Cinematic Civics: Independence Day

Is there a civics lesson in the 1996 film Independence Day? We think so. Join the Civics 101 team for a conversation about the film, its politics, and what it says about the United States and its place in the world. There's even a fire-jumping dog! CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nick Capodice?

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• 1:33Speaker 03

  Mr. President. Our intelligence tells us the object has settled into a stationary orbit. Part of it has broken off into nearly three dozen other pieces. Smaller than the whole, sir. Yet over fifteen miles in width themselves. Where are they heading? They should be entering our atmosphere within the next 25 minutes.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  I'm Christina Phillips. This is Civics 101, and I am here in the studio with... Rebecca Lavoy.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  Hannah McCarthy.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Nick Capodice. So this is another installment of our ongoing series Cinematic Civics. Is that what we're calling it? Cinematic Civics?

• 2:04Speaker 04

  Sure. Civic cinema, cinematic civics, civics on the screen, whatever you like.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  We'll go with cinematic civics. I like the alliteration there. What I'm talking about is where we talk about our favorite movies that have to do with the government, politics, et cetera, et cetera. And what movie did I make you guys watch this weekend?

• 2:24Speaker 04

  Star Wars, Episode 10.

• 2:28Speaker 04

  AKA Independence Day.

• 2:30Nick Capodice?

  It is confirmed. The unexplained phenomenon is headed for Moscow.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  It's like a chess. First, they're positioning their pieces, using this one signal to synchronize their efforts. And then what? Checkmate.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  So we are talking about the 1996 film Independence Day, directed by Roland Emmerich, about a giant alien invasion bent on destroying humans and harvesting all of Earth's resources. And the president, President Whitmore, played by Bill Pullman, wary data scientist David, played by Jeff Goldblum, and slick fighter pilot Stephen Hiller, played by Will Smith, who team up to bring these aliens down.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  Something you want to add to this briefing, Captain Hiller?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  No, sir. Just a little anxious to get up there and whoopee tease, that's all. I chose this movie for several reasons. One, because it's one of the first movies I saw in theaters when I was five years old, and I loved it. Two, aliens. Three, because it is a goofy artifact of American patriotism that's about as subtle as being the first country to land on the moon and then immediately planting your flag there, which is also the first scene of this movie. And four, because this movie deals a lot with the military might of the United States and the role of the US in geopolitical warfare.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Now, one reason I didn't choose this movie is because of the United States' decision to drop bombs on nuclear sites in Iran a few days ago, thereby demonstrating this military might. With a post online and then an address to the nation, President Trump announced

• 4:07Hannah McCarthy?

  The United States attacked Iran's three most important nuclear sites overnight, marking a major escalation in the violence in the Middle East.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Iran's key nuclear enrichment facility. So we're taping this on Monday, June 23rd, which is two days after the United States dropped bombs on three different nuclear sites in Iran. But it just so happens to be extremely, extremely relevant, more than I could have anticipated. So relevant, in fact, that the aircraft carrying the nuclear bomb that the United States drops on Houston in the movie Independence Day is the same kind of aircraft, the B-2, that the United States used to carry the 30,000-pound ground penetrating bombs that were dropped on Iran. So, in the words of our president, Donald Trump, quote, "There is not another military in the world who could have done this."

• 5:01Speaker 01

  All this to say, it's true that this movie both does a really good job representing the geopolitical position of the United States in the 90s, but it's also about telepathic aliens, Will Smith flying a spaceship into another spaceship so Jeff Goldblum can upload a virus to the spaceship's computers, question mark, question mark. If you've never seen it, spoilers abound. I don't think spoilers will ruin your experience of this movie. If you have not seen it in a while, I recommend checking it out again. It's kind of fun, but that's just my opinion. So I'm curious, and I'll start with you, Rebecca. What did you think watching this movie?

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Well, I was not five when it came out. I was 24 or something like that when it came out. I was born in 1973. I think that this movie is a peak 90s film. 90s, the 90s had this entire genre of action movies and political intrigue and all sorts of like psychological thrillers. And this movie combines a lot of those elements and you have Will Smith punching an alien in the face.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Look at you. Ship all banged up. Who's the man? Huh? Who's the man? Wait till I get another plane.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  So I first watched this film during a party my parents were throwing. I think it was a Fourth of July party, if I had to guess. It was on cable. And I just remember thinking, I can't believe I'm getting away with this. All the grownups are in the other room and I'm getting to watch this movie. That's deeply disturbing to me. I enjoyed watching it as an adult, seeing as it's been so very long. One of the things that struck me the most is that the CGI kind of holds up. I think they were really smart about the CGI. It's often behind smoke or it's like seen through another screen. I do wonder, like, was this one of the first movies in which Will Smith is our dependable, definitely gonna save us all guy? How well established was he at that point?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  I will just say, this movie does put him on the map. Fresh Prince of Bel-Air actually ended in 1996 when this movie came out. So he had like a continuous career. Like Fresh Prince of Bel-Air ended and then this movie came out, which is why he's kind of never had a gap in his fame, for better or worse, since then.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, but this is the one that launched him as the action hero.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  I've been waiting for this my whole life.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  In terms of the actual civics of it, there were a lot of moments where I thought, like, oh, come on. Like, this doesn't check out at all, but it was delightful nonetheless. And I was moved by the president's Independence Day speech. Okay, Nick, what did you think?

