Aliens and the white man's paranoia

 I have always had a suspicion about horror and sci-fi movies.

They reflect the paranoia of cis-het white men of eventually being violently retaliated. The colonizers, the oppressors, the ones that know what it was done, and how they benefit from it. They sleep at night with the nightmare of all that violence that was perpetrated against colonized, unruly female and queer bodies is coming back to haunt them. 

Alien invasion movies reflect the paranoia of being violently colonized by a "more advanced" foreign civilization with which we cannot communicate or understand. Our ways of being are threatened, but in the end we always succeed thanks to the leadership of the US military. We are made to vicariously participate in the military imperial project this way. As I am watching 1953's War of the Worlds, a sort of blueprint for this genre, it just makes sense how this idea would be a perfect pitch to refer to the invasion of communism amidst the peak of the Cold War. In this movie, a California town apparently populated by all white men and one woman protagonists deal with the menace of the Martians (the "red" planet, hint hint). All protagonists are male white scientists, policemen, firemen, military men, and a white woman with a Master's degree in science. She serves coffee and fulfills the role of hetero-cis-white romantic interest to the real hero, a young scientist with a cowboy's soul. We see white people suffering, being killed, displaced, enslaved, their bodies probed and experimented for scientific purposes. As the survivors gather to pray in a church amidst the invasion, we are made to feel empathy and sympathy with the poor white innocent people being erased like that. The movie ends with (white) humanity being saved by a miracle: the Martians are killed by the bacteria on Earth, against which they don't have immunity. White Earth is saved, for now.

Colonialism, white supremacy, and imperialism are reproduced in our psyches via narratives like this. In 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the invasion was reimagined by Steven Spielberg as an equally terrifying but slightly more optimistic to aliens. I find significant the presence of the figure of the Mothership, in a way, the return of the repressed feminine, which could reflect Spielberg's cultural sensitivity to women's liberation in the US.

Exactly 20 years after in 1997, Men In Black presents a world where aliens are already infiltrating our societies just like Mexicans do, sneaking in disguise though our borders. The risk is that aliens are constantly "passing" as human. Race is definitely the most apparent shift from the previous two films I talk about here, with Will Smith representing the Black man cowboy style, as well as Tommy Lee Jones as a more humorous and benevolent (yet equally violent) cop than in War of the Worlds. We have the most sophisticated FBI style agents dealing with the problem, the updated cool as fuck Men in Black, as opposed to the towny ignorant police (that tension between the locals and the feds that Americans love). 

Will Smith had already established himself two years before as the symbol for Black assimilation into white supremacy as the righteous but irreverent Black cop of Bad Boyz (1995). I suspect that this is the invitation for Black Americans to see themselves represented in one of the institutions that is most oppressive to them; the police (oh and there is also Black men in the military in high ranks, so I guess that says we have achieved a post-racial society). Will Smith's character becomes more significant when we consider that a year before MIB he was the star of Independence Day (1996), a cartoonish reimagination of War of the Worlds but with a clear racial inclusion message: Black, Asian and Latino men can be part of the imperial and colonial project of male and white supremacy. In Independence Day, the image of an impossibly giant ship (to big to even be contained in the film frame) destroying the White House is only reminiscent of the bombing of the Chilean presidential palace in 1973 for me. How can the invasor and the oppressor imagine themselves as the victimized part and then have us feel sympathy for the survival of their white imperial colonial project? The US, their project of multicultural freedom (read free-market economy) and independence (imperialist project of political-economic-cultural hegemony), as our project to defend.

I have further always suspected that zombies represent the fear of immigrants, and that vampires often stand as metaphors of queerness (but maybe represent immigrants too, with their Eastern European accents), and I mean, do we even need to go to talk about witches? A whole body of feminist academic analysis has dealt with that.

But bare with me for now, more to come.