(Related) Movie Throw-down #1: Signs v War of the Worlds (2005)
talk about a wierd blog---how about yours....15th best of your critiques of race in film....cuz you've got at least as many....cuz your a closet racist---you're just like a homophobe lashing out violently at gays. stay away from my workplace.
-Aaron With
Our modern world sure is fraught with peril and strife. Economic instability, the breakdown of the family, political divisions at home and abroad, ecological meltdown, and the little matter of the impending energy crisis that no one has half an idea how to address, nor seemingly the will to do so.
Add to these worries the threat of invasion by hostile extra terrestrials and you’ve got a summer blockbuster on your hands. Hell, let’s toss in a film star who can’t seem to shovel shit onto a once gleaming career fast enough with bizarre (even for a movie star) behavior, special effects worth more than the governmental budgets of many small nations, an adorable child star, some truly ill-conceived alien baddies, and a voice-over courtesy of Morgan Freeman. It shall be known as War of the Worlds (2005).
Right about now you’re probably having flashbacks to Independence Day, which also combined amazing special effects with an offensively thin and emotionally manipulative story. And while that is certainly a connection i made when i saw War of the Worlds, i also thought of a very different invasion movie that nevertheless seemed somehow more relevant.
Signs was M. Night Shyamalan’s third feature film. It’s more sober and atmospheric than War of the Worlds or Independence Day, and is hardly a special effects fest. So what’s the common thread, other than being multi-million dollar Hollywood productions?
Both movies depict alien invasions of our world from the point of view of nuclear American families, and in each case it’s the “head” of the family, the father, who must rise to the challenge and more or less save the day. And in both cases the mother is out of the picture leaving it to father to shoulder the whole burden of an interstellar conflict. It’s hardly surprising that both movies extol the values of white patriarchy; doesn’t every movie these days (and all days?)
Of course, Tom Cruise’s Ray Ferrier (from War of the Worlds) is a very different dad from Mel Gibson’s Graham Hess (in Signs.) He’s a scruffy, immature working class guy, just a normal dude who has a tough time relating to his kids and accepting his responsibilities as a father. He’s a union man, but not some kind of socialist rabble-rouser; he’d rather be terrorizing the neighborhood with reckless driving in his pride and joy, an old muscle car, than attending a labor rally. Typical stuff for Spielberg, the secular liberal. Let’s see what Shyamalan has up his sleeve.
Gibson’s character is a widowed ex-minister (i’m sure it was a great acting challenge for him to portray a Protestant) who lives with his brother and two children on a farm. He’s your archetypal red state Bush voter. He’d definitely base his vote on “moral issues.” He’s a family values type guy, but he’s also having a crisis of faith in light of his wife’s death, and has left his ministry. I suppose he pays the bills with farming, but you never see him working. Must be some of those sweet government subsidies.
In both cases, the alien invasion unfolds as a means of illustrating, intensifying, and ultimately resolving the crisis in each man’s family. Can Tom Cruise gain the maturity he needs to be the head of his family? Can Mel Gibson be reborn in Christ and become a spiritual foundation for his children? Can these men become the rocks that their families need to weather the horrors of the alien incursions?
The aliens: manifestations of your average filmgoers most relevant anxieties. Spielberg’s aliens are interstellar terrorists. They are terrorists literally in the sense that they use terror against civilian populations. And Spielberg plays adorably on the famously (self-)censored line from E.T. when Ferrier’s young daughter asks “are they the terrorists?” after the invasion begins.
Of course this “terrorist” theory may not bear up under closer scrutiny as the aliens’ have no realistic goal for their invasion other than sucking human guts up into their war machines in order to… kill more humans. (As nearly as i can tell, the alien’s war machines are fueled by blood… blood for oil indeed.) Perhaps they are going to take over the world, although that doesn’t explain why they didn’t just do that in the first place, all those years ago before humans even existed (which is when we are told they buried their war machines in the earth.) More probably they resent our way of life. Actually, the alien invasion more closely evokes the horrors of the Holocaust in terms of its scope and reduction of human life to a morally inert substance.
