Why didn’t we notice just how creepy Men in Black is?
If you weren’t there in 1997, trust me that Men in Black was an inescapable film, or at least for a ten year-old like I was. Its $589 million gross might not sound so impressive today, but adjusting for inflation, that was pop culture phenomenon money. It was the family-friendliest, slimiest, goriest event of the summer.
So how did we not notice that it convinced audiences to root for the villains? I don’t mean the cockroach in an Edgar suit, I mean the Men in Black. No matter your moral or political affiliation, these are a really loathsome group of people. This is the case even if we were to operate by movie logic and say that every single agent is a “good person” that would never use their vast arsenal of advanced technology for personal gain. I’m not nitpicking the logic of the plot, technology, the plausibility of the coverup, etc. I’m saying the moral universe of this movie is pretty insidious just below the surface, and its popularity says really unsettling thing about the surveillance state. As much as Starship Troopers (also by Sony) has been praised by some for being a satire of military jingoism by being styled as futuristic fascist propaganda, I would say that Men in Black’s makers pulled off the same trick with the surveillance state so much better that most of us didn’t even notice.
I’ll start with appealing to conservatives. At the very beginning of the movie, MiB Agents K and D interfere with an arrest of illegal immigrants. Of course the real reason that they’re doing this is because they suspect that one of the illegal immigrants in an extraterrestrial in disguise, but if you were a conservative when this came out in 1997, wouldn’t it piss you off to know that the MiB can apparently overrule Customs and Border Patrol (I guess that’s who the agents are since ICE wouldn’t exist for another six years) and let illegal immigrants into the country for no real stated reason? By “overrule” is meant “let the illegal immigrants go and get away with it because they have a memory-erasing device called a neuralyzer.” Hell, the neuralyzer would have been all the more reason to let the illegal immigrants be detained since it would be a lot easier to cover up one illegal immigrant not being in a van than fabricate reasons why a team of border patrol agents went out into the desert and let the perpetrators go.
It’s not like illegal immigration wasn’t an issue at the time, even if views on it hadn’t yet become so polarized. Why do human values of mean nothing just because they’re not convenient for the short term interests of the MiB? I’m not saying the scene would have justified picket lines outside screenings of the film, but in hindsight it’s kind of bewildering that it wasn’t criticized at all.
Now on the left side of the political spectrum, I want to focus on two quotes. Early on Agent J asks K why the presence of aliens is kept secret. The answer is “People are dumb, dangerous, panicky animals and you know it.” That feels like some kind of variation on Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, with the main difference being that the philosophy of Men in Black is so pro-authority that Agent J is worthy of being inducted into the MiB because he “ran down an unlicensed cephalopod. On foot.” The ability of a police officer to chase down someone who is extremely fast, able to jump high and climb walls feels like tenuous grounds to put him above the dumb, panicky animals. Of course Agent J is cut down by Agent K a few times (including being told explicitly that his skills mean “dick”) so that he can still have an underdog appeal, but he’s still supposed to be worthy of some of the most privileged information in the world.
For the second quote, roughly the midpoint of the movie Agent J complains after a shooting incident that there’s no time to be going through the cover up procedures, and K admonishes him that the World is always being threatened but that “the only way these people can go about their happy lives is if they do. not. know about it!” That is a hell of a judgement call to make for an extrajudicial group to make. What sorts of evil acts could be covered up under that logic/moral compass? Imagine someone arguing “We can’t tell people about our false flag attacks because they’d protest, and the protests would disrupt the economy!” Or even a relatively minor “We can’t tell people about the impending economic downturn because it would bum them out. They’re too dumb to understand it anyway.” It’s exactly the sort of thing that would be said by an evil CIA agent character about to destabilize a country in some movie, but we’re just supposed to go with one of the most elitist, misanthropic statement ever played straight in a mainstream movie.
The Men in Black of paranormal folklore function in roughly the same way they do in the movie. Someone reports seeing something unusual, most often a UFO or a cryptid. Agents show up to take testimony and/or pressure them or keep their experience private. In those accounts, the Men in Black are always sinister, even beyond sometimes behaving so weirdly they don’t seem like humans themselves. That’s unsurprising since, the comedy stylings of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones notwithstanding, the whole idea of this organization is an inescapably sinister one. That should have been the default audience reaction. Hell, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are performing a more benign version of what the extraterrestrials are doing to humanity in They Live. Men in Black kind of feels like a movie the aliens would make in the They Live universe as an inside joke about all the humans that they’re brainwashing around the clock.
Of course the reason that the Men in Black agents can be accepted as the good guys is because we’re following them around, not seeing the world through the POV of the people they ostensibly protect by keeping the truth from them. We get to laugh along with Agent J when he calls regular people ugly or Agent K when he’s disdainful of border patrol agents. It is incredibly easy to imagine a version of this movie where someone reports seeing an alien, they tell a friend about it very insistently, the MiB visit, but they don’t use the memory-wiping neuralyzer on the friend. Now that friend is in the creepy position of not understanding why the friend who saw the alien has completely changed their story and is now relatively blissful. Even the makers of the contemporary The X-Files tv show with its sympathetic FBI agents recognized that the implications of the show were creepy and the theme/production design reflected that. Covert government agents didn’t get the slang label “spooks” for nothing. However Men in Black’s filmmakers settled on making a buddy comedy/secret vicarious power trip, and along pop culture went.
Would the presence of secret extraterrestrials supersede the rights of humans? By the tone and implicit logic of the movie it feels like it would, since knowing that there are sufficient numbers of space travelers on Earth (1,500 known at any time, according to Agent K) would make all Earth political issues seem comparatively petty. But no, not really. Rights don’t go away just because there are larger entities with more reach than a single person. I mean, functionally they can be neutralized, but I’m sure the majority of us don’t find the implications of that charming or fun.
Do I think that Men in Black contributed to a tacit acceptance of the surveillance state? Not really, I believe popular movies reflect the popular perceptions of a society are way more than they guide them. But the idea that a movie insulted the public to its faces, told them some of the most sinister organizations are fun so that means our dumb Earth laws and values should mean nothing, and still made a fortune that justified four sequels is a cinematic achievement as impressive as it is creepy.
Dustin Koski is the author of Not Meant to Know, a fantasy book about rogue exorcists that at least acknowledges how unnerving secret societies can be.
