Militarism, Misanthropy and the Body Politic: - Brunel University

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streak of fire touching the top of the building, reeling back in, and heading down again to
initiate an explosion. Is the action reversible? Is this just a video game?
Rogin argues that Independence Day was made in part as revisionist history—to
defuse the newly emergent claims that Americans were wrong to drop atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to return Americans to our previously imagined place on
moral high ground. 12 ID4 is coy about the U.S. deployment of nuclear weapons over
American soil. General Grey notes that civilian casualties should be held to a minimum
(not non-existent), and the bombing is figured off screen. We see a quick shot of one-half
of a tank and flying balsa wood at the edge of a road. 13
The European-American Woman
Rogin argues correctly that Independence Day advocates a return to cold war ideology
and its notions of domesticity. 14 Though it’s touching in the film’s opening—and perhaps
progressive—that both the president and the cable technician plaintively ask their wives
to return home, the film makes these women pay too high a cost for non-compliance. The
president’s wife dallies, repeatedly looking over her shoulder, and dies from an internal
haemorrhage. On her death bed, she apologises to her husband, wishing she had come
home. (In a subtle rhyme, Connie almost dies as well. She keeps looking back as bombs
hit civilians, but an Air Force officer shoves her into the elevator.)
Of the four major female characters in Independence Day, two survive—Connie
and Jasmine—and two do not—Tiffany and Margaret Whitmore. At the film’s beginning,
the two women survivors are committed to their careers. Toward the end they become
women who patiently wait while their men go off to war. The film sanctifies this shift by
Carol Vernallis: Independence Day 67