EARTH: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT
Aufderheide, Pat
film EARTH Love it or leave it BY PAT AUFDERHEIDE The struggle to be human—something you can't do alone but can only do with other people under considerable stress (an observation that has kept...
...Floating up to the sky with the UFOs is getting to be a habit for young people...
...The link between zealotry and despair, between fundamentalist ecstasy and hopelessness in everyday life, is overt in Uforia...
...Arlene (Cindy Williams of Laverne and Shirley), though, is a true believer...
...What is gone from the universe the Company rules is any sense of community grander than that engendered by mindless military allegiance, any value higher than that of Company profits...
...Cameron also invented the Terminator, a role Arnold Schwarzenegger seized upon and turned into black comedy...
...The System doesn't work, but it makes sense of a sort—a totalitarian sort...
...Also a lonely one, capping the sense of doom for the engineer-dominated society that infuses The Quiet Earth...
...after a war...
...You can't help siding with Arlene against the con artists who try to capitalize on her faith...
...It's the grim suspicion that if there are ways out of how we are now, they do not lie in our power to come up with answers...
...But there is no exit...
...There have always been good aliens in the movies...
...Outraged, she calls the police...
...But, somehow, they don't satisfy...
...she yells at the Other Mom, as she climbs into the clanking machinery the movie's men have dominated up till now...
...She swallows everything she reads about UFOs in magazines at the checkout counter of the supermarket where she is a cashier...
...It is revealing that a prototypical generic pop star, Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, produced the film...
...Arlene is the real miracle worker...
...She wanted the heroine to stand as a critique of image-freedom: "Margaret had the attributes of liberation, in the way she dresses and speaks...
...And the Marines who come out to save the colonists are just as alienated as the workers had been: "They aren't paying us enough for this," one groans as they pull themselves creakily out of their hyper-space tubes...
...Other science-fiction films of the moment also display a disturbing lack of faith in a human future, along with mordant criticism of commodity culture today...
...Aliens don't have to be good guys any more to look good in comparison to humans...
...But you also can't help wishing, at movie's end, that there were some way other than up to get off the mountain on which they are perched...
...it's about grownups, but they are as lost and yearning as any teen-ager...
...Pat Robertson would not approve...
...And by the way, Cindy Williams professes to truly believe in UFOs...
...Films like these—and not high-budget, high-tech clunkers like 2070, which looked as if it had been made not only by a committee but by a committee of computers—are the ones that strike a chord with mass audiences...
...But the question that pops up in the middle of the film never goes away...
...Current science-fiction films display a disturbing lack of faith in a human future...
...Elaine, played by Alexandra Pigg, is young, cute, and desperately unemployed...
...What drives our movie heroes into outer space is the seamless exhaustion off everyday life* So: Biology is destiny...
...Despite all the fun with hardware, the premise of a powerful piece of science fiction is political...
...Sylvester Stallone then took his notion and ran the other way with it...
...For human beings, the body social is the critical unit...
...What forces them into the arms of the transcendant unknown is the seamless exhaustion staring out at them from supermarket shelves, unemployment offices, and the gateways to trailer courts...
...Rambo and Terminator in their original versions are both victims and destroyers, vengeful creations of a heartless society...
...Media fundamentalism isn't enough for Otto...
...But is it the right destiny...
...In the madly inventive Brazil, Terry Gilliam (a nice boy from Minnesota who joined the Monty Python crowd) imagines a 1984 organized by a combination of the telephone company, the Pentagon, and the Social Security Administration...
...What is driving our movie heroes into outer space with the aliens is not the sort of politicking that can be fixed up at an arms summit...
...In 2010, aliens are the deus ex machina that resolves the superpower conflict (in favor of the Free World, of course) and ushers in a secular version of the millennium...
...And in this era, the parents—who in Rebel are anguished, if ineffectual—are not up to worrying about his situation...
...Her boyfriend (Fred Ward) and the preacher first pooh-pooh her fantasies and then exploit them, turning her sweet conviction that life does have meaning—at least in outer space—into a new hustle...
...Soon, he has collected a couple of companions—a young woman (Alison Rout-ledge) and a Maori (Peter Smith)—and ancient patterns of jealousy and control surface...
...In the end, she welcomes the chance to submit to the UFO that zaps her into the ozone in an energy surge—and we're glad for her...
...He assuages his guilt by overindulging in now-plentiful consumer pleasures...
...They are creepy and grasping and conscienceless...
...We are running away from ourselves in these movies...
...Clammy but friendly aliens in Cocoon offer oldsters the ambiguous gift of eternal youth...
...The hero escapes, but to inner, not outer, space...
