Expecting visitors?
McConnell, Frank
Frank McConnell EXPECTING VISITORS? Aliens from inner space At this point it's difficult to red the movie listings, or channel-surf in prime time, without coming across an invasion from outer...
...Around the approach of the year 1000, people began looking for angels and demons in the sky-they were familiar with Revelation, after all, and knew what was what...
...and it's going to get even more difficult as we surf toward the emblematic year, 2001...
...The first invasion of Earth from another planet occurred in 1898, in H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds...
...In fact, you could write a revealing spiritual history of Anglo-American aspirations and expectations just by tracking the various ways the aliens, since 1898, have appeared...
...We are not alone...
...They can be purely malevolent, as in War of the Worlds...
...As we approach millennium-an artificial, Eurocentric date certainly, but just as certainly inescapable-our quantum physicists grow more mystical, our philosophers and theologians become more obsessed with the ancient, this-world-is-merely-illusion wisdom of the Gnostics, and prophets and madmen of every stripe plan for the End of Reality as We Know It...
...Surely some revelation is at hand...
...Not many of us use Revelation as a template for experience anymore, but we do have Roswell, Area 51 in New Mexico, and the concept of faster-than-light travel for metaphors, and the angels and demons are back in our minds again...
...Do they come to damn us or save us...
...The most significant event of summer 1996 was not either political convention, not Dick Morris, not the Atlanta Olympics, not even the prospect of O.J...
...Whatever they are, at various times, all these things-they are always mirrors, barometers of our hope...
...And yet it generated lines around the block, and it is one of the few movies ever to have been a cover story on both Time and Newsweek-before its premiere...
...Surely the Second Coming is at hand...
...Science fiction, the unique literary voice of our century, would scarcely be imaginable without them...
...But just who are they...
...Well, probably not...
...They're also, of course, as is all sci-fi, deeply religious manifestations...
...On TV for the last three seasons the most interesting, classy show has been Fox's "The X-Files," whose ongoing premise is that aliens have landed, are here, and the government is covering it up: something, by the way, that a scary number of folks really believe...
...And Independence Day is only the tip of the iceberg-or, better, the leading edge of the saucer...
...It's more like no-escape, no-way-out literature...
...Sure...
...I hope someone will organize a suitable centennial celebration, since this is the sort of literary event that does not often happen: no one before Wells had thought to envision an advanced, unsympathetic, murderous force showing earth-lings their pathetic littleness...
...A little history will help...
...It's about the "future" only in the sense that your life is about the future when you climb out of bed in the morning...
...Of course, bad guy/good guy alien stories have fascinated us throughout the century of millennium's end...
...revisited: it was Independence Day, a medium-budget, high-tech, bad-space-guys-come-to-kick-earth's-butt-but-we-kick-their-butt epic that, with cheesier effects, would have fit right into the 1950s...
...1898: two years before 1900, which is almost as apocalyptic a number as 2000, and when international tensions and military buildups throughout Europe had virtually ensured that the First World War would, sooner or later, break out...
...Mere hype...
...But they are always a projection of what we feel ourselves to be now, of where we think we're headed now...
...Still, as we approach millennium's beginning, the fascination is approaching the obsessive-compulsive level...
...Science fiction had begun-as had twentieth-century Angst, which, of course, is the tonic chord of science fiction altogether...
...they can be semidivine and kindly, as in Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
...And now we await 2000, and boy, are we atwitter...
...Fox and the three other major networks have all written into this fall's schedule a slew of new series centering around the alien-invader theme- including one with the eloquently economical title, "Dark Skies" (ABC...
...But don't underestimate hype as an index of the national psyche...
...Are they commies or missionaries...
...And no sci-fi invader story has ever, really, trespassed the boundaries of Wells's original invention-which does not mean that there haven't been brilliant, unexpected variations on the theme...
...Hollywood has already scheduled a baker's dozen and more of invader films-including the much awaited Mars Attacks, by the wonderfully eccentric Tim Burton {Edward Scissorhands...
...Evil or benign, these mythic figures tell us the Gnostic truth that-quoting the slogan of Close Encounters-"We are not alone...
...Nothing happened, of course, except the psychic longing of that end-time produced the High Middle Ages, Saint Francis of Assisi, Dante, and ultimately-us...
...But our passion for Visitors from Beyond makes noble sense as our still-unquenched thirst for the transcendent...
...And our collective enthusiasm for stories- myths-about those visitors, the rough beast slouching or flying toward a new birth, is no more nor less than an expression of our longing for meaning...
...Mankind can no more live without gods than you can kill yourself by holding your breath...
...Or, as someone once observed, sci-fi is always "about" the precise year in which it was written...
...And the rest of us watch more and more movies and TV shows about alien visitors...
...The trick of advertising is not to tell folks what they should like, but to tell them it's okay to like what they already do like...
...Science fiction is not, to use the dismissive academic phrase, "escape literature...
...The aliens are always the future-yours and mine...
...Aliens from inner space At this point it's difficult to red the movie listings, or channel-surf in prime time, without coming across an invasion from outer space...
...Wells's novel spoke to just that sense of dread of the future century: in fact, his invading Martians were the future century or, even more plainly, the future...
...The fact is that, even if actual saucers never actually land here, we have been invaded by aliens-not from outer, but from inner space, from the abandoned- we thought-mineshafts of the imagination...
...and they can be a puzzling mirror of our own moral complexity, as in "The X-Files" or the brilliant, recently resurrected series from the eighties, "Alien Nation" (get the pun...
...Or are they just-as in, say E.T.-feelgood imaginary friends, straight from the New Age nonthink tanks of Marin County...
...Look around: they're here...
Vol. 123 • November 1996 • No. 20
