1 I would like to express my gratitude to the Research Department of Sogang University, which, by providing a Special Research Grant in 2008, made work on this essay possible. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen “We Are of Peace, Always”: ABC’s Remake of V, Alien Invasion Television, and American Paranoia after Bush 1 Steffen Hantke Among the most commercially and critically successful television programs during the Bush presidency, paranoid narratives within the genres of the thriller and of science fiction became synonymous with the American zeitgeist. From Lost to 24, many of these multi-season series have ended during the transitional period between the Bush and the Obama administration. Superficially aligned with what was officially announced as a change in tone within American policy, both foreign and domestic, paranoid television did not decline, however. As ABC’s remake of the Reagan-era series V, starting in the fall of 2009, illustrates, cultural and political paranoia adjusted to a new set of themes. Acutely attuned to the cost of U.S. military engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan on the one hand, and to intense anxieties surrounding race, gender, and class in response to the 2008 presidential elections on the other, V has revitalized the science fiction trope of alien invasion by investing it with renewed topical urgency. 1. The paranoid years: a fond farewell? After 9/ 11 and throughout the presidency of George W. Bush, American culture saw a massive resurgence of paranoia as the engine of popular fiction. To be sure, paranoia has never been entirely absent from ideological discourse, prompting Douglas Hofstaedter’s much-quoted dictum that the nation’s imagination, political and otherwise, is shaped by a mode of percep- Steffen Hantke 144 2 The political slant in Joel Surnow’s The Kennedys (in production, 2010), for example, suggests that the politics promoted by 24 are part of the producer’s larger, unapologetically partisan political agenda. For a more detailed account of the controversy surrounding the project, see Itzkoff 2010. 3 Case in point is the maneuvering of studios in regard to films already in production or close to release in the period immediately after 9/ 11, in contrast to television networks releasing shows which - accidentally or on purpose - featured scenes, imagery, or plot premises exactly of that nature that had studio executives halt production or release (e.g. the pilot episode of Enterprise, aired less than two weeks after the 9/ 11 attacks on September 26, 2001, which features a terrorist organization named the Suliban [! ] bent on destroying humanity). 4 With a film entitled Super 8, produced by Steven Spielberg, on the Area 51 mythology announced for 2011, Abrams shows little signs of changing his tune. If one were to take one’s cue from Lincoln Geraghty, who argues that the failure of The Lone Gunmen (2001), the last of the X-Files spin-offs, “signals a shift in attitudes at the end of television’s period tion and expression, a totalizing fantasy, based on paranoia. But the manner in which the Bush administration conducted the so-called war on terror brought paranoia to the forefront and even injected it into genres of popular entertainment, especially in the medium of television, where it had played a minor role or none at all. Given their origins in the Cold War, espionage shows like Fox’s 24 (2001-10) or Showtime’s Sleeper Cell (2005-) merely needed to increase the degree of paranoia already inherent in their generic conventions. But even crime shows like Fox’s Prison Break (2005-), action adventure like ABC’s Lost (2004-10), or science fiction like CBS’s Jericho (2007-08) and the SciFi Channel’s remake of Battlestar Galactica (2004-09) turned into object lessons in the duplicity of all human motivation, the unpredictability of those closest to us, and the barely glimpsed existence of grand master plans demoting all of us to the status of pawns in one impenetrable scheme or another. Serving not only as a space for the public debate and examination of anxieties revolving around domestic and global terrorism and uncertainty about the mission and standing of the U.S. within the international community, television also served as the space where such anxieties were formulated, reified, encouraged, disseminated, and instrumentalized. 2 In contrast to the U.S. film industry, which by and large responded more slowly and with greater caution because it “viewed 9/ 11 as a kind of box office poison” (Prince 2009: 80), television proved its ability of taking on the issues of the day with speed, acuity, and daring. 3 Careers straddling the fence between television and cinema took shape in this arena: producer J.J. Abrams, for example, who had started with the politically inconspicuous teenage drama Felicity (1998-2002), turned - with films like Mission Impossible 3 (2006) and with shows like Alias (2001-06), Lost, and, more recently, Fringe (2008-) - into the Bush years’ equivalent of what Chris Carter had been to the Clinton administration: a powerhouse of high-profile franchises unpacking the considerable narrative and dramatic potential of paranoia. 4 “We Are of Peace, Always” 145 of paranoia” (2009: 150), then Carter passes the torch almost directly to Abrams, whose Alias initiates Abrams’ “paranoid period” the same year Carter’s ends. 5 “On NBC, a young female biologist, on a show called Surface, was hot on the trail of a new marine species erupting into the Earth’s waters from the deep trenches at the bottom of the ocean, challenging humanity’s evolutionary primacy as it landed on America’s beaches, [while, on CBS’s Threshold] a young female risk analyst, with a specialty in contingency planning for major national disasters, was called up to head a team of experts trying to contain an outbreak of sinister mutation, which had been caused by the encoded signal from an alien probe sighted off the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. […] All that time, next door at ABC at a show called Invasion, aliens had dropped out of the sky and into the waters (or vice versa? ) off the Florida Keys during a hurricane” (Hantke 2010: 1). 6 Due to constraints on budgets and graphic violence, adapting the genre of the war film to television has, with very few exceptions, never been a successful endeavor. Though CGI has brought down the cost of visual effects required for this genre, just as boundaries of the depiction of violence on television have expanded in recent years, the preferred version of alien invasion is still that of silent subversion over military assault - Invasion of the Body Snatchers over War of the Worlds. Hence, Quinn Martin’s The Invaders (ABC, 1967-68, unsuccessfully remade as a made-for-TV movie by Fox in 1995), with its contemporary setting and emphasis on human drama over special effects, still provides the blueprint for alien invasion shows on television today. A significant aspect of this paranoid television culture during the Bush years was defined by a return to genre types, themes, and narrative patterns derived from pulp science fiction, most prominently those associated in the collective cultural imagination with the 1950s and early 1960s, the heyday of the Cold War. With a parallel development in mainstream cinema (with remakes of such period classics as The Day the Earth Stood Still [Scott Derrickson, 2008], Invasion of the Body Snatchers [as The Invasion, Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007], or War of the Worlds [Steven Spielberg, 2005]), television returned with new sincerity and seriousness to old chestnuts of the genre hitherto palatable to audiences merely as camp or parody. As part of this return to Fifties science fiction, all three major networks launched, in the fall season of 2003, a show that revolved around one of the truest and most tried tropes of pulp science fiction - alien invasion: Threshold (CBS), Invasion (ABC), and Surface (NBC). 