps a 1864 Lincoln image as his screen saver.

“Lincoln resonates on so many levels, and in so many ways he’s our most human president,” said the colonel, who holds a doctorate in American history. “He had an uncanny ability to read people, with common sense and sophistication.”

[...]

[Harold Holzer, co-chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission] received so many questions about the war that he wrote an essay last year titled “What Lincoln would do in Iraq.”

He argued that Lincoln would advise the current president to spend more time at the front with troops, communicate more precisely about the war’s aims and fire appointed aides who fail in their missions — as Lincoln famously did with his battlefield commanders.

Well, I do recall George W. Bush making it onto an aircraft carrier at some point. Does that count?

“Look at this place.”

It’s a bitter line delivered by a mother heading down a Florida highway to visit her son who is on death row. The place she is referring to is not the prison. It’s not even the overly-commercialized Florida landscape. She, a British citizen, is talking about America. She’s disgusted that her son was stupid enough to end up here.

And that’s the fresh perspective of BBC America’s upcoming three-part miniseries “The State Within.” Centered around the crises facing British diplomats (and their charges) in America, its greatest strength is its ability to show us American anew, from an outsider’s point-of-view.

The ramifications of this perspective go beyond a unique storytelling angle. Politically, the show gets away with fairly direct shots at the Bush administration. Soon after terrorists down an airplane over Washington, we cut to a scene where Secretary of Defense Lynne Warner (Sharon Glass of “Cagney and Lacey” fame) is addressing executives of a friendly defense contractor. When an aide whispers in her ear something akin to “The nation is under attack,” she doesn’t miss a beat. She smoothly concludes her remarks and quickly leaves the room without revealing anything. Take that, “Pet Goat.”

On a more general level, the show also benefits from having itself rotate around a European axis, which is much more open to world opinion than insular American shows like “24.”

And “24″ is the most obvious comparison. “The State Within” begins with a bang, quite literally, as a plane explodes and crashes onto a Washington-area highway, just as British ambassador Sir Mark Brydon (Jason Isaacs, eschewing his Rhode Island accent from his previous state-side appearance on Showtime’s “Brotherhood”) is returning from the airport himself on the same road. The central plot of the show’s first part revolves around his attempts to manage the ensuing crisis, which become more acute when it is determined that a British Muslim was the suicide bomber on the plane.

Like “MI-5” — another British import — “The State Within” has better acting, more inventive camerawork and more challenging plotlines than what American audiences are used to. But it also suffers a little from its distance from the American mindset.

After the terrorist’s identity is leaked, for example, the governor of Virginia decides to intern all British Muslims in his state — claiming the Patriot Act as justification — and he has the initial support of the White House. A show more in tune with the way America works would understand, as “24″ does in its present season, that such a blatant racial profiling and violation of civil liberties would never occur so overtly, at least in as hasty a manner as it occurs here.

The show’s secret advantage, though, is its expansive canvas. It does not confine itself to terrorism — as the British embassy must deal with more quotidian details such as protesting the use of the death penalty against a British citizen (although all might be connected, it seems).

The show, though, is certainly meant to be a thrill ride, full of spies, hidden agendas and skeletons in the closet. But it’s a ride that stretches your imagination rather than insults it.

Parts one and two of “The State Within” premiere Feb. 17 and 18 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. Part three premieres Saturday, Feb. 24 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. Each episode is 150 minutes. The two-disc DVD set will be available Feb. 27 from BBC Video.