Victoria Luxford explores how cinematic attacks on the Statue of Liberty, the White House and other national monuments feed into America’s deepest fears.
Director Alex Garland’s action-drama Civil War imagines one of the most powerful countries in the world in the midst of self-destruction. Kirsten Dunst stars as a warzone photographer travelling from New York to Washington, covering the latter stages of a war where the seceding states of California and Texas are looking to overthrow the President (Nick Offerman), serving a third term as America’s despotic leader. Focusing on the consequences of war rather than the conflict itself, the film follows Dunst and a group of fellow journalists as they observe a country where violence has changed the daily way of life. Bodies hang from bridges, people seek refuge in sports stadiums and, most prominently, national monuments become a theatre of war. America has a number of landmarks known worldwide, signifiers of national pride that become icons for certain cities, and Hollywood has often exploited this recognition to dramatise the very worst fears of a nation.
Many establishing shots of New York will gracefully glide around the Statue of Liberty, and yet this historical symbol of hope for immigrants is often the prime target for destruction in movies, particularly those that signify the fall of the iconic city. 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow shows the statue being engulfed by a tsunami to indicate the severity of nature’s wrath. Four years later, in JJ Abrams’ Cloverfield, it would represent chaos, with a shaky camcorder capturing the severed head of Lady Liberty crashing to the streets in the midst of a monster attack as New Yorkers fled in terror. Famously, it confirmed the destruction of mankind itself in 1968’s Planet of the Apes, where a half-buried statue reveals where stranded astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston) had been all along. In other films, its original purpose is flipped, with 1981’s Escape From New York transforming it into Liberty Island Security Control, an immigration haven now turned into a menacing guard post for the isolated metropolis.
The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
While the Statue of Liberty often symbolises a city under siege, other landmarks demonstrate an entire country in turmoil, none more so than the White House, the nation’s seat of power. The idea of such a place falling to outside enemies is a deeply held national fear, one that has been exploited for cinematic thrills for decades. In 1980’s Superman 2, General Zod (Terence Stamp) swaggered into the Oval Office and made the President kneel as the ultimate display of might. In 2013, two competing action movies centred around one man protecting the seat of government from terrorists: White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen (‘Olympus’, the name for the home of the Greek Gods, being the Secret Service code name for the building). In both films, the recovery of the White House was seen as a reclaiming of national security.
White House Down (2013)
Few films, however, have demonstrated the impact of the White House in the same way as Roland Emmerich’s 1996 blockbuster Independence Day. The image of the building being destroyed by a flying saucer was its selling point, and the scene itself represented the ‘all is lost’ moment in the disaster film. Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore evacuates the White House, and watches in horror from a plane as it is blown to pieces. What’s significant here is that it is part of a sequence of many buildings being destroyed, such as the Empire State Building in New York, and a skyscraper with alien enthusiasts ‘greeting’ the spacecraft from its roof. Many more lives are shown to be lost in those other shots, but it is the destruction of an empty White House that seems most haunting, both within the film’s reality and the audience’s perception.
Independence Day (1996)
Civil War also uses these kinds of images, with Washington’s familiar landmarks surrounded by the smoke and chaos of a war zone. Alex Garland’s film may have a more serious tone than that of Independence Day, but it plays on the same kind of societal fears. For many Americans, the desecration of a landmark would be an attack on America itself, and the ideals on which national identity is built. For those who don’t share that same rose-tinted patriotism, these symbols are still a constant of American culture. They are on money; they are connected to the laws and system in which people live. One of Civil War’s most striking moments, a firefight on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, shows a jarring destruction of those beliefs. The traditionally peaceful national monument, positioned opposite a reflecting pool, becomes an arena for democracy in ashes. These cathedrals of order being destroyed speaks to more than political beliefs, but our very safety.
Civil War (2024)
Civil War may be set in the near future, but the parallels with the recent past add an extra layer of urgency. The memory of January 6th 2021 still looms large for Americans, when rioters stormed the United States Capitol. The images seen around the world were of extremists marching on the steps leading to the building, occupying hallowed spaces such as the Senate Chamber, and the office of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. An American nightmare had been realised, as previously sacred national spaces had fallen to violence, and that an unspoken agreement of civility had been broken. While written prior to January 6th, Civil War imagines an escalation of a similar tension that presses on a raw nerve in American culture, and uses familiar landmarks to press on those anxieties. Where once cinema fancifully wondered if aliens would blow up the White House, now it asks how much we stand to lose to divisions from within.
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