5 Though all three shows were cancelled by their respective network at the end of their first season, their reworking and updating of 1950s invasion tropes succeeded in overcoming or circumventing the most serious historical discrepancy between the 1950s and the latter half of the Bush presidency - that the morphology of current invasion anxieties had shifted, after the end of the Cold War, from military visions of massive territorial incursions by a superior army wielding fierce weapons on the battlefield, to paranoid visions of omnipresent covert infiltration and subversion, sleeper cells and fifth columns, highly localized terrorist attacks against targets chosen for their symbolic functions occurring in and legitimized by an expanded mediasphere. 6 Though the larger threat of full-scale military invasion remained strategically suspended, and thus perpetually available, in the background of these shows, postponed as a Steffen Hantke 146 7 For a full analysis of the three shows, see Hantke 2010. 8 The most significant film in this context - both for the Reagan years, but also in regard to ABC’s remake of V and its “borrow[ing] heavily from American mythology and folklore” narrative option until a later season that never materialized, all three shows ultimately served the political agenda of the Bush years by taking a centrist position that neither offended the administration’s left-leaning critics nor discredited its right-wing apologists - a timidity that might have contributed to each one’s premature cancellation. 7 What all three shows did demonstrate successfully, however, was the urgency of an internally inconsistent, yet none the less compelling agenda which amalgamated in complex ways anxieties about viral infection and pandemics in the wake of social panics triggered by SARS, avian bird flu, and swine flu and which then translated these anxieties into the thematic register of, on the one hand, class anxieties in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing debate on illegal immigration in the wake of the Clinton administration’s NAFTA agreement, and, on the other hand, into that of informational panic associated with the global spread of computer viruses, cyberwar scenarios against nations like China or North Korea, and privacy issues within the newly empowered security state created by the Patriot Act. To the degree that this thematic agenda put forward by Threshold, Invasion, and Surface aligned itself with paranoid television in other genres (spy thrillers like 24 or adventure narratives like Lost), the science fiction trope of alien invasion seemed to have lost its grip on the issues of the day. Especially in light of the fact that all three shows were cancelled by their respective network after only one season, it must, therefore, come as a surprise that, by 2009, ABC made the decision to give it another try and invest in yet another alien invasion show - the remake of NBC’s miniseries V, originally aired in 1983 and 1984. The newly remade V started its run on November 3, 2009, and is, at the time of writing, completing its first season on May 18, 2010 with a total of twelve one-hour episodes. Despite the inbuilt commercial safeguards of inheriting the “massive following outside of regular sf circles” the original show had garnered (Geraghty 2009: 146), several aspects of the historical context and the specific genealogy of the alien invasion trope made ABC’s commitment to V all the more perplexing. When NBC broadcast its miniseries V in 1983, the United States was, thanks to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, in the midst of its final ‘hot’ phase of the Cold War, with the result that “Cold War filmmaking polarized to a greater extent during the 1980s than in any previous period of the conflict” (Shaw 2007: 269). Scenarios of full-scale military Soviet invasion featured strongly within the national imagination, providing fodder for the literary and cinematic genres of science fiction, espionage fiction, and the action film. 8 To a surprising extent, which far exceeds any “We Are of Peace, Always” 147 (Shaw 2007: 273) - is John Milius’ Red Dawn (1984), “one of only two Hollywood films made throughout the Cold War (Alfred E. Green’s Invasion USA, released in 1952, being the other) that depicted World War Three in terms of a direct military invasion of the United States, as opposed to those that used aliens or that focused on Soviet subversion” (Shaw 2007: 273). 9 In an article entitled “Hillary Clinton vows to end paranoia of George Bush era,” Alex Spillius (2009) quotes Clinton, newly appointed to Secretary of State by Obama, as declaring the break with the principles of the Bush administration. “In a clear reference to George W thing in its three predecessors from 2003, the remake of V preserves the Cold War premise of large-scale military invasion. The historical obsolescence of this premise and its resulting topical irrelevance stem not only from the fact that tactics and strategies of terrorism have reshaped the culturally prevalent iconography of violent conflict; more significantly, they stem from the profoundly asymmetrical distribution of power between the U.S. and its enemies. However prolonged or costly those wars - if war is, in fact, the correct word for conflicts this asymmetrical - might turn out to be, no American anywhere would seriously consider the possibility of foreign troops landing on the shores of Virginia or California. The likelihood of such a scenario notwithstanding, America’s enemy in the Cold War at least had the military capacity to launch such an attack. Regardless of historical discrepancy, however, the two emblematic images of V, both of NBC’s original and ABC’s remake - one featuring the giant alien ships hovering menacingly over major cities worldwide, the other showing a vast invasion fleet crossing outer space on its way to Earth - thematize exactly that scenario. To understand the function of these emblematic images and resolve their ostensible historical irrelevance within the changed ideological and political context of ABC’s release of its version of V is one of the goals of this discussion. The second goal is to examine those elements within ABC’s remake of V which align the show with what I have been calling paranoid television, and to determine whether V represents a continuation of seven years of post- 9/ 11 paranoia, or whether its paranoid sensibility interacts with a political climate specific to the U.S. after the change of administrations in 2008. In other words, does V mark a political default position, the ghostly afterlife of a cultural preoccupation that should have run its course with the presidential elections and the change of administrations in 2008/ 9, but which is taking its time to wind down, wearing out its momentum with painfully embarrassing slowness in a commercial mediascape devoted to squeezing every last ounce of profit from an idea before embracing risky change (a suspicion given fuel by the fact that ABC’s show, unlike its 2003 predecessors, is a remake)? Or does the show mark a new kind of paranoia, driven by a new political agenda, unique to the U.S. under an administration that came into office under the slogan “Change we can believe in” and advertises its agenda online at an address called change.gov? 9 Though V is, of course, a Steffen Hantke 148 Bush’s obsession with national security after the September 11 attacks, Mrs Clinton said: ‘I don’t get up every morning just thinking about the threats and dangers, as real as they are. I also get up thinking about who we are and what we can do.’ Addressing staff members of the 18,000-strong state department on her first day at work, she proclaimed a ‘new era for America’.” (Telegraph, January 22, 2009). As to whether this declaration of intent is more about style than substance - a critique of the Obama administration voiced most poignantly by its strongest erstwhile supporters - see Greenwald 2009. tiny, singular instance of popular culture within a vast, complex, and constantly changing arena of cultural production, its symptomatic value might be to provide an insight into disruptions and/ or continuities between the two administrations in regard to their varying degrees of commitment to Hofstaedter’s “paranoid style” in American politics and culture. Before I turn to V itself, however, two prefatory comments are necessary. To the degree that V is still a series in progress at the time of writing, the narrative may take unexpected twists and turns, which are likely to modify some of the argument I am about to make. However, for a reading like this one, which traces the series’ politics in the placement and configuration of allegorical links to its immediate political context, the thematic premises on which all further narrative developments are based, and by which they are constrained (given the realist aesthetic the series applies to plot, character, and action), is more significant than the narrative ‘unpacking’ of these premises through its plot. Political allegory in science fiction and/ or allegorical readings of science fiction are closely tied to the text’s pursuit of ‘world building’; to the extent that all narrative developments are constrained by the rules of the fictional world and the imperative of its ontological coherence, they are subjugated to the premises from which they are extrapolated. Hence, my reading will - by necessity but also by conscious choice - focus more on an analysis of the fictional world of V, of the thematic premises that determine the diegesis, than on tracking its narrative arc from its first to its (projected) final episode. Furthermore, the alignments of, or correspondences between, motifs and themes in V and the show’s historical and political context I am about to trace are not, properly speaking, to the empirical reality of this context. This is not to assert that there is no empirical reality, or that this empirical reality is beyond the reach of critical analysis; it is beyond dispute, for example, that Obama did sign the Health Care Reform Act on March 24, 2010. Instead, I want to distinguish between this indisputable fact and its reflection within popular discourse, which interprets, filters, reworks, distorts, and represents it - which, in other words, recognizes it as embedded within processes driven by fear and desire. To some measure, these processes are also driven by the Obama administration itself, as it generates representations which may or may not correspond to its supporters’ or detractors’ expectations and perceptions. To the extent that empirical reality is reflected “We Are of Peace, Always” 149 10 It is in details like these that the emphasis of allegory over verisimilitude in V becomes palpable. Not only does the Visitors’ humanoid appearance fail to raise suspicion among the human population; their physical attractiveness, coded in relatively narrow cultural terms, and the racial variety they display do not seem to raise any eyebrows. in the public debate, historical events and agents are inevitably products of representational politics - someone’s idea of the person or the event rather than that person or event. Ontologically speaking, this discursive reflection of history might be a phenomenon of secondary significance; to the extent, however, that the public sphere is trafficking in symbol and metaphor rather than fact, the subjective, or even polemic or propagandist nature of ‘events’ and ‘characters’ circulating through this sphere does not diminish their power but merely defines its ontological status. 2. Meet the Visitors: iron fists in velvet gloves Much more than the trope of external mind control - the technological version, so to speak, of demonic possession - that has dominated invasion narratives from Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the three network shows launched in 2003, V mobilizes anxieties about the body as an inauthentic construct (V links the issue of external mind control, though still present, to propaganda instead of possession, which drags it from the shadows of uncanny psychology into the light of political strategizing). As the Visitors arrive upon Earth, their nefarious goals, the revelation of which is strategically parceled out over several episodes, are announced by the fact that their human bodies are biological constructs concealing their ‘true’ reptilian identity. 10 Since the medical examination of such a body and its display in the media would uncover their invasion strategy, all Visitors carry a suicide pill, the effect of which is the instantaneous combustion of the body. Reduced to a pile of ash, the alien body leaves no evidence for those intent on penetrating its secrets. This bodily combustion, as well as its paranoia inducing possibilities of discrediting enemies by eradicating incriminating evidence - borrowed, incidentally, from The Invaders (1967-68), a show in which alien bodies automatically burn upon death - links the materiality of bodies with the uncanny latencies of paranoia. However, the fact that the alien invasion comes with a human face is less significant - after all, the fact that ‘they’ look just like ‘us’ is the enabling mechanism of paranoia - than the fact that this face is that of a woman, which also happens to be coded in terms of ethnic ambiguity and class resentment. Played as a cool noir-ish femme fatale by actress Morena Baccarin, Anna, the leader of the alien invasion, reifies post-feminist anxi- Steffen Hantke 150 11 In the downplaying of gender attributes familiar from genres like film noir - overt sexual availability signaled, for example, by long hair - the show moves beyond previous alien invasion narratives in which the invaders are coded as female: the most notable example might be films like Species (Roger Donaldson, 1995) and its sequels, its key moment in cinema Miles Bennell’s sexual horror upon realizing that his beloved Becky has been turned into a pod overnight at the end of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 12 A scene in episode 2 in which Anna conducts a conversation while quickly running through a variety of costumes coded both in social and in national/ ethnic terms clarifies her role as a screen for shifting projections, while, at the same time, marking this very lack of personal identity as a social pathology, a symptom of ‘what’s wrong with her’ - a quality notoriously difficult to put into words. What remain stable throughout these prosthetic alterations are Anna’s stylish page boy haircut and her unflappable calm. 13 For a fictional exploitation of this specific scenario, see Graham Baker’s Alien Nation (1988), which was also adapted to television (Fox, 1989-90), as well as Neill Blomkamp’s more recent District 9 (2009). eties on both ends of the political spectrum. 11 The show’s production design articulates her sexuality as interplay between erotic signifiers and their (ostensible) repression: she is dressed in designer clothes that are conservative in cut and austere in color, yet so tightly form-fitting as to draw attention to the anatomy they pretend to conceal. Similarly, Baccarin’s hair is cut short in a boyish bob, emphasizing the actress’s high cheek bones and large eyes. The constant references to how ‘hot’ she is, voiced primarily by the human teenagers allowed into her company, align her with the rhetoric encoding recent high-profile female politicians on the left and the right. In the interplay between her physicality and her role as a political leader, she encodes a figure like Sarah Palin as seen through the lens of left-wing paranoia. Insistent references to Anna’s deviousness and her enacting a covert agenda detrimental to humanity, which stand in opposition to the claims to transparency and folksy authenticity that define Palin’s public persona, also align Anna with Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton as seen, conversely, through an equally paranoid lens on the political right. 