Is there a crisis looming?

  • Back here when I saw “The Last Mimzy,” we just hap­pened to see “V for Vendetta” the next night, and I real­ized that both movies allude — as many movies allude — to a loom­ing cri­sis of human­ity or soci­ety or cul­ture. Is that merely the stuff of over­ac­tive cre­ative types, or are these writ­ers and film­mak­ers sens­ing that we can’t go on like this much longer? If so, it may be one of the only things where they agree with the Pope.

    Pope Bene­dict XVI marked his 80th birth­day Sun­day with a mass before thou­sands of wor­shipers in which he spoke of “dark­ness” threat­en­ing the world in the form of war, oppres­sion and hate.

    So are we com­ing up to some kind of cliff’s edge or not? It’s a silly ques­tion, and I couldn’t pre­tend to have an answer. I sup­pose I’d do bet­ter to back­track and explain why two movies made me even start won­der­ing about all this.
    The movies are com­pletely dif­fer­ent in feel, in out­look, in mes­sage, but they share an idea about where we’re all headed. We’re headed into the abyss, apparently.

    (spoiler warn­ing. Gotta talk about the mes­sage of the two movies from begin­ning to end, so if you hate spoil­ers, eject! eject! eject!)

    In “Last Mimzy” human­ity will face extinc­tion because our DNA will become pol­luted. What­ever that means, it will take the tears of a child sent into the future to restore the human race to wholeness.

    In “V for Vendetta” soci­ety will hit the skids in the next cou­ple decades. America’s war on ter­ror­ism will ren­der it bank­rupt in every sense and Eng­land will come under the despotic rule of an ultra-conservative reli­gious fanatic (because Eng­land has so many of those — don’t get me started) who will use everyone’s fear as an excuse to set up a theoc­racy. Okay, so I totally hated that premise, but the movie was a fab­u­lous graphic novel treat­ment other than that knee-slapper of a prophecy. In this case, what brings the winds of change is one man (“V”) who goes around in a Guy Fawkes mask and even­tu­ally blows up the Houses of Par­lia­ment as the orig­i­nal Guy Fawkes tried to do. So the movie rejects the idea of ter­ror­ism as some­thing to be afraid of and tells us that it’s an act of ter­ror that we need to set us free.

    These two are the kind of movie fare we’ve all got­ten to sam­ple many times over the years, but there’s some­thing about the scope of them and the reg­u­lar­ity of the theme of mankind on the brink of dis­as­ter that seems to me some­times like drum­beats that are get­ting closer together.

    It doesn’t mean that any­thing has to hap­pen. But it may mean that we are start­ing to cave under the sus­pense that some­thing might hap­pen or should hap­pen. And then, just to make things more com­pli­cated, there are two entirely plau­si­ble expla­na­tions that argue against tak­ing any of this too seriously.

    1. This is what movies have to do. If there’s no prob­lem, then there’s no hero or hero­ine. If movie-goers are increas­ingly bored and hard to thrill, then the movies have to have major prob­lems so they can give us major heroes.
    2. The cri­sis that the enter­tain­ment indus­try is point­ing to is their own. It’s not just that ticket prices are down, it’s that more and more of the pub­lic are just get­ting fatigued with the con­stant assaults on their atten­tion, and seems to actu­ally be turn­ing away from mass enter­tain­ment in favor of mak­ing their own movies, music and fic­tion. This devel­op­ment is unthink­able to a seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion that has got­ten used to being held in par­tic­u­lar regard. And this is a cri­sis the enter­tain­ment indus­try shares with the Main­stream Media, who is los­ing a long­time monop­oly on giv­ing us all the news fit to print and broad­cast. Together, they point to a calamity for those who have been the sto­ry­tellers and myth­mak­ers of the last cou­ple cen­turies. When they present sce­nar­ios of The End of Things, they are broad­cast­ing their own panic at their grow­ing irrel­e­vance and loom­ing obsolescence.

    Both those things are hap­pen­ing. But is that all that’s happening?

    As I said, I don’t pre­tend that I know. But because it’s inter­est­ing to me to look into these things, I went ahead and set up a new cat­e­gory for a bit of ongo­ing inves­ti­ga­tion. I may even­tu­ally get a good model of how to sum up the dif­fer­ent ideas, but for now I’ll just get them down as they occur and let them stand or fall on their own.

    I’ve named this cat­e­gory after some­thing that you hear a lot in Chicago’s Mid­way Air­port. On one trip I heard it so much that it even­tu­ally seemed por­ten­tous, and I always thought that if I was doing a specif­i­cally escha­to­log­i­cal blog I would name it this:

    “Atten­tion: The mov­ing walk­way is ending.”


    Related posts:

    1. Kong not king
    2. Gosh. Can’t they take a joke?
    3. The Last Mimzy
    4. Advice from one pos­si­ble future

    April 20th, 2007 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • Jan Bear 04.20.2007

    There’s always immi­nent destruc­tion. Brave New World, On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, Godzilla, The Blob, War of the Worlds. Water­world. Too recent?