But more chilling than Spielberg’s aliens are his humans. By far the most effective scenes in the film are the ones where Cruise and his family come into conflict with panicked humans, desperately trying to ensure their safety by any means necessary. Early in the story Cruise figures out a way to counteract the aliens’ electromagnetic pulse that has rendered all electronics useless, and gets a car working. He uses the car to flee the city, ostensibly to meet up with his ex-wife in Boston. On the way he encounter a group of refugees who, out of their minds with fear, try to get the car and end up pulling Cruise and his son right out of it. They begin to beat him and the teenage son. Cruise grabs his gun and puts an end to the beating, but another man draws a gun and takes the vehicle. Meanwhile, Cruise loses his gun, another man recovers it, and then uses it to kill the car thief, either for blind revenge or to take the car himself.
This scene is effectively foreshadowed when Cruise takes his gun from a box under his bed as he prepares to flee his home after the beginning of the invasion. We know, even if he doesn’t (and given that he’d already seen one of the war machines he should realize,) that it will be of no use against the aliens, and that it will surely end up being used against other people. When we eventually see the aliens themselves, outside of their war machines, they are hilariously adorable, with big, round eyes. They look like the bastard children of E.T. and H. R. Giger’s alien, if you can believe it.
The disparity between their actions as mass murderers and the behavior of the almost cute aliens as Cruise and a disturbed fat man (Tim Robins) spy on them in a ruined house is puzzling. Spielberg whips out some of his usual routine, showing the aliens exploring the unfamiliar world of earth: they spin the wheel of a bicycle hung on a wall, they’re startled when it falls off the wall, they babble in interstellar baby talk. It’s true that the Nazis were human beings, but i’m sure they weren’t this cuddly.
Shyamalan presents the inverse situation. He plays it coy when it comes to the aliens, leaving you in doubt for most of the film as to whether they even exist. It’s a long time before you catch a glimpse of them, and by that point your anxiety is reaching the boiling point. They were terrifying in the theater and sort of rubbery on a TV. These aliens are altogether more mundane, more pragmatic. They are using fear and limited ground combat against us humans to soften us up for a larger scale invasion with the ultimate goal of seizing our resources.
Although more humanoid in appearance than Spielberg’s creatures, these aliens are far more frightening. They’re intelligent (although they seem to have a lot of trouble with doors) and devious. They act like very effective soldiers. The most frightening scene in Signs takes place as Gibson’s family is barricaded in their basement as the first wave of the invasion has begun. Much of the scene takes place in near pitch darkness, which effectively highlights the sounds of the aliens’ forced entry. Shyamalan makes good on some of his debt to Spielberg by lending him the execution of this scene for use in Robbins's basement.
Meanwhile, Shyamalan’s humans are, in general, the salt of the earth. Everyone in his little farming town knows each other, and it’s all hand-holding, group prayer, divine revelation, and family bonding as they face the assault. The incursion is the occasion for Gibson’s reconnection with his faith, a test for humanity sent, the film would have us believe, directly from God.
Spielberg pulls out the God card as well, although in a much less provocative way than Shyamalan. I’ve called Spielberg essentially secular, and i’ll stick to that, as he evokes God in the most inoffensive, blandly P.C., “in-God-we-trust” sort of way possible, having Morgan Freeman inform us, in his characteristically friendly, paternal way, that God placed bacteria on earth to defend us humans from these sorts of alien invasion, and that there are no meaningless deaths (since all those who died from diseases were contributing to humans’ growing immunity to bacteria. Never mind all the people wiped out by the aliens, or those you’ve just seen killed in the panic following the invasion.)
Shyamalan really outdoes Spielberg (apparently his idol) here, crafting a very tense thriller (although its best scenes don’t translate well for home viewing and it has quite a clunker of an ending) with genuine suspense and some pretty good acting. Spielberg has cranked out a gruesome summer blockbuster, which i like to call “Holocaust: the Ride,” after my sister’s suggestion that War of the Worlds was more akin to a Universal Studios ride than a movie. Spielberg’s mind must be a real charnel house; even his fluff is full of mass murders.
