American Cinema of the 1990s: Themes and Variations

1996 Movies and Homeland Insecurity

1996 Movies and Homeland Insecurity DEBRA WHITE-STANLEY AND CARYL FLINN At first glance, this seems like a rather stable year for the United States. President Bill Clinton was reelected, the first Democrat to achieve this feat since Franklin Roosevelt. Although partisanship was intense, his relationship to moderate Republicans was not unduly strained, despite Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s continuing investigation into alleged misconduct of the Clintons in the Whitewater case. The country’s economy was sound. The nation was not at war, and Clinton was promising to bring home the few troops he had committed to Bosnia the previous year. Superficially at least, things seemed fine at home. Many Americans simply wanted to be left alone to go about their own affairs without the interference of foreign interests or the federal government . Many, especially on the right, viewed these two forces with growing suspicion. Savvy to that perception, Clinton steered the country through a relatively isolationist course, recalling Dorothy’s sighing at the end of The Wizard of Oz (1939), “If you can’t find something in your own back yard, you’ve never really lost it to begin with.” By the mid-1990s, however, “home” was at once problem, solution, freedom, and fear. Cracks in the image of home as a safe place were even tarnishing the first family’s image. Since the demise of Hillary Clinton’s proposal for a national health care bill in 1994, her public activities had become a source of unfavorable media attention. She was still trying to live down her infamous assertions from 1992 that she was not “some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” and that “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession.” Much as her husband was trying to make things right at “home,” events conspired to turn the federal government into a bit of a public relations joke. As the year began, Congress deadlocked over the budget, effectively shutting down the government for three weeks. Nothing could have better demonstrated Washington’s fecklessness. Things that the federal government once controlled were being parceled out to corporate or state control. Clinton dissolved the Interstate Commerce Commission, handing authority over to the 157 states, and he signed a welfare reform bill that shifted federal expenditures to states and curtailed benefits and eligibility. As if in response to the negative publicity surrounding his own marriage, he also signed the Defense of Marriage Act, halted his campaign for universal health care, and stopped advocating for the rights of lesbians and gays to serve in the military. Signs of instability were overshadowing the American homeland. During the Olympics in Atlanta, a bomb went off that killed one and wounded over a hundred others. The “Unabomber,” in the person of Theodore Kaczynski, was arrested for mailing explosive packages in protest of what he viewed as an overly industrialized society. Along with the suspicious explosion of a transatlantic TWA flight in July in which 230 people died, two months after a Valujet airliner crashed in the Florida Everglades, killing 110 people, these events helped set in motion an emergent besieged mentality in the country. Some Americans blamed foreigners for the problems at home. Debates over the rights of immigrants continued to rage, and racism and xenophobia fueled a small explosion of homegrown militia groups, whose membership that year was estimated at a hundred thousand. Heavily armed, these survivalists, neo-Nazis, and self-proclaimed patriots readied themselves to take on all threats, even the FBI and the rest of the U.S. government. Global developments also fanned the flames of domestic anxieties: China became the fastest growing economy in the world (and the United States’ greatest debtor nation), and fourteen Caribbean and Latin American nations formed an economic union with the eventual hope of becoming party to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It was a year of exponential growth in the arts, the business world, and science. The Federal Trade Commission approved the massive $6.5 billion merger of TimeWarner and Turner Broadcasting. Family groups were pleased that the TV industry was proposing a ratings system. Book consumers snatched up CBS veteran’s Walter Cronkite’s memoirs, A Reporter’s Life: it became the year’s best-selling nonfiction hardback. Overseas demand for American movies was rising and Hollywood, for its part, benefited from Congress’s push for bankruptcy overhaul, which...