Militarism, Misanthropy and the Body Politic: - Brunel University

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and his father, get out of Washington in time, but millions die, including the President’s
wife. The party heads for Area 51, a government facility in Roswell, New Mexico, where
alien materials previously recovered—a ship and several carcasses—are the subject of
ongoing research. Captain Steven Hiller (Will Smith) brings along a new specimen, a
badly injured alien pilot he has just shot down in a dogfight. Levinson discovers that the
military can implant a computer virus in the alien spacecraft, set off an explosion, disable
the aliens’ shields, and bring down the mothership and its progeny. David and Steven set
off to do so. Independence Day ends happily with fireworks rather than global
annihilation.
The most sustained analysis of the film, Michael Rogin’s Independence Day, or
How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Enola Gay, serves as a starting point for
this article. 4 This book catches the film’s extreme misanthropy by cataloguing the crude
types that populate the film—the trash-talking, young African-American male, the
neurasthenic, fast-talking Jewish American, the flagrantly gay man, the oppressed,
domesticated woman. Most critics responded positively to ID4’s stereotypes, judging
perhaps that these broad caricatures functioned like vaudevillian representations with the
power to amuse and to ameliorate difference. 5 Rogin shows, however, that these
representations function in ways similar to Stepin Fetchit and Amos and Andy,
reinforcing the self-certainties of “mainstream” viewers at the expense of those who do
not fit the mainstream’s restrictive definition. While Rogin points to these
representations, he does not consider how they work. A careful look at the film reveals
something canny and disturbing.
Carol Vernallis: Independence Day 63