Keep watching the skies!
– from The Thing
From the alarming ‘carnivorous carrot’ in The Thing (Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks, 1951) to Steve McQueen’s getting ‘slimed’ by The Blob (Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., 1958) to Richard Dreyfuss’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) to the downright cuddly E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982), science fiction films have been bringing alien life into American movie theatres, driveins, televisions and VCRs for nearly forty years.1 This fascination with aliens reveals much about Americans’ deepest fears. During the 1950s, cinematic aliens clearly reflected Cold War fear2 of ‘penetration, invasion and colonisation by an alien Other’.3 One thinks of films such as the aptly named Red Planet Mars (Harry Horner, 1952) and the emotionless, faith-free pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), both representing what life under communism would be like. During the 1960s, space aliens descended less frequently to earthly screens. Film scholar Vivian Sobchack posits that this shift away from overt representation of otherness may be the result of a new focus on the domestic ‘Other’ in the form of the proud Black, the liberated woman, or the alienated and rebellious youth.4 During the 1970s, real space aliens returned, this time, however, in much less threatening forms. In this essay I focus on these kinder, gentler aliens, arguing that their appearance addressed our deep fears about technology and answered spiritual questions about our destiny.
The space alien dramatically reentered Earth’s atmosphere in 1976 with the release of Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. Importantly, Thomas Jerome Newton appears entirely human. He is neither a repulsive blob nor a mechanised robot nor a blank-faced automaton nor a horribly deformed creature. He is an entirely recognisable human being.
In the decade that followed, humanoid aliens, markedly different from the classic Cold War aliens, were frequent visitors. This is not to say that nonhuman aliens stopped dropping by as well. Close Encounters, E.T., The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), and The Abyss (James Cameron, 1989) are but a few of the popular movies that deal with extraterrestrial visitors that are not humanoid. The focus of this essay, however, is on aliens who are unmistakably humanoid. Why has Hollywood begun to make aliens in our own image?5
This essay examines, along with The Man Who Fell to Earth, three other spaceman movies of the 1970s and 1980s: The Brother from Another Planet (John Sayles, 1984), Starman (John Carpenter, 1984) and Man Facing Southeast (Eliseo Subiela, 1986). Each of these films centres around an intentional visitation. Some visitors come for purely selfish reasons: Newton (David Bowie) is on a quest for water for his drought-ridden planet, and the Brother (Joe Morton) is seeking asylum from galactic slavery. Starman (Jeff Bridges) seems to have simply responded to the invitation broadcast by Voyager II. The visitor in Man Facing Southeast claims pure altruism; Rantes (Hugo Soto) wants to alleviate the suffering of the poor and helpless.
Each visitor, despite his familiarly human, nonthreatening appearance, is regarded with awe and fear – as a holy person and a fiend, a highly evolved superman creature, and a charlatan. The Earth-person’s reaction toward the alien seems ambiguous and confused. The spaceman, seeming to burst out of nowhere into the everyday world, may be regarded as a hierophany, a manifestation of the sacred.6 And the ambivalent earthling response of attraction and dread, fascination and fear, love and disgust reflects the visitor’s numinous, or sacred, quality.7 The alien is, quite simply, Other, not one of us. He may resemble us, but he is different.
Why do the aliens seem so mysterious, awesome and extraordinarily powerful? Why are the visitors always described as more highly evolved, more civilised, more intelligent, more technologically advanced than the people who make and watch the films? The fact that we can identify a virtual genre of films depicting such aliens suggests that these visitors are important to us. As film scholars such as Stuart Kaminsky argue, ‘The more popular a film (the more people who see it), the more attention it deserves as a genre manifestation. If a film is popular, it is a result of the fact that the film or series of films corresponds to an interest – perhaps even a need – of the viewing public.’8 He continues, ‘Genre analysis can involve an attempt to understand the milieu and background of the work through its relationship with religion, mythology, the social sciences, psychology and anthropology. The roots of genre are … in the fabric of existence itself … The very persistence of genre films argues that they must be dealing with basic aspects of existence and social/psychological interaction, or they could not continue to be made.’9 Since these basic aspects of existence are also the prime subject matter and concern of myth, I would argue that generic films can act as powerful purveyors of myth.10 These films serve as repositories and reminders of our deepest concerns.