...That alien lets the best in white-bread-land triumph at the movie's end, and the flood of licensed products in its wake kept us frorq asking what will happen when little Elliot grows up—presumably to be one of those men with clanking keys that he so fears...
...They fit right into the game people are playing...
...He has a mission: rescuing consumer culture...
...Our Mom wins, having put technology in the service of fierce maternal love...
...They manage to pull together to try to save the Earth from final destruction, and it almost works...
...The board room executives are just as focused on the bottom line as those workers said they are...
...Close Encounters of the Third Kind imagines an alien who embodies the sense of childhood innocence that director Steven Spielberg finds betrayed in the adults of his authentically captured, suburban, plastic-wrapped worlds...
...It's the uninviting prospect of pledging their allegiance to systems that only work with a deathly logic...
...Cameron created a psychopath whose pathology was fostered by an inhumane and self-contradictory war machine, one of the walking wounded of empire...
...If you're living in a place where there are no prospects for you, you don't see yourself as having any future...
...It's a beautiful vision, even a lyrical vision...
...Uforia is built from some of the same raw materials as Repo Man...
...I got involved in the film because so many people died, and I felt it was very sad that this whole cultural upheaval that had happened at night, a theater in life, would die—pass on once it had hit the windows at Macy's...
...But so what...
...Just think of the patriarchal pontifications of Robert Heinlein or the inspirational humanism of Clifford Si-mak...
...Caught inexorably by the oppressive political machine, he fantasizes about disappearing with his girlfriend over the horizon into a bucolic never-never land free of hardware and blisses out as torturers go to work on what's left of his body...
...The opening scene is reminiscent of Bob Dylan's "Talkin' World War III Blues," with the line, "Good car to drive...
...But two generations later, the kid isn't looking for romance, just a job...
...The horror was really within society...
...She's American, in that sense...
...they just have to be aliens...
...But aliens don't have to be good guys any more to look good in comparison to humans...
...He really believes the kind of rhetoric our President hands out as he strips away the Government's role as social redistrib-utor of benefits—that what's good for the corporation's profit margin is what's good for people...
...Repo Man does for supermarket culture what Liquid Sky does for downtown New York...
...politics-please rule for the mass-appeal movie...
...Once Burke has been swallowed into the pod-reproduction factory, it is Ripley—a single mother protecting the adopted daughter she has found on the colony—against the Supermom from outer space...
...The unemployment office presents him with an exemplary sampler: night watchman, asbestos worker, fast-food flipper...
...Wherever he's going, at least he will be spared the exhausted version of consumer life to which his buddies, staring up at him from the parking lot, are condemned...
...The morality plays of high-tech culture, works of science fiction offer a progress-addicted people hurtling into the future a way to see themselves in the present...
...At the same time, anonymous aliens are trying to repossess their radioactive treasure, stashed in the trunk of a 1964 Chevy Malibu...
...he is not ready for the living grave of the living room...
...she can take cheap lies and turn them into real inspiration...
...There's a strong case for being a pod," he said...
...But not quite...
...But he would understand...
...The heroes and heroines are courageous enough to be wistful—for meaning, location, belief, love...
...And then, of course, there are galactic imperial constructions from Isaac Asimov to Frank Herbert, including the cosmic marriage of imperialism and innocence in Star Wars...
...He was the original scriptwriter for Rambo...
...film EARTH Love it or leave it BY PAT AUFDERHEIDE The struggle to be human—something you can't do alone but can only do with other people under considerable stress (an observation that has kept anthropologists and psychologists in socks for a century now)—is also the stuff of science fiction...
...At least they have the camaraderie of shared exploitation...
...That's right...
...Like him, Otto wants to be both a kid and a man, both hip and in charge...
...Back in 1955, with anticommunist paranoia the mood of the day, director Don Siegel argued that his Invasion of the Body Snatchers was all about the dangers of conformity...
...There certainly is no place for her down here...
...In the last scene, our hero wakes up to—a vision of another planet...
...The ending is open for another sequel, but Ripley may run out of reasons to save us, because, unlike the mega-organism she fights, she can't win by preserving the body alone...
...We leave them just as the UFOs are landing...
...New Wave was a very black protest," she said, "so black that there was nothing left to talk about...
...She falls in love with a Russian sailor and fantasizes about defection from capitalist decay...
...Get away from her, you bitch...
...At the end, the hero sails into the sky in the Chevy, in an apotheosis as tacky as the generic culture he leaves behind...
...And she found a niche in the New Wave, but in the end she looks for a prince again—and it's a UFO...
