Skyline
August 10, 2010Henry Baum 1 Comment »Another aliens are terrorists movie. Though the image of thousands of people being sucked up in a cloud of dust is effective.
A group of young, mildly douchey friends are spending the weekend partying at a swanky hotel on the outskirts of Los Angeles. After a night of revelry, they are awakened at 4:27 AM by strange, booming noises. They head outside to see strange blue lights vaporizing downtown Los Angeles. When two of the characters go out to the roof to investigate, they see UFOs descend from the clouds, and other people start getting sucked off the rooftops into the ships.
So, “Cloverfield” meets “War of the Worlds.” Curiously, L.A. seems to be the main target of aliens these days. TABOTD takes place in L.A., as does my life.
My problem with these movies is not just that the alien story is potentially more multi-faceted than they’re here to kill us. It’s propagating a fear of the other, and trumping up the idea that it’s always a good idea to go to war with the other. That it’s playing on terrorist paranoia is not really much of an insight, but our response to terrorism is to go to war with two countries where we shouldn’t have been. But not only that – the Bush administration and the media painted terrorists as a black and white boogie men, while overlooking our own deficiencies – killing hundreds of thousands, displacing families, torture. So it’s relaxing to have a movie where an antagonist is so unquestioningly evil, but it’s also a dangerous sort of conditioning.
I find it uniquely mysterious that there were so many disaster movies in the late nineties before 9-11 – “Independence Day,” “Volcano,” “Deep Impact,” “Armageddon,” even “Titanic.” Not for a second saying that there was a conspiratorial effort to condition people, but when people said, over and over again about 9-11, “It was like watching a movie,” they’re also remembering the black and white antagonists of Hollywood blockbusters. If 9-11 was like a movie, so was the impulse to bomb the shit out of anybody after it. We’re still there, long after the death wish for revenge is gone from the country’s psyche.
I’ve written two novels about Hollywood, so I’m not just obsessed with the UFO issue, but how pop culture sculpts popular thought, and there’s so much more that could be explored about the topic of UFOs – but it’s usually covered with violence or mockery. Frankly, that’s as un-nuanced a position as the blatherings of the Republican base.
August 24th, 2010 at 4:53 pm
[...] “coming of Maitreya” or somesuch. I’ve actually argued that movies like Skyline condition people – but to war, not alien invasion. Maybe I really am playing into the puppet-masters’ [...]