I really want to believe that Roland Emmerich
is a smart director. In my mind, his
films simultaneously give the mainstream audience what they want, whilst
including enough layers to appease a populism-skeptic like me. They may all have moments of saccharine family
bonding, interspersed with (at first glance) the worst manifestation of
American exceptionalism – yet upon closer inspection it is possible to see more
nuanced representations of military strength, politics and American civic
culture.
White
House Down takes place
during the morning after President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) has announced that
all American troops are to be withdrawn from the ‘Middle East region’ and all
military contractors removed. This same
morning, Martin Walker (James Woods) is retiring as the head of the
presidential Secret Service team that John Cale (Channing Tatum), an
Afghanistan veteran, is desperately trying to be recruited to. Cale has a tumultuous relationship with his
11-year-old daughter, so after his secret service interview, and due to her
obssession with politics, they go on a tour of the White House to try and bond.
During the tour, Emily disappears to use
the bathroom at the same time that a group of terrorists set off a bomb and
shoot all of the security guards, thereby systematically taking control of the
White House and it’s control centre.
John uses his expert training to escape from becoming a hostage and goes
to try and find his daughter, yet he quickly has to concentrate on protecting
the president from the mercenaries.
Like all of his narratives, Emmerich
includes so much foreshadowing in the early build-up of his films that it is
possible to predict most of the outcome before the final reel. A divorced father, with military training
that needs to prove his commitment to a mission…? A secret service character on the last week
of his job that lost his son in the war…? An 11-year-old girl with an intimate
knowledge of the White House with a YouTube channel…? Anyone who watches movies should be able to
predict the outcome for these character plots.
The camera spends much of the time
lovingly swooping past the Capitol Building, the Lincoln Memorial, the
Washington Monument and of course, the White House. This, alongside clumsy dialogue such as “Did
you know that the White House is visited by 1.5 million people a year…?!”,
gives a patriotic audience much to be proud of in the first twenty minute
set-up. When the terrorists begin to
cause destruction, it incites a frustrated rage in the viewer that anyone
should dare desecrate such revered institutions – a rage that must be
infinitely heightened in an American patriotic viewer.
Yet, there is ideological cognitive
dissonance in this film. At a time when Americans have a real problem with the
legitimacy and the efficiency of their governments (especially during the recent shutdown), it
seems natural that an audience would like to see it destroyed in an act of symbolic,
yet nihilistic vandalism.
********
Spoiler Alert ********
For those who have already seen the
film, there is an even more nuanced ideological opposition going on. The Hero, President Sawyer, is an obvious
pastiche of Obama, a cerebral African-American democrat with ambitions of world
peace, and the terrorists are white-power radicals and right wing lunatics – a
seeming declaration that Emmerich is a liberal.
Also, Sawyer is being targeted due to
his apparent rejection of the military industrial complex that is benefitting
financially from the extension of global war, suggesting that Emmerich is
making a damning indictment of American foreign policy. Yet, in the film it is the nameless, ordinary
soldiers who save the day in the end, averting the airstrike on the White House
for ethical reasons as they spot the innocent civilians. So clearly, Emmerich is praising the
all-American bravery of the Soldier and attacking instead the leadership and
the politicians, who send them to unethical and corrupt wars overseas etc.
This seems to fit with the preferred
reading of most action films, where an ordinary citizen courageously rises to
the challenge and overcomes a villain without the use of the bureaucratic
FBI/NSA/CIA/Police etc. But the villain
is usually foreign in this classic ‘model’, and in the few years since the
Obama administration the trend seems to have a ‘homegrown’ terrorist
instead. So now you have a celebration
of ordinary American citizens rising up and defending the country from the threat
of other American citizens – without the help of any federal agency.
So hidden within the liberal narrative
is an alignment with the ideologies of right-wingers who want to take the
country back from the overreaches of the federal government. Even though Sawyer is left in office at the
end of the film, the moral authority of the institution of which he represents
is left redundant: it is the citizens who have protected the state, not the
other way round – a growing post-Obama right-wing belief.
********
Spoiler Over ********
Another feature that Emmerich has had to
update in his disaster films is his relationship with the press. In all of his films, the apocalypse is
reported in the media and these broadcasts are used to aid the characters or
further the plot. But, now he has to up
the game and include citizen journalism clunkily undermining news media. Emily uses her YouTube channel to distribute
footage of the terrorists, and earlier Sawyer laments the use of the White
House lawn – especially a right wing Fox News parody (who later has the moral
highground by confronting a terrorist to protect a child).
Overall, the film is overlong and filled
with fight scenes, that depending on the palette of the audience will either excite
or alienate in equal measures. The
ending, depicting the main characters ‘riding into the sunset’ in a helicopter,
is patently ridiculous. But Emmerich has
managed to appeal to both Liberals and Conservatives, and by doing that has
created a quasi-subversive film that captures the political zeitgeist masterfully.
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