Gale Power Search - Document
9/5/14, 5:18 PM
Title:
The racial politics of disaster and dystopia in I am legend
Author(s):
Sean Brayton
Source:
Velvet Light Trap. .67 (Spring 2011): p66. From General OneFile.
Document Type:
Critical essay
Copyright:
COPYRIGHT 2011 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/journals/jvlt.html
Full Text:
On 12 September 2009 more than sixty thousand supporters of the 9/12 Project and TEA Baggers (Taxed Enough Already)
marched on Washington. Although participants in the Taxpayers March decried Barack Obama's health-care reform, "big
government" spending, and corporate bailouts, their placards sent a more alarming message. Bobbing among the crowd of
mostly white faces were separate images of Obama with a Hitler moustache and "joker" makeup (made famous by the late
Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight) as well as allusions to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and the implied "horrors" of
socialism. These symbols evoke a lexicon of fear that frames the current cultural politics of race and countenance of the
nation as an omen of "immanent totalitarianism" (Goldberg 1). Swirling suspicions of Obama's U.S. citizenship, religious
affiliation, and middle name (Hussein), for example, work to preemptively discredit his leadership in hopes of exposing the
"Obama nation" as an "Obamanation." Following the September rally, Republican congressman Trent Franks called Obama
"an enemy of humanity," while a writer for Newsmax.com suggested a military coup was needed to deal with "the Obama
problem." While the rallies and rhetoric are inflamed by an unresolved economic morass, they have assumed an increasingly
racialized tone in their failure to build multicultural alliances and jaundiced position on immigration reform. The eruption of
such hostility and discontent so shortly after the election of a black president marks an open renewal of white male backlash,
"Dixiecrat," racism and anti-multiculturalism, which can be read as a collective response to a perceived political and
economic nightmare.
Despite the apparent spike in popularity of right-wing media pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, figureheads of a
revamped white identity politics, there is little novelty in the relationship between multiculturalism and dystopian visions.
Before the "Obama era," Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis forecasted the impending doom of the American
Southwest as a result of "Hispanicization." Other commentators added similar predictions of "national breakdown" and a
"new world disorder" caused by mounting immigration and the inherent "perils" of multiculturalism (Smith, Lyons, and
Moore 6). It is perhaps not surprising that this homology of "difference" and dystopia underwrites a range of white identity
movements, reactionary politics, and cultural obituaries for "tolerance" and "diversity" in the new millennium, most abruptly
after 11 September 2001. For many on the far Right, multiculturalism is nothing short of a dystopia, one in which white
public spaces and political offices are "taken over" by people of color. Similar anxieties underpin Glenn Beck's "doomsday"
predictions (made shortly after Obama's inauguration) of a nation paralyzed by a distended liberal (multicultural)
government, irascible labor unions, and Mexican immigrants--a triumvirate of "folk devils" that have historically haunted
the conservative American imaginary.
Doomsdays and disasters are not uncommon themes in popular culture, especially within the narrative traditions of science
fiction (SF), horror, and fantasy (Newman 4). In recent years there has been a spate of Hollywood films that visualize
"multicultural" landscapes in a calamitous near future. Films like Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), The Happening (2008),
Blindness (2008), and Quarantine (2008) pursue a postlapsarian curiosity to various ends through a multiracial group of
characters. The intersection of science-fictional catastrophe, racial "difference," and the state is even more pronounced in
Idiocracy (2006), Children of Men (2006), 2012 (2009), and, most important for our purposes here, I Am Legend (2007).
While technically described as a biopolitical disaster film (rather than a classical dystopia), I Am Legend uses a dystopian
background to sketch a crumbling social order and implicate the state in devastation. What distinguishes this SF film from
conservative "doomsdays," however, is the extent to which hope is realized without restoring white normativity; instead, the
racialized body holds the key to "national survival" (Kakoudaki 127). Both versions of dystopia anticipate the demise of a
multicultural society, but they seem to support opposing racial projects in a "climate of fear." The purpose of this essay, then,
is to trace some of the competing dystopian currents in popular and political culture of the post--civil rights era, specifically
within SF films that imagine the end of the world with and without multiculturalism. As I suggest, there is a curious
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort…GALE%7CA250677236&&docId=GALE|A250677236&docType=GALE&role=ITOF
Page 1 of 12
Gale Power Search - Document
9/5/14, 5:18 PM
connection between racial conflict and the dystopian imaginary, one that is often understated in cultural studies of race and
representation.
Dystopia and Dissent
Although the classic dystopia drew from satire, realism, and anti-utopian writing, it emerged as a literary subgenre through
"the terrors of the twentieth century" (Moylan xi). As Tom Moylan explains, "a hundred years of exploitation, repressions,
state violence, war, genocide, disease, famine, ecocide, depression [and] debt" provided ample fodder for the social
nightmares of E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909), Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1921), Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927),
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and later George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Ray Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 451 (1951), Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), and Harrison Bergeron (1961) (xi). Despite obvious narrative
and historical differences, such visions offered grim warnings of political, economic, and environmental exploits run amok in
a distant but not entirely unrecognizable future. The classic dystopia extrapolated the particular social climate in which the
author worked into a "utopian" future where the hubris of the present became magnified to the point of calamity. Its purpose
was to "map, warn and hope" (Moylan 196).
