It has to be no great revelation that sci fi flicks about aliens must really be about the abiding problem that the human race has with itself – we humans just can’t seem to get that tolerance thing working. Now War of the Worlds (not the Orson Wells radio version, nor the 1953 one with Gene Barry) is about to be released under the practiced alien eye of Steven Speilberg.
For years films about alien invasions tended to regard our extraterrestrial visitors as unwelcome guests. Dozens of them had the simple plot of aliens bent on conquest that had to be vanquished with the assistance of some military or technological device. Movie audiences became inured to the response to the first citing of an alien was to kill it, like some unwelcome bug you found in the shower. There were exceptions, some of them thoughtful, and I had favorites, such as The Man from Planet X , and a British film whose name always escapes me, but is about a curious vessel found in the London that was apparently used by a “civilization” of insect-like creatures who became extinct from endless wars. But most sci fi alien films have been unimaginative and stupid, with aliens that are typically bi-pedal and our size and, of course, spoke English.
The latest version of the H.G. Wells classic represents something of a sea change in Steve’s approach to exobiology. I’d like to be able to get into Steve’s head because he’s the guy who really got the cuddly alien phase going with Close Encounters of the Third Kind , in which cuddly Richard Dreyfus gets to go off somewhere with cuddly almond-eyed aliens with long skinny arms and oversized heads. He also did ET , the stuffed animal version of cuddly alien with over-sized eyes in over-sized head (but that one had one heck of a finger). Now, he’s reverting to the really Alien alien thing—nasty buggers that want to eat us and destroy our planet before we get a chance to complete the job.
The Alien series truly deals with out inter-species problem; hence it is more ecological in its implications. It is basically a throwback to The Lost World , where humans end up contemporaries of T-Rexs, which of course is reprised with a more sophisticated premise inJurassic Park . The question of whether humans can or want to co-exist with velociraptors is essentially one addressed by human ingenuity, or technology. But then you can guess what the answer to that one is by watching an Orkin commercial. “It’s us or them. ZAP the bastards!”
For a lot of this we have Steve and George to thank; two talented adolescents who are rich enough to indulge their sci fi fixations and get even richer doing it. Lucas’s space critters are not quite as cuddly as Spielberg’s; they have weird appendages, drool a lot, can be ornery, and often untrustworthy and fat. One is definitely gay and looks like a cross between a camel and Barney the purple dinosaur. So Lucas’s aliens are just like us, a rather unpleasant sort if I may indulge my misanthropic mood.
If Lucas weren’t so devoted to his series—and I think that he and a couple hundred pimple-pussed teenagers may be the only ones left—I would offer the notion that the title of his last Star Wars, The Revenge of the Sith actually contains an anagram in the title. Is it really SITH? What would George do without war? Well, something much better, actually, like his much earlier (and cheaper), and deeper, THX 1138. Speilberg seems to have taken the metaphor that we can all live together (except that ET really wants to go home, and you can’t blame him.) Lucas takes the other approach—would you want one of those drooling creatures in that bar dating your sister?
I just finished watching on TMC It Came From Outer Space, a Ray Harryhausen-effected 1950s version of the war of the world’s genre. Flying saucers with goofey-looking Pillsbury Dough Boy looking aliens wanting to take over the earth, but their saucers are undone by a scientist who makes a weapon that screws up their gyroscopes and they crash into obvious models of the Capitol Building, The Washington Monument and other government buildings. This is an early version of Independence Day, metaphor for “we hate our government and this is how we metaphorically trash it.” Of course, these all owe allegiance to that masterpiece of the sub-genre, The Day the Earth Stood Still . What better admonition for our nuclear proliferation than an Englishman (Michael Renne) from another planet telling us to get out act together or he will have his robot, Gort, fry the whole shebang.
In the 1970s something else showed up—alien abductions. And I really want to know what’s behind this phase. People were whisked away from dark roads and crop circles to space ships where aliens always seemed to be poking around their genitals. What was that alien fascination with our genitals? I didn’t notice any genitals on those little gray critters that Speilberg came up with; maybe they’re envious of ours. Does it have something to do with the fact that these abductions seemed to arrive about right about the time we junked Freud for Valium? Just a quick hypothesis for any psych students out there in need of a thesis topic. Anyway, that bit of self-abuse seems to have abated for the time being.*
Are alien science fiction films really all metaphor for our endless problems with race and immigration? Sometimes I think that everything is a reflection of our problems with race and immigration and that the only way to solve it is if every variation in humankind had its own planet well separated from other planets by vast reaches of space. Then the universe could quietly go from the Big Bang in over a few billion years a well-deserved implosive end that could be called The Big Bore.
Part of the War of the Worlds premise is that we humans might only be able to tolerate each other when we are threatened by an alien enemy. Only then might we stop being Serbs and Croats, Greeks and Turks, Israelis and Palestinians, Sunnis and Shiites, etc. A common enemy might “teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.” We need evil aliens that come with their flying machines to destroy our precious buildings, and kill or enslave us. Only then can we form “coalitions of the willing” to save our earthly culture and vanquish the alien evil. Bring those ugly buggers on!
Yah, sure.
Klaatu Barada Nikto
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 7.13.2005)
*Although I must admit to a fantasy of dressing up in an alien costume and abducting Angelina Jolie.