Signs presents us with a worrisome thesis. That God will send us enemies to strengthen our faith. That only through this conflict can faith be strengthened and asserted. It’s easy to dilute this and claim that the aliens are here as a mere metaphor for spiritual struggles that we face (and not for, say, real flesh-and-blood enemies that we must combat,) but keep in mind that this is the analysis that many Christian fundamentalists actually applied to the terrorist attack of 2001. And its basis in doctrine concerning the coming apocalypse hardly needs to be mentioned (consider that the religious right supports aid to Israel on the basis that the wickedness of the Jews is an expedient to the judgment day.)
Furthermore, the September eleventh attack did nothing to change Shyamalan’s preoccupations (Signs came out in 2002, but i’ll play it safe and assume that it came together as a project before the terrorist strike.) Instead, he went on to make The Village, offering an even more disturbing thesis: that we must create our own enemies in order to preserve our values. Which, of course, the United States did in a sense, and more precisely, the global capitalist world system did by creating the conditions under which this kind of global terrorism can exist. Whatever Shyamalan was thinking when he made Signs (and that’s not really my interest) it is hard to look at it now except as a predictor of the Christian Fundamentalist response to the terrorist attack or an echo of apocalyptic prophesies.
It’s harder for me to make something coherent out of Spielberg’s movie. Perhaps this is because there is nothing coherent about Spielberg’s film. It’s a summer blockbuster with little substance. There’s Spielberg’s love for evoking average working class people and neighborhoods, which he does pretty well. There’s his disgustingly predictable penchant for casting adorable precocious girls. And of course, there’s the almost boundless brutality, atrocity, and death.
It’s easy to see what you might get out of a movie like Independence Day. It plays like one of those incredibly triumphant World War II movies, but by replacing the “Japs” or “Krauts” with aliens it remained uncontroversial while allowing the heroes to brutally beat their enemies sans irritating moral quibbles. It would’ve been not only disturbing, but likely a war crime if Will Smith had pulled a wounded Japanese pilot from a crashed airplane and repeatedly punched his head. Luckily there is no interstellar Geneva Convention, and if there were one, we could likely find a loophole large enough for an offshore alien detention center to fit through anyway.
So Independence Day glorified American spirit and prowess in battle at the expense of imaginary others to whom we have no apparent moral or ethical obligations. Of course we should suspect that jingoism will always have innocent victims. What does War of the Worlds offer? It’s hard to say when there is so little resolution to such a gruesome story, and few moments of anything approaching heroism. War of the Worlds hardly glorifies Americans or anyone else, for that matter, in relation to its aliens, presenting instead a chaotic world where life and death are meaningless except in the terms of bare survival, plunging twenty-first century America into Hobbes’s state of nature.
According to a recent article in the Chicago Tribune, War of the Worlds has, in its original and derivative forms, reflected social anxiety, over the fate of the British Empire, the United State’s fate on the eve of World War I, the Cold War, and of course, America’s current precarious position in global events. For a film as brutal and unrewarding as War of the Worlds, this indicates a pretty bleak outlook for America. Even if it's accurate, why is it that people want to see it on the screen? I’m not sure exactly what pleasure we Americans take in envisioning our own end, but it’s hard to argue that we aren’t fascinated by it. From disaster films to actual news coverage of the 2001 terrorist attacks, we replay images of our destruction over and over.
War of the Worlds seems emblematic of the lack of vision that liberals currently posses. Beyond tightening security (right up to the point where the constraints on liberties become intolerable,) there have been few ideas that address the problem of international terrorism. The line taken by neo-conservatives of strengthening foreign military presence will clearly lead to further acts of terrorism and international discord. Changing policy towards Middle-Eastern nations is the most sensible idea, but it seems doubtful that the idea will gain enough support. Even if it does, can enough be done to significantly erode the terrorist’s support and forestall further attacks? And to what extent do terrorists actually rely on broad support? My sense is that regardless of whether or not there is approval for acts of terrorism in a broad sense, funding comes from relatively few wealthy individuals or families, who would be difficult to sway.