• 7:40Nick Capodice?

  Well, I saw it when it came out in theaters in 96. And I was telling Hannah, the one thing I remembered most about this movie is not just me, but the whole audience laughing at the amount of product placement that was going on, particular when Will Smith hugs his girlfriend's son. There's a giant Reebok hat scene. The entire audience exploded in laughter when the emotional highlight of the movie had a big old Reebok right there as big. Is the cinema itself. But as to the movie, I got emotional. I was, you know, I was prepared to be really cynical and snide the whole way through. And of course, I was racked with tears at certain moments, you know? I do, I do got one thing that matters a lot to me.

• 8:25Nick Capodice?

  The movie opens on July 2nd, which is actually our Independence Day.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:30Nick Capodice?

  So they got that right. It's not the 4th of July. The 2nd of July was when the Continental Congress approved Virginia's resolution to become an independent nation. So hooray for that. John Adams would have been thrilled.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Does someone want to sort of break down what happens? The aliens show up on Earth and then the United States does what? And kind of what is the main climax that brings everybody together? Well, I think when it becomes clear that it's a worldwide disaster, that everybody is facing the same thing, the United States comes up with a plan that they say is impossible, but they figure out how to do in like 45 minutes. And then they put out the Aquaman signal to all of the other heads of state and militaries around the world who are able to somehow coordinate within just like a five minute window when they are going to be able to drop the shields of these giant ships that are floating all over the world. And they're all going to simultaneously be able to blow them up.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  And it takes a lot of coordination, but of course, we pulled it off from deep inside of a mountain because that's how we are.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  What the hell does he say? Seems they're getting a signal. Old Morse code.

• 9:49Nick Capodice?

  There was a lot of like, well, we can't understand each other because we all speak different languages, even though we're all citizens of the world. But then it's like Morse code is going to solve all the problems. It's still English in Morse code. It's not like Farsi in Morse code. It's English. Fire the missiles now, buddy.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. Morse code is not, it has never been a universally, every single country in the world has used it. And there are different forms of Morse code. So that is definitely like a hand wavy thing. I do think that's a really good example of a like, well, we'll just do this. And if you poke that hole just a little bit, you're like, that. I don't think that'll work. I think the whole point, though, is that they were using the cables under the ocean instead of like signals over the air, right? Presumably.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  Well, just this idea that like, it's Morse code. It's echoing Jeff Goldblum being like, I'll just make a virus that will infiltrate this highly evolved technology that we've already been told by Brent Spinner that their bodies are like ours in terms of vulnerability, but their technology is way more advanced.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no. We know tons about them. But the neatest stuff, the neatest stuff has only happened in the last few days. See, we can't duplicate their type of power, so we've never been able to experiment. But since these guys started showing up, all the little gizmos inside turned on.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  But it was the 90s, so computer virus, you know? Well, it's a nod to War of the Worlds. Yeah. Yeah, the aliens die from a virus in that. I know. I thought that was great, but it's also silly.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And to be clear, Brent Spinner, that is the actor playing Dr. Brackish Okun, who is the scientist, the sort of eccentric scientist who has been studying these aliens for the past 15 years, presumably.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  At Area 51.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  At Area 51, which we will talk about.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  The big thing that really stuck out to me that I want to talk about first is the fact that the climax of this movie is about the United States solving this problem, as we've said, and saving the world and doing so by creating a worldwide alliance, which includes countries such as Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, all launching their own weapons at the same time. This was a national sensation. It was also a global sensation. This was the biggest blockbuster globally since Jurassic Park, which, like this movie, was about reptilian super beasts and Jeff Goldblum telling us we don't know what we've gotten ourselves into. So I mean, maybe it's just the Jeff Goldblum of it all.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  He was not in Titanic, which was the movie that beat the record a year later, but it seems as though he's got something that's really successful. But also, I think that one of the reasons this movie was so appealing is because it hits on the sentiments of the time about the United States, both within the country and outside of it, alongside being super entertaining and bombastic and aliens and excitement if we think about the 90s when this movie came out. If we were to imagine a scenario set up in the movie where our world is invaded by aliens, would you say in the 90s that the United States is the one best prepared to respond to that attack?

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, we'd just come off of Desert Storm. Like, we had practice. We're fresh off the Cold War, and I think the United States would have prided itself on being the sort of victor of the Cold War, right? Like, look, we came out super powerful, you guys didn't get us, and now here's a movie about nukes.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  All of that exactly right. So, building up towards the 90s, the United States, for at least a century, had the world's strongest economy. So, we were already the economic superpower. By the 1990s, the United States and the Soviet Union were the two main military superpowers, far and away. No other countries were close. And then, as you said, in 1991, we have the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And you're right, Hannah, the United States played a major role, and I think this is a pretty good example of soft power, in that George H.W. Bush was lending his support and essentially saying that if there were parts of the Soviet Union that wanted to seek independence, as long as they were doing it in a way that

• 14:11Speaker 01

  matched the democratic ideals of the United States, that the US would lend them aid. And so, there was like, sort of, this tightrope that the United States is walking, and I think it's a really great example of the soft power that it's using into effect, in part because we have a lot of actual power, meaning weapons. So, that is one side of it. So, we have the dissolution of the USSR, and then the US is now the global superpower, right? We are the one that is left.

