Militarism, Misanthropy and the Body Politic: - Brunel University

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EnterText 6.2 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
EnterText 6.2 The cultural meanings of the cartoonish figures in the foreground are reinforced by a profusion of details in the background. While this play between the background and the foreground doesn’t represent a novel strategy, its savvy use has rarely been surpassed. In ID4 the vaudevillian characters, though objectionable, are familiar and legible. Furthermore the props and characters in the back of the frame are so subtly rendered, and pop in and out so quickly, that they remain barely perceptible. Nevertheless this background material adds depth to the cultural stereotypes—in ways as insidious as they are technically sophisticated—and forges new connections among them. Such an approach may have emerged from a new common practice. David Bordwell points to a recent trend in which cinema is sped up and stripped down. Directors deploy rapid editing, choose distorting lenses and close-ups over wide shots, and compress what would normally comprise several shots into a single one. 6 In addition several scholars of acting have noted that contemporary film productions allot less rehearsal time than in the past, and suggest that characters are thus less fully realised. But big budget films can create richness by other means. Today’s bloated production budgets and expanded shooting schedules allow time for the finessing of storyboards. 7 Sets are carefully constructed to match the wallop of the expensive effects. Contemporary films reveal a new kind of density through connections across shots and finely worked material in the background. This article expands upon Rogin’s study in a second way. While Rogin’s analysis provides an excellent psychoanalytic and intertextual description of why the film was so pleasurable for viewers, this article describes several large-scale formal structures that might also have produced such effects. Filmic techniques linked to tone, form, pacing, Carol Vernallis: Independence Day 64
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Militarism, Misanthropy and the Body Politic: - Brunel University

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