Dystopian narratives, however, follow uneven historical paths across popular culture, a phenomenon that resists sweeping
observations of the subgenre. While there is often a dialogue between dystopian literature and film, for instance, the mode of
communication engenders different audiences, aesthetics, and experiences. Such incongruity was particularly evident during
the 1960s and 1970s, a period marked by a return to utopian writing as a supplement of "new social movements" and civil
rights struggle. While some literary critics trace a decline in dystopian narrative at this time, a visit to the Cineplex would
suggest otherwise. Indeed, some of the most celebrated dystopias in American popular culture emerged during an alleged
downturn in dystopian literature. In the 1960s cinemagoers were introduced to The Trial (1962), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), and
Planet of the Apes (1968). In the 1970s a breakout of dystopian films included THX 1138 (1971), The Omega Man (1971),
Silent Running (1972), Soylent Green (1973), Sleeper (1973), A Boy and His Dog (1975), Death Race 2000 (1975), The
Stepford Wives (1975), Rollerball (1975), and Logan's Run (1976). Some of these dystopias flirted with global disaster and
called "from the world of satire and of the grotesque" to provide a caustic commentary on the perceived perils of nuclear
holocaust, despotic governments, suburban conformity, and a patriarchal gender order (Nemoianu 358).
Considering the breadth of the subgenre, it is perhaps not surprising that dystopian narratives bend in many political
directions. This is especially so in Hollywood. For Douglas Kellner, Flo Leibowitz, and Michael Ryan, films like Alien
(1979), Outland (1981), and Blade Runner (1982) provided "liberal dystopias" that critiqued "increased pollution, nuclear
war and economic exploitation" (1). Other films like THX 1138, Rollerball, The Ultimate Warrior (1975), Logan's Run, and
Escape from New York (1981) presented "conservative dystopias" that feared the "breakdown of law and order, the
disintegration of the family and the curtailment of individual freedom by centralized governments" (1). Such a distinction
can be used to organize and understand more recent Hollywood dystopias. At the liberal end, films like Total Recall (1990),
Pleasantville (1998), The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003), I, Robot (2004), and l/for Vendetta (2005), for instance, "develop a
significant counter-narrative against their multiple dystopian realities," one that includes multicultural or multispecies
resolutions (Moylan 194). Social change, if not revolution, is cultivated in these films as a response to corporate predation,
state violence, and demagoguery. At the conservative end, however, films like Gattaca (1997), The Truman Show (1998),
Dark City (1998), and Minority Report (2002), while visually impressive, provide solipsistic accounts of emancipation; they
flesh out the liberation of the protagonist at the expense of social struggle or class upheaval. In each of these films, however,
the more or less neoliberal state (and its military and cultural appendages) produces disciplined subjects that comply with
their own social and economic domination, often to catastrophic ends. Incapable of reform, the state must be either
dismantled or deserted by the exceptional class or individual.
White Dystopias of the Post-Civil Rights Era
It is important to note that dystopian narratives of the state are neither exclusive to SF nor naturally opposed to a "white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy" (bell hooks's famous epithet). Perhaps the most vitriolic examples are provided by William
Luther Pierce's unequivocally racist diatribes The Turner Diaries (1978) and the lesser-known Hunter (1989), both of which
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort…GALE%7CA250677236&&docId=GALE|A250677236&docType=GALE&role=ITOF
Page 2 of 12
Gale Power Search - Document
9/5/14, 5:18 PM
were popular readings for white militiamen Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Set in the future of 1991, The Turner
Diaries depicts an American multicultural society inundated with racial and ethnic minorities, who have penetrated all levels
of authority in the media, the State Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The novel describes a series of
racial assassinations and ends with a suicide bombing of the Pentagon. Since the late 1980s the Patriot movement, Christian
fundamentalists, and white nationalists have turned increasingly to a dystopian vocabulary to articulate various libertarian
anxieties like increased taxation and the government regulation of all facets of daily life and private property (especially
firearms). By the 1990s white extremists were convinced of a liberal orthodoxy in which government-sponsored
concentration camps and "re-education" programs sought to stamp out the heterodoxy of political dissent (Keller 2). From
armed standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, to the bombing of the Edward R. Murrow Building in Oklahoma
City by McVeigh, the ideologies espoused by many white separatist groups at this time included horrific endings, some of
which were borrowed directly from Pierce's dystopian imagination.
These "doomsday" scenarios are not limited to the murmur of Aryan factions; instead, they are pitched by mainstream
pundits, philosophers, politicians, and environmentalists, albeit to markedly different (and hitherto nonviolent) ends. For the
ecologist and FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) board member Garrett Hardin, "Promoting
multiculturalism within the bounds of a single country means encouraging the grossest sort of promiscuity [whereby] the
unity and psychic strength of a nation" are severely compromised (129). Titles like Global Meltdown: Immigration,
Multiculturalism and National Breakdown in the New World Disorder (1998), The Ends of the Earth (1997), The Great
Reckoning (1992), and The Coming Anarchy (1994) capture a dystopian spirit that not only forecasts disaster but also
legitimates a range of backlash politics and xenophobia in the new millennium. Both camps hold mutually reinforcing views
on immigration and liberal multiculturalism as two prominent "precursors" of Western catastrophe, a sentiment that has
gained increasing attention. As Henry Giroux observes, "There is a growing discourse of racist invective directed toward
Mexican immigrants, Arabs, Muslims, and others who threaten the 'civilizational' distinctiveness of American culture, take
away American jobs, or allegedly support acts of terrorism directed against the United States" (Stormy 103). Despite
substantive political differences, there is a narrative convergence of white nationalism in Huntington's predictions of
"Hispanicization," for instance, and Lou Dobbs's fear of an Aztlan conspiracy to "reconquer" the American Southwest,
Beck's phobia of Mexican "illegals," and growing anti-immigrant sentiment within the Patriot movement.
Although white identity groups supposedly receded from public view during the presidency of George W. Bush, they have
reemerged in alarming numbers in response to the apparent effects of liberal multiculturalism (Keller 1). As David Holthouse
suggests, "[h]igh levels of non-white immigration and a decline in the percentage of whites overall in America, has helped to
racialize the Patriot movement, which in the past was not primarily motivated by race hate" (2). Concerns over the "reverse
discrimination" of affirmative action and multiculturalism during the 1990s have been compounded by the election of a black
president, who is increasingly positioned as "un American" by groups like the Oath Keepers, the Birthers, and the American
Grand Jury, a citizen's court that aims to indict Obama for "illegally occupying the office of the president" (Holthouse 2).