• 14:41Speaker 04

  Also, I believe, if I remember this correctly, that when the Soviet Union broke up, and they began looking at all the nuclear sites in the Soviet Union, they hadn't really been maintained very well. So, it turned out that we'd been maintaining our arsenal, and it was ready to go, and the Soviet Union's was kind of rusty.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  Given that fact, this movie presumes that all of these other Nations have semi comparable nuclear power to ours in terms of size of arsenal. We see how many nukes it takes to bring down a ship, right?

• 15:14Speaker 01

  My assumption is that the nuclear weapon is only used first on Houston and then on the mothership.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  Agreed.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  That all of the other weaponry is just bombs of of different kinds.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  Rando missiles. Oh, gotcha.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Can I confirm that the target was destroyed? Get the tech commander online. I want confirmation that the target was destroyed. Yes, sir.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Houston is the one place where they try it first and it fails. And then they're like, well, we have to get down this force field. And the idea is that if you can get into the ship, you can take down the force field. We'll use the one nuclear bomb on the mothership, which is way bigger than the other ones, even though it really doesn't look that way because you don't see it in scale to anything else. And then all the other countries will use all of their missiles to take down the other ships, presumably using the method that Russell Case, AKA Randy Quaid, uses by flying straight up into the solar beam and blowing up the ship.

• 16:09Nick Capodice?

  I told you I wouldn't let you down. Just keep those guys off it for a few more seconds, will you? Okay, Echo Niner, Echo Seven, take flanking positions. I want you to look after this guy, okay?

• 16:20Speaker 04

  Just wondering, when is an okay time to talk about Randy Quaid? Rebecca, I think you might know what I'm talking about, right? Yes, yes.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  I didn't mention him in the intro, but he is just some real color in this movie.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  I mean, Randy Quaid in this movie plays a crop duster who's a former Vietnam era pilot who claims to have been abducted by aliens at some point, which everybody thinks makes him bananas. And that kind of parallels some of Randy Quaid's real life trajectory. You know, he's a mainstream actor in the 80s and 90s. And then over time, he has become this kind of outside Hollywood figure.

• 16:59Nick Capodice?

  He tried to become a refugee to Canada and was refused entry. Then he was convinced, made public statements that actor deaths such as Heath Ledger and then somebody else after that, who I don't remember, those were due to somebody who was killing celebrities. And he was convinced that he was next on.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  What's his arc in this movie? How are we supposed to feel about him by the end of this movie?

• 17:20Speaker 04

  Redemption. He got redemption for being a bad dad by saving the kids.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Also, he gets redemption for being presumed to have been making it up, right? And then he's like, no, no, I was actually abducted by aliens. It's not clear if it's these aliens or what.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Civics 101 will be back after a quick break.

• 17:59Nick Capodice?

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• 18:44Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code CIVICS at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 19:06Speaker 01

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• 20:12Speaker 01

  We're back. This is Civics 101. We are talking about the 1996 film Independence Day, directed by Roland Emmerich. There is one other thing that I think is really important to this time period, which we've already alluded to. What President Whitmore's job was before he was elected. So what was President Whitmore doing before he became the president?

• 20:28Speaker 04

  Wasn't he a pilot in the air force?

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Yes. In what war?

• 20:32Speaker 04

  Desert Storm?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  You mean Desert Shield or Desert Storm? Yeah. I was actually looking this up and they've kind of co-branded everything together now. The Gulf War, Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Freedom. Like they've sort of put it all under one big umbrella on all of the military history websites.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  And Desert Shield is the first part and Desert Storm is the second part. And this all took place over seven months. This was a military campaign. So I'm just going to lay out very briefly what happened. Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait. And this was part of a long, complex history in this region of the world. The important thing to know for today is that the United States was already deeply embedded in the politics of this region. It would be a disservice, I think, for me to try to condense any of that down into a few sentences.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  I just want to give a shout out to another podcast out there. If anybody wants to know the whole history of our embeddedness, specifically in the Middle East.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  The Blowback Podcast is a phenomenal exploration of this, season one in particular.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  What you should know is that post-World War II, or even starting in World War II, is that the US considered the Middle East one of the most strategically important regions in the world, in large part, but not completely, because of oil and petroleum. The US government was involved in the formation of Israel in 1948, the 1949 Syrian coup, the overthrow of the Iranian prime minister in 1953, and the first Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. So what happened in the early 90s is that in order to stop the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the US and 41 other coalition countries launched a major military campaign that involved massive land battles and massive air campaigns.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  And they ultimately succeeded in stopping the invasion, ending the invasion of Kuwait. But it created this major humanitarian crisis in Iraq, and it further destabilized the region. But the US comes to call this "the good war," because it was an example of a success, if you will.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Hannah, I remember you said that you had a lot of thoughts about all of this. What were you thinking when you were watching this movie?

