When the genocidal, gerbil-swallowing space lizards known as the Visitors first settled their flying saucers over Earth’s major cities in the 1983 NBC miniseries V, it was a time of apocalyptic paranoia. With the Doomsday Clock ticking two minutes to midnight, Ronald Reagan announced his “Star Wars” missile defence system and the Soviets were mired in Afghanistan. The Cold War was close enough to a hot war that, in the movies, Matthew Broderick could conceivably kick-start WWIII with his 300-baud modem.
Yet V creator Kenneth Johnson wasn’t using the Visitors as a sci-fi allegory for the nuclear era. He was targeting an old, shared enemy of the Soviet Reds and Yankee Imperialists: the Nazis. The Visitors wore swastika-like symbols on their red pantsuits; their scientist-internment campaign paralleled Nazi methods and their fastidious deportation of humans as food mirrored Hitler’s Final Solution. Of course, in the tradition of anti-Nazi parables, V — and its 1984 sequel, V: The Final Battle — was also a warning about the fascism lurking beneath the cloak of anti-communist fervour in post-war America, which resurged wildly under Reagan’s rule. The series’ opening even featured leftist guerillas being cruelly cut down by US-funded attack helicopters in El Salvador.
Campy though it was, Johnson’s rumination on democracy’s fragility was based on Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 satire It Can’t Happen Here, about a populist politician who is able to turn the US into a fascist dictatorship precisely because people want to believe the book’s title.
With apocalyptic paranoia again surging, a V revamp has returned and placed another charismatic US president in its subtextual sights.
The producers of ABC’s new weekly series, based on the original V, deny any real-world references in their show, which nonetheless features a charismatic leader, Anna (Firefly’s Morena Baccarin), who speaks of hope and change, builds healing centres and encourages “peace ambassador” volunteerism. That this attractive alien arrives during an economic crisis and harbours ulterior motives might not sound far-fetched to Glenn Beck’s frightened followers — the kind who demand to see Obama’s birth certificate and believe the President’s community-service call is a ploy to create a private paramilitary.
V 2009 plays more right-wing notes with its Tea Party–esque protesters, who are dismissed by other humans on the show as racist. For the show’s main protagonists, the leaders of the Earthling resistance, the original’s journalist/doctor team (played by Marc Singer and Faye Grant) is rewritten as a priest (The 4400’s Joel Gretsch) and a counter-terrorism agent (Lost’s Elizabeth Mitchell).
Obama’s cult of personality makes for an interesting allegorical examination — in a nod to last year’s US election, our rebel priest notes, “The world is in such bad shape right now, who wouldn’t welcome a saviour?” — but the implied, creeping socialism of the Visitors’ program of — ahem — “universal healthcare” is hardly on par dramatically with Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speechifying or Hitler’s anti-Semitism.
V would do well to emulate The X-Files, which rooted itself in Clinton-era New World Order conspiracies without producing any particular political axe for the grinding. That ’90s, non-partisan “fusion paranoia” — an internet-fuelled convergence of far-left and far-right conspiracy theories ranging from UFO cover-ups and one-world governments to the eschatological End Times — has prospered in the years since.
Originally popularized by the 1970s acid-soaked satire The Illuminatus! Trilogy, this all-in approach is currently promoted by the likes of ultra-libertarian radio host Alex Jones, who claims that Bush caused 9/11 and that Obama is a puppet, while distributing anti-government DVDs like Fall of the Republic and attacking a complicit corporate media. (V’s criticism of the media, equally applicable to the fawning practices of MSNBC on the left and Fox on the right, is embodied by a careerist TV journalist, played by Scott Wolf, who accedes, on the promise of more access, to Anna’s insistence that he “not ask anything that portrays us in a negative light.”)
British Illuminati conspiracy theorist David Icke takes things further, blaming the world’s woes on alien lizards in human guise — including Bush Sr. and Brian Mulroney —which neatly dovetails with V attributing terror attacks, “unnecessary wars and economic meltdown” on reptilian sleeper agents seeding instability for decades in advance of Anna’s arrival. The Resistance is already echoing the militia movement and, once the street fighting starts, it’s going to look a lot like an insurgency.
So: if conspiracy theory is what you’re looking for, don’t consider V an anti-Obama polemic so much as Sinclair Lewis’ spiritual sequel, It’s Already Happened Here.
» V airs Tuesdays, 8pm on ABC/CTV.