Such circles lament the grand "theft" of their once-grand country and are some of the most outspoken (and outlandish)
opponents of Obama's curiously centrist proposals. Railing against Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme
Court justice, MSNBC commentator Pat Buchanan recently remarked that because of affirmative action policies white
Americans who "basically built this country" are experiencing "exactly what was done to black folks" (Hardball). Clearly
dystopian narratives can be identified across popular and political culture in myriad ways, some of which guide our
understanding of the (post)multicultural milieu. The "ominous" relationship between racial difference, disorder, and the state
foreseen by white identity groups in recent years is reconfigured, for example, in I Am Legend.
I Am Legend
Released in December 2007, I Am Legend (hereafter Legend) is the latest incarnation of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel of
the same title, which inspired motion pictures like The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man, and the B-movie I Am
Omega (2007). Set in New York City in the years 2009 and 2012, the alleged date of the apocalypse in Mayan calendars,
Legend presents a disaster tale with notable dystopian rhythm. After a "cure" for cancer mutates into a deadly virus, major
city centers undergo a mandatory evacuation and quarantine organized by the military branches of respective governments.
Miraculously immune to the Krippin Virus (KV), which kills 90 percent of the world's population and turns another 9 percent
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort…GALE%7CA250677236&&docId=GALE|A250677236&docType=GALE&role=ITOF
Page 3 of 12
Gale Power Search - Document
9/5/14, 5:18 PM
into vampiric monsters, army colonel and virologist Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith) remains in the infection zone, destined
to find a cure. What he finds at "ground zero," however, is an abandoned New York City inhabited by wildlife and paleskinned mutants ("dark seekers") that prowl and prey after dark. Most of the film involves Neville testing antidotes and
battling solitude by day but eventually snaring white monsters by dusk. Basically, the film offers a postapocalyptic setting
with dystopian flashbacks of a disorganized state and the hubris of modern medicine, personified by one of the few speaking
white characters in the film, Dr. Alice Krippin (played in passing by Emma Thompson).
As some critics point out, the mise-en-scene of Legend contains conservative brushstrokes (see Mitchell; Kunkel; Boyle).
From extended shots of Neville whipping through Manhattan in a 2007 Ford Mustang and blatant adverts for Staples and
XM Radio to analogies of "lightness" and Neville as Christ, the film's enthusiasm for consumer culture and Christian
symbolism is apparent. For Kirk Boyle, the film provides a "neoconservative combination of religious and market
fundamentalism with an aggressive foreign policy" (1). Despite the film's postapocalyptic setting, Boyle finds a "consumerist
utopia" in which Neville is free to collect the accoutrements of modern art, automobiles, and entertainment without any
concern for labor and material production (4). Of course, all of this is threatened by the film's vampiric villains, which are
described as either an impediment to consumption or potential jihadists (Boyle 9).The critique of Legend as neoconservative
fantasy is erudite and imaginative, but it understates the racial politics of a film premised on disaster, dystopia, and
"difference." While the film certainly contains some messianic accents, the idea of a black "Christ" (like a black president) is
perhaps incongruous with the American brand of Christian fundamentalism that Boyle finds in Legend. The neoconservative
fantasy, in other words, is more convincing when we ignore the protagonist's racial identity, a reading that is complicated by
the social backdrop of "one of the most astonishing media spectacles in US history": the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
(Kellner 223).
While Legend is mostly concerned with a deadly plague, it provides a glimpse of a postmulticultural society and perhaps a
more striking parable of racial conflict than its predecessors. In the novel and the big-screen spin-offs, the protagonists were
white, played most notably by Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth and Charlton Heston in The Omega Man. Although
Heston's Neville partook in an interracial love affair and defended multiracial hippies from evil albinos, The Omega Man
glamorized a renegade white masculinity over any obvious antiracist moralizing. In Francis Lawrence's 2007 version,
however, Robert Neville is black, a shift that more than merely reflects "multicultural" casting trends in Hollywood. It also
provides a nuanced racial angle to the Matheson franchise, so much so that Legend was listed as one of the "twenty-five most
important films on race" by Time critic Richard Corliss. In many ways, the "whiteness" of the mutants becomes accentuated
against the "black" cultural signifiers that frame the new Neville, played by an actor who has built a career on "biracial
buddy" films. While the casting of Will Smith is highly strategic, given his box-office appeal and "mild" blackness, it offers
an interesting narrative twist that deserves closer attention. Legend's more complicated commentary on race can be unraveled
in relation to three overlapping themes: (1) "the Will Smith character," (2) the alien "other" in SE and (3) a racial politics of
disaster informed most notably by the flooding of New Orleans in 2005.