• 22:49Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, so here's like one thing. This is what often just like baffles me about alien invasion movies. It presumes that an entire planet can overcome infighting completely, get together as a planet, and go invade another planet. Like, the notion that there are species out there who can coordinate a planetary effort is like baffling. And if we are to be extraordinarily generous with Independence Day, perhaps that's kind of what's going on when it comes to a full planet coordination in defense of another planet attacking us.

• 23:34Hannah McCarthy?

  But it is a bridge that is very, very far away, as I'm concerned, because, I mean, we know our species has evolved. We don't know how highly evolved, because we don't know what to compare it to, except for other species on this planet. But like, we are having a real hard time with planetary coordination.

• 23:52Speaker 04

  Why is there no United Nations?

• 23:53Hannah McCarthy?

  And this and this alien planet.

• 23:57Speaker 04

  They're living John Lennon's Imagine on their planet, right? No borders, no countries, no nothing. And I think these movies are a fantasy. Like if there's an existential threat to everyone, we will come together. And I think that we've proven that that's not true. Given the climate change situation, there is an existential threat to everyone. And yet we are not able to come together and agree to fight it together. So.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I will say that Roland Emmerich, one of his next movies is The Day After Tomorrow, in which presumably there is a massive climate disaster. We're heading into the next ice age. And that plays a little bit more with the geopolitical situation in that there is a very obvious, like one to one to Vice President Dick Cheney in that film. But yeah, to your point, Hannah, I find one thing about this movie is that it's like very smug. It's extremely smug about the ability of the United States in particular, but also our world to create this kind of unified response to this alien invasion as though we are all one and they are the enemy.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  The person who does that gets a lot of, you know, he gets a lot of time to sort of be human and to presumably be the one who can help bring all of these things together, which is why I really want to talk about President Whitmore.

• 25:18Nick Capodice?

  Regardless of what you may have read in the tabloids, there have never been any spacecraft recovered by our government.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  So I would like to spend just a little time laying out what we know about him as a person heading into this invasion. And this is specifically things we learned essentially in the first five minutes of this movie. You know, him waking up and seeing his daughter and hearing the news in the background. What do we learn about him as a person and what people think of him?

• 25:46Hannah McCarthy?

  We know that he's awake when he gets the phone call, even though the line immediately preceding it is wake him. But it's like, no, he's already up. He's already watching the news. We know that he loves his wife very much, right? Laura Roslin. I have a feeling that Mary McConnell starring as President Laura Rosalyn in Battlestar Galactica is her way of making up for all of the wild space inaccuracies in this movie. Because BSG is like known for being pretty good at that. Do you hear me? I will use every cannon, every bomb, every bullet, every weapon I have down to my own eye teeth to end you. I swear it.

• 26:30Hannah McCarthy?

  But yeah, so we know that he's just an all around, all American sweetie, sweetie, sweetie, right?

• 26:36Speaker 04

  He gets over his wife pretty quick, though. Just saying.

• 26:39Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  He sure does.

• 26:42Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, he sure does.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Perhaps if we got to her earlier. Wait a minute, what are you saying? We can't stop the bleeding. If we could, there's nothing we can do for her.

• 26:55Hannah McCarthy?

  A doctor will not walk out of a room where someone is bleeding out, be it internally or externally, and say, ah, we couldn't stop. That doctor will work on you until you die. I mean, unless there's a doctor out there who's like, no, I do it all the time. But like, to my understanding, that's not what we do when someone is bleeding out.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  I love that you draw the line not at telepathic alien speaking English, but at doctor leaving the hospital room when someone is bleeding out. But yes, you're right. That's ridiculous. What else do we know about this president as far as how he's doing his job up to this point? Oh, yeah, he's a PR disaster, isn't he? His PR person is also like mouthing the words to his speech that he's giving at the beginning of the movie. Yeah, it implies that his press secretary also writes all of his speeches for him. He's not doing well in the polls. He needs a boost. He's under constant supervision by the press secretary, who happens to be Jeff Goldblum's former wife. Yes, Connie. But later in the movie, when he speaks from the heart.

• 27:57Nick Capodice?

  His own words, they rallied the world together.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  One of the things that you hear sort of in the news that's coming up and in his conversations with his press secretary is that he was a fighter pilot in the Gulf War, right? So he's presumably fresh off this war. He's very young. He's 39 years old and that youngness helped him win the presidency, but now it's also seen as a weakness. He is getting mired down in politics. At one point, it's too much politics, too much compromise. So at this point in the movie, he's seen as a very weak president.

• 28:31Nick Capodice?

  They're not attacking your policies. They're attacking your age. Addressing Congress, Whitmore seems less like the president and more like the orphan child Oliver, asking, please, sir, I'd like some more.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  But if you look at how he performed with audiences, a number of studies and polls have found that he is one of the most beloved fictional presidents in pop culture alongside President Bartlet from The West Wing and President Marshall from Air Force One. The first was played by Martin Sheen, of course, and the second by Harrison Ford. Why do you think he's so popular? And Hannah, you alluded to this a little bit, but I'm curious, like, what do you think this says about what we value in a leader if we're using this movie as a frame of reference for American audiences?

