OF COURSE Bill Clinton will be re elected in spite of his aides' and his own recklessness. I don't know why I bothered reading all that stuff about Bob Dole and Jack Kemp and how well things went for the Republicans in San Diego. I've just seen In dependence Day, and I know Bill Clinton will get back in.
It doesn't matter much how many blonde kiss and tells come tumbling out of the Clinton closet and not at all what domestic or foreign policy decisions he makes between now and the election. Nothing could harm him, except the breakdown of his family. In that sense, he is the prisoner, in the first place, of his wife and daughter, and in the second place, of the myth of family bliss which is at the heart of Independence Day. It is the great central popular myth of the world now, as we enter the 21st century. It has replaced the mid century myth of heterosexual romantic love. When slimy aliens come in from space to destroy earth, what is there worth the heroic earthling men going out to fight them for? Why, the women, and the children.
Not mouthy women, need I say. The Hillary Clinton figure in the movie hardly utters a word before being despatched from the scenario in a death bed scene as affecting as Little Nell's. "Mommy's sleeping", the President of the United States says as he gathers his little daughter to himself. You should have heard the snuffles and sobs in the Stella Cinema, Rathmines. Dickens is alive and thriving in Hollywood. Except that in Hollywood the most perfect of loves is buddydom, the love between male and male, and in Independence Day the best they can come up with is two motherless families run by child like but heroic fathers (three, when the president's wife takes off for the afterworld with just one last adoring look at him).
After that, however, seeing that they are operating with whole populations, the producers have to include women, and these are represented by a gallant black striptease artiste, and a whippet thin career girl. These women are gorgeous, but they're in this movie as wives, make no mistake. In this movie, if a woman is not married she gets married, and if the marriage has broken down, she still confesses to her (genius) ex husband that she has always loved him.
A great popular entertainment like Independence Day has scanned the yearnings of the planet so as to programme them into a narrative. Men wish to be fearless, technically wizard, loyal to other men, ("Sir!" this and "Sir!" that the men in this movie love to say. The corollary is the giving of orders. "Sir! will I instruct the men to break formation? Men break formation! Sir! The men have broken formation!"), and seen by their woman and children as brave defenders. Women want to be defended by a brave defender. (According to this movie, they do. That they don't want wars in the first place, especially interplanetary ones, and they'd rather not see half the world destroyed so as to provide an opportunity for the display of their men's bravery doesn't enter into it.) Each of the characters in this film exemplifies some of the virtues and thus qualifies for some of the rewards of this value system.
BUT only the President of the United States gets them all. He gets the most silent wife, the most cute kid, the most idealism when he says why can't we all be friends to the slimy aliens - and the most oratorical opportunities, and on top of this he pilots his own fighter plane to devastating effect against the slimies. What's more - the whole world is willingly under his command. Arab and Israeli, Iraqi and Japanese, English and Russian - all of them, when they hear that America, having brilliantly circumvented slimy technology, as mounting an equally brilliant aerial counter stack - eagerly join in. This is a male version of world peace: the world united in war.
The gleeful destructiveness of the whole thing is humanised, in a fairly perfunctory way, by the involvement of children and women. The President of the United States, in this movie, is rarely seen without a little extra addressed as Munchkin draped around his neck. This is his daughter. The child signals not just heart, but youth. And that's where Bob Dole has a case to present at the bar of justice. Youth and potency and impetuosity are celebrated in this film, and experience is represented - in the character of the Secretary of Defence - as dishonest and self serving. There used to be films with people like Henry Fonda in them where older men were wise and so on. But in the new films, which are essentially video games writ large, there is no place for fuddy duddy old wisdom. Smart, yes. Wise, no.
The simplified portrait of a president in Independence Day is perfectly adequate to the task of delivering the Clinton vote in the November election. The US is very big, and its people very busy, and the presidency is perceived as mythic and symbolic rather than as directly executive.
You can't make mythic films about heroic Taoisigh and their dotey little families because Ireland is dreadfully intimate, and we know about politicians and everybody else - exactly what the schools they went to imply, and exactly what their accents say about them, and whether their kids' clothes are bought in Dunnes Stores or Brown Thomas. But an American president be as empty of complexity and yet as full of meaning as a great star - a John Wayne, a Judy Garland. His portrait can be done in the broadest of strokes. In Independence Day that is how it is done. It will shape the ideal of a president, even after Clinton.
The old men on the Hill had better think again about who they put forward as candidates for high office. They reward each other for seniority and cunning and accumulated favours. But the world out there wants to work out at the gym and live in a welter of feet good artefacts such as good looking women, Golden Labradors, cheerful black people, loveable Jews, infants with baseball hats on backwards who never need to be fed or cleaned. They don't want old guys in suits.
A few million American voters will have read that marvellous book, Primary Colours, and will have been influenced by it when they go into the polling booth. It describes a presidential candidate who has no moral understanding whatsoever but who has an emotional sensibility so fine as to allow him access to what other people are talking about when they talk about morality.
That's the way things are going - towards privatised neo moral systems, held in check by a vestigial social consensus such as the one sketched in Independence Day. For every one reader of the book a thousand will have seen a movie which showed a young president with a (silent) wife and a happy family who is able to save the planet from slimies. Modern slimies not long ago ones, like the actual enemies the actual Bob Dole fought. And that's what the planet wants: love and security and splat zap virtuality. Mark my words: Bill Clinton will be the first Democratic president to be elected to a second term since Roosevelt. Dole's promoters simply weren't dreaming the people's dreams.