12 Aside from these post-feminist anxieties, the fact that Baccarin’s physical appearance signals a carefully modulated ethnic otherness, which gestures at a variety of concrete ethnic origins without committing itself to any specific one - an ambiguity so profound that it moves her toward the very post-racial identity often brought up in discussions of Obama’s symbolic status within the American cultural economy - also plays to anxieties about a post-racial America. For recent examples of this anxiety one must look no further than the ‘reverse racism’ debate surrounding the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court in the summer of 2009, or to the critique during the 2008 presidential elections about Barack Obama not being ‘black enough.’ In framing racial issues, the writers of V deliberately forego a strategy of dramatic racial othering, in which the security of the ‘homeland,’ coded as white, is under attack by waves of dark-skinned immigrants. 13 Instead, they opt for a vision that, superficially, acknowledges multi-ethnicity as an estab- “We Are of Peace, Always” 151 14 It is interesting to note that the original series constructed the Visitors’ otherness around fascist imagery borrowed primarily from Nazi Germany, featuring, for example, an elderly Jewish man, a Holocaust survivor, growing suspicious at the Visitors’ conspicuously and stereotypically Aryan features. ABC’s remake of the series has erased this specific ethnic iconography, just as its production design has muted some of the historical analogies accompanying it (e.g. between the Visitors’ youth program and the Hitler Youth). 15 Repeated references to Anna as the alien species’ queen complicate this reptile metaphor by adding an insectoid spin. Though reptiles and insects might be considered equally coldblooded/ hearted, acting out amoral, biologically mechanistic imperatives, the insect metaphor ties V in with anti-Communist rhetoric, which, during the Cold War, cast alien invaders invariably as ants (Them! [Gordon Douglas, 1954]) or grasshoppers (The Beginning of the End [Bert I. Gordon, 1957]). lished, defining feature of American society, yet, in its construction of a character like Anna, who seems to exist beyond the determining binaries of race, reneges on this acceptance by framing its destabilizing effects on the authenticity and legibility of identity at large. It is no coincidence that the second most notable character of color in V is a renegade alien sleeper agent named Ryan Nichols (Morris Chestnut), a male character positioned primarily as a moral opposite to Baccarin’s Anna; their opposition is structured around both of them being non-human but pursuing morally and politically opposed goals. Chestnut’s conspicuous blackness plays on a more easily legible idea of American-ness; encoded as ‘African’-American, his blackness registers conspicuously against Baccarin’s indeterminate ethnic otherness. The interplay between the two characters and the racial registers they engage distances a positively connoted authentic Americanness, whether black or white (i.e. a concept within an obsolete yet clearly legible racial politics), which also happens to be male, from a threatening inauthentic female post-racial otherness which is hard, if not impossible, to read because of its emergent status. 14 Aside from the angles of, respectively, race and gender, V also interpellates its audience in a class-specific manner - perhaps the most significant of the three vectors running through the show. Let me illustrate this point in reference to the complex articulations of bodies, human and/ or alien, especially in their relationship to a spirituality the show portrays as striving toward the extreme opposite of embodiment. Fundamentally, the Visitors are reptiles encased in a genetically designed ‘human suit,’ which, once it is ripped open, provides revealing glimpses of the true alien form underneath the skin. 15 Bodily abjection hides beneath an inconspicuous or, more frequently, erotically or sexually attractive surface. As their beautiful bodies conceal their ugly true selves, their calm, controlled, serene demeanor conceals their aggressive, exploitive agenda. The Visitors’ serenity is a far cry from the muted affect displayed by all those alien invaders in Cold War science fiction functioning as embodiments of the evils of communism. In contrast to their robotic calm, the Visitors command a range of affects, all of them expressed Steffen Hantke 152 16 The visualization of this practice beautifully balances the sublime (on Anna’s end as she broadcasts serenity) with the uncanny (on the receivers’ end, as individuals stare enraptured into empty space). The show also goes to great lengths to distinguish the inauthenticity of this new-age religiosity of the Visitors from the practice of established religions; after all, one of the positive main characters of the show is a priest. New age religiosity is framed as a class-specific deviation from social norms defined by Christianity. in a manner signaling a control of the self by the self, not by an external agent. But this serene self-possession is merely a cover for mercenary efficiency, all the more so since its practice is enforced in a yoga-like collective practice called Bliss with which Anna broadcasts collective serenity to her troops; only in this specific practice of re-affirmation do the horrors of external mind control enter the show in their most paranoid form. 16 Since the show recruits its viewers into this paranoid logic from the very beginning, they are encouraged to distrust this serenity regardless of specific external circumstances. Semiotically speaking, serenity serves as an emblem of otherness; diegetically speaking, it serves as its symptom. Accompanied by impeccably accent-free articulations of the English language, which parallels their elegantly austere designer couture, the Visitors immediately register as social elite; viewers would be hard pressed to miss the fact that their physical appearance, as well as their demeanor, is coded in terms of social class. All of these markers collude in the marking of the Visitors as upper-class, or, more precisely, as members of a uniquely American early 21st century upper-class. To be clear, there is no 19th century anxiety here about the subversion of American democracy by way of residual or resurgent European aristocratic sensibilities. The Visitors are not the foreignaccented, cruel, sexually perverse autocrats that haunt late-20th century fantasies about serial killers (e.g. Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter or Brett Easton Ellis’ Jason Bateman). Though both types of fictional monsters share that deceptive serenity, V’s aliens are not singular social outsiders. Discussions about their status as immigrants illustrate that they function specifically as a group, a demographic. Hence, the target of the narrative’s othering is what popular political and social discourse in the U.S. frames as the liberal elite: a college educated, left leaning, professional middle class, environmentally conscious, open to non-traditional religions and philosophies, tolerant (i.e. ‘politically correct’) in matters of race and gender - it is this demographic, or its caricature, that serves as the negation of all things American in V. Configurations among other characters within the show confirm this handling of social class as a consistent strategy - an approach based less on absolute class identity and more on a shifting network of class markers operating in relation to each other. Erica Evans (Elizabeth Mitchell), for example, the female character at the center of the narrative, is an FBI agent, “We Are of Peace, Always” 153 17 Since parts of the Visitors’ plan involve contaminating the public health care system with R6, the show also harks back to a long tradition of conspiracy theories (e.g. the fluoridation of drinking water in the 1950s