Archive: Film Reviews, August 2001
Mars Attacks!
Dir: Tim Burton, 1996
ID4-Independence Day
(Dir. Roland Emmerich, 1996)
A Review by Harry M. Benshoff, University of North Texas, USA
The alien invasion film has been undergoing a dramatic resurgence in popularity during the era of cinematic postmodernity (which, for the sake of this essay let us define as the post-Star Wars 70s, 80s and 90s). This fact is perhaps best exemplified by the blockbuster success of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's Independence Day during the summer of 1996. Some six month's later, ID4 was followed in the theatres by Tim Burton's take on the alien invasion film, Mars Attacks!. Generically speaking, both Mars Attacks! and ID4 exemplify the narrative structure, iconography, and thematic concerns of the classical 1950s alien invasion film. However, whereas ID4 nostalgically recapitulates the ideology of 50s patriarchal masculinity and militarism, Mars Attacks! performs a very different and critical project via its self-conscious use of formalist visual design and generic pastiche. By examining more closely the thematics of the alien invasion movie, and, specifically, these narratives' relationship to a social understanding of masculinity, this essay will suggest that the sub-genre's core of thematic meanings might best be understood as speaking to male fears of bodily penetration. In other words, why do aliens always insist on probing--either anally or otherwise--their often male captives? Just what is at stake in these films?
The alien invasion film, as an identifiable sub-genre of the science fiction genre, first enjoyed mass popularity in the early 1950s, and includes books such as Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (1951) and films like The Flying Saucer (1950), The Thing (1951) and Invaders From Mars (1953). The alien invasion film is actually something of a hybrid between science fiction and the horror genre; sometimes these films are referred to as bug-eyed monster movies because they are closer in narrative form to the classical Hollywood horror film. Aliens in these particular films are almost always evil and menace bourgeois heterosexual culture as much as did the vampire or werewolf, whereas the broader genre of science fiction would be more likely to include friendly or helpful aliens, perhaps eschewing scare effects altogether.
Since the 50s, many critics have understood the ideological project of the alien invasion film in terms of Cold War paranoia. More broadly, one might understand the alien invaders as a metaphor for any type of cultural Other--ethnic, racial, sexual, etc.--that threatened to upset the status quo of 1950s white-bread American culture. In the recent alien invasion film, while general xenophobia may or may not be as pronounced as it was in the 1950s, I think it is fairly safe to say that Communism per se is no longer such a frightening cultural touchstone. (However, the return to public Cold War rhetoric during the Reagan years may have helped fuel the resurgence of the sub-genre during that decade.)
Many postmodern alien invasion films have also been quick to deny any racist coloration to the monstrous invaders--or else they acknowledge it forthrightly, as in the opening scenes of Men in Black (1997) when government agents stop a van load of illegal Mexican aliens in search of an extraterrestrial alien. Both ID4 and Mars Attacks! go to great lengths to correct the potentially racist messages of the classical alien invasion film, primarily by focusing on multicultural scripting and casting. Thus one of ID4's three male heroes is played by African American actor Will Smith, while Mars Attacks!, as part of its project of filmic pastiche, casts blaxploitation icons Pam Grier and Jim Brown in heroic roles.
If race and Communism are being played down as metaphoric Others in the recent alien invasion film, gender (and specifically sexuality as predicated upon male-female binaries) nonetheless remains as potent an Othering discourse as ever, and comes into sharper relief upon analysis. Given our culture's continuing struggle over women's rights and gay rights during the 1980s and 1990s, it is not surprising that these issues would percolate within the sub-genre once again. Add to this the pervasive fears of AIDS and sexuality--specifically anal penetration--and you have a recipe of cultural forces that can be shown to coalesce in the alien invasion film.
Let me put it this way: one of the central recurring tropes of these films is the abduction of human beings (usually male) by alien invaders. What happens then, according to the generic narrative pattern, is that the male body is symbolically raped by little green men, either with mysterious rays, metallic instruments, actual fleshy appendages, or other sundry types of alien probes which often strike the male body from behind, in a bizarre analog of anal intercourse. The end effect of this penetration of the male body (both culturally and within the generic formula) is desecrated masculinity--some combination of submission, mental obeisance, nervous breakdown, or effeminacy. The fucker has now become the fucked, masculinity has become feminized, man has become like woman. This sexualized reading of the alien abduction is more explicit (and usually far less traumatic) in films where aliens abduct women. Often it is made clear that the aliens in these films want women for breeding purposes; as many B movies from the 50s and 60s suggest, "Mars needs women" to propagate its failing race. But when a man is abducted and penetrated by aliens, rape and violation return to the foreground of meaning, as does the truly monstrous proposition of queer sexuality. This trope has become so pronounced within the genre (and UFOlogy in general) that is has become fodder for parody shows including South Park and The Simpsons.