• 29:14Hannah McCarthy?

  I don't think we actually value like, axoriusness and being a good dad the way we might pretend to. Axorius means loving one's wife a great deal. But my point is, while these polls might say that he's our favorite, and maybe it has to do with the fact that he ends up like redeeming himself and saving the world, maybe. I think we like people who are loving fathers and husbands in fiction, but in terms of a leader, does that really matter to us once they're actually in power? I'm not so sure.

• 29:47Nick Capodice?

  I think one of the reasons he's so beloved as a fictional president is because he is fictional, because he doesn't have a party as long, as far as much as I can tell. Isn't that interesting? We don't know where he stands on any issues that are sort of hot button political issues. He doesn't have any policy at all. A crime bill? That's the most generic thing.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Thing in the world. We just know that he's good at fighting aliens and he can speak with sort of a paraphrased Dylan Thomas poem and get everyone all rallied up. Rebecca, do you have thoughts about him?

• 30:19Speaker 04

  Pullman. That's all I'm gonna say about it.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  Very appealing actor.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  He's handsome.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  He's just appealing. He's like, I mean, when, when the attack is first happening or first imminent, he's gonna stay behind in the White House. Like, he's gonna be with the ship, right? He's gonna be the captain. Oh, my God, those poor second helicopter people, they always get destroyed in these kinds of movies. Like, never get on the second helicopter when you're escaping the White House. That is my advice. If I've learned anything, it's that if I'm at the White House when disaster happens, get on that first helicopter with the president and randomly the press secretary and the other people who are there, because the second one is always a goner. Always.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, the first helicopter also always has the evil guy who's gonna keep saying, "Do the wrong thing." And that actor, I don't know his name, the actor who plays the evil, Secretary of Defense, do you know his name, anybody? So, the name of the secretary, this is the Secretary of Defense, Albert Nimzicki. He's named for, I believe, a producer that role in Emmerich didn't like. He's played by James Rebhorn. James Rebhorn has been that role in about 7,000 movies. Yeah. And he's always like, "No, no, we gotta bomb everything."

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Moved as many of our forces away from our bases as possible, but we've already sustained heavy losses. I spoke with the Joint Chiefs when they arrived in Iran. They agree we must launch a counteroffensive with a full nuclear strike. Over American soil.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think that that is hitting on something that really stands out to me, which is that at every opportunity, this is a president who is approaching things from as peaceful a perspective as possible. So, they send out that helicopter, it's called the welcome wagon. They're, they're like, "We're sending out the welcome wagon to like, flash some lights and see if they'll communicate with us."

• 31:56Speaker 04

  No, they will not.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. But even when he's in front of an alien itself, he's like, "Can we strike a deal? Let's communicate."

• 32:07Nick Capodice?

  And now there is much we can learn from each other if we can negotiate a truce. We can find a way to coexist.

• 32:17Nick Capodice?

  Can there be a peace between us?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  And it's like, the alien is like, "No, we're gonna kill you." You know, it's only once the alien has telepathically communicated the future in which they take over all of Earth's resources that he's like, "All right, it's time. We have to attack them." But I think he's situated throughout this entire movie as responding to attack rather than initiating attack in order to prevent harm, which at least to me seems very different from the way that the United States has been engaging in political warfare and regular warfare for much of the 20th century.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  In that we have been taking active military action, and even, by the way, today, in order to prevent what we presume is a threat or prevent some sort of action in the future.

• 33:14Nick Capodice?

  I freaking love movies like Starman and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and any movie where an alien comes to Earth and people keep wanting to kill it, and it turns out this may be the savior of humanity.

• 33:34Nick Capodice?

  All of those movies are referenced in this one. Will Smith punches the alien in the face and says, "Now that's what I call a close encounter." And the helicopter that's flashing lights like, "Do, do, do, do, do", just gets blown to hell. So it's sort of a slap in the face to this notion that people from other planets are welcome and they might help us save ourselves. We need it.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  No, they're worse than us because they want to use all of our resources even faster than we're using all of our resources.

• 33:59Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  How dare you do it better than us?

• 34:03Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, we're the ones who do that. We strip my everything.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  I would like to listen to the speech that the president, President Whitmore, makes on the morning in which they are going to begin this mission to send Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum up to plant the virus somehow, hand wave at that, and lower the defenses of all of these alien spaceships that have gathered around the world and allow us to attack. We're fighting for our right to live, to exist.

• 34:46Nick Capodice?

  And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday.

• 34:55Nick Capodice?

  But as the day when the world declared in one voice, "We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight. We're going to live on.

• 35:08Nick Capodice?

  We're going to survive. Today, we celebrate our Independence Day.

• 35:16Nick Capodice?

  I would love it if there was a holiday that celebrated everybody as a citizen of the world and we're all together on this roller coaster. I don't love the idea that, hey, our independence... They're not independent from anything. Like, from these aliens? We're already independent of the aliens. Well, how on earth is that a celebration of independence?

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Do you know what it is?

