This review was requested by Nate Biagiotti. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.
Director: Roland Emmerich
Writers: Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich
Cast: Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Mary McDonnell, Judd Hirsch, Robert Loggia, Vivica A. Fox, Randy Quaid
Runtime: 145 mins.
1996
Independence Day, released in 1996, is the first post-9/11 movie.* A malicious Outside Threat dares to undermine our national spirit. These terrorists target recognizable monuments to demoralize the people. Meanwhile, intrepid and heroic Americans come together to fight back. It has all the ingredients of post-9/11 cinema five years before 9/11, which leads me to believe that Independence Day unconsciously functions as a blueprint for America's infamously ugly response to that national tragedy.
*There's even an onscreen countdown timer in the film that reads 9:11 at one point, for you conspiracy-minded folks out there.
This is the most famous Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin film, and like every Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin film, it is pretty terrible in most of the ways that count. The dialogue is empty of significance, the character arcs waffle between shabby and nonexistent, the suspense is awkwardly grafted together with countdown timers, and its premise is as basic as you can imagine. Aliens just start blowing stuff up. That's it. Independence Day does manage to succeed where it really counts for movies like this: scale and spectacle.
The largely model-based / CGI FX blend came at a time when special effects felt like the frontier for exciting new possibilities, rather than the videogamey atrocities that pass for special FX work in today's blockbusters. Independence Day, from its infamous Superbowl marketing campaign to its iconic fixation on national monuments, was an event. The film is clearly built with this in mind: the creators pack the movie with characters and characters and more characters. We see busy scientists, adrenaline-pumped soldiers, streets swarming with terrified people. The sheer number of extras creates a sense of scale to match the city-levelling sequences. Imagine the catering bill.
Nothing in the film properly lives up to its reputation beyond those good good explosions. The infamous 'Independence Day' speech is a dollop of corny on a pile of generic, the plot revolves around meaningless gobbledygook goals, and even Will Smith at the height of his celebrity gets buried beneath tiresome cliches. But here's the thing about art. A film's appeal will always be alchemical no matter how many quality checkboxes it does or doesn't pass. Audiences don't latch onto the most proficient works... it's often unclear exactly what audiences latch onto. But there's always a reason, whether we can discern it or not.
A great deal of the appeal of Independence Day comes from the way it wields colonialist imagery. Its approach is elemental and psychosexual. No need to plumb the depths of the human spirit with your dialogue if you can access mythic scale and hidden desire. The explosions, the invasions, the monuments, and the men: this is a film about castration anxiety.
Castration anxiety and penis envy are two linked concepts that receive a lot of criticism. At first blush they seem to imply that people with penises wish to keep them, and people without wish to have them. But that's a perfect misreading. These ideas are about the ways the patriarchy shapes our psyches. The supposedly powerful phallus is made-up, nobody really has a phallus whether they have a penis or not. Yet the patriarchy indoctrinates us to believe in its power; the result is a toxic culture that places a tremendous amount of import on an imaginary thing that everyone must pretend to possess.
This is why we talk about phallic imagery so much in film, or in work like Shakespeare's. It's a subliminal window into the characters' and often the authors' psychosexual anxieties. It's a great bellwether for sexism and misogyny, but it is also inextricably tied to colonialism. For what is Manifest Destiny but a violent claim made on the basis of a phallic power that doesn't really exist?
Many films critique the phallopatriarchy by demonstrating the violence implicit in castration anxiety; Independence Day instead imbues its characters with that anxiety only for them to reassert their command of the phallus at a climactic moment. This makes Independence Day an exercise in pure masculine fantasy.**
**Just like with castration anxiety, people of all genders can participate in and be complicit in the exercising of toxic masculine desire. Michelle Rodriguez has made a career out of playing such roles.
The aliens are well aware of our phallocentric fixation. That's why they target the monuments first: the cultural signifiers of the phallus. There's a reason so many dead racists are riding horses and unsheathing swords in their statues. The aliens understand that to defeat humanity, they must first emasculate it. Cue several extremely prominent shots of the Washington Monument, the most embarrassingly phallic monument of all.
The president himself functions as a walking, talking phallus. He is a synecdoche for the potency of the United States, and as such his actual politics are completely repressed from the film.*** He is a jingoist's view of what a president should be: simple, intuitive, handsome in a way that becomes more unsettling the longer you look, and a rootin'-tootin' good shooter. Indeed, his arc hilariously concludes not with him taking any political action, but with him taking to the cockpit to personally shoot aliens out of the sky. This film's fixation on the phallus thus culminates in a hilarious joke about castration anxiety: "Doesn't anyone have any missiles left??" the president bellows while looking around as if for lost car keys.
***We can venture a guess that he is likely a Republican. The only Black woman in the film says that she voted for the Other Guy.
Our main characters fittingly suffer their own personal forms of castration anxiety. Jeff Goldblum's David Levinson is an engineer who is working a job way below his level of expertise. Meanwhile, his ex-wife has left him to pursue a career as right-hand aide to the president. Yes, Jeff Goldblum is metaphorically cucked by the President, the ultimate American submissive fantasy.
Will Smith's Captain Steven Hiller, meanwhile, is suffering a similar anxiety. He is afraid that his girlfriend Jasmine (Vivica A. Fox) and their son may be destroyed by aliens. His arc is also about commitment; he proposes marriage once he reunites with his partner. She is a stripper for a living, so a 'marrying the stripper' fantasy also plays into the proceedings. You let other men leer at your woman?? Better lock that down!
At the end of the film both men emerge victorious from their cockpit to greet their respective wives. The wives rush into their arms while the President watches approvingly. To top it all off, the men stride into frame smoking big honking cigars together. These cigars are pregnant with psychosexual significance. They were meant to be death cigars, smoked when all hope was lost. Fortunately David and Steven's superior masculine wit destroys the entire invading fleet. Thus the cigars become symbols of phallic dominance, over the aliens, over their wives, and over all the world that they can bend to their will. Sometimes a cigar is never just a cigar.
Yet the central figure of Independence Day's dick-centric narrative is not the protagonist pair, nor is it the president. It is much beloved side character Russell Casse (Randy Quaid). His story is all about rape from beyond. We learn early in the film that his severe alcoholism is a trauma response to something that happened in his past, an event that he insists was an alien abduction. His community uses this as an opportunity to emasculate him further, making rape jokes and generally diminishing his masculinity. If I were abducted, I would never let that happen to me, their bravado suggests. Yet when the aliens attack and their enormous mechanical sphincters open to release phallus-destroying beams, Russell understands something that nobody else does.
Humanity is suffering from anal terror, and Russell is the only one whose redemption arc is equipped to stop it.
Russell thus becomes the biggest hero of all. He stops drinking and takes to the skies in a military aircraft to exert his revenge. Just when (as we learned previously) everybody is out of missiles, Russell shows up to deal a finishing blow. He locks onto the alien ship's tremendous anus and tries to fire his last missile, but it won't trigger. Russell is having projectile dysfunction. Perhaps owing to years of alcoholism, he cannot shoot his wad. He knows that there is only one thing left to do.
"Hello, boys! I'm back!" he screams as he launches his entire ship into the rectal cavity, achieving a sort of reverse-birth orgasmic immolation. Note the pointed gendering of his nemesis. His act of anal rape against the invading force is portrayed not only as a solution to the problem of castration from space, but as an act of redemption for his own emasculation.
As incompetent as Independence Day is at storytelling, it is a Swiss watch of precision when it comes to patriarchal phallocentric America-first colonial homophobic psychosexual imagery. No wonder it became a beloved classic.
2.5 / 5 BLOBS
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