Abstract
The chapter discusses The Patriot (Dean Selmer, 1998) and Arlington Road (Mark Pellington, 1999) as representing the federal American state as being, in the former, challenged by an armed militia and, in the latter, confronted by a nationally integrated domestic terrorist organization. By contrast, The Siege (Edward Zwick, 1978), Enemy of the State (Tony Scott, 1998) and Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002) are discussed as representing the same American federal state as actualizing fascism through the imposition of martial law, untrammelled surveillance and the legally sanctioned overriding of civil liberties. The chapter ends by discussing the Star Wars prequels – Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999), Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones (Lucas, 2002) and Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (Lucas, 2005) – which, as they represent the replacement of the democratic Galactic Federation by the fascist Galactic Empire, revolve around the figures of the Jedi, whose representation is itself seen to partake of fascist implication.
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Notes
- 1.
It would also, through its disregard of the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibits race as a factor determining the right to vote, and the Twenty-fourth Amendment, which prohibits the levying of poll tax, have a significant effect on the electoral rights of those who are non-white and/or poor.
- 2.
Charged with the murder of Degan as well as the original firearms crime, Weaver was acquitted in July 1993 of all but some minor associated offences. After 16 months in prison, Weaver sued the federal government, which in 1995 settled the suit with a $1.3 million payment for the deaths of Vicki and Samuel Weaver.
- 3.
The blowing up of the J. Edgar Hoover Building besides reflects a like occurrence that is described in the novel, The Turner Diaries, which was written by William Pierce, founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, under the pseudonym of Andrew MacDonald, and that had significant influence on the actions of the far Right, including those of the Order. Moreover, upon McVeigh being arrested following the Oklahoma City bombing, a search of his car found ‘an envelope containing typewritten documents and copies of pages from right-wing magazines and books, including excerpts from The Turner Diaries’ (Levitas, 2002: 315). For more on the novel, and its influence, see, for example, Karl (1995: 118–22) and Levitas (2002: 291–2).
- 4.
Apropos of Grant’s burnt hand implying symbolic castration, Sigmund Freud, rhetorically pondering whether, concerning dream symbolism, we can consider ‘the male limb’ as being replaced by ‘another limb, the foot or the hand’, concludes: ‘We are, I think, compelled to do so’ (1917: 189).
- 5.
- 6.
A separatist is one who believes that different races should live separately.
- 7.
The assassinations of Martin Luther King in April 1968 and Robert Kennedy in June 1968 were similarly attributed to lone perpetrators: respectively James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan.
- 8.
Ponytail girl in addition states, unconvincingly, using diction unlike that of Faraday, that he had told her: ‘Sweetheart, one day those men are going to pay. One day those men are going to burn’.
- 9.
This book uses ‘working class’ as it is understood in Europe: that is, as referring to the urban proletariat and rural farm and other workers, inclusive of salaried and so-called skilled members of those groupings. As much contrasts with the American definition of class, which tends to include salaried and skilled workers as part of an extremely broad conception of the middle class, which – embracing welders and Wall Street bankers, police officers and politicians – is of little significatory, much less political, use value.
- 10.
Among those who have considered pre-World War II fascism to be predominantly associated with the middle or lower middle class are Reich (1942), Fromm (1942) and Lipset (1960). For brief summaries of some of the empirical evidence regarding pre-World War II fascism and the middle class, see Kitchen (1976: 64) and Renton (1999: 35–6).
- 11.
For an account of how the far-Right exploited the situation in rural America in the 1970s and 1980s, laying the ground for the spread of the Patriot Movement and militias in the 1990s, see Levitas (2002: 168–283).
- 12.
‘Nominally’ because the film bears little resemblance to the novel beyond the representation of the spread of a deadly toxin within the USA. Sussman and Kingswell would also appear to be pseudonyms, as neither have any other screen credits. Among those supposed to be involved in the writing of the script are David Ayer and one of the film’s producers, Paul Mones. For more on the differences between novel and film, see Vern (2008: 127–8).
- 13.