In U.S. popular culture and particularly SF film, Will Smith epitomizes the stylish "Black Star du Jour" (Bogle 396). He often
plays the black buddy of white America, rescuing the planet from alien invaders and returning it to the hands of white
leaders, as in Independence Day (1996) and Men in Black (1997). Smith's relation to whiteness was especially revealing in
The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), in which he played the magical caddy of a troubled white golfer, and in Hitch (2005),
in which he taught white men how to court women. Though some of Smith's blockbusters may seem more politically
charged, they are infused with a white liberal sensibility. Ali (2001) mostly domesticated an antiracist icon, and The Pursuit
of Happyness (2006), despite its focus on poverty, celebrated the goodwill of white businessmen. The actor recently reprised
the "magical negro" in Seven Pounds (2008) and the black superhero in Hancock (2008), both of which offered reflexive but
ultimately reaffirming takes on Smith's racial heroism in white Hollywood. While some of this may apply to Legend, in
which Neville is a "heroically suffering model of moral excellence," Smith's accommodating brand of blackness is more
perplexing (Gabbard 145). Neville is alone through most of the film, and his priority to rescue humanity is not readily coded
as a "white" pursuit; instead, his central concern (other than finding a cure for a virus that makes its victims extremely white
and wild) is dodging white "monsters," an enterprise that places Legend in the wider context of SF allegories and white
supremacy.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort…GALE%7CA250677236&&docId=GALE|A250677236&docType=GALE&role=ITOF
Page 4 of 12
Gale Power Search - Document
9/5/14, 5:18 PM
Although SF and dystopian cinema is renowned for exploring the perils of technological and political tyranny, it is
historically less articulate of antiracist politics (see Nama; James). Conditions of racial violence, colonialism, and
discrimination are often elided by a "color-blind" setting where differences are "transcended" or disguised as slippery ethnic
metaphors in which the "human" race must battle aliens, apes, or robots. Whereas the alien "other" is often used to "smooth
over racial fissures" between human characters and "make racial strife obsolete" in SF, it is occasionally used as a narrative
pretext for racial difference (Nama 7). This metaphor was given a subversive spin during the emergence of Black
Nationalism in the United States. In 1965 Leroi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) wrote a short play titled A Black Mass, which
provides a Faustian origin myth of racial struggle: at the dawn of civilization, a black magician named Jacoub ignores the
advice of his fellow alchemists by creating a hideous white beast, a "soulless distortion of humanity" that disrupts the
arrangement of the cosmos (Jones 32).This monster has "no regard for human life," displaying a complete "absence of
feeling, of thought, of compassion" (35). It scurries about screaming, "White! White! Me! White!" and kills all but Jacoub
(31). As the play warns, white beasts haunt society and black culture in particular with the threat of extinction and must
therefore be eradicated.
Drawing historical parallels between its white menace and white America, A Black Mass provides a template for studying SF
and horror texts that allegorize racial conflict and white supremacy. In films like Night of the Living Dead (1968) and I,
Robot (also a Will Smith vehicle), for instance, whiteness becomes the monstrous symbol of evil against which a black
protagonist must struggle (see Guerrero; Brayton). In similar ways, Legend presents whiteness through a trope of inhumanity
and terror. Neville informs us that "typical human behavior is now entirely absent" among the white mutants, who are paleskinned byproducts of scientific hubris pitted against a black character called on to defend a nonwhite collective (redolent of
A Black Mass). Such racial symbolism is made explicit when Neville explains to Anna Montez (Alice Braga) his admiration
for Bob Marley: "He had ... kind of a 'virologist idea.' He believed you could cure racism and hate ... by injecting love into
people's lives" Though Neville's experiments may suggest otherwise, his remarks position the black scientist as an aspiring
humanitarian and the "dark seekers" as symbolic racists who are capable of reform (unlike the beasts of Jones's play).As
Neville pleads with his white nemesis, "You are sick. I can help you." Though Legend is pseudoscientific, it can be critically
appropriated as a fable of racial discord reminiscent of white dystopias but filtered through a "black paradigmatic reference
point" (Nama 73).
Legend is essentially a narrative of disaster and black survival. As such, the film participates in a larger discourse of
postmulticulturalism, one that intensified after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 but continues to develop and draw international
attention. Indeed, Legend can be effectively situated within a growing body of critical films like When the Levees Broke
(2006), Kamp Katrina (2007), and Trouble the Water (2008) as well as television programs like AC3 60[degrees], Holmes in
New Orleans (2007), and Treme (2010), where the flooding of New Orleans is referred to as "a federal luck-up of epic
proportions." In Legend there are traces of Katrina that support a political understanding of "natural" disasters by
emphasizing, for instance, the role of the state in widespread devastation, a looming presence of "white terror," and black
heroism, all of which are structured around the slippery racial symbolism of the "dark seekers." The first postlapsarian scene,
for instance, reveals scores of vehicles submerged in the inexplicable floodwater of an underpass, all set against an
abandoned New York cityscape. The sprawl of deserted automobiles and buses in midtown Manhattan signals a failed exodus
and an absence of life. During the evacuation sequence, we watch Neville's wife and daughter board a U.S. Coast Guard
helicopter bound for safety, while countless others are left in despair, including an infected white woman who begs to have
her uninfected child escorted to shelter. As some critics have suggested, the scrambling bodies and fleeing helicopters "call to
mind ... the so-called rescue operations in New Orleans," which were relatively fresh in the national imaginary at the time of
Legend's release (Mitchell 2).
While the scenes can be understood in a variety of ways, they invite historical comparisons to Katrina, where we witnessed
not only the "largest internal displacement in U.S. history" (over 1.3 million people) but also the acute effects of government
disregard for predominantly poor black communities (Loyd 123). FEMA'S deplorable response has been widely described as
one of the neoliberal benchmarks of the Bush administration, which included "cutting back on funds to shore up protection
against flooding and trimming government agencies to deal with crisis" (Kellner 224). In Legend the collapse is attributed to
the dominant social order in less specific but related ways. As Colonel Neville admits, "We created this. We did this," a
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort…GALE%7CA250677236&&docId=GALE|A250677236&docType=GALE&role=ITOF
Page 5 of 12
Gale Power Search - Document
9/5/14, 5:18 PM
remark that attributes disaster to military mishap, much like the Army Corps of Engineers' responsibility for inadequate
improvements to the levees surrounding New Orleans. During a flashback later in the film we witness the organized air
strikes of bridges and thoroughfares to and from Manhattan. On its own, the scene merely illustrates the bold pragmatism of
the state. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, however, it does important cultural work that legitimizes suspicions held by
many New Orleanians that the Louisiana government deliberately breached the city's surrounding levees in order to spare
affluent white neighborhoods (see When the Levees Broke). Despite differences in scale and location, both commentaries
attribute the botched evacuation attempts of metropolitan areas and the plight of residents to the misdirection of the state,
making Legend an insightful but imperfect reflection of the emerging cultural politics of disaster and "difference."
