Fascism and Millennial American Cinema by Leighton Grist

Author:Leighton Grist
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

II

Early in The Believer, Curtis Zampf’s voice is heard warning, in words that invoke a disingenuously intellectualized version of far-Right attacks on the New World Order, that the USA faces the loss of its ‘unified set of core beliefs’, and, accordingly, its cessation as ‘a nation in the traditional sense’, with it instead becoming ‘a confederation of specific interest groups like medieval principalities’. This is, with historical logic, implicitly referred by Zampf to the spread of deregulatory, neo-liberal economics, with the USA correlatively becoming, for him, part of ‘the anonymous, undistinguished sea of the global market’ – something that, while threatening what Zampf implies are dire ‘cultural, psychological, and spiritual consequences’ will nevertheless bring what he sees as being ‘obvious’ ‘economic advantages’. Zampf’s prognosis reverberates, in turn, during the later scene in which Daniel Balint, ‘fundraising’ for Zampf and Lina Moebius’s proposed fascist movement, speaks with a New York financier (Jordan Lage). A situation that invites comparison with fascism’s historical complicity with the capitalism that it purportedly condemns, it as well indexes the explosion of finance capitalism that has been a concomitant of the spread of neo-liberalism since the 1980s. That noted, on Daniel responding to what he perceives as a derisory offer of $5,000 by claiming, with characteristic anti-Semitism, that the financier is ‘a Jew’, the latter, having already asserted, in near-confirmation of Zampf’s contentions, that ‘There’s only the market now’, observes – suggestively, regarding Daniel’s tacit alignment of Jews, abstraction, money and the deracinating undermining of ‘traditional life’ – that ‘Maybe we’re all Jews now’.

While the global spread of neo-liberal economics and the establishment of the New World Order have been equally pressing for the Left, the further focus has been less on the USA, as Daniel Levitas puts it, ‘relinquishing its sovereignty to a shadowy cabal’ (2002: 4) than on the growth of the USA’s economic and cultural supremacy – that we are all now, or becoming, American. Moreover, if, as Toby Miller avers, culture has been considered as being ‘at the centre’ of globalization (1998: 376), then – as the notion of cultural imperialism that emerged in the 1970s has been replaced conceptually by that of (inevitably inequitable) cultural exchange – American music, television and cinema have, through their long-standing international distribution networks, and the more recent lessening of state regulation that has attended deregulation, been in the vanguard of the USA’s present economic and cultural dominance.5 This dominance can, in turn, be seen to be figured in Starship Troopers. The film’s Earth-set scenes centre upon Buenos Aires: that is, South, not North, America. However, the characters, lifestyle and mores represented are manifestly North, not South, American, and more particularly redolent of the USA. Moreover, not only are the film’s central characters played by actors that had appeared in teen- or young adult-orientated television series – with Van Dien, Meyer and Richards having been in Beverly Hills, 90210 (Fox, 1990–2000), Richards and Muldoon having been in Melrose Place (Fox, 1992–99) and Harris having played the title character in Doogie Howser, M.

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