Many would argue that in the twentieth century our central concern is technology. We modern Westerners regard ourselves as rational beings who understand creation through science. Our cosmogony has nothing to with gods, not with the spoken word of the Hebrews’ Yahweh nor the cosmic dismemberment of the Hindus’ Purusha, but with a chemical reaction. We believe all matter was created initially by a ‘primeval fireball’.11 After the Big Bang, hydrogen and helium coalesced into stars. That is our creation story. We and everything we know are essentially ‘stardust’.12
Although we understand our creation story rationally through the hard sciences – physics, chemistry, mathematics – we enjoy experiencing our science in the form of fiction, especially at the movies. Science fiction films project a world at once familiar and other. Space travel happens in NASA-like space ships, numbers and lights flash on computer screens just like our comfortable and convenient personal computers, characters wear shiny uniforms and use multisyllabic words. As scientifically oriented people, it is as if we want to act as though we are not involved in myth. We resist admitting that we are like all other human communities, in need of orienting myths and transcendent values. Science fiction enables us to have our cake and eat it too, to experience a world centered on technology that nonetheless allows for an encounter with cosmic otherness. Consider this: We are fascinated with space aliens, with familiar-looking men who fall to Earth because this genre tells us of our beginnings. By coming into contact with people who are closer to the stars than we are, doing nothing other than participating in a mythic experience; through watching space alien films, we are getting in touch with our roots, exploring the secret, sacred dimension of our scientific worldview. And, as Vivian Sobchack points out, ‘The great force of the genre film is that it depicts truth without contemplating it, that it dramatises our deepest conflicts in such a way that they are apprehended indirectly, painlessly.’13 We receive the message in a nondidactic way, as entertainment. We are ‘indirectly, painlessly’ seeing the deeper meaning of our cosmogonic myth enacted on the screen.
In order to understand their innate Otherness, let us examine the numinous quality of each spaceman. Each alien is regarded with awe and fear, as a manifestation of mysterium tremendum et fascinans.14 Ambiguity is the key. The Man Who Fell to Earth, Tommy Newton, is strangely androgynous. When he first meets Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry), Newton’s dark hat is dipped over one eye, and he refuses (or does not know how) to shake hands. His physical features and actions are such that his gender is nearly underminable. The diminutive Mary-Lou (Candy Clark) carries him out of the elevator. In this context, the fact that she is more able-bodied than he underscores Newton’s uncertain gender. Androgyny is an ancient attribute of the gods. ‘Universal bisexuality’ is revealed in cults of a bearded Aphrodite and a bald Venus, in the androgynous nature of many vegetation and fertility gods, and in the Talmudic midrashim (commentaries) depicting Adam and Eve as sharing one body.15 The significance of this divine ‘totalisation’ is that it forms a simultaneity of cosmos and chaos, ‘a reintegration of opposites, a regression to the primordial and homogeneous. It is a symbolic restoration of ‘Chaos’, of the undifferentiated unity that preceded the Creation.’16 Newton’s physical ‘undifferentiated unity’ is a manifestation of his numinosity.
In The Brother from Another Planet, everyone seems to like the Brother, but most are somewhat disturbed by him as well. This is revealed best in the early scene in Odell’s bar. Each of the ‘regulars’ has his own territory: Odell (Steve James) is comfortably in charge behind the bar, Smokey (Leonard Jackson) is seated at the bar, Walter (Bill Cobbs) slouches at a table, Fly (Darryl Edwards) mans the video game. As a group of four, they seem to represent order and stability, even though they also seem to be in their own worlds. When the Brother wanders in, the fifth wheel, he disturbs the easy equilibrium. The normally aloof men are forced to interact, even though, like themselves, the Brother sits by himself. When unable to engage the Brother in conversation, the men are frustrated, but they do not shun him. Smokey pops a bag behind his head to test him for deafness and tempts him with whiskey ‘to find out if he’s crazy’. Later, Sam (Tom Wright) arrives, evening up the number of men in the bar and restoring a sense of order. He sits with the Brother, finds him a job and a place to live. The men acknowledge that he is a little strange, yet they are attracted to him as another, somewhat alienated Black man adrift in Harlem.
Jenny’s (Karen Allen) reaction to the Starman is one of fear and attraction. When she awakens to find a clone of her dead husband in her living room, she approaches, calling him by her husband’s name. She is attracted to him because of the uncanny resemblance yet faints of fright when he approaches her. She dresses him in her husband’s clothes, which shows her attraction. But when he puts on his cap she is repulsed because it is too weirdly familiar. Jenny nearly abandons him at a truck stop but changes her mind when she witnesses him reviving a recently slaughtered deer. Her emotions flip back and forth throughout the film as she tries to respond to an inexplicable, ineffable situation. National Security is also of two minds toward the visitor. George Fox (Robert Jaeckel), the businesslike professional man in charge, feels he should be captured and investigated and calls the chase ‘a combat mission’. In contrast, Mark Shermin (Charles Martin Smith), the informal freelance scientist, wants to get to know him as an individual.