or, more recently, theories about so-called chemtrails). a branch within the network of law enforcement agencies conventionally associated with upper-class elitism. However, the show omits any character whose presence would re-enforce this conventional assumption about her profession’s class allegiance; at its most conventional, this missing character would be a street cop or lower-ranked detective whose working-class authenticity serves to offset the FBI agent’s class pretensions. In the absence of such a contrasting character, however, Erica’s affiliation with the FBI is stripped of its conventional class component, which makes her available as a figure of positive viewer identification. Within the logic of class relations in the show, her moral integrity, vigilance, and sense of moral and political fairness now stand in contrast to the conspicuous class superiority of the Visitors. Superimposed upon this broad ideological foundation, V adds a textual layer of more specific topicality, recasting in fictional terms selected themes within the debate on domestic policy, especially since the change of administrations in 2009. In contrast to the larger ideological positions articulated within the show, these are references planted with such specific deliberation that the audience is likely to respond with amusement at how thinly veiled they are. The Visitors’ plan, for example, to tag human beings like animals with the help of an injection, ominously referred to as R6, plays not only to broad pandemic anxieties, from SARS to avian flu, but, more specifically in the form of conspiracy theories surrounding public health policy responses to the perceived threat of a swine flu epidemic, to right-wing anxieties of a federal government expanding its surveillance to every private citizen. 17 Though these anxieties could have been inherited from the Bush administration’s systematic expansion of the security state legitimized by the Patriot Act - just as the social panics triggered by SARS, avian flu, and swine flu, predate the Obama administration - the discourse on medical technology in V aims at something more up to date. The plot hinges on the willingness of the Visitors to hand over their superior medical technology, ostensibly free of charge, to the entire human population - a plan repeatedly referred to by characters in the show as universal health care. For a U.S. audience in the first half of 2010, the term cannot but resonate with the public debate about the plans for the Obama administration’s Heath Care Reform Bill, plans met with considerable resistance from the health care industry and its representatives in politics and the media. The sinister overtones of the Visitors’ ‘universal health care’ initiative reify the anxieties circulating throughout this policy debate; for example, ominous references to incalculable waiting periods, which may or may not decide over one character’s survival, insinu- Steffen Hantke 154 ate that it is not just the Visitors’ covert agenda that renders their generosity suspect, but that, more importantly, it is the centralized origins and distribution of technology that make it susceptible to covert machinations. To a minor extent, the show itself recognizes that this situation comes with a pre-history. There is mention of sleeper agents having been embedded deeply within humanity for the last twenty years - i.e. back through a series of U.S. administrations both Republican and Democrat - and that, thanks to their tireless subversive activities, the world has come to the brink of crisis, making it ripe for the alien plucking. However, this long-term chronology of the invasion does little to divert allegorical recognition beyond the present U.S. administration. To the extent that previous alien invasion shows, like Threshold, Invasion, or Surface, were undeniably products of America under the Bush administration, V is a product of America under Obama. Given the confluence of these basic thematic elements of the show on the one hand, and the political climate at the time of its release, starting in September of 2009, on the other hand, it is clear that V embodies a politics aligning itself most comfortably with the political right. The specific forms of paranoia its fictional world indulges, the shape they take, and the origins they purport to uncover are allegorically encoded in details unique to the Obama administration. The discourse from which V draws its topicality might be most potent on the fringe, but what the show’s writers understand all too well is that its paranoid logic has become widely available in the mainstream as well. Regardless of the veracity or even just plausibility of fringe positions on the far right, mainstream conservatism, demoted to the opposition since the 2008 elections in both the White House and the Congress, has done little to repudiate them, presumably in pursuit of hitherto untapped voter potential for the 2011 midterm elections. Moreover, left-leaning media in support of Democrat agenda - from pundits like Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews to Jon Stewart and Bill Maher - has exploited fringe positions on the right, discrediting them by letting them air out their grievances in all their paranoid glory. As a result of this unprecedented visibility granted both from the right and the left, right-wing paranoia has moved from fringe to mainstream providing fertile grounds for the paranoid imagination in V. The degree to which V so obviously wants to be topical also suggests ways of resolving what I have identified earlier as the puzzling lack of relevance of the motif of alien invasion to the show’s immediate historical context. Though the U.S. is not likely to be the target of large-scale military invasion, it nonetheless is the prime agent in exactly this activity. Even after the change of administrations, and even with a series of financial crises and scandals dominating recent news cycles, images of military invasion still form a staple of media reporting, with U.S. troops playing the role of the invader. Hence, it would seem that only by reversing the show’s literal “We Are of Peace, Always” 155 18 Another, albeit more complex example, would be the fictional Borg within the Star Trek universe, which according to Lynette Russell and Nathan Wolski, constituted “Star Trek’s first attempt at questioning its own narrative […], ‘a post-colonial mirror held up to reflect the nature of colonization and assimilation’ and in which the Federation’s colonialist mission was ‘reflected and intensified’” (Geraghty 2009: 147). distribution of narrative agency it is possible to achieve proper viewer identification. The imagery V mobilizes most strikingly applies to conditions which the U.S. has created elsewhere in its role as a military and, more significantly, cultural and ideological invader and, subsequently, as an occupying force laying claim to the invaded territory’s resources within a larger ideological framework that stridently denies any claim to empire. A number of examples should suffice to illustrate this point. For one, there is the Visitors’ technological superiority. Though much of it technology remains carefully concealed - from humanity in the show as much as from the audience of the show - the very fact that the Visitors are far advanced of the human civilization they are preparing to conquer is obvious. In fact, as human resistance to the invasion is forming, it needs to assemble itself in ways that evade the enemy’s technological superiority: guerilla warfare, insurgency, and, most notably, terrorist tactics. Though the imagery of desperate low-tech warfare against a superior imperialist power has consistently been coded in terms of the American Revolutionary War in the past (e.g. the Empire versus the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars, or the ‘shock and awe’ attack of the Cylons against humanity in Battlestar Galactica), the immediate historical context of V makes such associations difficult, if not impossible. 