Eventually, the only remaining residents of a multiracial New York City are white "monsters" and a lone black hero. With
shots of Neville's daily life in the barren city, the film asks us to revisit the racist assumptions of disaster and disarray that
guided some of the media coverage of Katrina's aftermath; Legend is as much about black survival as it is disaster and
dystopia. While he appears to collect fine art, automobiles, and electronics, we only witness Neville's attempts to find food
and supplies. He even returns DVDs to a rental shop occupied by white mannequins. Though the events are oddly amusing
pokes at consumption, they sharply contrast with embellished if not erroneous reports of barbarism and lawlessness in New
Orleans, where "selfish" blacks sought only bigscreen televisions, high-definition stereos, and vulnerable tourists (see Zizek).
In Legend "black looting" is reframed as a tactic of survival rather than unbridled avarice. Adding to this counternarrative of
"blackness" are scenes in which Neville is barricaded in his apartment as the "dark seekers" scurry through the streets
looking for prey. Here whiteness becomes a threatening presence through alien alterity, which is reified by the racial identity
of the film's reluctant black hero. Legend symbolizes white violence in ways that resonate with widespread reports of "racist
militias that forced black residents to stay in their [Gulf Coast] homes" shortly after Katrina (Hildebrand, Crow, and Fithian
82). Despite the reported decrease of white supremacist groups in the Bush era, it is now well known that following the
deluge the bodies of at least seventeen black men were discovered with gunshot wounds purportedly inflicted by white
militiamen bent on sending "a message to local blacks that deadly force would be used to keep control of the situation" (84).
In both Katrina and Legend, then, whiteness can be largely understood as "a representation of terror" (hooks 172).
Whiteness is not only "othered" in Legend; it is also visibly displaced, but in complex and contradictory ways. For instance,
the film privileges the (anti)heroism of its black scientist over any white leader or celebrity volunteer who dominated national
newscasts of New Orleans. In Legend there is no FEMA, Common Ground, or Sean Penn to shepherd the disenfranchised to
safety; there is only Neville and the white mutants who seem to be engaged in a bitter rivalry. While the film may indeed
reflect residual and emergent conflicts in a post-multicultural America, Legend's symbolic racial politics are rather tricky,
more so than in SF classics like Planet of the Apes (1968), Brother from Another Planet (1984), and Enemy Mine (1985). At
first glance, the film's language of "infection" revises the relationship between difference and disparity as a product of chance
rather than discrimination and domination. The apparent "color blindness" of KV allows Legend to balance suffering in ways
that obfuscate not only the inequalities aggravated by the misdelivery of health care and disaster relief but also the
overwhelming images of "black death and displacement" after Katrina (Rodriguez 135). Once stricken with KV, however,
infected citizens are quarantined and basically discarded.
Although the "dark seekers" remain physically different throughout the film, it is their difference that accentuates (and
legitimizes) their dispossession. Abandoned at "ground zero," the white mutants personify not only mayhem but also
marginality. More than any other character in the film, the "dark seekers" are an abject entity of the state. Neville attributes
their worsening condition to the "growing scarcity of food," which is directly linked to the government's neglect of those
afflicted with KV. What Giroux calls the "biopolitics of disposability," then, is both revealed and concealed in Legend by the
narrative conventions of SE specifically, the use of an alien "other" ("Reading" 175). In contemporary SF aliens may no
longer threaten the sociopolitical fabric of American society as they did in the 1950s, since they now represent "alienated
images of our alienated selves" (Sobchack 293). As a result, the infected victims of Legend's plague lend themselves to
competing interpretations, one of which may ironically support white dystopias that decry the "degradation" of whites in
American culture, politics, and economy. In the context of disaster, however, the "dark seekers" may also be a proxy for a
predominantly black underclass stranded in New Orleans. In either case, the "dark seekers" remain "monstrous" and are
ontologically positioned beyond the state's (and perhaps the audience's) purview of moral responsibility. Neville initially
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort…GALE%7CA250677236&&docId=GALE|A250677236&docType=GALE&role=ITOF
Page 6 of 12
Gale Power Search - Document
9/5/14, 5:18 PM
denies them gendered (human) pronouns in conversations with Anna. As such, alterity is declared "subhuman" and
disposable by the state.
This rejection of the white villains strengthens the film's investment in blackness. As a biopolitical disaster picture, Legend
focuses intensely on racialized bodies, which become crucial sites of both anxiety and hope. Although we are told that 1
percent of the population is immune to the ("color-blind") virus, we only find "ethnicized" examples like Neville as well as
the migrants from Silo Paulo: Anna and Ethan. While this theme plays into racial fantasies of genetic powers, it also
celebrates multiracial posterity. The film inverts the racialization of "degeneracy" found in white racial dystopias and
mainstream discourses where public concerns over infectious diseases like Ebola, tuberculosis, and SARS target bodies of
color for discipline and possible deportation (Murdocca 24). In Legend infection is synonymous with whiteness, whereas
survival is associated with racial and ethnic difference. After saving Neville from a confrontation with the infected, the
immune Brazilian migrants provide a sort of ad hoc multicultural family for the virologist. In return, Neville provides food,
shelter, and safety before "suicide bombing" a laboratory full of "dark seekers." Moments before detonation, Neville hands
Anna a vial of his vaccinated blood, which promises a cure for KV. As a result of his efforts, Neville is eulogized by Anna as
a hero who "gave his life to defend it," a rather ambiguous statement. In short, "a military man saved humanity with the aid
of an ethnic woman's faith" (Boyle 16).
