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A Catastrophic Success of a Satire?

Michael Atkinson has an especially good essay in the Village Voice about the critical and (un)popular reception of Team America.

Some reviewers—including the Voice's J. Hoberman—read the movie as right-wing, but its representational chicanery has driven many to distraction. Rolling Stone's Peter Travers celebrated the fact that "the film targets a clear and present danger: liberal Hollywood," daring to turn Janeane Garofalo "into a puppet and blow her head clean off. Sweet." The dissonance reached a kind of solemn acme with A.O. Scott's review in the Times [reg req], which suggested that the fuck-you puppet Kim's plot for world domination might reflect reality, and that the movie is to some extent intended as a straight action film. "When Team America blows things up in other countries, they do it by accident, in the course of their sloppy but zealous fight against the people who want to do it on purpose. . . . The obscene patriotic ditty that is the Team America theme song might be hyperbolic (and impossible to stop singing), but it is not sarcastic. Nor is a speech [about dicks fucking pussies and assholes]. . . . [I]t is one of the more cogent—and, dare I say it, more nuanced—defenses of American military power that I have heard recently."

Not sarcastic? Cogent? It's possible that the muddle of interpretations is partially responsible for the film's mediocre box office performance. Parker and Stone's interviews don't help—the boys are inherently incapable of attributing larger sardonic meaning to anything they do, wisely characterizing their approach as fifth-grade potshots lest they be accused of grandstanding.

The question is as old as Voltaire's wig powder: How close can you get to what you're satirizing before the line between target and vilifier all but disappears? Indeed, Scott's review could be read as straight on—that is, certifiably absurd—or a spoof itself.

The question is, if a satire has pissed off both sides, doesn't that make it a success -- or has it come full circle back to being the thing it condemns (and become a "catastrophic success")?

I can't judge for myself because I haven't seen the movie. All I know is that A.O. Scott has been a self-parody for a long time.