Militarism, Misanthropy and the Body Politic: - Brunel University

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television. We first meet Miguel and his two younger siblings in a tiny, cluttered motor
home (over the girl’s left shoulder, a bumper sticker states “Don’t date,” – a reminder to
her). A knock on the door produces a white-male hero-type who holds overflowing
handfuls of wilted, dusty lettuce: “Look what your father did.” 41 Lucas’s comments
reflect the anger that Southern California voters feel about agribusiness—a rage that
ought to be directed toward corporate farming and the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, but is more commonly displaced onto the labourers who work the fields.
Two or three brief shots contain ethnic representations that verge on the
cartoonish. During the president’s speech, before the final space battle, when he states
that “Today is our Independence Day,” a Latin-American man in the crowd wears
camouflage and holds his rifle against his shoulder as if he were a Sandinista fighter. 42
Among the celebrants after the downing of the alien spaceship are Africans who run out
from the bush, waving spears, almost completely naked except for some red paint. The
aliens have so disrupted the basic functioning of humanity that even those who remain on
the farthest outskirts of American culture know what has happened. The Africans look
like something out of a 1920s Tarzan movie.
There are no Arab-Americans, only two Arabic soldiers in the desert, only one of
whom speaks English. The other Middle-Easterners live in tents and ride camels. This
may be too far-fetched an interpretation, but in interviews, directors Emmerich and
Devlin have groused that “the exciting villains, such as Arabs or Nazis” who once were
available to the Hollywood film industry, no longer are, because viewers have become
sensitised to racism. 43 In ID4, the pickled aliens from the laboratory scene, and the dark,
thickly skinned alien from the desert scene might allude to our old nemeses. The desert
Carol Vernallis: Independence Day 84