While the film's tale of black heroism offsets the overwhelming whiteness of SF cinema, it is also instrumental to the
rearticulation of the nation, a caveat that bridges catastrophe and American racial politics. Shortly after the levees broke in
New Orleans, for example, 244 stranded residents of midtown were rescued by John Keller, an African American ex-Marine
whose miraculous stow was recently purchased by Smith's production company. As one reporter remarked, "By the sheer
power of personal authority [Keller] faced down the crisis and kept [residents] ... safe from the flood water, from the
impending chaos and from the menacing visitors" (Mullener 1). A similar brand of heroism is found in Legend when Neville
defends Anna and Ethan from a mutant invasion. In both narratives, however, the lone black hero is an ambivalent figure. On
the one hand, he underscores the state's withdrawal from the disaster zone, a phenomenon Keller was quick to address: "Bush
and the government abandoned us all" (5). If the lone black hero illustrates the abandonment of the state, he also marks its
potential recovery. The valor of Neville and Keller is attributed in part to their military training, provided of course by the
state. Such stories recast the American military apparatus in terms of benevolence and pragmatism rather than violence and
imperialism. In Legend Colonel Neville tells Anna: "I'm not leaving. This is my site. I'm not going to let this happen." More
than once we are shown a cover of Time magazine, where Neville is dressed in formal military regalia and praised as a
"Savior, Scientist [and] Soldier?' Such scenes appear to finesse a relationship between "blackness" and the state that was
especially strained after Hurricane Katrina.
To be sure, Legend's chronicle of black survival provides an important response to the images of black destitution and
deviance that dominated international media coverage of Katrina, but it does very little to disrupt the unholy alliance between
the military-state apparatus and masculinity. The promotion of Neville's "manliness" relies on an active displacement of
women through most of the film, a maneuver that does obvious hegemonic work. Unlike the white beasts of A Black Mass,
for instance, the "dark seekers" are created by a virus developed and named after a white female scientist; Dr. Alice Krippin
is responsible for the near-total destruction of humanity and is cut from the film after the opening scene. Her displacement
performs the dual function of reinforcing the gendered boundaries of science (i.e., women should not "reprogram nature")
and enhancing the film's interest in black masculinity, urging some male viewers to imagine a multiracial bond with Smith's
maverick military scientist. Neville is athletic and conversant with firearms, science, and American-made automobiles. He
embodies a stalwart masculinity that is memorialized in the final moments of the film. So Legend is able to articulate an
improved relationship between "blackness" and the state, but only through a masculine vernacular that downplays if not
excludes women from the narrative of national recovery. Krippin's "heroism" inadvertently destroys the nation, and Anna's
courage is channeled toward the delivery of Neville's antidote to safer pastures, making her little more than a courier of hope
by the film's end. Of course, Legend is not the only Hollywood disaster film to imagine the end of the world through a
masculine optic of "diversity."
I am Legend and "Multicultural" Disasters in American Science Fiction Cinema
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort…GALE%7CA250677236&&docId=GALE|A250677236&docType=GALE&role=ITOF
Page 7 of 12
Gale Power Search - Document
9/5/14, 5:18 PM
Although Legend is the analytic centerpiece of this essay, its significance arises in relation to not only white dystopias and
the racial politics of catastrophe but also the liberal multicultural visions of recent Hollywood disasters. By displacing
whiteness through absence and "othering" but maintaining it as a source of anxiety, Legend troubles the Clinton era
"pluralism" of films like Independence Day (1996), Volcano (1997), Dante's Peak (1997), and Deep Impact (1998). For
Despina Kakoudaki, such films warn against globalization and racial tension but respond with "a fantasy of interracial ...
union with the lost ideal of human community," one that caters to the cursory multicultural desires of white liberalism (136).
In other words, Hollywood disaster films of the 1990s imagine racial reconciliation without asking characters or viewers to
account for white racial privilege (Rogin 46).After the beating of Rodney King and the riots that resulted from the initial
acquittal of his white assailants in 1992, the films offer a racial panacea that fails to de-center whiteness. Specifically,
Independence Day and Deep Impact present loyal black men in esteemed professional and government positions who work
alongside white people "while avoiding any occasion for a reciprocated gaze that would cause the dominant culture to look at
itself through another's eyes" (Willis 6). In these films black courage and masculine leadership are tailored to the needs of the
dominant (white) culture.
This visual economy of "multiculturalism" is epitomized by the increasing iterations of African American presidents on the
silver screen. While black U.S. presidents are sporadically found in Hollywood dramas like The Man (1972) and 24 (200109), they are typically confined to genres of "light entertainment?' From Rufusdonesfor President (1933), The Richard Pryor
Show (1977), and The Fifth Element (1997) to Head of State (2003), Chappelle's Show (2005), and Idiocracy, black
presidents and politicians have often provided white America with comic relief. In Luc Besson's The Fifth Element a meteor
(and Gary Oldman) threatens to destroy Earth, which is governed by a maladroit black president played by Tom "Tiny"
Lister, a performer known for his brawn, wandering eye, and stint as a professional wrestler. The campy film places the fate
of humanity in the hands of its white taxicab driver, momentarily inverting racial hierarchies of labor only to revive an
intrepid (but underpaid) white masculinity. A more dystopian farce appears in Mike Judge's Idiocracy, where a nation
obsessed with consumerism, celebrities, and anti-intellectualism is steered by a daft black president: Dwayne Elizondo
Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews), an ex-professional wrestler/adult film star.
In Hollywood "blackness" in the Oval Office represents not only derision but also imminent danger, much like the
predictions of white reactionaries. This is readily apparent in recent SF films, where the "color coding" of the state coincides
with social and ecological upheaval to reveal a curious commentary on the prospects and pitfalls of multiculturalism in the
future. In Deep Impact and 2012, for instance, black political leaders appear stoic and courageous in the face of impending
doom. Such blockbusters enlist black presidents and "men of science" as guardians of a multicultural America that must
brace for the epic arrival of meteors, earthquakes, and tsunamis--lavish digital props used to flatten inequalities among the
characters and enable multiracial amity. Although such films appear to inadvertently affirm white "doomsday" predictions of
a black presidency, they provide a more liberal sense of inclusion. They seem to suggest that nothing less than interracial
friendships are needed to withstand cataclysmic events on the horizon. Here "African American characters in positions of
authority can ... be celebrated as reviving previously lost 'American' moral values" (Kakoudaki 134). As a symbol of diegetic
diversity, the black leader appeals to national cooperation in a fraternal narrative of interracial reconciliation, one that often
privileges a white liberal vantage point.
