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.Both Independence Day and Air Force One are aware of the Americanpublic s desire for a president who can perform, who can offer a narrative thatcan entertain the nation and capture its attention.The difference is that, in Inde-pendence Day and Air Force One, a different kind of performance is represented.The performative narrative that all the Clintonesque films took was that of thesordid, melodramatic, sexually active afternoon soap opera.The presidentialperformances of Independence Day and Air Force One are old-fashioned, heroic,American Western narratives out of High Noon (1952) and The Gunfight at theOK Corral (1957).In fact, it is almost as if these films are answering the prayer ofJack Stanton s political aide in Primary Colors who, watching an old western onTV, begs,  Come back, Shane.Run for President.But these superhero films are also aware of the carnivalesque qualities that thenineties American presidency had taken on.In Independence Day, for example, theFirst Lady is rescued from a crashed helicopter by a stripper.That is an exampleof the White House meeting the carnival world of the streets with a vengeance.After the White House is blown up, the president ends up in the post-Holocaustworld of the survivors and, at one point, becomes one of the guys with a bunch ofragtag misfits right out of The Dirty Dozen (1967).And, of course, there is alwaysthe ever-present press.Even when the world is coming to an end, they continueto stick their microphones in peoples faces and report what they think is goingon.Independence Day gleefully steals from the worlds of every sci-fi movie thatever preceded it.Its most fully articulated thefts come from Dr.Strangelove, StarWars, Alien, and War Games with War of the Worlds serving as the éminence griseruling over the genre references that appear in Independence Day.Air Force One is a much less rowdy, much more mature, somber, interiorized,and politically acute film than Independence Day, but it is still, despite its gravityÏ%The American President 111and the much more presidential bearing of Harrison Ford, no less a superherocomic book.On a scale of unbelievability, it ranks right up there with Indepen-dence Day.Actually, the one film that Air Force One most resembles is Die Hard(1988).President James Marshall exhibits all the same instincts as John McCaindoes in those popular terrorist thrillers of the late eighties and nineties, exceptthat instead of trying to reclaim a skyscraper or an airport (plus his wife), Presi-dent Marshall must defeat the terrorist usurpers on the biggest, most sophisti-cated airplane in existence.When Air Force One was released, ex-President Gerald Ford (no relation toHarrison Ford) consented to review it and wrote,  Air Force One is great enter-tainment, with great action and great performances.Just like politics. 40 Whileex-President Ford noted the presidential performativity of his namesake, othercritics consistently emphasized the discourse of wish fulfillment that Ford s per-formance and the script offers:  Harrison Ford as the President of the UnitedStates is such a perfect piece of casting.As President James Marshall.Fordis the chief executive as red-blooded liberal superjock a Bill Clinton who servedin Vietnam and has never waffled since.Here, at last, is what America hasyearned for in a leader: the heart and mind of Franklin Delano Roosevelt joinedwith the cojones of Clint Eastwood. 41 At times, President Marshall even soundslike Eastwood, such as when he delivers the great one-liner  Get off my plane! ashe knocks his terrorist nemesis into kingdom come from ten thousand feet.Butat no time does he ever sound like Clinton or act like Clinton.Perhaps the strongest subtext that both Independence Day and Air Force Oneshare is the theme of family.The presidents in both films are unequivocallydevoted family men, and family becomes a metaphor for country as the thingmost worth fighting to preserve and protect.Time and again the one thing thatPresident Marshall places above his country is family.First, he refuses to leavethe plane in the special president s escape pod when the takeover begins.Oncehe gains control of enough weapons and men to retake the plane from the terror-ists, he refuses to push his advantage because his wife and daughter are still heldhostage.When he finds a way to parachute all the hostages to safety, he refusesto go for one simple reason:  I m not leaving without my family. And when theterrorist leader (Gary Oldman) holds a gun to his daughter s head and asks himif now he is ready to negotiate, his immediate answer is,  I ll do it.I ll do it.Justleave my family alone.The other subtext that both Independence Day and Air Force One share is anunintended yet uncannily prophetic one.The imagery (skyscrapers on fire andplanes exploding) and the terrorist threats of both films are visually predictiveof the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and thePentagon.These films may be comic books, but their vision of the world orderin the late nineties is frighteningly accurate.In fact, President Marshall s reactionto the threat of world terrorism could have been a template for Bush s reactionfollowing the 9/11 attack and his subsequent rhetoric in regard to the rogue gov-ernment of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.Air Force One opens with a tough talking,root-out-the-evil-and-destroy-it speech that Bush wishes he had given:  AtrocityÏ%112 The Films of the Ninetiesand terror are not political weapons and to those who would use them, your dayis over.We will never negotiate.We will no longer tolerate and we will no longerbe afraid.It is your turn to be afraid. President Marshall keeps things simple.When his political adviser, after this speech, cautions that  it might come backto bite us in the ass in November, Marshall simply replies,  It is the right thingto do. When his wife asks him why his political advisers disliked his hard-linespeech, he answers,  They re afraid we won t have the guts to back it up. Again,this political reaction to terrorism rather eerily predicted the Bush administrationstance post-September 11.The world of Air Force One, with its heroic president, its female vice president,its hard-line antiterrorist view, and its clear morality at the top, is a brave newworld for representation of the American presidency.Until Independence Day andAir Force One, the nineties film representations of the presidency had all empha-sized the corruption, the unfaithfulness, and the moral vacuum created by thepowerful phenomenon of spin [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]