What’s more American than a big, dumb summer action movie? Why, it’s the big, dumb summer action movie with America as the world’s savior against a powerful alien menace Independence Day.
Even though it preceded the MAGA era by 20 years, the 1996 summer hit from 20th Century Fox and Centropolis entertainment checks off a shit ton of boxes for the fantasy-prone America First patriots in the audience, and we might as well check through those boxes for National Zero’s audience.
Republican president: No, President Thomas Whitmore – played by Bill Pullman – is never stated to be a Dem or Republican. But early in the movie there’s a brief depiction of the McLaughlin Group TV roundtable in which liberal columnist Eleanor Clift, playing herself, calls him a “wimp,” so we’re going to go ahead and say this strongly suggests Whitmore is a Republican. The WASP-y name helps too.
Liberal cities get occupied and attacked: The destruction of New York, Los Angeles and Washington, DC are a perfect retroactive allegory for “sanctuary cities,” almost as if the movie’s saying “See, look what happens when you hold up a sign welcoming foreigners and/or space aliens into your cities. You get destroyed for it. We tried to warn you libs and you didn’t listen.”
This is basically what Fox News viewers think New York looks like now anyway after the BLM “riots” of 2020.
The characters who died in the attack were mostly libtards, like the raspy-voiced gay Jewish guy played by raspy voiced gay Jewish guy Harvey Fierstein who got incinerated in his car in Manhattan, or the dorky stripper lady who got her ass vaporized alongside a bunch of other new age hippie idiots on top of the US Bank Tower in Downtown Los Angeles. A couple of Whitmore’s staff were killed when their helicopter didn’t leave the White House in time, but they were lifelong DC bureaucrats who deserved it too. What better way to “drain the swamp” than have an alien spaceship completely destroying DC in a massive firestorm started by an alien spacecraft?
The MAGA kids definitely freaking LOVE this part.
Replacement theory: Once the aliens have destroyed the nation’s capital and the global capitals of media, entertainment, and finance, their plot becomes clear. They want to replace white people as the dominant race on the planet. Yeah, they want to replace other people too, but the MAGA audience is especially concerned about the white victims of the genocidal alien plan. Tucker Carlson probably even got the idea for replacement theory from Independence Day.
Deus ex Machina doesn’t make sense: People who believe that a dogshit country like Venezuela can build a powerful AI supercomputer capable of stealing the 2020 presidential election are probably the same kind of people who could believe that a 1996-era MacBook could be used to write a virus that could take down the force fields on the ships of an advanced alien race. It’s a perfect plot device for people with no understanding of technology (Minor tangent: The script writers could have made it more believable with just a few more lines of exposition. David had discovered the aliens hijacking human satellites with their own code and had figured out they were coordinating the attack. So if he understood what their code was doing and that it interfaced with Earth technology, he knew its flaws and could exploit them to cause their systems to crash).
Drunken trailer trash idiot played by Randy Quaid saves the day: Just as Area 51 and all the human refugees hiding within it are about to be vaporized by the aliens, the “real American” played by real-life far right dipshit actor Randy Quaid sacrifices himself to destroy the spaceship.
Tomorrow will be one of the worst Independence Days in American history because we have a sleaze as “President”who is maliciously prosecuting and slandering half of this country to cover for his openly crooked crime family and rigged election. What a dirt bag! 🇺🇸 #July4thWeekend
— Randy Quaid (@RandyRRQuaid) July 3, 2023
America First: Even though throughout the film it’s made clear that this is a global invasion, everything happens in the United States. It’s Americans who first discover the aliens approaching Earth, it’s Americans who figure out that they’re going to attack, it’s Americans who coordinate the counterstrike, and it’s Americans who declare independence from the extraterrestrial menace.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 16, 2020
Then of course there’s this embarrassment the fat fuck tweeted back in 2020. Besides being rehearsed and succinct the original speech fits the MAGA worldview well. Everything is the dramatic final battle for them, moral complexity or nuance be damned. They’re always fighting for their right to exist against an existential threat, their faces imagined on the heads of a small group of desperate, benighted freedom fighters for whom shit only got real after the libtard cities were annihilated by the invaders (and the military accidentally nuked Houston too).
It’s just too bad director Roland Emmerich, a gay immigrant who also made The Patriot starring Mel Gibson, didn’t have the forethought to make all the heroes more white and Christian – and the aliens somehow more “woke,” or maybe communists. He also definitely lost some of his cred with right wingers when he directed 2004’s very stupid climate change disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow.
But on its own Independence Day is an extremely MAGA-friendly movie, deep within their comfort zone in so many unique and interesting ways. It’s a tale of triumph that begins with a justification of the their hostility toward the other and ends with America kicking their asses out.