Every year, invariably, three or four alien takeover movies come out with basically the same plot structure, characters, and ending. Sometimes, the aliens are giant squids, sometimes giant robots, sometimes giant mech-squid robots. It doesn't really matter. Some of these movies are farcically serious reflections about fate and belief in a higher power (a higher power that isn't the aliens with their faster-than-light time travel) as in the case of Signs, some are comic reflections by weirdoes like in Mars Attacks!, and somearen't about aliens at all, but some vague 'alien' thing like communists (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), but really, what they are all about, the phenomena beneath the lasers and spaceships and tentacles is the wrath of god that just hit Japan (We will not even break the surface of god's near cosmic sense of irony that they only nation in the world to have two thermo-nuclear bombs dropped on it will now have a couple of its thermo-nuclear reactors start spewing radiation into its water supply). It is bad news for a nation that worships nature more than any other on the planet, but it also exposes modern, post-enlightenment man's deep seeded impotence and fear of nature, suppressed and externalized into Godzilla and space crabs.
The Japanese might love nature, but they love a controlled, human (and humane) version of it. Human rust and roughness. Their sabi-wabi aesthetic is posited on the ability to portion out the area in which the moss or trees can grow uncontrolled. The Japanese are the most technologically advanced nation on the planet, and thus confronted their own impotence far earlier than the west did, but we got around to it eventually, and seem to have really run with the genre; I cannot help but feel Katrina helped spur this on, though it is as dark, vague, and unfounded an intuition as I can make. Roman Polanski, for all his peaderastic greatness, once said man trying to understand god is like a dog trying to understand a car, and I hate to be practical and S-ish (as in sensory on the Myers-Briggs personality index), but how exactly would we fight an alien race that can travel faster than light? Or, to put it another way, how would the Kombai fight an F-22 stealth fighter jet with their sticks and utter lack of bronze age 'technology'? Everyone acknowledge the comical farce of these movies, like in Independence Day where a Macbook uploads a virus to 'destroy' the aliens when a nuke can't, but because most people are not interested in phenomenology, or, really, because they don't want to think about it, don't ask the obvious question: what can you do when nature decides to destroy our Towers of Babel? Modern man lives as outside the cycles of nature as possible, most people, myself included, cannot tell you when you harvest beets, and I love the earthy sweetness of them. We live in a post-Sauron/Saruman world where nature is to be beaten and raped into submission, yet despite all of this, deep down we all know we have no control over the air and earth around us. The delusions of probability provide us a false comfort, but really, as Heracleitus said, time is a child playing a game of draughts, our lives are in the hands of a child. That deep, pre-Socratic intuition into the nature of the world around us, that plague, or Athens might any day destroy your city and turn you into a slave, simply cannot be escaped. The eventual triumph in all of these movies of man over aliens/nature is about as escapist as you can get, but it is also inconsequential. Of course we have to win, have to find some technological solution to confront an enemy with a will and a way, to not would invalidate our entire view on the nature of the world. The only movie I know of recently to confront nature directly, Eastwood's Hereafter gets around staring the whirlwind of God directly in the face by injecting some vague, spiritual after-life mumbo-jumbo into it.
Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate has written about the rash of post-apocolyptic literature and films to come out recently, and while I see some connection to the alien-takeover movie, these pieces of art seem to be more realistic than a film like say, Independence Day, or the upcoming Battle for LA. Those movies also seem to be more about suburban man's utter dependence of the world around him, not his inability to control nature. In the post-apocolyptic genre, man is left in the dark ages, not facing an existential crisis in the post-modern world, and must cope with being trust into Hobbes' state of nature. Rosenbaum links the inevitable cannibalism in these films with the idea of us destroying ourselves with nuclear fission, and while that idea does really link to Oppenheimer's brilliant quip from the Gita after detonating the Trinity bomb ("I am become death, destroyer of worlds") to me, the key thing in these films is the state of nature that reigns; the cannibalism seems to be just an offshoot of being in that state. Life in these movies seems to be very close to what I imagine it was like being in Germania in Tacitus' time, except we aren't Romans, we are men who are in touch with our feelings, attached to things material and immaterial, and unable to acknowledge the will in the world. These movies never take place in say, rural, tribal Africa, because, lets be honest, what would be different? There are a number of tribes in the Amazon who do not have metal smithing, are they really worried about what they'll do when their espresso machine no longer works?
So, as you watch the floating fires in Japan, and the planes and freighters and cars bobbing around the water like they are toys in god's bathtub, and as you hear the staccato click of the geiger counters increase as that island nation is damned by the kamikaze that saved them twice in the 12th century when Genghis-Khan tried to over-run them, think about what you would do if you are an ant, and a little boy decides it would be fun to flood your entire civilization. Do you cling to a little piece of dirt with your ant family? Do you finally allow the ideological differences you have with the other ant colonies to fall by the wayside so you can fight this giant with his deluge of water? Or do you acknowledge your existential powerlessness when face to face with the leviathan and behemoth?
No comments:
Post a Comment