• 35:35Nick Capodice?

  What is it?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  It's American democracy finally triumphing worldwide, which is the thing we tell everyone we're doing when we engage in war activities.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  So we will come back to the president when we talk about aliens and Area 51, which is what we're going to talk about next, about all of the things that this movie references, all of the government agencies, all of the secrets that are referenced in this movie and not really explained and oftentimes mis-referenced when we come back from a break. So stick around for that.

• 36:32Nick Capodice?

  Haven't you out there ever Googled your own name? Like, actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing. There are companies called data brokers whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just... Just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over. So your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once and they keep working in the background.

• 37:17Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 37:36Nick Capodice?

  Observe the North American dad. 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  My life is booked and busy. I don't have time to try on a million outfits that still don't feel right. That's why I get styled with Stitch Fix. My personal stylist sends outfits picked for my size, style and budget. So I can get dressed and get on with my day feeling confident. It's no risk, all style. Free shipping, free returns, no subscription required. Get started today at stitchfix.com. That's stitchfix.com.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  We're back. This is Civics 101. We are talking about the movie Independence Day, which came out in 1996. We've talked about the geopolitical climate. We've talked about how the US is the hero of this movie and what that says about how we feel about our country. Now we're going to talk about aliens and whether or not our government knows anything about them. I want to start with a moment where David, AKA Jeff Goldblum, and his father are on Air Force One.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  David's father is the one who invokes the idea of Area 51.

• 39:21Nick Capodice?

  None of you did anything to prevent this? There was nothing we could do. We were totally unprepared for this. Ah, don't give me unprepared. Come on, Julius. It was what, in the 1950s or whatever? You had that spaceship?

• 39:33Speaker 03

  Dad, not that.

• 39:34Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, that thing that you found in New Mexico.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Dad.

• 39:37Nick Capodice?

  Where was that?

• 39:37Speaker 03

  Not the spaceship.

• 39:38Nick Capodice?

  Russwell, Russwell, New Mexico, yeah. No, you had the spaceship and you had the bodies. They were all locked up in a bunker. Where was that? David. I don't know. Area 51, right? Area 51. You knew then. And you did nothing.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  And that the US has encountered aliens before. And the president's like, no, we haven't. And then his people are like, yes, we have. We just wanted to give you plausible deniability. Thereby putting plausible deniability in the lexicon for American English forever.

• 40:08Hannah McCarthy?

  Thank you, Independence Day.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Let's talk about this plausible deniability thing, right? So the idea is that the president does not know about a secret military base that maybe has aliens. Is it a good look that the president doesn't know what the government is doing? Or is it a good look if the president does know and is part of the scheme to hide it? What do you guys make of that?

• 40:28Hannah McCarthy?

  The president is an elected civilian, the highest ranking civilian in the country, right? But the idea is like, the president is like us, which we know that this is not true. But so the idea that someone who doesn't have the cohesive training that many people at various levels of the government have would be given a bunch of information that they almost certainly cannot understand or know what to do with? That should be a little frightening, right? Like, it should. The idea that the president knows everything without the tools to parse it is a bit concerning. So I can understand the concept of, he doesn't need to know this. I'm with you on this one, Hannah, because, you know, the president is given the nuclear codes, right? They're given the football and the biscuit.

• 41:13Hannah McCarthy?

  And then they're not the president. Right. And they're not president forever. It's eight years at the most. You know, you can't take the knowledge of aliens.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Away from the president, once they're no longer the president. So, you know, I think that's kind of in keeping with the framers intent. I do think it's interesting that once he knows, he's able to make a lot of decisions about it. Once he sees the facility, he's like, okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to do this, we're going to do this. So it's almost like he gets to demonstrate the fact that he's a problem solver or whatever. But before we even get to Area 51, David's father Julius accuses the government of having found aliens before, and he references a place known as Roswell, New Mexico. What is the significance of Roswell, New Mexico? Because he's alluding to something that actually is a part of our history. What is he talking about here?

• 42:00Speaker 04

  Roswell, New Mexico is the site of an alleged flying saucer crash. And basically, Roswell has branded its entire town around this, which is super interesting. There's a lot of debate about whether or not it was a weather balloon. And there's a lot of really fun fake videos of the alien autopsy that happened after the Roswell, New Mexico incident. They're totally fake. People try to pass them off as real. But it definitely fed, Roswell fed into this lore that, you know, we are being surveyed. And it was very much a response to the growing power of the Soviet Union and things being up in the air that we don't know what they are. But yeah, Roswell certainly took on the most legendary status of UFO incidents in the United States. There was even a television show called Roswell with Katherine Heigl in it.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  In 1996, was the existence of Area 51 not particularly well-known? We didn't have Google Maps. We didn't have a super robust internet. What was the status of the generalized knowledge that Area 51 does actually exist? The government did not officially confirm the existence of a research facility in Nevada known as Area 51 until 1998. In fact, Roland Emmerich, the director and his producer have said they originally had permission to film on military bases for this film. When the Department of Defense saw the script and saw references to Area 51, and Roland Emmerich refused to take them out, the US government pulled that offer of filming locations and material. Roswell, New Mexico, what