The outcome is slightly different in Legend. In its disavowal of "whiteness," the film--like Katrina--replaces "the
'multicultural' pretensions of the American post-civil rights national ... formation" with (implicit) racial conflict (Rodriguez
134). Whereas "whiteness" is equated with disease, "blackness" stands for national recovery. But the film's dystopian
narrative includes a utopian revival (as do all dystopias by definition) from which an alternative "multicultural" society
develops. Following Neville's death, Anna and Ethan arrive at the towering gates of the Bethel colony, where they find a
small village anchored by a church spire, an American flag, and armed guards. While this "utopia" is perhaps multicultural
with the inclusion of the Brazilian migrants, it reflects a revival of Christianity and American patriotism housed in a fortified
rural community. It is a neoconservative rendering that relies on the very military-state apparatus largely responsible for the
collapse of American society in the film. So while Legend presents an important commentary on disaster, "difference," and
the state, it falls back on a nostalgic model that reinforces post-9/11 paranoia and anti-immigrant impulses echoed by the
likes of the Patriot movement and the Minutemen, who routinely use the "illegal alien" epithet in their diatribes.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort…GALE%7CA250677236&&docId=GALE|A250677236&docType=GALE&role=ITOF
Page 8 of 12
Gale Power Search - Document
9/5/14, 5:18 PM
In Legend the viewer is ultimately encouraged to reinvest in the state through a problematic framework of multiculturalism.
The liberal placement of "blackness" in a visible position of power (i.e., Neville as colonel and scientist) potentially distracts
us from ultraconservative government practices like the militarization of national borders and by extension regressive
immigration reform implied by the steel barricades of the Bethel colony. As Jody Melamed explains, "embodiments of
multiculturalism"--like Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and now Obama and Sotomayor--provide distractions "from
deployments of US state power to enforce the biopolitical restructuring required by neoliberalism and its negative effects on
the racialized poor in target countries" (18). To this end, Legend performs conservative cultural work similar to television
dramas like 24 and (to some extent) Battlestar Galactica. In each text the state's racial diversity works to legitimize the global
or galactic oppression of a more threatening "other" (i.e., "dark seekers," Muslims, or cylons). Unlike other dystopian films
that use racial "difference" to draw out the indecencies of the state--including Strange Days (1995), Children of Men, and
perhaps District 9 (2009)--Legend uses its black hero to revive the state and a version of multiculturalism that is conservative
and pastoral. If the challenge of critical dystopias is to sketch a desperate political or ecological setting that horrifies the
reader with prophetic parables but resists resigning the reader to a state of despair, what kind of dystopia is offered by
Legend?
The film provides a conflicted response fostered by not only Neville's skepticism but also a narrative aporia between
theatrical and alternate endings (found in the DVD edition).Whereas the savior scientist pays for Anna and Ethan's safety
with his life in the former, he brokers a tentative truce between the infected and his multiracial cohort in the latter. The
"director's cut" illustrates an alternative approach to diegetic difference where the alterity of the infected is contained by
mutual "tolerance" and "diversity." Although such terms are highly stigmatized and problematic, they also foreshadow an
articulation of multiculturalism that is less inspired by xenophobia and militarized borders; the panoramic view of the Bethel
colony is absent in the alternate ending. The significance of this revision is such that black leadership is no longer doomed to
martyrdom (as in the theatrical ending of Legend). It raises the possibility of a heterotopia built on intelligent black guidance
and multicultural difference.
Conversely, the theatrical ending suggests that the color of leadership may have changed, but the approach to national
security has not.
Conclusion
From 2012 and 24 to Children of Men and Battlestar Galactica, the relationship between disaster, dystopia, and diversity is
increasingly apparent in SF film and television, where the end of the world is imagined in relation to multiculturalism. In
Legend there is not only a connection between "color" and catastrophe, there is also a symbolic "return" of racial conflict,
specifically, white supremacy. The film presents an allegory of white terror that implicitly challenges white racial dystopias
of recent years, on the one hand, and the "pluralism" of Clinton era disaster films, on the other. While Legend's dystopia is
notably different from white reactionary versions, it provides a similar setting where multiculturalism in the West has ended.
The key difference is that Legend imagines national recovery through rather than against "blackness." This is enabled by the
"panracial" popularity of its star. As Corliss suggested in 2007, because Smith "is both black (obviously) and beyond
blackness [his] preeminence is as cheering as Barack Obama's Presidential plausibility" (1).
And so the film is able to subvert white dystopias that warn against "black power" by repairing a relationship between
African Americans and the U.S. government, one that seemed nearly irreparable after Hurricane Katrina. But this posturing
enables some questionable politics in the film. Since the lone black hero stands in for the state, giving the appearance of
diversity and multicultural tolerance, Legend is able to indulge in a conservative utopia that privileges both militarism and
masculinity. The text offers an ironic glimpse of disparity as it revives the state through the disavowal of those in despair.
This is a central contradiction of Legend, a film that speaks to neoliberal multicultural currents found elsewhere in American
popular and political culture. In light of rising discontent among white identity groups in a purportedly multicultural society
as well as Obama's (inherited) military offensive in Afghanistan and alleged "thug squad" at Guantanamo Bay, Legend
exhibits some of the neoliberal paradoxes of multiculturalism in North America (Scahill 2). So while the film revives the
nation through "blackness," much like the liberal mantras of Obama's ascendancy (i.e., "Yes We Can" and "Hope"), it does so
by constructing a more threatening "other," one that resonates with some of the anxieties of white reactionaries as well as
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort…GALE%7CA250677236&&docId=GALE|A250677236&docType=GALE&role=ITOF
Page 9 of 12
Gale Power Search - Document
9/5/14, 5:18 PM
American empire in a post-9/11 political climate that spills over into the Obama era.