How then are these concerns figured within the specifically postmodern alien invasion film? Before continuing I want to make a clear distinction between two different types of postmodern artifacts. The first, following parameters outlined by Hal Foster and Ann Kaplan, might be thought of as a reactive, co-opted, or commercialized postmodernism. This is the Jamesonian postmodernism of naive nostalgia, one that recycles former tropes and styles in a realist manner without questioning the ideological underpinnings of the genre, or calling attention to itself as a recycled artifact in the first place. The other postmodernist style, a deconstructive or critical postmodernism, more readily acknowledges itself as a formalist artifact or a palimpsest, a writing upon or about the genre. To my thinking, Independence Day and Mars Attacks! exemplify these distinctions quite clearly. Independence Day recycles and repackages the 50s alien invasion film with little or no regard for understanding or exposing its underlying ideologies. Mars Attacks!, on the other hand, readily announces itself as generic pastiche, inviting the viewer to understand the film as a meta-commentary upon the genre, rather than merely another retread thereof.
How both films figure masculinity is reflective of this difference. The nostalgic Independence Day looks backwards to a world wherein macho military men and advanced technology can save the planet from destruction. The film vociferously reinscribes American patriarchy, macho militarism, and handy lap-top computer technology as the triumvirate savior of the world, literally embodied in the masculine poses of the President (Bill Pullman), fly-boy Steven (Will Smith), and Jewish intellectual David (Jeff Goldblum). As one reviewer noted, all "that stands between planetary life and death are three extravagantly fit American men with good hair."
To some extent ID4 might be better discussed as a sci-fi version of the World War II war film, focusing as it does on aerial dogfights and a tightly knit group of men who must band together to defeat a common enemy. As such, it basically excludes women from its heroic project--the few female characters present are wives, mothers, nurses, and (ahem) strippers. The action is driven exclusively by men, and if we remove the science fiction trappings or are willing to read them metaphorically, ID4 can be understood to be fundamentally about masculinity and the threat that feminization poses to that concept.
"Failed" masculinity in the film is represented most spectacularly by the neurotic gay male stereotype played by out gay actor Harvey Fierstein. Fierstein's character is not openly denoted as gay (and in fact Fierstein has gone on record suggesting that the character was not meant to be gay). Yet, the mincing character Harvey Fierstein plays is heavily coded with homosexual stereotypes, such as when he crawls under a desk with the line "There's no shame in hiding--oh--I'd better call my mother!" (Actually, filmmakers Emmerich and Devlin may have hired Fierstein in reaction to charges that their previous film Stargate, 1994, was forthrightly queer-phobic. For that film, they cast the androgynous and dark-skinned Jaye Davidson, fresh from his stint as The Crying Game's mysterious transvestite, to play the monstrous alien invader. Surrounding him with children further tapped into social fears of predatory queers. True to the generic imperative, the alien was also defeated by a straight white buddy pair of scientist and military man.)
ID4, like many other buddy, action, and/or war films, thus celebrates masculinity and male homosocial bonds while negating or denigrating their shadowy other, male homosexual bonds. Practically though, homosociality and homosexuality are inescapably intertwined, for one cannot really delineate male homosocial bonds without at the same time vocally disavowing the homosexual possibility, lest the audience (or members of the group itself) get the wrong idea. Indeed, like homosocial institutions in general, the macho men of ID4 seem obsessed with phallic symbols (they are always chomping on big black cigars) and anality. Masculine competence is after all measured by not being penetrated or, as the popular phrase has it, by "keeping one's butt covered." One character in the film, frustrated by military authority, expresses this sentiment by noting disgustedly that "NASA's been on my butt all morning." Other military men worry about being "wusses" and joke about their having to "kiss some serious booty" in order to get ahead in the military hierarchy. Somewhat surprisingly, even the issues of gays in the military and homosexual marriage are raised by the film when, rather outlandishly, the filmmakers maneuver pilot Will Smith and buddy Harry Connick Jr. into a scene where it appears that one pilot is proposing marriage to the other. In an excellent example of the process of inoculation, wherein counter-hegemonic ideas are addressed in order to be contained, the scene is played for laughs: the issues are jokingly raised and then reassuringly dismissed as having nothing to do with the world of heroic masculinity; indeed, these issues are not even worth the consideration of "real" men.
Yet, as these few instances of conflict and containment have demonstrated, traditional masculinity and male homosocial groups are on some level obsessed with forthright homosexuality--if only in their obsessive need to deny it. Seminal queer theoretician Guy Hocquenghem noted over twenty-five years ago that "we find the greatest charge of latent homosexuality in those social machines which are particularly anti-homosexual--the army, the school, the church, sport, etc. At the collective level, this sublimation is a means for transforming desire into the desire to repress." In other words, while the men joke nervously about gay marriage, they soon acknowledge that what they really want to do is get into their phallic jet planes and "whup ET's ass." By fucking the Other they reassert their masculinity and reinscribe the active/passive binary of heterosexuality and traditional gender roles.
