Escape into glorious nonsense
Watching heroic deeds will give your spirits a boost, Alyssa Rosenberg writes.
As summer heat and bad news descend in tandem, I’ve been seeking refuge from one set of disasters in another.
Though I initially treated Independence Day and Armageddon as pure escapism, I emerged from my re-watches of both with a stiffer spine than I’d expected. These late-’90s hits are fortifying to watch right now, and not just because the good guys triumph or because there’s little else on offer with Hollywood on hiatus and many movie theatres still closed. These movies are a popcorn affirmation of two ideas that we need right now: First, that it’s exciting and revitalizing to tackle a challenge of world-destroying dimensions, and second, that there’s something we can all contribute to that effort.
To be clear, Armageddon and Independence Day are not practical guides to surviving a pandemic, nor even the sort of hard science fiction, like the pandemic movie Contagion, that has come to seem prescient in our current situation. Both movies are gleeful, glorious nonsense.
What they have in common with our current moment is that their characters face an imminent, global threat: a planet-killing asteroid in Armageddon, a voracious alien race in Independence Day. What the movies have in common with each other is that the characters respond to these threats not with despair, not with the belief that they can wish danger away and not with a death-courting pursuit of immediate gratification, but with creativity and even joy.
Armageddon is the worse of the two, full of cringe-inducing moments. Yet the movie gets zip from a kind of cross-class, cross-racial solidarity as NASA astronauts and drillers, led by
Bruce Willis as Harry Stamper, team up to get into space, tunnel into an asteroid bound for Earth, and blow it up from within.
Yeah, the movie is, on the surface, a yarn about nuking a big rock. But it’s also a celebration of a wide spectrum of Americans — at least, of American men — and an argument that they all have something to offer.
Independence Day embodies that idea even more broadly. Capt. Steven Hiller (Will Smith) is torn between his dreams of joining NASA and his love for his girlfriend Jasmine Dubrow (Vivica A. Fox), who works as an exotic dancer, worried that respectability politics will derail his career. David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) is alienated from his Judaism and his wife, Constance Spano (Margaret Colin), whose all-consuming job as White House communications director he resents. Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) is an alcoholic veteran, traumatized by what he insists was an alien abduction.
Independence Day finds value and a use for all of them: Jasmine commandeers a big rig and saves the first lady (Mary Mcdonnell); Russell leads a fleet of Rv-dwellers that get Steven and an alien specimen to Area 51; Steven overcomes his careerism to propose to Jasmine and fly an alien spacecraft; and David comes to appreciate Constance’s devotion to public service and reunites with her.
The COVID-19 pandemic is no action movie: We can’t blow up the virus. Staying home, avoiding people we love and ordering in groceries feel more like inaction than heroics. Still, in performing these little acts of valour we can save our communities and discover our best selves.