Suits vs. Skins: Immigration and Race in Men in Black

While the political aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, has triggered a national debate about the rights of immigrants, the U.S. Patriot Act is only the latest of a series of state and federal measures reflecting growing suspicion toward immigrants in the U.S. during the past decade. Certainly the Patriot Act has had the most sweeping impact, requiring immigrants from many countries to register with the INS and permitting arrests and detentions without warrants, filing criminal charges, or providing access to an attorney. Yet as early as 1994, Proposition 187 was passed in California, barring illegal immigrants from receiving basic social services; and in 1996, following the Oklahoma City Bombing, two federal laws were passed that facilitated deportation and expanded the latitude of law enforcement to investigate immigrants' activities in cases of suspected terrorism.¹

Although these government actions reveal the anti-immigration disposition of powerful American lawmakers and their constituents, they do not tell the whole story of the place immigrants occupy in the contemporary U.S social formation. Indeed, the apparent distrust toward "aliens" that such legislation implies requires those of us who study contemporary culture to look to various cultural forms as a means of understanding more deeply the complex ways notions of ethnic and racial difference are being constructed by (and, inevitably, will construct) current events within America's borders.

In his examination of the "place of the alien in science fiction" (27), Michael Beehler suggests a deep affinity between narratives concerning aliens from other worlds and those from other nations. "The story of the alien," he argues, "is always the story of borders and of the institutional forces that try to neutralize and control those borders in the name of a certain political economy" (26). It is from this vantage point that I want to examine the 1997 blockbuster Men in Black, reading it not just as the story of an American agency that controls the flow of space aliens on and off planet Earth, but also as an expression of a contemporary American political economy in which the status of immigrants is ideologically linked to the management of African American racial difference. Men in Black articulates its anxiety about immigrants' effects on American society through its depiction of a fierce invading "bug" bent on destroying humankind. Yet it is equally preoccupied with a second, non-immigrant "alien"—a young black man, played by Will Smith, whose foreignness to the old white male guard at the center of the film is repeatedly underscored. While superficially celebrating immigrants' place in American culture, Men in Black offers its audience a cynical fantasy in which agents of white privilege use their control of knowledge and information to manipulate these two different sorts of "aliens" against one another in order to preserve the borders of their own hegemony. Underpinning this narrative of race and ethnicity is a second, economic one, in which immigrants misguidedly put themselves in the skin of the erstwhile working class, while African Americans bank on the empty promise that the economic prestige of whiteness has been outsourced from skin to suit.

Catching the Bug

Inevitably, an objection to thinking about Men in Black, a film about an undercover agency that "monitors and controls alien activity on the planet earth," in relation to such serious and urgent questions would be its manifest status as a light summer action-comedy. Film critic Peter Travers effectively articulates one representative view of the film, simultaneously applauding its outstanding craftsmanship and stating categorically that "Men in Black is not out to change your life" (128). As Travers's comment suggests, the pace and special effects-laden surface of the film might well place it in the category of the "post-classical," in which sheer spectacle prevails over coherent plot or deeper meaning. Critics such as Elsaesser and Buckland, however, have effectively challenged this reductive treatment of recent Hollywood films. Using the action film Die Hard as a case study, they argue: "even assuming there is a new kind of emphasis on spectacle in contemporary Hollywood, . . . it...