...Pigg explained recently in press interviews: "From Elaine's point of view, if she could go to Russia, at least it's an adventure...
...As the part-machine cyborg, the Terminator comes back from a postnuclear future to attack a modern Madonna carrying the seed of human survival...
...We're only tenants of this world," says one of the sobered humans...
...And that's a disturbing innovation...
...That's why science-fiction movies are the great exception to Hollywood's no-Pa...
...The hero is a lost kid, an inheritor of the character played by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause...
...The society that Ripley returns to after fifty-seven years of drifting in space has only gotten worse since her days piloting a factory-ship full of alienated drifters, tempering their routine with hostile remarks about their exploitation...
...It is Burke who wants to preserve the nuclear installation ("a substantial dollar value") and to bring back an alien (as a great "bioweapon...
...He's the Don Quixote of Credit Worthiness...
...in an electrical blitz, everyone on Earth is zapped out of existence—it seems— except for one of the engineers (Bruno Lawrence) who worked on the doom project...
...This time he's a hustler-preacher who believes his own message to the extent that it works to keep him in beer...
...The New Zealand import The Quiet Earth, directed by Geoff Murphy (known for his international hit Goodbye, Pork Pie), works a different sub-genre: the end-of-the-world story...
...Guess who saves them...
...This offbeat film was directed by John Binder, who worked on Marjoe, a film about a faith-healer...
...In the same way that the recent flood of teen-age movies portrays a world in which it is impossible to imagine being a grownup and liking it, these science-fiction films abandon the Utopian thread on which our modern morality plays have been hung...
...It's like, the world is so full of lies we don't want to speak our own...
...This is the kind of philosophy that a slightly chastened Burke from Aliens might be able to get into an annual report...
...The look was everything...
...And that's also why it's so interesting that science-fiction films recently have given a new role to the aliens in the story: that of escape hatch...
...We've been given a new lease—and a warning from the landlord...
...Burke, like middle-management professionals all over our corporate landscape, buys the Company line...
...The wonder and promise of the beyond and the other—recall the haunting mystery of 2001—are wedded to the here and now of us together...
...In The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), for instance, a nice guy from outer space tries to tell us to stop the nuclear-arms race by pulling the plug on the world's power...
...It takes place in trailers and tents in the Southwest, where the new migrant workers get tacky jobs and tacky lives and look to roving fundamentalists for tacky salvation...
...He finally finds work repossessing cars...
...In this parallel universe, everything is a generic product—down to a can labeled food in generic packaging...
...The punker Otto, played by a mournful-looking Emilio Estevez, takes that way out in Repo Man, directed by first-timer Alex Cox...
...You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamned percentage...
...think of Ursula LeGuin's cross-cultural probes and anarchistic dreams...
...In the most recent blockbuster science-fiction film, Aliens, Sigourney Weaver as the androgynous heroine Ripley updates that comment...
...I'm not sure which species is worse," Ripley cries...
...An experiment has gone awry...
...The only thing more powerful than Burke and the monster corporation he represents is the other horror that Aliens exploits: mother love...
...His boss, played,by Harry Dean Stanton, goes at it with a cru-j sader's zeal...
...At movie's end, the girls are heading home—home, where the board-room execs, the sullen dock workers, the muscle-bound Marines, and the Company clones are...
...They look to the sky, hopefully...
...In her battle to protect humanity against the super-parasites from outer space, she's as much at war with the Company and its legal-eagle Burke as she-is with the alien Supermom who has turned the nuclear-powered space colony into a hive for her young...
...Too bad he left before he could make a date with Elaine, the heroine of Letter to Brezhnev, an independent film made by unemployed Liverpudlian youth about the despair at the core of Maggie Thatcher's England...
...In the end, Ripley wins against both the Company and the aliens...
...They are glued to the television preacher who promises them salvation...
...A woman's instincts save high-tech society from itself...
...This is not the first time that James Cameron, the director of Aliens, has created horror-drama out of horrific social conditions...
...The heroine struggles for self-expression, but it's a lonely battle in her neon-lit, nihilistic world—so lonely, in fact, that the only person she can establish a relationship with is an alter ego...
...Aufderheide is a senior editor of In These Times and the Washington, D.C., representative of the United Church of Christ Office of Communications...
...Liquid Sky, the independent film made by Russian emigres and American punk artists that's become a midnight cult favorite nationwide, plunges its audience into a youth culture of sex, drugs, and death, and all of it with style...
...Again, Stanton stars...
...Co-scriptwriter and star Ann Carlisle meant for her work to be seen as a "memorial," she told me soon after the film's first national splash...
Vol. 50 • October 1986 • No. 10