• 43:31Speaker 01

  The government has said is a military research balloon that crashed in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico. The reason it was in New Mexico is because New Mexico is a place where the federal government does a lot of top secret research. This is born out of a few things. Geography, it's hard to access. There's the kind of topography that you can do a lot of tests and you have lots of space for runways. Also, Oppenheimer chose to build the Manhattan Project in New Mexico and that sort of laid the groundwork for further research facilities in that region. There's also a lot of research facilities in Colorado, Utah and Nevada in particular. So, the fact that Roswell becomes important is honestly because that's where the government

• 44:16Speaker 01

  was testing things that would go up high enough to monitor communications, especially communications and transmissions from Russia. There was also a lot of scientific research just to gather information about the planet. So, once that weather balloon crashed in Roswell, the government was very secretive about it. There were actually people who witnessed what looked like body bags when the government went to recover it. And that led to the assumption that there were aliens. It was actually, as far as the government claims, they were transportation bags for the equipment, to keep the equipment safe. All of these things sort of led to these theories of aliens, when in fact, it was

• 44:57Speaker 01

  the federal government trying to hide its own defense research capabilities. And it is true that Area 51 is a place that was known to people in part because of former military and former government officials who left the government and then would say, "Hey, I worked on an alien spaceship when I was at Area 51." It was sort of known in popular culture. And it was also known pretty widely that there was a black box, if you will, in Nevada that was near Las Vegas, that was about 23 miles wide and 25 miles wide in the other direction, that was a no-fly zone, a no-photograph zone. And that was the location of Area 51. It was known as the groom box. And so, there is the

• 45:41Speaker 01

  This knowledge that there is something there that nobody is allowed to get near. And there's also this idea that we've seen these weird flying things in the sky. And it turns out that many of those things are actually researched weapons. They're weapons development happening in that place.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Nick, do you want to tell me your factoid about Area 51?

• 46:08Speaker 04

  You can go online and see people who have federal criminal records. You can see their file. One day, a person who was, you know, a journalist sort of stumbled into Area 51 and was looking around and trying to take photographs. And now has a file, now has a government file. And that man who walked in that day later on became a radio personality. And now you know the rest of the story. Oh, wow. Paul Harvey, ladies and gentlemen. Paul Harvey. Paul Harvey.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  When did the government figure out that the UFO theories were actually good for them? Because they were. Because I remember when the stealth bomber first was unveiled, right? And everybody in like Nevada or whatever was like, oh, we've seen that. We thought it was aliens this whole time.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  There's lots of communications that you can see declassified information in part, where the government is kind of like, people know about this place. And like, we know that they're seeing the military weaponry, the military aircraft that we're testing, and they're assuming it's UFOs. And like, what do we do? Should we confirm that this is in fact a military training ground? Or it's a testing facility? Like, what do we do? And there were conversations about that. I think it is one of those things where the government is like, maybe this is a better thing for you to think we're doing here than what we're actually doing, which is developing weapons and stealth reconnaissance abilities and testing nuclear bombs, which is another thing that was happening in Nevada.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  There was actually a civil lawsuit against the federal government in 1996 by some government contractors who were like, you're not disposing of nuclear materials properly in this area. And it's causing a lot of environmental issues and health issues.

• 48:04Hannah McCarthy?

  There are still communities deeply affected by this, who are just

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:08Hannah McCarthy?

  who still want some sort of help or retribution. And it's, yeah.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  It's been confirmed that over 700 of the over 900 nuclear tests have been done in this region. So this is just a concentration of weapons development and weapons testing that happens in this part of the country. We have had some things declassified, but it's still like the development of weapons and the development of different kinds of infrastructure, military infrastructure is still not very well known. Do you know of some of the things that have come out of Area 51? What sort of stuff has been developed?

• 48:42Hannah McCarthy?

  Besides stealth technology for planes? Because isn't that Area 51 stuff?

• 48:46Speaker 01

  That is the correct answer, yes. So the first is the U-2 and then later the A-12. Now, these are military aircraft, surveillance aircraft that can fly way higher than most aircraft, presumably outside of the range of Soviet missiles that can pick up on radio transmissions and monitor and take photographs. The U-2 and the A-12, for a while, they were like, yes, these cannot be shot down. And then the Soviet Union did shoot them down in 1960. They shot down one. And in order to negotiate, in order to get the pilot back, the US government had to admit that they had developed these spy planes. So these came out of Area 51. There is also something known as the F-117,

• 49:31Speaker 01

  which is the first stealth bomber developed in the United States. Now, if you look at the alien spaceship in Independence Day.

• 49:40Hannah McCarthy?

