The White House is a favourite target for destruction in American movies

The phone call came in the middle of a press junket, patched through to a New York City hotel room. The President wants to see Independence Day.

It was 1996 and Bill Clinton was in the White House, and the filmmakers and cast had been invited to screen their alien invasion movie for the then most powerful man in the world that very night.

A few hours later, director Roland Emmerich and screenwriter Dean Devlin were standing at the back of the White House screening room, while actor Bill Pullman, who played President Thomas J. Whitmore in the film, was sat between Bill and Hillary.

Right after the scene in which the White House is blown up by spaceship hovering above it, Clinton runs out of the room. He comes back a minute later, shaking water off his hands.

He had gone to the bathroom, rather than fled at the vision of a possible future. Apparently, according to Emmerich, who recounted this memory in 2021 to The Hollywood Reporter, many people in the test screenings ran out at the same moment, all going to pee.

Maybe there was something about the physical destruction of America’s national seat of power that triggered a visceral response in the form of agitated bladders. Or maybe it had something to do with Independence Day’s specific pacing.

But there is no denying that scene came on, it was a potent image.

This week, as the bulldozers knocked down the East Wing of the White House to make way for Donald Trump’s renovation plans to install a presumably very gilded 1000-capacity ballroom, the symbolism was as loud as a gong.

Trump tore down a part of the building that has stood since 1902 when it was erected under President Theodore Roosevelt, just as he had earlier paved over the Rose Garden lawn that had been established by Jacqueline Kennedy.

The visuals perhaps would be even more horrible if people around the world hadn’t already been primed for it, myriad sequences of White House destruction embedded in our cultural consciousness.

The Independence Day scene is the most memorable but many more exist.

Just this year, the White House was pummelled in Captain America: Brave New World, a Marvel extravaganza which pitted superhero Sam Wilson against a Red Hulk-ed out President Thaddeus Ross.

Ross even monstered out while addressing a crowd in a White House garden, and their fisticuffs and fire from two helicopters wrought a lot of damage before the action shifted elsewhere. But most of the structure was still standing and by the end of the film, restoration had begun with a CGI frame showing the White House covered in scaffolding and nearby construction cranes.

In Alex Garland’s 2024 movie Civil War, the exterior of the White House was largely intact, but it was the scene of the final siege. The unnamed fictional fascistic president was bunkered inside when armed forces breached the building after firefights at the perimeter and around Washington D.C.

Inside, revolutionary forces make their way through the building, trailed by the journalist characters that were the centre of the film. Gunfire is exchanged between the soldiers and remaining Secret Service agents before the president is cornered in the Oval Office, where he is executed.

In 2013, there were two movies released within three months of each other that had terrorist attacks on the White House as the central plot.

The first, Olympus Has Fallen, follows a Secret Service agent who must protect the president who is taken hostage inside the White House after a plane crashes inside the perimeter and people start shooting. A façade is blown off by a rocket-propelled grenade.

The second, White House Down, also directed by Emmerich who made Independence Day, follows a wannabe-Secret Service agent who is on a tour of the building with his daughter when mercenaries led by a rogue agent launches an attack inside.

In comic book movie X-Men: Days of Future Past, the White House’s destruction is more creative. In an alternative history where Richard Nixon is set to unveil the Sentinel robots, Magneto rips the White House bunker out the building, peeling the exteriors back like fruit, using only his psychic powers.

The White House was also destroyed in the disaster movie 2012 when an aircraft carrier rams through it after being displaced by a tsunami.

In addition to Independence Day, the monument is a favourite target of other extra-terrestrials. In Superman II, Kryptonian villain General Zod effortlessly fight their way into the Oval Office and take over the reigns.

In Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton’s satirical invasion movie, the aliens have a wild time with the American leaders, including crashing the “Nancy Reagan chandelier” right on top of the First Lady played by Glenn Close.

The White House has taken many knocks in cinematic history, although it’s not known if any other film featuring its demise, besides Independence Day, was ever screened inside the building.

Today, you wouldn’t be able to. The White House theatre was part of the East Wing and all that’s left is rubble.