In The Last Canadian the source of the toxin is, in line with the novel’s virulent anti-communism, the Soviet Union, albeit specifically a ‘mad’ scientist who ‘detested the Americans because of some incident during the Vietnam War’ (Heine, 1974: 226).
- 14.
Further to this, whereas McClaren and his PhD-student, Native American sister-in-law Ann (Whitney Yellow Robe), on gaining access to a government laboratory facility secreted in the mountains, are shown working intensively to find a biochemical anti-toxin, wild flowers just have to be boiled to create Red Medicine.
- 15.
In the wake of the spike in militia membership, however, ‘critical coverage’ of the bombing ‘took its toll’ and ‘militia numbers plummeted’ (Levitas, 2002: 329).
- 16.
Although in The Patriot Chisholm refers to those besieging his property as ‘storm troopers’, and asks McClaren whether one of the government’s aims is, in an adduction of the National Socialist policy of German territorial expansion, ‘Lebensraum’, the implication is, with Chisholm having been identified as a neo-Nazi, that of disavowal and projection. For all its criticism of the government, at no point does The Patriot suggest that it is fascist.
- 17.
Given the time of the film’s production, and his appearance within the television reports that open the film, the noted president would appear to be Bill Clinton. Whether Clinton when president would have been ready actually to impose martial law is not something that this study has the space – or the inclination – to pursue.
- 18.
Snowden, who had previously worked for the CIA, leaked classified information regarding the NSA’s global surveillance practices. Charged by the US Department of Justice with espionage and the theft of government property, Snowden has since 2013 resided in Russia, which has granted him asylum.
- 19.
The film’s script was initially written by Cohen for filmmaker Jan De Bont, being rewritten by Frank upon Spielberg becoming involved in the project. Shussett and Goldman obtained executive producer credits after they claimed, in a case that ‘went to arbitration’, that Frank and Cohen’s script borrowed ‘heavily’ from a script based on Dick’s story that they had written (Buckland, 2006: 211 n. 1).
- 20.
In comparing Anderton’s actions to those of a film editor, Nigel Morris as well alludes to The Conversation and Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) (2007: 318). The former, moreover, in which Caul is shown constructing a coherent conversation from different and/or initially unclear recordings, is a reworking of the latter, in which a photographer (David Hemmings), on suspecting that he has inadvertently photographed a murder in a park, orders and/or enlarges his photographs to construct a narrative that ‘proves’, albeit with considerable ontological and perceptual ambiguity, that this is the case.
- 21.
- 22.
Despite their dependence and exploitation, the Pre-Cogs in the film are young and physically prepossessing, unlike the Pre-Cogs in Dick’s story, who, termed ‘the three idiots’, are middle-aged, and described as ‘gibbering, fumbling creatures’ with ‘enlarged heads and wasted bodies’ (1956: 3).
- 23.
Regarding the fact that the phallus, as it signifies ascendency within patriarchal society, can be instantiated by different things within different historical and cultural situations, Jacques Lacan notes that, as a ‘signifier’, the phallus ‘is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its presence as signifier’ (1958: 579).
- 24.
The Logan Act, which dates from 1799, prohibits any unauthorized person from negotiating with foreign governments in the name of the USA. With respect to Miranda Rights, if any law-enforcement officer does not read a suspect his or her rights on being arrested, then any evidence subsequently obtained is legally inadmissible, being thus in transgression, constitutionally, of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and their proscriptions regarding legal and judicial process.
- 25.
The piece of writing that Wood is referring to is Freud (1905).
- 26.
For a more detailed consideration of these representations, and an outlining of some of the racist sources on which they appear to draw, see Brooker (2001: 17–21).
- 27.
The Night of the Long Knives also saw the murder of ‘recalcitrant conservatives’, ‘notables who had given offense’ and ‘thirteen Reichstag deputies’ (Paxton, 2004: 108).
- 28.
Luke’s hand and Anakin’s arm are each replaced mechanically.
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Grist, L. (2018). Patriots and Militias, Fascism and the State. In: Fascism and Millennial American Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59566-9_3
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