Post by uforn on Mar 24, 2011 11:22:13 GMT 1
Paul and Battle: Los Angeles portray aliens in very different lights
The modern-day America is clearly of two minds, as the melting pot continues to curdle between red states and blue states, but the political polarization is becoming so intense, it's creating two entirely different worlds for mass consumption.
The distinction isn't easy to see on the surface - mostly because we're in the midst of the social schism that is slowly, but surely, redrawing moral boundaries. But if you look into the darkened corners of your local cinema, you'll get a front-row seat to the unfolding revolution as the alien-invasion genre cleaves in two.
Witness last week's release of the Aaron Eckhart action drama, Battle LA, and this week's release of the Simon Pegg-Nick Frost collaboration, Paul.
The former is a classic action movie featuring an evil, aggressive alien race out to kill all humans and steal Earth's water. The latter is a touchy-feely comedy about a lone alien desperately seeking to get back to his home galaxy.
Both films are from major studios, and both feature A-list talents, as well as very pricey visual effects. In short, they are both artifacts created by the dominant culture, which means they are both equally valid reflections of the advertised American ideal.
So why are these two films completely different? Why does one urge us to fear everything and carry a big gun, while the other counsels us to grow up and recognize shared traits, regardless of one's background?
The answer demands a short recap of the genre's roots.
Though science fiction has been wrapped around film's double helix from the very beginning, when Georges Melies took his viewers on a trip to the moon in 1902, it really only blossomed as a genre unto itself after the Second World War.
The onset of the nuclear age caused a dramatic mutation that allowed the monster movie (in the tradition of Frankenstein) to evolve beyond cautionary tale questioning the merits of empirical knowledge.
Suddenly, "mad scientists" fell out of fashion, as did their partly human monsters. Replaced by men of intellect who sought to understand the unknown without being forced to pay a moral price, the postwar science-fiction reel allowed human curiosity and the scientific method to not only co-exist, but also to attain heroic dimension.
This new, decidedly secular, perspective came at a price - and it was xenophobia.
In order to keep the balance between good and bad, a new villain had to be created - a creature capable of being loathed without reservation, a being that spoke a different language, and a race capable of annihilating ours at the push of a big red button.
The alien was the perfect cinematic stand-in for the Red Menace, and, as a result, early films in the bona fide postwar genre such as The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing feature a very cryptic alien force that is feared and never entirely understood - even though it shares certain human characteristics.
In these movies, "the powers that be" must be revised. Usually, this means the destruction of the status quo, either metaphorically, in the assassination of the Earthling leader, or literally, with the destruction of American cities - and, in some cases, The White House itself.
A look back at some Alien invasion classics
A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune), 1902: The very first film encounter with extra-terrestrial life happened at the very dawn of cinema, when Georges Melies sent a rocket into outer space, and it landed in the eye of the man in the moon. As one of the very first motion pictures ever made, it marks the easy marriage of the fantasy message and the film medium: It lets us experience dreams, nightmares, and contact with extra-terrestrial life, which, in this case, was entirely benign, and caked in whipped cream.
The Thing (from Another World), 1951: Christian Nyby's still chilling piece of science-fiction horror is one of the first reels to really turn the Cold War into alien metaphor, as a group of scientists and soldiers thaw out a hostile alien organism -which turns out to be James Arness, with prosthetic claws. Like War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still, regular human weapons are largely useless against the alien creature enemy.
My Favorite Martian/ Mork and Mindy/ Alf, '60s, '70s, '80s TV: Because real space travel via the Apollo missions in the 1960s redefined the way we understand Earth in relation to the universe, the clunky alien in the rubber suit was a tough sell outside the B-circuit. Science-fiction movies became more sophisticated (2001: A Space Odyssey).
The Cold War was still blowing, but the Kennedy sense of optimism brought a humanization of Other, and the alien was transformed into a potential friend - even a colleague capable of pointing out human flaws and foibles from an outsider stance.
In dramatic terms, the alien took the place of the Shakespearean fool. And our weapons? Still useless. Fortunately, the alien force is too intelligent to care about our primitive ways.
Star Trek/ Star Wars, '60s-'70s-'00s: When the alien is so entirely normalized and he's not even acknowledged as different, then you know you have true subversion - which is exactly what Gene Rodenberry did with the inclusion of a Vulcan aboard the bridge of the Enterprise, as well as a Russian man and a black woman.
Alien/ Aliens (1979, 1986): Ridley Scott's classic and James Cameron's sequel mark an interesting return of the alien genre right around the time Reagan assumed office. The first film is styled after Greek myth, as a lone ship hears a distress beacon and ends up meeting a hostile alien force that reconfigures the power structure. Empowered with new cinematic tools to realize their visions, the filmmakers could create a terrifying new monster to rekindle primal fears of Other - a fear heightened by the creature's ability to colonize our own bodies. The interesting twist in these films was the true enemy: The aliens were clearly nasty, but the people in charge were truly evil, because they wanted to cultivate the aliens as weapons, regardless of how many people died.
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982): Right between the two Alien chapters lies the most revolutionary first-encounter story, as the once horrific genre gets a cute and cuddly makeover in the kids' room. Steven Spielberg didn't just humanize Other, he canonized it, and turned a wee alien being into a modern-day Jesus Christ with a glowing finger and a fiery heart.
District 9 (2009): Neill Blomkamp's brilliant satire of the whole genre takes the whole alien as "Other" notion to the very edge of the concertina wire, and blows it up in the middle. First, the aliens are shipwrecked, leaving them refugees - only, refugees with extremely powerful weapons that are useless to humans. They eat cat food, are forced into concentration camps, and every sign of their humanity is systematically repressed - until our human protagonist undergoes a metamorphosis of his own, and becomes an insect-alien in the final act.
Source:
dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/entertainment/article/1390608