I gotta tell you this one thing and then I gotta go.

I was channel-surfing around the dial this evening looking for something to watch on tv. The viewer landscape is pretty barren on this particular day. However, on a second attempt around the dial, I came across “Independence Day” (or ID4), a highly digestible piece of tapioca. It’s cool and mushy. Now, I saw this when it came out in ’96. It was made for the Big Screen. All the destruction was really spectacular. So, to see it on my dinky tv screen was a disappointment but I decided to watch it anyway.

What I came to appreciate this second time around is the faux grandiosity of the picture as well as the big gestures. The biggest gestures are the exploding White House, the Capitol, and the Empire State Building. (In fact, the special effects folks got an Oscar for their work as did the sound people.) Another big gesture was the gigantic spacecraft that hovers overhead in NYC and DC. Supposedly they’re seven miles across. And why are they shaped like saucers still? You would have thought that this race would have ignored the 1950s tv waves coming across the galaxies as a design inspiration and come up with something more post-modern.

But it isn’t just the things in the film that have big gestures. Will Smith’s character, Captain Hiller, is a cigar chewing, military, macho man with the hard exterior kind of guy. His “Welcome to America” line is a classic like “Open the pod bay doors, HAL!”.  Jeff Goldblum’s David Levinson is the nerd’s nerd’s nerd. His big gesture nod to machismo is to smoke a cigar. (So, is cancer the goal of every macho man?) Robert Loggia must have his own general’s suit by now. He’s such an extremely well known single dimensional authority figure that he would have been a great stand-in for W. Bill Pullman as President Thomas J. (Jefferson, what else?) Whitmore (Rushmore?) is the hammiest big gesture. His big gesture is to deliver a lousy version of the St. Crispin’s Day speech that would have Shakespeare laughing his ass off.

This movie is my favorite propaganda piece.