Generic White Guys and Domestic Terrorism
The 1990s were an interesting decade for villains. There were still remnants of ethnic baddies, but it seems the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the fascination with the Unabomber and the bombing in Oklahoma City led to a decade of movies focusing on domestic terrorists of the Generic White Guy variety.
American ex-military men however, are very nicely suited for that role. Angry and unemployed, these generic white guys are perfect for a reusable Hollywood stereotype. Action movies are big on the white guy who is or used to be associated with some sort of military or police role but turns his back on the American way to go rogue.
Die Hard 2 & 3, Speed, On Deadly Ground (really any flick with Steven Segal), The Getaway, Arlington Road, Cliffhanger, Blown Away, Under Siege, The Rock, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Face/Off, and Con Air were all about domestic terrorists or bombers looking to hold people hostage for money.
Most of those movies are so ridiculous, they wouldn’t work in any decade outside of the ’90s. It just wouldn’t happen. Could you imagine Face/Off as an ’80s action movie?
The quintessential action movie of the decade, however, belongs to Michael Bay’s 1996 opus, The Rock. American ex-military antagonist, Brigadier General Francis Humme, played by Ed Harris, was an American rogue reconnaissance Marine who leads his unit to steal deadly toxic gas missiles and take Alcatraz as their base.
He doesn’t want glory or fame or deaths — he only wants ransom and reparations to the families of Recon Marines who died on illegal missions under his command and whose deaths were not honored.
Around this same time, vague Middle East terrorists began to creep into the Hollywood proceedings.
The 1990s featured two action movies that starred Arabic bad guys as the main antagonist, which seems a bit shocking. It feels like perhaps we’re missing a movie or two.
One of them, True Lies, was an absurd action-comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis with a brilliant deus ex machina at the end. But still! An Arabic terrorist threatening to destroy the world with a nuclear device! That’s progress right there!
The other one, The Siege, was a serious and realistic look at how people could react to an Arabic terrorist threat and was apparently so good … that Hollywood didn’t make any other films with bad guys of Middle Eastern descent. Mind you this is three years before 9/11.
Running from 9/11
After 9/11 happened, Hollywood took an abrupt left turn from their usual way of doing things. No longer would the movies in the next decade reflect current events or the deepest fears of the population.
Instead of embracing the cultural fear of terrorism, natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or man-made ones like the BP oil spill, religious fanaticism, a horrible recession and subprime mortgages run amok, Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, climate change and a looming government defaulting on its debt, Hollywood ran from its obligation to amplify the country’s fears and instead turned to remakes, prequels, sequels and cartoonish comic book movies in the last decade.
Given the downward spiral of American life this past decade (just look at that list above! Was 2001-2010 the worst American decade?), what should have been a decade of creativity the likes that Hollywood hasn’t seen since the auteur days of the 1970s turned into the equivalent of a crass cash grab.
Perhaps this is do to any number of factors — like television supplanting movies for complex narratives.
What’s also interesting about the past decade in action films, and the genre in general, is the absence of the Chinese as villains. Given that China has supplanted Russia as “the shadowy country we know little about but are always told they are our direct competitor,” one would think there would be a few movies now with China as the bad guys.
Even the Red Dawn remake that is slated to come out this year was originally going to feature the Chinese Army as the invading force, but that was scuttled at the last minute in favor of the North Koreans. The movie title Red Dawn doesn’t really work in the context of the North Koreans, but that’s beside the point. Perhaps, Hollywood understands that the Chinese market is too valuable to alienate, unlike the North Korean one.
It’s as if Hollywood saw 9/11 and transitioned right into superhero movies and bad guys who in no way could be related to Arabic terrorists or impugn their entrance into the Chinese market. It’s Hollywood’s right to go for the cash grab. But it’s also our right to call them out on that and say we deserve better villains, goddammit. We deserve villains fitting for our times and cultural fears.
Still, this last decade did produce Team America, the South Park duo’s hilarious send-up of action movies and American-jingoism. That movie, however, features bad guys ranging from Kim Jong Ill of North Korea to documentary film director Michael Moore. It’s an equal-opportunity destroyer.
Then there was the little seen comedy Four Lions by Chris Morris about four incompetent British jihadists who set out to train for and commit an act of terror. That movie was more of a would-be fantasy than it was one that reflected America’s fear of jihadists.
Even in 2005 with Batman Begins and Ra’s al Ghul as the bad guy, the technically Arabic enemy is played by Liam Neeson, a very clear Generic White Guy. Action movies became the Harry Houdini of films; escaping the real world and shielding audiences with superheroes and CGI action plots.
To drive this point home further, in 2008’s Iron Man, despite being held captive by Afghan terrorists, it ends up being the generic white guy corporate raider who is the true villain to Tony Stark’s hero.
And Where the Hell are the Women?
Um, nowhere, really. That’ll be the subject of our next villain piece!
Still Here? Okay, We’ll Wrap It Up
We won’t pretend that any essay could adequately tackle a history of cinema villainy, but we hope this little exercise serves as a jumping-off point, a cinema Cliffs Notes if you will, for a conversation you can start at a party or a bar with your friends. That’s how we got started.
The truth is, there are too many movies, too many villains, too many genres to account for the breadth of cinema out there. But when you look at the cultural events of various decades and match them up to some of cinemas biggest genre hits (or at least the memorable movies), whether they be action movies or other popular genre fare, some interesting trends begin to develop between the villains in the movie and the social circumstances of America at the time.
That is at least until 9/11, when everything turned into panoply of superheroes, Harry Potter and bad action movies like XXX or Fast and Furious.
You can take a look at the spreadsheet we put together that formed the basis for this post.
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This post was written by Elliot Mandel and James Furbush. It originally appeared on HyperVocal on August 3.
—Photo Newtown grafitti/Flickr