Ultimately, all of Independence Day's thematic subtext coalesces around the failed masculinity of character Russell Casse (Randy Quaid), a man who has been abducted by aliens in the past, an event that has so destroyed his identity as a man that he has become an alcoholic. It is strongly implied that Casse has been anally penetrated by the aliens, and other male characters in the film taunt and tease him about it mercilessly. At the climax of the film, Casse reclaims his heroic masculinity by destroying the aliens via a phallic jet plane which he drives into the bowels of the alien space ship, triumphantly "topping" the aliens while exclaiming "All right you alien assholes--in the words of my generation--up yours!" In this climactic act, masculinity is reaffirmed as an active, penetrating phallicism dependent upon the forceful submission of the Other.
On the story level alone, Mars Attacks! looks very much like ID4. Aliens approach Earth with the intent of taking it over, attack US institutions such as Congress and the Presidency, cause panic and a lot of disaster movie special effects, and are eventually thwarted. Unlike the more straightforwardly realist film style of ID4 however, Mars Attacks! immediately announces itself as a pastiche of the specifically 1950s alien invasion film. Mars Attacks! uses its state of the arts special effects budget to make space ships that aren't impressive or frightening by 90s standards; rather they look exactly like the cheesy flying saucers from the 50s films. Danny Elfman's musical score explicitly recalls the theremin-scored classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) while actor Pierce Brosnan, playing the scientist role, seems to be channeling Richard Carlson (the original B actor who created so many of those characters), complete with wooden B-film delivery and an ever-present pipe. Such explicit genre pastiche invites the viewer to consider the film critically--as a text that has something to say about the genre itself. Rather than being merely a nostalgic reworking of the genre, Mars Attacks! sets out to unravel its ideological assumptions.
Perhaps the most interesting way Mars Attacks! does this is by making the allegedly "external" threat of Martian invasion a reflection of the dominant white patriarchal culture as opposed to that of some minoritized Other--its aliens are obvious masculine id figures run amok. When not shooting down everything in their path (and "high fiving" each other afterwards), they sit around their space ships in their underwear, reading Playboy, drinking alcohol, and watching The Dukes of Hazzard. They seem to want to conquer earth for the malicious fun of it - just because they can. Their experiments upon human beings are bizarrely pointless and humorously queer--as only Tim Burton can imagine them. For example, Burton satirizes the heterosexual love story of the Hollywood formula by playing it out between the scientist's severed-but-living head and his paramour, who after some bizarre alien surgery, exists as a female human head grafted onto the body of a chihuahua. (Compare this to the solemn heterosexual nuptials of ID4, where fly-boy Will Smith marries his stripper girlfriend before God and country.) In another sequence, the film self-consciously parodies the woman-as-alien motif, acknowledging that construct even as it uses the sequence to satirize the establishment libido. Dressed as an over-the-top, parody of the slinky, big-haired femme fatale, one alien (Lisa Marie) gains access to the White House because of its Press Secretary's blind lust.
Ultimately, unlike the masculine saviors of ID4, in Mars Attacks! the President, the scientist, and the military men are all destroyed by the aliens: killed by their own id figures run amok. It is postmodern pop culture itself which defeats the alien invasion, via a recording of Slim Whitman yodeling the "Indian Love Call," the sound of which causes the aliens' heads to explode. The film ends with a Mariachi band playing the National Anthem on the ruined steps of the Capitol, as the President's surviving daughter gives medals of honor to a teenage slacker boy and his wheel-chair bound grandmother.
Independence Day became one of the top grossing films of all time. Mars Attacks! was a box office bomb. As a naively nostalgic commercialized postmodern artifact, ID4 recycles and celebrates the chest-thumping masculinity of the 50s alien invasion film, whereas Mars Attacks! actively critiques the same institutions and the generic formulas that support them. Sadly, such pop deconstructions of filmic genres rarely succeed financially; those fans who hunger for the genre's ideological reassurances would be outraged at the satire of Mars Attacks!, and those who might be open to such a critique probably don't go to see alien invasion films in the first place.
Ultimately then, and by way of concluding, I want to propose that the alien invasion genre--or UFO mythology as a very real life phenomenon--is based on a kind of "tentacle porn"--if I can borrow that term from Japanese animation, or anime. "Tentacle porn" is the result of certain Japanese censorship dictates that forbid the depiction of "normal" human sexual activity. As a result, the censoring bodies have created a situation in which animators, still wanting and needing to draw sexually explicit scenes in order to sell their product, create violent inter-species sexualities. Rather than depict human beings engaged in mutual sexual couplings, which they are forbidden to do, they now present people (usually women) being sexually mauled and raped by all manner of alien pseudo-phalli. I'd like to suggest that the postmodern alien invasion film operates in similar ways. Censorship--both social and psychic--has forbidden the representation of queer sexualities that might disrupt the rigid binaries inscribed by heterosexuality. What might happen to a man who is raped by another man, or even more unthinkable--a man who chooses to be penetrated by another man--or by a woman--these are not topics that can be countenanced within mainstream media. Yet the fears and anxieties surrounding these issues find coded expression in the alien invasion film. Sexual difference is turned into metaphoric science fiction warfare--according to this paradigm, and in the words of another best-selling media text, truly, "Men are from Mars, and Women are From Venus."