The difficulty behind rooting out the threat of terrorism is that this threat is internal to our world-system, not an external one (as a clash of civilizations theory might suggest.) Terrorists play by the rules of international capital, moving information and funds across borders with the ease of high-speed communications and purchasing arms from black markets that are an inevitable side effect of “free” markets. They feed off the anger that is generated by the intrusion of markets as well as the support provided by rich countries to oppressive regimes and the establishment of foreign military bases that are necessary to maintain these markets. And it’s obviously impossible to stop the spread of markets without fundamentally altering the world economy. How is it possible to overcome this resistance that is part-and-parcel of the system itself?
But what’s more worrying, a lack of vision on the part of liberals, or the apparent strength and certitude of those who would dispense with liberal values? Shyamalan, as a presenter of the views of religious fundamentalists, welcomes the invasion and articulates the “proper” response: to reaffirm the values of his Christianity (including those of white male patriarchy.) He suggests that only such a threat can preserve these values.
But these films reveal another source of anxiety, the looming energy crisis. There is a near consensus that current consumption of oil is not sustainable. Meanwhile, China is poised to vastly increase its demand for oil and energy companies are taking only pathetic steps towards alternative energy sources. Once again, the demands of the economy, of continual growth, make it unlikely that a satisfactory solution can be found, especially in the time we probably have to produce one. The result could be armed conflict, possibly on a world scale.
A scarcity of resources is precisely the reason that the aliens in both War of the Worlds and Signs are attacking Earth. Like a clichéd Twilight Zone twist, is it possible that we are actually these aliens, driven to horrible acts by the depletion of our resources?
As a final thought, imagine an America in decline, struggling to retain its dominance overseas to obtain enough oil to prop up a failing economy. Who will be more likely to take up the leadership, the ones desperately pulling each other from cars in hope of a temporary salvation, or the ones who knew all along that there would be a reckoning, and welcomed it Bible in hand and eyes looking proudly up to the Lord?
While you’re pondering that, you should check out Wedding Crashers as a potential antidote to a floundering summer blockbuster season.
Special thanks to jon monteverde (thow-down concept, check jonnymo.blogspot.com) and aaron with (unrestrained id).
-Aaron With
Our modern world sure is fraught with peril and strife. Economic instability, the breakdown of the family, political divisions at home and abroad, ecological meltdown, and the little matter of the impending energy crisis that no one has half an idea how to address, nor seemingly the will to do so.
Add to these worries the threat of invasion by hostile extra terrestrials and you’ve got a summer blockbuster on your hands. Hell, let’s toss in a film star who can’t seem to shovel shit onto a once gleaming career fast enough with bizarre (even for a movie star) behavior, special effects worth more than the governmental budgets of many small nations, an adorable child star, some truly ill-conceived alien baddies, and a voice-over courtesy of Morgan Freeman. It shall be known as War of the Worlds (2005).
Right about now you’re probably having flashbacks to Independence Day, which also combined amazing special effects with an offensively thin and emotionally manipulative story. And while that is certainly a connection i made when i saw War of the Worlds, i also thought of a very different invasion movie that nevertheless seemed somehow more relevant.
Signs was M. Night Shyamalan’s third feature film. It’s more sober and atmospheric than War of the Worlds or Independence Day, and is hardly a special effects fest. So what’s the common thread, other than being multi-million dollar Hollywood productions?
Both movies depict alien invasions of our world from the point of view of nuclear American families, and in each case it’s the “head” of the family, the father, who must rise to the challenge and more or less save the day. And in both cases the mother is out of the picture leaving it to father to shoulder the whole burden of an interstellar conflict. It’s hardly surprising that both movies extol the values of white patriarchy; doesn’t every movie these days (and all days?)
Of course, Tom Cruise’s Ray Ferrier (from War of the Worlds) is a very different dad from Mel Gibson’s Graham Hess (in Signs.) He’s a scruffy, immature working class guy, just a normal dude who has a tough time relating to his kids and accepting his responsibilities as a father. He’s a union man, but not some kind of socialist rabble-rouser; he’d rather be terrorizing the neighborhood with reckless driving in his pride and joy, an old muscle car, than attending a labor rally. Typical stuff for Spielberg, the secular liberal. Let’s see what Shyamalan has up his sleeve.
