Dirty Liberal Invasion Films

I saw X-Men 2 in March/April 2003, and it was right after the invasion of Iraq officially began. There were a lot of news stories about why we were invading Iraq, and the debate was actually pretty fierce. Halliburton was all over the place, and in Houston, there were protests outside KBR (Halliburton subsidiary) headquarters downtown. Basically, the liberal view was that this war was being orchestrated by Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfiwitz, et al. as a means to control oil and to simply make money from government contracts. I didn’t buy it, at least not wholly. Nothing’s ever quite so simple, I maintain.

And then X-2 enters in the middle of this. If you have seen the movie, you know who the bad guys are—a private corporation that runs a paramilitary group and wants to eradicate all dissidents, I mean all difference, I mean, anyone who isn’t just like everyone else.

Not far into the film, this paramilitary organization, sanctioned by the government and acting as the U.S. army, invades the Xavier school. To save one the students, Wolverine brutally kills many of these soldiers. When he first killed one, I jumped. First of all, killing is generally minimal in these action movies—it’s generally limited to the main bad guy. The rest are either robots or simply knocked unconscious. Here, though, we get to see the good guys (the X-Men) kill the bad guys (soldiers in army uniforms who are simply doing their jobs). It was shocking to see the U.S. military in the role of the enemy, the bad guy, as it were.

Am I hinting that Bryan Singer is commenting on Iraq in this film? Not really. I do think films take on special prescience according to the cultural climate of the time, however. X-2 certainly seemed shocking at that point in time, where it would not have if it had been released five years earlier. Is the paramilitary organization actually Halliburton? No, I wouldn’t go that far. But the film does comment on the role and power of such organizations to manipulate government—see Patriot Act, etc.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith contains similar elements. In this film, we get lines like Skywalkers—“If you’re not with me, you’re against me.” And Obi-Wan replies, “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes.” Or Padme’s “This is the way democracy dies—with thunderous applause,” when the Senate agrees to give the Chancellor supreme power. I may have gotten the exact quotes wrong, but you get the jist. Being released in 2005, we can’t help but read these lines as comments on the Bush administration.

And then there’s Spielburg’s War of the Worlds. Consider the basic plot—aliens have been planning this invasion for a long time. They have superior intelligence and technology, and they can easily wipe out the humans. The invasion begins, and they begin chewing up everything, terraforming to create their own world on top of ours. And what happens? They didn’t plan for every contingency, that’s what happens. Smartest beings in the universe, and they forget to bring their gas masks. Or more metaphorically, they didn’t plan on the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s not the people that fights them off, but the climate itself.

I will ask myself the same question: is War of the Worlds an allegory of the U.S. invasion of Iraq? That’s way too complicated, I think. What is undeniable, though, is that an invasion movie is released in 2005, while the U.S. is still in the middle of its own invasion. The movie must therefore take on special prescience, or undertones, that it would otherwise not really have. It easy to substitute the U.S. for the aliens—they plan the invasion, go and wipe everything out in order to create their own land and government, and yet that little bit of resistance continually gnaws at them until they die, or in this case, leave. But I would never seriously suggest such an allegory (although I just did!). Instead, I would say that the film is commenting on invasions and how they never work. Resistance can come in many different forms, but it always comes.

Sometimes movies can be dirty little conservative films, too, and I will talk about one of those next time.