Alien-Invasion Films: Imperialism, Race and Gender in the American Security State, 1950-2020

318 Pages·2022·4.181 MB·English

by  Mark E. Wildermuth

Alien-Invasion Films
Imperialism, Race and Gender in the
American Security State, 1950–2020
Mark E. Wildermuth
Alien-Invasion Films
Mark E. Wildermuth
Alien-Invasion Films
Imperialism, Race and Gender in the American
Security State, 1950–2020
Mark E. Wildermuth
Literature & Languages
University of Texas of the Permian Basin
Odessa, TX, USA
ISBN 978-3-031-11794-7 ISBN 978-3-031-11795-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11795-4
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This book is dedicated to my father whose valor on the battlefield
during World War II in the fight against fascism was exceeded only
by his brilliance as an artist in the years thereafter.
A
cknowledgments
I must thank the University of Texas and the Dunagan Endowment for
gracious financial support during the writing and the researching of this
book. Special thanks go to my research assistants Aileen Taft, Lisette St.
Michelle, Amanda Christesson, and Robert Kirk for their invaluable aid in
finishing this book. Thanks also to the late Dr. Peter Brunette, Reynolds
Professor of Film at Wake Forest University, whose scholarship and kind
guidance have taught many of us so much about film, media, and the
profession.
vii
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 An Overview of the History of American Imperialism
and the American Security State 13
3 The First Postwar Security State Invasion Films,
1950–1956 47
4 Invasion Films in the 1960s Post-Camelot Security State 81
5 Nixon, Post-détente, and Invasion Films in the 1970s 109
6 Invasion Films and the Reagan Era 145
7 Invasion Films and the 1990s Interregnum 179
8 Invasion Narratives After 9/11: The Bush and Obama
Regimes 229
ix
x CONTENTS
9 Invasion Films After 9/11 in the Trump Regime 263
10 Conclusions 283
Index 289
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In 2005, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri indicated in the book Empire
that “sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national
and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new
global form of sovereignty is what we call empire.” Thus, “in contrast to
imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not
rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializ-
ing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global
realm with its open, expanding frontiers” (xii). It replaces the old nation-
alist and imperialist states via a global “regime with no temporal boundar-
ies” (xv). Many postmodern critiques of oppressive nationalist and imperial
states are therefore obsolete, and even postcolonial “discourses are effec-
tive only in very specific geographical locations” (154). Politics of differ-
ence that are the basis of such critiques have no place in a system that
incorporates them to support “the functions and practices of imperial
rule” (142).
Since 9/11, and with the resurgence of populism and nativism that
flowered under the revival of nationalism since 2001, this view of empire
has been rejected by others seeing modified forms of imperialist discourse
and practice flourishing in the twenty-first century. In 2005, Atilio Boron’s
study A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri criticized
the limited view of this conception of empire in the wake of 9/11.
Likewise, the editors of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
noted that Boron and other critics rightly “point to the unilateral U.S.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2022
M. E. Wildermuth, Alien-Invasion Films,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11795-4_1
2 M. E. WILDERMUTH
invasion and occupation of Iraq, dating from 2003, as evidence that sov-
ereignty of the traditional nation state is as hegemonic as ever” (2618). In
short, they say Empire relies too often on “oversimplifications of ‘post-
modernism’ and ‘postcolonialism’” (2619).
Indeed, culture critics describe how the twenty-first-century nation
state and its imperialistic tendencies in America require double focus on its
continuity with the past and its continuing evolution. John Carlos Rowe,
describing the role of culture in U.S. imperialism and globalization, argued
in 2005 that what Horkheimer and Adorno had “termed ‘the culture
industry’ conditioned American citizens to accept the undisguised milita-
rism and jingoistic nationalism now driving U.S. foreign policy” in places
like Iraq and Afghanistan (575). For Rowe, not only was military might be
involved, but also the exportation of American culture. This was evident
in the “globalization of consumer capitalism” (576). Such activity is a part
of “our emergence as a neo-imperial nation since 1945” and is central to
“our conception of the U.S. as a discrete nation that nonetheless has a
global identity and mission” (576). The state’s use of the cultural industry
works in ways “that encompass a wide range of nominally different politi-
cal positions, so that in many respects left, liberal, and conservative cul-
tural works often achieve complimentary, rather than contested, ends”
(575). Rowe, in short, described a state behaving much like that discussed
in Empire but one which, despite its global reach, centered itself in
American culture and still had a central geographical location.
Rowe’s reference to 1945 as a late modern starting point for this neo-
imperialism in American culture points to his interest, shared with other
cultural critics of his time, in the reprisal of the American security state in
the years after 9/11. Writing in 2003, feminist critic Iris Marion Young
said “a security state […] constitutes itself to an […] aggressor outside” by
organizing its “political and economic capacities to respond to this threat.”
Such a state “must root out every enemy within” the state by keeping
“watch on everyone who could be an internal security threat” (225). The
security state thereby embodies “a logic of masculinist protection” that
reduces citizens to the role of helpless women and children (223–225).
Rowe and Young implicitly were showing how this post-9/11 security
state was becoming an extension of earlier security state regime logic
which could create cover for American neo-imperialism. They were not
alone. In his afterward to the 2009 edition of William Appleman Williams’
famous critique of American imperialism (originally published in 1959,
with subsequent editions in 1962 and 1979), The Tragedy of American