18 The remaining interpretive option is the one that would, by all measures, need to be repressed - that human resistance against the Visitors is, in fact, that of insurgencies against U.S. occupation in Iraq or Afghanistan. Another revealing example is the ‘Live Aboard Program’ introduced in episode 5. Designed as a ruse by which humans are to be corrupted and instrumentalized for propaganda purposes (and other, more sinister ones to be revealed later), the program extends an invitation to a broad array of humans to come aboard the alien mothership and stay there permanently. Ostensibly intended as a good-will gesture to further inter-species communication, even the immediate effects of the program, as illustrated by Erica’s son and his growing estrangement from his mother, are devastating to human cultural identity. It is not difficult to recognize in this program the allure that emigration to the U.S. holds for citizens of those nations brought to the brink of economic and cultural collapse by U.S. military intervention. Even the human characters on V acknowledge that the world is in bad shape and that the Visitors arrived just in time to rescue humanity from itself. Steffen Hantke 156 19 It is interesting to note that the original series still conceptualizes such sleeper cells as a fifth column, a term harking back to Cold War paranoia geared ultimately toward a military invasion aided by such internal forces of destabilization. The war on terror has replaced the older term with that of the sleeper cell, drawing on an updated biological discourse of infection and immunity. Yet another, more specific example are the military-style home invasions featured prominently on V. While the image of a military or paramilitary force conducting a carefully planned and meticulously executed home invasion is a clichéd element in the contemporary action thriller - black-clad SWAT team members in infrared goggles yelling, “Clear! Clear! ” as flashlights flicker through darkened rooms - the execution of such raids against nonmilitary conspiratorial groups takes on an eerie double meaning in the context of an invasion narrative like V. In the context of domestic policy, it still registers as an image of state power mobilized against internal threats, e.g. against the terrorist sleeper cell planning attacks from within the ‘homeland.’ Nonetheless, the same motif has recently been recoded in a manner that reaches back to the 1992 FBI siege of Randy Weaver’s Idaho compound at Ruby Ridge or the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, both of which, in the wake of the Tea Party and ‘Birther’ movements, as well as public debate about ‘socialist’ government takeovers of private enterprise in the wake of the 2010 Health Care Reform Bill, figure as targets of right-wing anxiety. Simultaneously, in the context of foreign policy, this same imagery also aligns itself with American troops raiding private homes in Iraq and Afghanistan - raids which have sparked controversy for their legitimacy as well as for the blowback they create among the civilian population. One final example would be the significance of sleeper cells: in order to infuse the original series with a higher degree of paranoia, in keeping with the Bush years’ predominant thematic, the arrival of the Visitors’ ships, as the visible manifestation of invasion fears, is preceded by the covert implanting of sleeper cells within state institutions and the general population; the plotline in the first few episodes revolving around FBI agent Erica Evans investigating a terrorist plot allows V to explore this territory planted firmly within the popular imagination by shows like the eponymous Sleeper Cell or 24. 19 While the current discourse on terrorism conceptualizes the sleeper cell as an indigenous phenomenon, a broader view of the same phenomenon would include the covert preparation of an all-out military invasion as a strategy pursued by the extensive and complicated network of organizations within the U.S. security apparatus. From the CIA to the NSA, American sleeper cells have aided in the preparations for recent military invasions, not to mention a long-standing heritage of those same organizations of “We Are of Peace, Always” 157 destabilizing democratically elected governments elsewhere. An emphasis on the insidious nature of such covert operations serves as a disavowal of the same strategies from the American playbook. Even the absence of what qualifies as a full military invasion in V is ultimately more reminiscent of American agency than that of its enemies. While America’s two ongoing wars have undoubtedly acclimatized the public imagination to images of open military hostility, the larger global strategy into which these activities are embedded - at great cost to American credibility and strain to general logic, one might add - is that of ‘bringing peace and stability to the region,’ advancing the cause of democracy and freedom, and engaging in mutually beneficial exchanges of resources and technologies with those nations America considers vital to its national interests. As if to confirm this agenda of ‘winning hearts and minds,’ the arrival of the Visitors’ giant space ships above all major cities - like U.S. aircraft carriers appearing on the coast of Somalia or Haiti - does not signal the commencement of a military invasion. Though undeniably menacing by their sheer size and, presumably, superior firepower, the Visitors’ ships, instead of opening fire on the White House (as in Independence Days, a film relegated by V to the status of a less subtle antecedent), are capable of converting their bottoms into giant television screens broadcasting messages of free trade, declarations of good intentions, and visual signals of goodness through beauty. Again, it is Morena Baccarin’s face beaming down benevolently onto scared and huddled masses of New Yorkers - a face that prompts one journalist to pose the question, “Is there such a thing as an ugly Visitor? ” In accord with the paranoid logic of the genre the show operates in, these declared intentions are eventually revealed as a front for a more mercenary agenda of exploitation and occupation, a pack of lies intended to safeguard the smooth installment of a power structure aiding the occupying force in successfully exploiting those it dominates, infiltrating indigenous political and economic structures, recruiting indigenous power elites by promises of sharing profit margins with them, corroding social structures like family, neighborhood communities, and friendships, and thus corrupting the native population. Imagine yourself, however, a patriotic Iraqi or Afghani watching a show like V, or one of the millions of protesters around the globe who took to the streets before, respectively, the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq: given your lived experience of the last ten years, who would you immediately peg as the equivalent of the alien Visitors? 3. Interpretive options: alien invaders at home and abroad Those inclined to speculate about the reason for ABC’s repeated changes of the air date for its newly updated version of V might suspect that the Steffen Hantke 158 20 For a detailed account of the production and release schedule and its numerous delays, see, for example, Anders 2009. network feared it had a problematic property on its hands. 