The day the earth stood still… and then rotated backwards.
The Christian Science Monitor connects the dots in today’s “Return of the alien invaders: Tales of a nation under attack, which recur when public anxiety rises, multiply at theaters and on TV.”
While I believe the part about public anxiety, I don’t agree that the inevitable collective response is cowering in fear…of our own shadows.
Frankly, I think the American public is smarter than that.
If “The Swan” and “Survivor” are accurate reflections of the zeitgeist (and Mr. Nielsen certainly confirms this premise), there’s more hunger for dark comedy than black face.
I’m not sure when this era’s equivalent of Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street or V will emerge but I’m quite confident that hysterical horror is more American than horrified hysteria.
As to the current fad of alien invasion stories, I think there’s a far more obvious explanation than some deep-seated cultural neurosis: lazy, overpaid, unimaginative writers.
Why should we credit the dream factory with revelatory powers? (Gigli.)
On the contrary, deep psychological insights tend to be surprising, rather than reassuring.
Facing a far more visceral national crisis than today’s, a famous American once said: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
In other words, we are the aliens.
That kind of self-awareness doesn’t often come out of Hollywood, a hermetic world where narcissism is usually confused with introspection.
In yesterday’s El Pais sunday magazine, a cover-story (OK, a blowjob) for War of the Worlds ended with Tom Cruise describing Stephen Spielberg as the greatest storyteller of our time and an unparalleled genius.
Maybe, yes. Maybe that laurel does inded belong to Stephen.
Stephen King, that is.
Update: I had started to feel guilty about this diatribe. Maybe I was being to hard on Stephen Spielberg. I mean, what Oscar winning movies have I directed or produced? Where are my hundreds of millions of dollars of positive, mainstream affirmation? Did I make a the story of the Holocaust accessible to millions of Americans? Did I help E.T. phone home? Um, Poltergeist?
Luckily for my oversized ego, one of my favorite writers, Timothy Noah, has written the following critique of War of the Worlds for Slate.
Because War of the Worlds has nothing to say about 9/11, its appropriation of 9/11 imagery can only be described as pornographic. Tapping the audience’s memories of the 9/11 attacks injects a frisson of real-world suffering that’s completely unearned. The movie lacks any construct elucidating further parallels between 9/11 and the imaginary invasion of Bayonne, N.J., by space aliens. The 9/11 trope has no meaning. It’s merely an elbow in the side, reminding the audience of that day’s awful events.