Yes, I admit it -- I've seen four of the big summer blockbusters: Mission Impossible, The Rock, Eraser, and Independence Day. Most likely I will see any others that come down the movie pike in the next few months, the guilty pleasure of slipping away for a middle-of-the-day matinee far outweighing the generally mediocre quality of the movies.
If the flickers give back a kind of fun-house mirror reflection of American society, mediated through the money-gauzed lenses of the studios, then these four mega-productions have some disturbing images for us to ponder as citizens of this struggling democracy. I'm not talking about some Bob Dole-like diatribe about how Hollywood has corrupted American morality; instead, the insistent militarism and nationalism of these movies troubles me because these twin themes reinforce some of America's worst social and political traits at a time when American democracy needs more, not less, openness and tolerance.
In two of the movies, The Rock and Independence Day, the military figures heavily as both perpetrator and savior, and even as perpetrators (as in The Rock), the soldiers fight for a noble cause. This generally benign image of the military acts as an unintended Armed Forces recruitment effort, a big-budget version of the "Be All That You Can Be" commercials. The high-powered gizmos also have their own techno-attraction, especially to the producers' primary target audience of testosterone-laced adolescents, and the snappy, no-nonsense discipline can easily be mistaken for personal integrity.
In the other two movies, the clandestine "MI" team and Arnold Schwarzenegger's employer, the U.S. Marshals, act as a kind of adjunct to military service. With the help of advanced technology, especially weapons, each operates to defend a statist version of law and order, acting from a kind of noble dedication to certain ideals sharpened by superior training and self-discipline. Arnold and Tom may not be members of the Navy Seals (The Rock) or be fighter pilots (Independence Day), but they stand just one small step to the side, warriors without military portfolio, gentlemen if not officers.
Of course, the military always serves larger interests, and in these movies the "Big Daddy" is the power and authority of the state. Lurking in the background in all these movies is not just the government acting either as criminal or redeemer but the unquestioned acceptance by all the characters that power comes from on high and must be obeyed and protected. "MI" is really Ollie North's "off-the-shelf" intelligence team, ready to act outside the laws for the protection of the state. In The Rock, the state has made Sean Connery's life wretched, and only with its permission can he gain his freedom. Schwarzenegger's U.S. Marshal assassinates the corrupt government arms dealers to rid the body politic of infection but never questions the policy of the state to sell military arms that started the wave of crime. Bill Pullman's "we are all one people" speech in Independence Day is a John Bircher's nightmare, a one-world government that voids all differences in the service of restoring the hegemony of the state.
I don't want to carry this too far, of course -- after all, they're just movies, not propaganda films. But it is interesting how these movies all use a common assumption about how American audiences like their action stories framed, and that these same audiences never question the connections made by the movies' producers between military adventurism and the power (if not the right) of the state to direct the lives of its citizens. American society has always had this strange hybrid strain in its national character composed equally of a strong-man individualism coupled to a state apparatus for terror and domination -- in other words, fascism. Now, this is not the only force field in the American character, and it has been more than balanced by democratic and socialistic beliefs, but it is there. And these movies play on it, consciously or not, to lure in their audiences.
If I were Bob Dole or Newt Gingrich, I wouldn't be railing against godless, liberal Hollywood for corrupting our children's morals. I would examine just what kind of lessons Hollywood broadcasts this summer, and I might turn out less worried because, in the end, the morality of these summer blockbusters fits quite neatly with their ideologies of power. And that should give us all pause.
(July 1996)