20 Commissioned and developed in the political and cultural slipstream of the Bush administration’s final two years in office, V was clearly paranoid television of the type that had thrived during the period that was about to end. There would have been reason to suspect that change would not arrive as promptly as the Obama presidential campaign seemed to promise. In fact, writing in 2009 about U.S. cinema during the Bush administration - “upon the conclusion of that administration” - Stephen Prince suggests that “the historical period that engulfs all of us,” which is defined by paranoia as one of its characteristic features, “has not ended, and […] shows no signs of ending any time soon” (2009: 15). Prince cites former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, who “has written that henceforth American presidential administrations will be ‘Terror Presidencies’, that is, they will be motivated by fear and will be occupied ceaselessly with efforts to prevent the next [terrorist] attack” (Prince 2009: 306). If so, V would likely be greeted by an audience primed for more paranoia. However, there was the possibility that, by the time the series made it onto the 2009 fall schedule, the political climate might have changed. Aside from the banking crisis edging out war, terrorism, torture, forcible rendition, black sites, and all other paranoia-inducing manifestations of the ‘war on terror,’ the Obama administration’s declared commitment to replace secrecy, subterfuge, and unilateral policy-making with accountability, transparency, and bipartisanship would have had a full year to drain the reservoir of collective paranoid anxiety. With a new president in the White House sounding a more conciliatory note in the national debate - especially on the policing of the American empire after the end of the American century - the success of paranoid entertainment like V suddenly seemed less assured. Whereas shows, from ABC’s own Lost to Fox’s 24, had had been mining public sentiment for years to the approval of prime ratings and critical recognition as symptomatic of the American condition, the new tone of American foreign politics seemed to call into question the continuation of this zeitgeist. The SciFi’s Channel’s final episode, after four seasons, of Battlestar Galactica’s in March 2009, Fox’s cancellation, after eight seasons, of 24 in May of 2010, and Lost entering its fifth and final season at the same time might have been taken as symptoms that Bush-style paranoia was about to run its course. Was this the reason, one wonders, why ABC seemed wary about finding the right moment for releasing the show? If that was the case, then the network can lean back and relax: audience responses to V have, by and large, been positive. By all appearances, the network has a success on its hands. Given the historically specific frame of “We Are of Peace, Always” 159 21 For the full explanation of the term, see Charles Krauthammer’s column, “Bush Derangement Syndrome” (2003). 22 One example of this would be Wheeler Winston Dixon. We “are living in the 1950s right now,” Dixon argues in his book Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood (2005): repressed, obsessed with ‘terror alerts’, eagerly seeking phantom security in everincreasing hypersurveillance, reverting to the patriarchal order for a measure of safety and reassurance, retreating to our digital home entertainment centers to experience the world as filtered through a variety of ‘news’ filters rather than experiencing the joys and sorrows of the human community firsthand. (2005: 184) the show’s topical references, V provides a textbook example of how easily paranoia has traveled from left-wing opposition to the Bush administration to right-wing opposition to its current successor. Case in point, as David Aaronovitch points out in his book on conspiracy theories, Voodoo Theories (2010), is that, in “some polls, up to 58 per cent of Republicans were skeptical about Obama’s right to be president,” while a 2006 Scripps Survey Research Poll indicated that “54 per cent of Democrats had agreed with the proposition that people in the federal government had either assisted the 9/ 11 attacks or taken no action to stop them because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East” (2010: 330). Paranoia on the right about the Obama administrations would, thus, appear as merely the equivalent of what Charles Krauthammer (2003), famously yet somewhat tongue-in-cheek, called Bush Derangement Syndrome. 21 If critics saw the Bush years as an uncanny return of the Cold War, this larger paradigm of cultural production and consumption has - all assurances by the Obama administration to the contrary aside - continued unabated. 22 Aaronovich also provides a valuable insight into what drives conspiracy theories, an insight that dovetails with V’s definition of otherness in terms of race, gender and, most prominently, of social class. In reference to Timothy Melley’s (2010) concept of agency panic - i.e. the “intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy or self-control” or “conviction that one’s actions are being controlled by someone else, that one has been ‘constructed’ by powerful external agents” (Melley 2010: 12) - Aaronovich points to the nexus between one’s degree of powerlessness, perceived or real, and one’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories (328-31). “There is a more than plausible argument to be made,” he suggests in a section entitled “History for Losers,” “that, very often, conspiracy theories take root among the casualties of political, social, or economic change” (340). It is in this specific context that V’s right-wing paranoia feeds so efficiently off class-based anxieties, expressed through a resentment directed at what it frames as a social class whose elitism is defined by its endorsement of a post-feminist and postracial agenda. The fact that the most outraged, most hysterical, and most paranoid protesters against the evils of the Obama administration are recruited from exactly that same upper-middle class which provides the profile Steffen Hantke 160 for their projected enemy - the profile which V translates so efficiently into the cultural vocabulary of the alien invasion narrative - is an indication that a mechanism of displacement and disavowal is at work here. As cleverly as V exploits the binaries of self and other, this exploitation is merely a matter of genre conventions, a surface phenomenon. Underneath runs a stronger current of bourgeois class anxiety, which, in a society that prides itself on being essentially ‘classless,’ requires an other, even if its author is demonstrably the self, onto which it can project itself. Given the fact that U.S. television programs, like Hollywood films, are designed to circulate smoothly, and thus profitably, throughout foreign markets, the question I raised earlier - how an Iraqi or Afghani viewer would read and respond to V - is far from facetious. Though network executives are not sworn in on the administration’s official foreign policy agenda, it is likely to assume that their products are not designed to erode attitudes toward the U.S. which would sustain interest in imported American television series abroad. This would hold true even for programs satirizing American manners and mores - after all, there is satire, and then there is satire! Consequently, V’s peculiar demand for the viewer’s cross-cultural identification - i.e. to recognize yourself in the characters whose lived experience is diametrically opposed to your own, and ignore the ones whose lived experience aligns itself precisely with yours - still serves a political agenda that leaves basic ‘truths’ about the U.S. untouched. In the broadest sense, this means that, given the commercial imperatives of network television as well as the collaborative nature of scripting a dramatic program over a projected narrative arch of several seasons, V does not represent a single, coherent ideological perspective. Instead of advocating a ‘position,’ the show plays on narrative options which, in turn, offer viewers a variety of subject positions. Though V’s authors make specific concessions to assumptions about its domestic audience, which were undoubtedly supported by meticulous demographic research, the show, like much of contemporary fictional narratives in popular culture, tries to be everything to everybody. What appears to be its consistent ideology project is, thus, either the central axis around which various subject positions are organized formally, or the central ideology that asserts the primacy of multiplicity itself as a principle for the narrative organization of experience. For a domestic audience, viewer interpellation is channeled into recognizing oneself in the American characters who represent humanity in jeopardy. Conventionally, this is accomplished in the form of a historical displacement of fictional events into a canonical nationalist iconography: i.e. resistance against the alien invaders is projected upon, for example, the American Revolutionary War. Cold War culture - from Byron Haskins’ War of the Worlds to the original V miniseries to Star Wars or Red Dawn - provides the blueprint for this strategy. The dominance of this interpretive option sup- “We Are of Peace, Always” 161 23 A possible though far more subversive reading would resist cross-cultural identification and thus forego the disavowal of the U.S. as an imperialist invader of sovereign nations. 