Gibson’s character is a widowed ex-minister (i’m sure it was a great acting challenge for him to portray a Protestant) who lives with his brother and two children on a farm. He’s your archetypal red state Bush voter. He’d definitely base his vote on “moral issues.” He’s a family values type guy, but he’s also having a crisis of faith in light of his wife’s death, and has left his ministry. I suppose he pays the bills with farming, but you never see him working. Must be some of those sweet government subsidies.
In both cases, the alien invasion unfolds as a means of illustrating, intensifying, and ultimately resolving the crisis in each man’s family. Can Tom Cruise gain the maturity he needs to be the head of his family? Can Mel Gibson be reborn in Christ and become a spiritual foundation for his children? Can these men become the rocks that their families need to weather the horrors of the alien incursions?
The aliens: manifestations of your average filmgoers most relevant anxieties. Spielberg’s aliens are interstellar terrorists. They are terrorists literally in the sense that they use terror against civilian populations. And Spielberg plays adorably on the famously (self-)censored line from E.T. when Ferrier’s young daughter asks “are they the terrorists?” after the invasion begins.
Of course this “terrorist” theory may not bear up under closer scrutiny as the aliens’ have no realistic goal for their invasion other than sucking human guts up into their war machines in order to… kill more humans. (As nearly as i can tell, the alien’s war machines are fueled by blood… blood for oil indeed.) Perhaps they are going to take over the world, although that doesn’t explain why they didn’t just do that in the first place, all those years ago before humans even existed (which is when we are told they buried their war machines in the earth.) More probably they resent our way of life. Actually, the alien invasion more closely evokes the horrors of the Holocaust in terms of its scope and reduction of human life to a morally inert substance.
But more chilling than Spielberg’s aliens are his humans. By far the most effective scenes in the film are the ones where Cruise and his family come into conflict with panicked humans, desperately trying to ensure their safety by any means necessary. Early in the story Cruise figures out a way to counteract the aliens’ electromagnetic pulse that has rendered all electronics useless, and gets a car working. He uses the car to flee the city, ostensibly to meet up with his ex-wife in Boston. On the way he encounter a group of refugees who, out of their minds with fear, try to get the car and end up pulling Cruise and his son right out of it. They begin to beat him and the teenage son. Cruise grabs his gun and puts an end to the beating, but another man draws a gun and takes the vehicle. Meanwhile, Cruise loses his gun, another man recovers it, and then uses it to kill the car thief, either for blind revenge or to take the car himself.
This scene is effectively foreshadowed when Cruise takes his gun from a box under his bed as he prepares to flee his home after the beginning of the invasion. We know, even if he doesn’t (and given that he’d already seen one of the war machines he should realize,) that it will be of no use against the aliens, and that it will surely end up being used against other people. When we eventually see the aliens themselves, outside of their war machines, they are hilariously adorable, with big, round eyes. They look like the bastard children of E.T. and H. R. Giger’s alien, if you can believe it.
The disparity between their actions as mass murderers and the behavior of the almost cute aliens as Cruise and a disturbed fat man (Tim Robins) spy on them in a ruined house is puzzling. Spielberg whips out some of his usual routine, showing the aliens exploring the unfamiliar world of earth: they spin the wheel of a bicycle hung on a wall, they’re startled when it falls off the wall, they babble in interstellar baby talk. It’s true that the Nazis were human beings, but i’m sure they weren’t this cuddly.
Shyamalan presents the inverse situation. He plays it coy when it comes to the aliens, leaving you in doubt for most of the film as to whether they even exist. It’s a long time before you catch a glimpse of them, and by that point your anxiety is reaching the boiling point. They were terrifying in the theater and sort of rubbery on a TV. These aliens are altogether more mundane, more pragmatic. They are using fear and limited ground combat against us humans to soften us up for a larger scale invasion with the ultimate goal of seizing our resources.