Works Cited
Boyle, Kirk. "Children of Men and I Am Legend: The Disaster-Capitalism Complex Hits Hollywood." E-Jump Cut 51
(Spring 2009): 1-25.
Brayton, Sean. "The Post-white Imaginary in Alex Proyas's I, Robot." Science Fiction Studies 35.1 (2008): 72-87.
Corliss, Richard. "The 25 Most Important Films on Race." Time. 3 Feb. 2007.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/ 0,28804,17091481709143_1709678,00. html.
Gabbard, Krin. Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004.
Giroux, Henry. "Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability." College Literature 33.3
(2006): 171-96.
--. Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006.
Goldberg, Michelle. "Why the White Militias Are Back." Daily Beast. 14 Aug. 2009. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogsand-stories/ 2009-08-13/why-the-white-militias-are-back/.
Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993.
Hardin, Garrett. The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
Hildebrand, Sue, Scott Crow, and Lisa Fithian. "Common Ground Relief." What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State
of the Nation. Ed. South End Press Collective. Cambridge: South End, 2007.80-98.
Holthouse, David. "SPLC Report: Return of the Militias." Southern Poverty Law Center. 12 Aug. 2009.
http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?pid=416.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1992.
Huntington, Samuel R The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1996.
--. "The Hispanic Challenge." Foreign Policy, Mar.-Apr. 2004: 30-45.
James, Edward. "Yellow, Black, Metal and Tentacled: The Race Question in American Science Fiction." Science Fiction,
Social Conflict and War. Ed. Philip John Davies. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990.26-49.
Jones, Leroi. A Black Mass. Four Black Revolutionary Plays: All Praises to the Black Man. 1965; New York: Bobbs-Merrill,
1969.17-39.
Kakoudaki, Despina. "Spectacles of History: Race Relations, Melodrama, and the Science Fiction/Disaster Film,' Camera
Obscura 50, 17.2 (2002): 109-53.
Keller, Larry. "The Second Wave: Evidence Grows of Far-Right Militia Resurgence." Southern Poverty Law Center. Fall
2009. http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=1092.
Kellner, Douglas. "The Katrina Hurricane Spectacle and Crisis of the Bush Presidency." Cultural Studies=Critical
Methodologies 7 (2007): 222-34.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort…ALE%7CA250677236&&docId=GALE|A250677236&docType=GALE&role=ITOF
Page 10 of 12
Gale Power Search - Document
9/5/14, 5:18 PM
Kellner, Douglas, Flo Leibowitz, and Michael Ryan. "Blade Runner: A Diagnostic Critique." Jump Cut 29 (Feb. 1984): 6-8.
Kunkel, Benjamin. "Dystopia and the End of Politics." Dissent Magazine. Fall 2008. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article
/?article=1308.
Melamed, Jodi. "The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism." Social Text 89, 24.4
(2006): 1-25.
Mitchell, Kevin. "I Am Legend: Apocalypse Soon." World Socialist Website. 8 Jan. 2008.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jan2008 /lege-j08.shtml.
Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000.
Mullener, Elizabeth. "The Can Man." Times-Picayune. 25 Mar. 2007. http://www.nola.com/living/t-p/index.sSF?/base/livin7
/1174800565214070.xml&coll=1.
Murdocca, Carmela. "When Ebola Came to Town: Race and the Making of the Respectable Body." Atlantis: A Women's
Studies Journal 27.2 (2003): 24-31.
Nama, Adilifu. Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film. Austin: U of Texas P, 2008.
Nemoianu, Virgil. "The Contexts of Kafka: Dystopia, Phantasy, Multiculturalism." Neohelicon 32 (2005): 357-71.
Newman, Kim. Apocalypse Movies: End of the World Cinema. New York: St. Martin's, 2000.
Rodriguez, Dylan. "The Meaning of 'Disaster' Under the Dominance of White Life." What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and
the State of the Nation. Ed. South End Press Collective. Cambridge: South End, 2007. 133-56.
Rogin, Michael. Independence Day, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Enola Gay. London: BFI, 1998.
Scahill, Jeremy. "Obama Thug Squad Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo." Antiwar. 17 May 2009.
http://original.antiwar.com/scahill/2009/05/ 16/obama-thug-squad-brutalizing-prisoners-at-gitmo/.
Smith, Joseph Wayne, Graham Lyons, and Evonne Moore. Global Meltdown: Immigration, Multiculturalism, and National
Breakdown in the New World Disorder. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.
Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1997.
Willis, Sharon. High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002.
Zizek, Slavoj. "Katrina: Rumors, Lies and Racist Fantasies." Alternet. 31 Oct. 2005. http://www.alternet.org/katrina/27442/?
comments =view&cID=52882&pID=52319.
Brayton, Sean
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Brayton, Sean. "The racial politics of disaster and dystopia in I am legend." Velvet Light Trap 67 (2011): 66+. General
OneFile. Web. 5 Sept. 2014.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
id=GALE%7CA250677236&v=2.1&u=nm_s_eldorado&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w&asid=0cfb290b1f3e65996f8d5f4bd715d4f1
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort…ALE%7CA250677236&&docId=GALE|A250677236&docType=GALE&role=ITOF
Page 11 of 12
Gale Power Search - Document
9/5/14, 5:18 PM
Gale Document Number: GALE|A250677236
Top of page
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort…ALE%7CA250677236&&docId=GALE|A250677236&docType=GALE&role=ITOF
Page 12 of 12