24 I am indebted, for the term engagement diplomacy, to Patrick Joseph Linehan, Minister- Counselor for Public Affairs with the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. 25 The point of reference for Booker is, specifically, Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day. presses alternative readings, but it does not erase them altogether. Fueled by right-wing paranoia, it is one of those secondary options which V capitalizes upon when it frames the central conflict as that between individualistic, patriotic, ‘true’ Americans, taking up arms to ‘take back their country,’ and a sinister socialist government headed by a tyrant with no legitimate claim to his position, polite and soft-spoken yet intent on destroying ‘their’ America. 23 Having explored the show’s ideological potential for its domestic audience, I would like to close my discussion by taking a look at the interpellative opportunities V offers to an audience abroad. Of course, there is the possibility that this audience might read V exactly the way a domestic audience would: as a commentary on patriotic resistance against governmental ‘tyranny’ - a favorite catchphrase of current right-wing extremism. However, given the improvement of international relations between the U.S. and its allies and enemies alike - thanks in part to Obama’s shift away from Bush’s aggressive, unilateral foreign policy toward ‘engagement diplomacy’ - foreign viewers are, I believe, not very likely to read V this way. 24 In fact, given the controversial manner in which the Bush administration took office in 2000 and the consistent domestic criticism of the Bush’s administration’s confrontational policy style, it is more likely that viewers abroad are going to perceive the show’s governmental paranoia as a delayed comment on the Bush rather than the Obama administration. Though the puzzlement abroad about the Obama administration’s domestic struggles would make this reading more likely, it would still have to contend with the fact that the alien invaders in V do not pursue their nefarious goals with Bush’s and Cheney’s blunt aggressiveness but with a demeanor, in a tone and style, more reminiscent of Obama’s ‘engagement diplomacy.’ Lacking the same degree of familiarity as its domestic equivalent with the patriotic iconography that casts the U.S., by default, as a scruffy bunch of idealistic freedom fighters going up against an ‘evil empire,’ an audience abroad would most likely be more predisposed toward the ‘subversive interpretation’ that would cast a show like V “as anti-American and pro-Third World” (Booker 2006: 244-45). 25 Only citizens of a global superpower have the privilege of imagining themselves as the underdog; everyone else’s wellbeing depends on a more pragmatic take on geopolitical reality. Of course, this is not to say that V is “in any way intended as an allegory of anticolonial resistance to American or other Western domination, even if it can be read that way” (Booker 2006: 245); the fact that the text includes this interpretive Steffen Hantke 162 option is, as I suggested earlier, a side effect of the need on the part of its domestic audience for mechanisms of displacement and disavowal. However, if these mechanisms happen to produce such ‘subversive interpretations’ in the context of a different audience, it might help to explain why American cultural exports are popular even in countries that have reasons not to be favorably predisposed toward American influence. In the final instance, viewer identification in V, as in any other piece of popular culture that claims to ‘represent America,’ is set up in a way that does not depend on the final choice the audience makes between heroes and villains - a final choice that is determined from the outset by the “simple good vs. evil oppositions such as those around which [alien invasion narratives are] structured” (Booker 245) - but on the process the audience undergoes as it enacts the plot’s narrative choices to arrive, eventually, on the side of heroes. Like this hermeneutical process itself, America’s identity in the arena of global politics - under Bush as much as under Obama - is the discursive product of assertiveness exonerated by hand-wringing, exploitation exonerated by guilt, imperialism exonerated by post-colonial critique. Within the genealogy of alien invasion on film and in television, V has gone, perhaps, to the greatest lengths to make this process compelling for an audience which, by way of media and genre expertise, knows that its final outcome - the exoneration of the U.S. and the celebration of its political ideals - is a foregone conclusion. References Aaronovitch, David (2010). Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. New York: Riverhead/ Penguin. Anders, Charlie Jane (2009). “V Is Not Doomed, and You Should Still Watch” io9.com. November 3, 2009. http: / / io9.com/ 5396219/ v-is-not-doomed-and-you-should-stillwatch (October 2010). Booker, Keith M. (2006). Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Films and American Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger. Dixon, Wheeler Winston (2005). Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Geraghty, Lincoln (2009). “Television since 1980.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Eds. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sheryl Vint. London & New York: Routledge. 144-153. Greenwald, Glenn (2009). “Obama and Transparency: judge for yourself.” Salon.com. 17 June 2009. http: / / www.salon.com/ news/ opinion/ glenn_greenwald/ 2009/ 06/ 17/ transparency (October 2010). Hantke, Steffen (2010). “Bush’s America and the Return of Cold War Science Fiction: Alien Invasion in Invasion, Threshold, and Surface.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 38/ 3. 143-151. “We Are of Peace, Always” 163 Itzkoff, Dave (2010). “Even Before Filming, Kennedy Series Stirs Anger.” New York Times, February 16, 2010. http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2010/ 02/ 17/ arts/ television/ 17kennedy.html (October 2010). Krauthammer, Charles (2003). “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” Townhall.com. December 5, 2003. http: / / townhall.com/ columnists/ CharlesKrauthammer/ 2003/ 12/ 05/ bush_ derangement_syndrome (October 2010). Linehan, Patrick Joseph (2010). “The First Year of the Obama Administration.” Public Presentation. Sogang University, Seoul. May 11. Melley, Timothy (2000). Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Prince, Stephen (2009). Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press. Shaw, Tony (2007). Hollywood’s Cold War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Spillius, Alex (2009). “Hillary Clinton vows to end paranoia of George Bush era.” Telegraph.co.uk February 22, 2009. http: / / www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/ worldnews/ northamerica/ usa/ barackobama/ 4316996/ Hillary-Clinton-vows-to-end-paranoia-of- George-Bush-era.html (October 2010). Steffen Hantke English Department Sogang University