Although more humanoid in appearance than Spielberg’s creatures, these aliens are far more frightening. They’re intelligent (although they seem to have a lot of trouble with doors) and devious. They act like very effective soldiers. The most frightening scene in Signs takes place as Gibson’s family is barricaded in their basement as the first wave of the invasion has begun. Much of the scene takes place in near pitch darkness, which effectively highlights the sounds of the aliens’ forced entry. Shyamalan makes good on some of his debt to Spielberg by lending him the execution of this scene for use in Robbins's basement.
Meanwhile, Shyamalan’s humans are, in general, the salt of the earth. Everyone in his little farming town knows each other, and it’s all hand-holding, group prayer, divine revelation, and family bonding as they face the assault. The incursion is the occasion for Gibson’s reconnection with his faith, a test for humanity sent, the film would have us believe, directly from God.
Spielberg pulls out the God card as well, although in a much less provocative way than Shyamalan. I’ve called Spielberg essentially secular, and i’ll stick to that, as he evokes God in the most inoffensive, blandly P.C., “in-God-we-trust” sort of way possible, having Morgan Freeman inform us, in his characteristically friendly, paternal way, that God placed bacteria on earth to defend us humans from these sorts of alien invasion, and that there are no meaningless deaths (since all those who died from diseases were contributing to humans’ growing immunity to bacteria. Never mind all the people wiped out by the aliens, or those you’ve just seen killed in the panic following the invasion.)
Shyamalan really outdoes Spielberg (apparently his idol) here, crafting a very tense thriller (although its best scenes don’t translate well for home viewing and it has quite a clunker of an ending) with genuine suspense and some pretty good acting. Spielberg has cranked out a gruesome summer blockbuster, which i like to call “Holocaust: the Ride,” after my sister’s suggestion that War of the Worlds was more akin to a Universal Studios ride than a movie. Spielberg’s mind must be a real charnel house; even his fluff is full of mass murders.
Signs presents us with a worrisome thesis. That God will send us enemies to strengthen our faith. That only through this conflict can faith be strengthened and asserted. It’s easy to dilute this and claim that the aliens are here as a mere metaphor for spiritual struggles that we face (and not for, say, real flesh-and-blood enemies that we must combat,) but keep in mind that this is the analysis that many Christian fundamentalists actually applied to the terrorist attack of 2001. And its basis in doctrine concerning the coming apocalypse hardly needs to be mentioned (consider that the religious right supports aid to Israel on the basis that the wickedness of the Jews is an expedient to the judgment day.)
Furthermore, the September eleventh attack did nothing to change Shyamalan’s preoccupations (Signs came out in 2002, but i’ll play it safe and assume that it came together as a project before the terrorist strike.) Instead, he went on to make The Village, offering an even more disturbing thesis: that we must create our own enemies in order to preserve our values. Which, of course, the United States did in a sense, and more precisely, the global capitalist world system did by creating the conditions under which this kind of global terrorism can exist. Whatever Shyamalan was thinking when he made Signs (and that’s not really my interest) it is hard to look at it now except as a predictor of the Christian Fundamentalist response to the terrorist attack or an echo of apocalyptic prophesies.
It’s harder for me to make something coherent out of Spielberg’s movie. Perhaps this is because there is nothing coherent about Spielberg’s film. It’s a summer blockbuster with little substance. There’s Spielberg’s love for evoking average working class people and neighborhoods, which he does pretty well. There’s his disgustingly predictable penchant for casting adorable precocious girls. And of course, there’s the almost boundless brutality, atrocity, and death.
It’s easy to see what you might get out of a movie like Independence Day. It plays like one of those incredibly triumphant World War II movies, but by replacing the “Japs” or “Krauts” with aliens it remained uncontroversial while allowing the heroes to brutally beat their enemies sans irritating moral quibbles. It would’ve been not only disturbing, but likely a war crime if Will Smith had pulled a wounded Japanese pilot from a crashed airplane and repeatedly punched his head. Luckily there is no interstellar Geneva Convention, and if there were one, we could likely find a loophole large enough for an offshore alien detention center to fit through anyway.