    The Apoc­a­lypse of St. John, Ezekiel, Isa­iah. God telling Noah to build an ark.

    Com­ing back to the present, I think there are two fac­tors here. One is rais­ing the stakes as a nar­ra­tive device. There has to be some­thing impor­tant at stake to make the story com­pelling enough to keep the reader read­ing. (“But wait. Why do peo­ple like sto­ries about the immi­nent end of the world instead of happy bun­nies?” “Next ques­tion, way back there.”) This is the same as your #1.

    The other fac­tor is that sci­ence fic­tion helps us face and deal with the oth­er­wise unimag­in­able effects of new tech­nol­ogy. We can’t wait for tech­no­log­i­cal dis­as­ters to come upon us, because with many of them, once they do, it’s too late. It’s not the end of the dis­cus­sion, and sci­ence fic­tion is not an ade­quate sub­sti­tute for learn­ing real sci­ence, but it serves a valu­able role in edu­cat­ing the imag­i­na­tion of the people.

    I believe that the sci­ence fic­tion of the ‘50s prob­a­bly helped the prin­ci­ple of mutual assured destruc­tion “work” — in that we avoided nuclear war with either the Sovi­ets or the Chi­nese. (I don’t think it will work with Ahmadine­jad, but that raises the ques­tion of what kinds of sto­ries we need to tell now.)

  • Grace

    Immi­nent destruc­tion: Sort of makes us look like the species that oper­ates by a series of con­trolled falls.

    But along with that, I favor the pro­gres­sion of the Ortho­dox idea of time and cycles. We oper­ate in cycles — sum­mer and win­ter, war and peace, rise and fall — but it doesn’t mean we’re doing exactly the same thing over and over again. As we progress through the cycles, we’re also pro­gress­ing in another dimen­sion (the “time as Slinky” idea — for­get when I talked about it last). So the Pelo­pon­nesian War and the Franco-Prussian War and WW I and the war in Iraq are all wars, but they are not iden­ti­cal. We are mov­ing for­ward towards some things and away from others.

    Rais­ing the stakes: Absolutely. No mat­ter what else is the­o­ret­i­cal, this part of it is cer­tain — sto­ry­tellers are talk­ing louder than ever because there are so many of them vying for atten­tion. And once they get our atten­tion, they’re by golly going to do what it takes to keep it.

    Sci­ence fic­tion and “future shock” (which is an out­dated term for it, but what­ever): I for­got about this aspect of things, but you’re right — sci­ence fic­tion became one of the big cop­ing mech­a­nisms and a way to talk about tech­no­log­i­cal prob­lems with­out being seen as a gloom-and-doom naysayer. In that way, I’ve always thought that it’s inter­est­ing to fol­low the pro­gres­sion in sci­ence fic­tion books and movies of who the bad guy is and what it takes to beat him. Some­thing like this:

    War of the Worlds — bad guy: them — beaten by: germs
    Day the Earth Stood Still – bad guy: us — beaten by: them keep­ing the earth still so they could give us a good talk­ing to (I think. Been a while since I’ve seen that one)
    Godzilla — bad guy: Godzilla, but because nuclear fall­out made him what he was, we shared a big part of the guilt — beaten by: mil­i­tary might
    Planet of the Apes — bad guy: apes, or so you think until the big end­ing. Ulti­mately, the bad guy is us — beaten by: well, they didn’t really get beaten. The lone human just rode off after some brief pon­tif­i­cat­ing.
    Alien – bad guy: the alien, though again, at the end you find out that we’re to blame — beaten by: one fighter
    Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind — bad guys: us, when we’re igno­rant and close-minded — beaten by: Nobody’s beaten; every­one wins. Aliens are benev­o­lent, we are idiots who they take pity on and attempt to edu­cate.
    Inde­pen­dence Day — bad guy: them (and only them, with no human guilt. In that way, I always thought that movie was a bit of a throw­back) — beaten by: com­puter virus plus some mil­i­tary might
    And then recently they rere­leased War of the Worlds, and they were the bad guys and they were beaten by germs again.

    You could prob­a­bly come up with a lot more com­pre­hen­sive list than this. My sci-fi back­ground is sketchy.

    Cul­ture wars and sto­ry­telling: Yep, I’ve been won­der­ing about that. We no longer have the abil­ity to cre­ate last­ing mythos, and yet there’s still a need for it. Well, that’s some­thing for another blog-day, as they say.

  • Jan Bear

    Nice sum­mary of good guys and bad guys. I think it’s an indi­ca­tor of how we see our own power at any given time. When our ene­mies seem huge and dan­ger­ous and the out­come of the strug­gle is in ques­tion, then the aliens are the bad guys. When we seem indomitable, then we are the bad guys.

    There’s a lot of cul­tural psy­chol­ogy stored in these sto­ries, and I wish I had the infor­ma­tion or the wis­dom to tease it out.

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required