Militarism, Misanthropy and the Body Politic: - Brunel University

EnterText 6.2
President Whitmore’s WASP sidekicks speak to his not fully-manifested good
and bad sides. General Grey is a one-trick-pony who repeatedly intones, “I’m with you,
Mr. President.” (He resembles Jasmine’s dog, Boomer.) Nimziki, the head of the Security
Council is a trigger-happy hawk, whose repertoire of lines includes “You’ve got to do it,”
and “You can’t do this.” Scientist Okun seems to represent intellect gone mad. In Area 51
they do not let him out much. At their first meeting, the president immediately recoils
from him. 21 Okun, like the Marty Gilbert character, has trouble making good object
choices. When the alien arrives, he runs out after it saying, “Oh. Oh. Oh. Is he still
breathing? We’ve got to get him into ER as soon as possible.” 22 When the white men
view the aliens pickled in their vats in the freak show room, we see the similarities
between the two groups. The aliens’ enormous skulls and foreheads gleam with
whiteness.
The lighting on the foreheads of the powerful white men shows that their brains
possess the same radiance. Both the aliens and the white men possess a desire to control
and destroy. (Rogin points out that the aliens represent the multinational corporations
who use up our natural resources and move on, and the same might be said for these
white men. 23 ) The photography of great white men, as Dyer points out, has captured them
historically as giant illuminated foreheads with swept back hair, and the directors
consciously or unconsciously draw on this tradition. 24 The president and the alien will
later share a Vulcan mind-meld—not bodies, just pure thought linked to pure thought.
The African-American Man
Carol Vernallis: Independence Day 71