Is there a crisis looming?
April 20th, 2007 ~ Caution: The moving walkway is endingBack 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.
- 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.
- 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.”
Contents available under a
April 20th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
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.)
April 21st, 2007 at 10:47 am
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:
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.
April 21st, 2007 at 2:14 pm
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.