So Independence Day glorified American spirit and prowess in battle at the expense of imaginary others to whom we have no apparent moral or ethical obligations. Of course we should suspect that jingoism will always have innocent victims. What does War of the Worlds offer? It’s hard to say when there is so little resolution to such a gruesome story, and few moments of anything approaching heroism. War of the Worlds hardly glorifies Americans or anyone else, for that matter, in relation to its aliens, presenting instead a chaotic world where life and death are meaningless except in the terms of bare survival, plunging twenty-first century America into Hobbes’s state of nature.
According to a recent article in the Chicago Tribune, War of the Worlds has, in its original and derivative forms, reflected social anxiety, over the fate of the British Empire, the United State’s fate on the eve of World War I, the Cold War, and of course, America’s current precarious position in global events. For a film as brutal and unrewarding as War of the Worlds, this indicates a pretty bleak outlook for America. Even if it's accurate, why is it that people want to see it on the screen? I’m not sure exactly what pleasure we Americans take in envisioning our own end, but it’s hard to argue that we aren’t fascinated by it. From disaster films to actual news coverage of the 2001 terrorist attacks, we replay images of our destruction over and over.
War of the Worlds seems emblematic of the lack of vision that liberals currently posses. Beyond tightening security (right up to the point where the constraints on liberties become intolerable,) there have been few ideas that address the problem of international terrorism. The line taken by neo-conservatives of strengthening foreign military presence will clearly lead to further acts of terrorism and international discord. Changing policy towards Middle-Eastern nations is the most sensible idea, but it seems doubtful that the idea will gain enough support. Even if it does, can enough be done to significantly erode the terrorist’s support and forestall further attacks? And to what extent do terrorists actually rely on broad support? My sense is that regardless of whether or not there is approval for acts of terrorism in a broad sense, funding comes from relatively few wealthy individuals or families, who would be difficult to sway.
The difficulty behind rooting out the threat of terrorism is that this threat is internal to our world-system, not an external one (as a clash of civilizations theory might suggest.) Terrorists play by the rules of international capital, moving information and funds across borders with the ease of high-speed communications and purchasing arms from black markets that are an inevitable side effect of “free” markets. They feed off the anger that is generated by the intrusion of markets as well as the support provided by rich countries to oppressive regimes and the establishment of foreign military bases that are necessary to maintain these markets. And it’s obviously impossible to stop the spread of markets without fundamentally altering the world economy. How is it possible to overcome this resistance that is part-and-parcel of the system itself?
But what’s more worrying, a lack of vision on the part of liberals, or the apparent strength and certitude of those who would dispense with liberal values? Shyamalan, as a presenter of the views of religious fundamentalists, welcomes the invasion and articulates the “proper” response: to reaffirm the values of his Christianity (including those of white male patriarchy.) He suggests that only such a threat can preserve these values.
But these films reveal another source of anxiety, the looming energy crisis. There is a near consensus that current consumption of oil is not sustainable. Meanwhile, China is poised to vastly increase its demand for oil and energy companies are taking only pathetic steps towards alternative energy sources. Once again, the demands of the economy, of continual growth, make it unlikely that a satisfactory solution can be found, especially in the time we probably have to produce one. The result could be armed conflict, possibly on a world scale.
A scarcity of resources is precisely the reason that the aliens in both War of the Worlds and Signs are attacking Earth. Like a clichéd Twilight Zone twist, is it possible that we are actually these aliens, driven to horrible acts by the depletion of our resources?
As a final thought, imagine an America in decline, struggling to retain its dominance overseas to obtain enough oil to prop up a failing economy. Who will be more likely to take up the leadership, the ones desperately pulling each other from cars in hope of a temporary salvation, or the ones who knew all along that there would be a reckoning, and welcomed it Bible in hand and eyes looking proudly up to the Lord?
While you’re pondering that, you should check out Wedding Crashers as a potential antidote to a floundering summer blockbuster season.
Special thanks to jon monteverde (thow-down concept, check jonnymo.blogspot.com) and aaron with (unrestrained id).
posted by Chris at 1:15 PM
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