United Nations in popular culture
[5] In Andrew Marton's Storm Over Tibet (1952), the protagonist leads a UNESCO expedition to the Himalayas to return a precious religious artifact to its rightful owners.
Set to be aired to an American audience, the series comprised four television films which portrayed the United Nations in a positive light and where the UN was at the center of the plot: Carol for Another Christmas (1964), Who Has Seen the Wind?
[21] The film notably casts a UN interpreter, played by Nicole Kidman, who becomes entangled in a murder plot of an African leader set to deliver a speech at the United Nations.
[25][26] Other reviewers echoed "the lack of disappointingly slim grasp of UN life", and the fact that the movie was "so lofty as if it were made to be screened at the United Nations".
[33][34][35] In the Oscar-winning Bosnian film No Man's Land (2001), UN peacekeepers and UN officials serve as major plot drivers, which the New York Times called a "savage portrait of nervous bureaucratic wheeling and dealing that has little regard for the lives being gambled".
[36] UN peacekeepers are also featured in the Academy-nominated Hotel Rwanda (2004), where their force withdraws in the face of escalating violence, although the UN commander's representation has been criticized as historically inaccurate.
[38][39] The Canadian war drama Shake Hands with the Devil (2007) depicts the genocide from the perspective of blue helmet Roméo Dallaire, head of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda.
"[49] In Black Panther (2018), the post-credits scene has the protagonist deliver a speech to the UN in Vienna in his quality of king of Wakanda, to announce the opening of his secretive nation to the world.
Canadian legal scholar Amar Khoday, noting the absence of the UN Security Council in the series, wrote that "[t]he U.N., embodied by the General Assembly, is reduced to a quivering mass of indecision and effete inaction in the face of a genocide leaving the United States as the only viable entity to respond.
[69] In a similar inclusion of the UN in its plot, the third season of the American political drama House of Cards (2013–2018) prominently features a plan brought forward by US President Frank Underwood to the Security Council to bring peace to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through the deployment of a UN peacekeeping mission in the Jordan Valley.
[72][73][74] In the Japanese mecha anime series Mobile Suit Gundam Wing (1995–1996), Macross (1982–1986), and Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–1996), the United Nations plays an important role, being depicted "either as government or supreme commander of powerful armies".
[75] In The Animatrix anime, following their planned destruction at the hands of world governments, the machines found a new state in the Middle East called Zero One, and apply for UN membership, which the Security Council soundly rejects.
[80] This analysis stands in contrast with the one of legal academic Nabil Hajjami, who wrote in 2019 that the UN has been, for half a century, a subject of fascination and of a plurality of representations by writers.
[82] Among the idealist interpretations, Charles Stross' Singularity Sky (2003) describes the UN as "the sole remaining island of concrete stability in a sea of pocket polities".
[82] In Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars (1996), following the catastrophic rise of sea levels due to volcanic eruptions, the United Nations "rose like some aquatic phoenix out of the chaos", spearheading and coordinating the planet's emergency efforts.
[83] According to Hajjami, several authors of the idealist wave also see the United Nations as a tool through which humankind's material and moral resources are pooled.
This is the case of one of the characters of the Isaac Asimov short story Shah Guido G, who marvels at the "extraordinary miracle" that must have been witnessed by the people of the Earth when the United Nations became a world government.
[84] United Nations legislation also transcends spatial distance: in Stanisław Lem's Solaris (1961), a distant planet is aware that a UN convention has banned the use of X-rays.
[85] Unsurprisingly, extraterrestrials often expect to interact with the United Nations as the supreme, unified, and legitimate polity of humanity, and are often confused about the degree of disunity and decentralization under its banner.
[87] In Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, the UN owns forty to fifty information channels, tightly regulates the world's food supply, and automatically manages worldwide social insurance from Geneva.
In James S. A. Corey's Leviathan Wakes, the world currency has become the UN dollar, and the organization overcharges for postage stamps headed to the Moon to restrict communication with what it believes is an anarchist haven.
[88] In other science fiction worlds, the UN rules in "authentic totalitarianism": in Pierre Bordage's sci-fi novel Les Dames Blanches, the UN adopts a law to kill newborns, and urges its states to implement capital punishment against possible contraventions.
The latter depiction is often coupled with the organization being "only a tool at the service of state interests" and weak (René Barjavel's The Ice People; Robinson's Red Mars; Ben Bova's Millennium).
[92] In Dick, Bordage and Dantec's works, UN officials engage in acts of corruption, and in Haldeman's Forever War, the only way to make the organization incorruptible would be to automate it, depriving it of its humanity.
[93] Finally, the legal formalism that workers of the United Nations engage in can be found in Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), as well as in the novels of Dick, Stross, and Clarke.
[95][96] Romain Gary's L'Homme à la Colombe (1958), written under a pseudonym while its author was working for the French delegation to the United Nations, offers a fictional critique of the organization.
In Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014), antagonist Jonathan Irons, leader of the world's largest private military company, is granted a seat at the UN Security Council.
[105] A similar futuristic organization appears in Deus Ex (2000), where protagonist J.C. Denton works for the fictional United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO), a militant police force prominently featured throughout the game.
[107] In the turn-based strategy 4X game series Sid Meier's Civilization, the United Nations is a tool any player can wield as a means to keep peace in the world or achieve a Diplomatic victory.
Although it doesn't posses its own armed forces, other nations' troops can be placed under the UN Security Council's command which is at the same time advised by a Military Staff Committee composed of its member states.
