Does Men in Black Work in 2019?

The world has changed somewhat since the nineties.

Men in Black is a film about aliens.

This, you’re probably thinking, is an observation so obvious that you’re wondering why you’re even reading this newsletter. So let’s be a little more specific.

Men in Black is a film about aliens secretly living among us on Earth, policed and hidden from plain sight by a secret branch of the United States government.

This kind of thing was all the rage in the nineties. The obvious example is The X-Files, at the height of its popularity upon Men in Black’s release in 1997. The X-Files, as you’re surely aware, follows a pair of FBI agents investigating paranormal cases, and ideas about the US government attempting to keep the truth about alien life from ordinary people. Going beyond aliens, this era also saw a trend of, as others have noted, “relatively comfortable white dudes discovering their entire existence is predicated on lies”, such as The Truman Show and The Matrix. While the protagonist of Men in Black is obviously not white, most of the people who made the movie were, and this is the headspace they seemed to be in.*

While most of these works deal with the idea of reality not being what it seems, and some important truth being hidden from the protagonist, Men in Black was the one to hit especially hard on the angle of conspiracy theories. The government wasn’t just hiding something from Agent J, and thus the audience, but the truth was to be found in the last place anyone would look: the tabloids. Agent K, our guide into the world of aliens, claims they have the “best investigative reporting on the planet”. Every obviously ridiculous news story you ever saw in a tabloid is true. To help the film’s aim of having all of this take place in something akin to the real world, genuine tabloid brands are used, such as the National Enquirer.

This was all perfect for the nineties zeitgeist. Bill Clinton was in the White House. Tony Blair was in Downing Street. Socialism was dead. Francis Fukuyama’s concept of the End of History, “the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”, was the dominant understanding of the world. Everything was fine. There was nothing to worry about. We (well, the people making Hollywood movies at least) were safe in comfortable lives. Obviously looking for conflict in life, we told stories about how all of this was a lie. The trick was to make it feel real enough that audiences could believe it, but fantastic enough (hence the aliens) that they knew it wasn’t, and could go home to their boring but decent lives once the credits rolled. Men in Black hit the sweet spot.

To once again state the obvious, 9/11 changed all of this. The benign world people had grown accustomed to was a lie. Not a lie about aliens, but very real world terrorists. Audiences, or at least Western audiences, no longer felt safe. Instead, they wanted to be told that the American government would protect them. 24 is the classic of this genre, a show about a courageous white man doing whatever it takes, going to any measures necessary, to fight the West’s villains. Other things suddenly felt wildly out of touch. The X-Files aired just one season in the post-9/11 era before being cancelled. X-Files creator Chris Carter even admitted the show became out of touch, claiming that “things had changed after 9/11”. Men in Black II, the sequel to the 1997 hit, was in an uncomfortable position of having been shot mostly before September 2001 but getting its release in the summer of 2002. That it didn’t leave anywhere near as much of a mark on the wider culture as the original can mostly be attributed to it being a bad film. But it’s hard to escape the sense that, even if all involved had made a masterpiece, it wouldn’t have been what the public were looking for.

As 9/11 was used to justify the War on Terror, it became fairly obvious that the US-led coalition into Iraq were indeed lying to people. The American government was hiding the truth. Men in Black, in its own very strange way, was sort of right. But it wasn’t just governments. Economists, though not “lying” to us as such, failed to predict the 2008 crash. British sociologist and political economist William Davies has understood this better than anyone. Repeated scandals including but certainly not limited to the military reports published by WikiLeaks and the British newspaper phone hacking saga painted a world in which those in positions of power were frequently lying to you. What this helped build, as Davies notes, was a resentment toward so-called “liberal elites”.

Trust had been fundamentally tarnished in the government and institutions we rely upon as neutral arbiters of truth. The post-2008 economy and “recovery” had left people on much less secure financial footing than the relative safety they experienced in the nineties (though of course, this very much was not distributed evenly, and some of the most well off people were in fact the least trusting of institutions). And so, with a not insignificant chunk of the population looked for alternative explanations for what was going on with the world. This has led to a torrent of outright conspiratorial thinking. Barack Obama apparently wasn’t born in the United States. Muslims are supposedly staging a grand plan to replace christians in Europe. Pop culture has somehow been run by marxists attempting to indoctrinate future generations into becoming communists through having more diverse casts on TV. That these conspiracy theories overwhelmingly target disenfranchised groups surely isn’t an accident, and it has powered a resurgent far right to electoral victories across the world. While the internet has certainly been a source for this, traditional broadcast media such as radio, TV news and definitely tabloids have been central in pushing this line of thinking. One of the most frequent targets of the conspiratorial far right has been immigrants, or, to use a very dehumanising legal term, aliens.

Men in Black is a film about aliens.

It’s a film about a special branch of the US government that deals with crimes committed by illegal aliens. It depicts a world in which all conspiracy theories are true, and the best news reporting out there is done by the National Enquirer. Is it that hard to imagine a Men in Black film in which the characters deal with Pizzagate or QAnon?

The latest entry into the franchise, Men in Black: International, is being released in June of this year. It very obviously hopes to tap into one of the most powerful forces in modern pop culture: nostalgia. Empty recreations of things we once loved are everywhere, from the live action remakes of Disney animated classics to Ready Player One. It’s absolutely possible that Men in Black: International will be able to ride this wave enough to secure solid box office success. But doesn’t this franchise feel a little, well, uncomfortable at this point?

*If you read my last newsletter, you’ll know that of course The Wachowskis are trans women and The Matrix can be interpreted through a lens of trans existence. That the pair were able to take this framework and turn it into such a metaphor speaks to their talent as artists, but certainly the film also fits a broader narrative of the time, one that probably resonated more with cis audiences who helped make the movie such a hit.