  The ones they fly around? Yeah.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, the one that Will Smith flies. That, if you look at the F-117 or the B-2, which is the same aircraft that was used to drop the ground penetrating bombs that were dropped on Iran this past weekend, they look very, very similar. Which I think gets to your point, Rebecca, that people were seeing these being tested and they began to associate them with aliens, when in fact, these are government weapons.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  One of the features of these Hollywood patriotic movies is that the United States is our military hero, right? This film, it does make attempts to make humanity important here, but it's pretty easy to watch a movie like this and sort of get the impression that the United States is all good. The United States is being presented as all good in this film. Until you remember that the reason we have all of these super powerful weapons in the first place is not to defend ourselves from outer space, but to use these weapons against one another and use these weapons against human beings. So I feel like this movie is really relevant in our current moment because we are holding these two things right next to each other. These weapons are used to save humanity in this movie.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  They're now being used, very similar weapons, in some cases the same aircraft, to carry out campaigns against other people in other countries. So that's sort of where I ended up ending my feelings about this. And I'm wondering what else you guys thought about, if you have any final thoughts?

• 51:23Speaker 04

  I thought a lot about Jeff Goldblum's character and sort of the, you know, the before the rise of tech bro culture, you know, there were just, and in pop culture especially, computer guys were always portrayed as like sitting in dark rooms alone. He obviously couldn't maintain his marriage and all that stuff, right? But he's kind of the hero, right? The guy who figured it out, the computer guy, the quote nerdy guy who can see the code, who can interpret the code, and everybody listens to the tech guy. And it just occurred to me that like, that seemed very much like a fantasy, like at the time, like, you know, the smart guy in the corner who no one talked to in high school is all of a sudden the hero. Same thing with War Games, same thing, you know, with lots of these like 80s and 90s films.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  And today, it's the tech guys who are running the world. Like, they see themselves that way. Like, they're not portrayed in pop culture that way anymore, they're villains in pop culture, but they see themselves as saving the world in real life. It's because those tech guys started making those movies in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.

• 52:27Nick Capodice?

  Be the hero. And then that, you know, two generations later, they run the world.

• 52:42Hannah McCarthy?

  What's so strange to me about this movie is that it doesn't have a moment of the deeply selfish character who's supposed to be representative of all of the deeply selfish people who in a moment like this would get on a spacecraft and leave Earth. And we know that there are people who have the ability to do that privately, right? In certain ways, I mean, I know I'm stretching it a little bit, but I would have appreciated like one guy trying to get to Florida so that he could just get off the planet and then somehow he's foiled or the aliens get him or something. But there was none of that. Nobody even suggests leaving the Earth and not staying and fighting.

• 53:23Hannah McCarthy?

  And I have one other thought, which is that as I hinted at the beginning of this episode, Will Smith is so Luke Skywalker coded, it's ridiculous. It is so silly.

• 53:35Speaker 04

  Hero's Journey?

• 53:36Hannah McCarthy?

  Hero's Journey, he is someone who wants to have an adventure in space, but is mostly getting his training in an arid climate, in a canyon. He performs beautifully. And then later on, he uses that exact same skill that he displays when he is in a giant destructive structure in space after getting it ready to be blown up. It's so Star Wars.

• 53:58Nick Capodice?

  Oh, that's a good, yeah, just like Beggars Canyon back home.

• 54:01Hannah McCarthy?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:02Nick Capodice?

  I had a thing that I thought was interesting that I just sort of realized is that there's a scene in this movie that's kind of the reason we're all here, making this show. Bill Pullman turns to his weasely, weasely Secretary of Defense and says, you know, you're fired. And the Secretary of Defense says, I don't think he can do that. You can't do that. He can't do that. And then the White House Press Secretary says, yeah, I think he just did. This notion of can the president do this? Well, he did it. That's it. That it just got done.

• 54:33Nick Capodice?

  That's, that's something we talk about a lot on our show and it was, it's part of our genesis as a show. So, thank you, Independence Day.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Thank you, Independence Day.

• 54:47Nick Capodice?

  Also, there's a scene where the dog jumps through a ball of fire.

• 54:53Nick Capodice?

  Before that scene happened, and like, the dog was in the tunnel, I was, I jokingly said to Hannah, I was like, "Man, it'd be really cool if the dog like jumped through a ball of fire to get out." And we laughed really hard. And then it happened exactly like that.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:07Nick Capodice?

  Nineties, baby.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  This episode of Civics 101 was written by me, Christina Phillips, and produced and edited by Rebecca Lavoy. A big thank you to our hosts, Nick Cappadicee and Hannah McCarthy. Our team includes producer Marina Henke.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound and Chris Sabriski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  Did you know that if your spouse goes missing and you don't tell anyone, that's not necessarily a crime? That surprising fact is at the heart of the brand new season of Bear Brook, the critically acclaimed true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. I'm your host, Jason Moon. In this season, Bear Brook investigates another New Hampshire mystery. A Christmas tree farmer with dementia vanishes. His wife never reports him missing. Can he still be found? Don't miss it. Follow Bear Brook wherever you get your podcasts.

• 56:41Nick Capodice?

  Observe. The North American Dad. 50s. Great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, "Dang, that's a good offer." The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him "boss." He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  My life is booked and busy. I don't have time to try on a million outfits that still don't feel right. That's why I get styled with Stitch Fix. My personal stylist sends outfits picked for my size, style and budget so I can get dressed and get on with my day feeling confident. It's no risk, all style. Free shipping, free returns, no subscription required. Get started today at StitchFix.com. That's StitchFix.com.