Independence Day

A rancid, meretricious film called "Independence Day" is breaking box-office records in the United States. This thinly disguised valentine to Bill Clinton and the New World Order features a colossal war led by the United States against space aliens. In a peroration delivered over the smoking hulks of the defeated space aliens on a July 4th some day in the future, the American president says that July 4th would now be celebrated by all the nations of the world since it is now everybody's Independence Day.

Today's NY Times reports that the producers of the film were rummaging about for a "politically correct" villain. Arabs and Nazis had been done to death. Why not space aliens? There was no Anti- defamation League for creatures from the planet Neptune, was there? You could concentrate the full intensity of jingoist fury against such enemies, just like in the old days of WWII.

That's what this movie is essentially, a pastiche of WWII movies with Star Wars. The good guys are a collection from various ethnic groups: Jew, Afro-American and redneck. Meanwhile, the aliens are just undifferentiated boogy-men who the audience feels no qualms about hating with full intensity. It reminds me somewhat of a new show on Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV network called "Space Invaders" in which the aliens are referred to as "chigs". This is short for "chiggers" since the enemies from outer space look like bugs. I leave it to your political imagination to make the tie between this word and powerful subconscious motives it invokes.

I wouldn't mind it so much if the film was well-crafted. I confess to enjoying Star Wars, the original Rambo movie and other cultural icons of the Reagan era. I suppose that this flaccid, ridiculously plotted B- movie with expensive special effects is a product of the Clinton era: Republican values cloaked in universalist garb. The only scene which gave me pleasure is when one of the spaceships directs a green death- ray toward the White House and blows it off the face of the earth.