Rantes, the Man Facing Southeast, remains an enigmatic character. He is loved by his fellow inmates in the asylum, who accompany him on his daily vigils when he faces southeast ‘receiving and transmitting information’. Yet Dr. Julio Denis (Lorenzo Quintero), despite his obvious affection for the man, never believes his celestial origin and continues to try to cure his ‘neurosis’. Rantes’s ambiguity climaxes in the scene at an outdoor concert when he displaces the conductor and leads the orchestra in a rousing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, stirring the patients to march to the park. The movements of the patients are choreographed to the music, as are the swinging billy clubs of the police, lending an air of strange other-worldliness to the situation. Although it is possible to believe that the patients could have found their way to the park, it seems improbable that they would march there in time to the music. The police ultimately lead Rantes away. Is he criminal or savior? Is he a troublemaker or a problemsolver? Is he extraterrestrial or in-sane? We are never quite sure where to place him. He remains the Other, characterised by Rudolf Otto as ‘that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the ‘canny’. The contrast between the Other and the familiar fills the mind with blank wonder and astonishment’.17
Like all sacred beings, each alien has extraordinary power. Newton is an extremely gifted electronics engineer whose nine basic patents can, as his business partner Farnsworth exclaims, ‘take on RCA, Eastman Kodak, and Dupont, for starters’. This power is revealed on the screen primarily through monetary accomplishments. His lover, Mary-Lou, is at first a uniformed housekeeper in a hotel, supporting him in a crowded studio apartment. Soon she is wearing designer outfits and extravagant wigs and enjoying the expensive toys he lavishes on her including, ironically, a telescope.18 Newton does not seem particularly gifted, either physically or psychically. Driving forty-five miles per hour makes him dizzy, and he faints in elevators. Yet, his power is manifest in his agelessness. At the end of the movie Mary-Lou and Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn) are paunchy and gray, indicating the passage of many years, whereas Newton remains slim and redheaded. His only ‘inexplicable’ act is to appear to Bryce, before they have actually met, as a ghostly apparition, dressed in black with a hood over his head, his face a white spot in the darkness,19 saying ‘don’t be suspicious’. The next day when they do meet, Newton self-consciously repeats his plea, revealing that Bryce did not imagine their encounter.
The Brother demonstrates his power in several ways. He can fix things. When he first arrives at Ellis Island, he heals his own mangled leg with his glowing hand. The video machines in Odell’s bar and Hector’s (Jaime Tirelli) ‘video graveyard’ all respond to the power in his hand, as do Little Earl’s (Herbert Newsome) scraped knee and broken television. As he works his magic, his face shines with a beatific glow. The Brother is also supersensitive to the pain of others. In the immigration centre he can sense those who have arrived before him; when he touches a pillar or sits on a bench, cries and voices leap out at him. In Odell’s bar he violently recoils from ‘the death seat’, because by simply approaching it he ‘hears’ the scream of the man who was shot there. He experiences a heroin high by injecting himself with the empty syringe of an overdosed junkie. Moreover, the Brother can see more than ordinary people, having the remarkable ability to remove an eyeball and have it ‘film’ things he is unable to witness himself. These out-of-body visions are in slow motion and are jerky, as if to emphasise their uncanny nature.
Except for his ability to start a car, rig a slot machine in Las Vegas with his fingertip, and impregnate the infertile Jenny, the Starman’s main source of power seems to be small, mirrored marbles.20 It is as if the energy of the stars has been solidified, to be used as needed. With the help of these marbles, the Starman sends an emergency transmission to his planet, prints a map of the United States on a car windshield, heats up a lug wrench, and survives a car crash. The Starman is also a miraculous healer, able to resuscitate the dead. First, we see him bring a deer back to life. The camera remains in the truck stop with Jenny, viewing him through a plate-glass window across a parking lot. He does not have to touch the deer, he merely stands before it holding a glowing marble aloft. Because the camera, and, thus, the audience, remains at a distance, we are reminded of the taboo in most religions that is associated with extraordinary power, the injunction to approach the holy with great care.21 Also, with his back toward us we are unable to witness how he works his miracle; we see only its results, making it seem all the more mysterious and uncanny. Later, the Starman revives Jenny. He kneels beside her, holding his uncannily potent nugget. Again, we view him from behind and are not privy to his healing knowledge, as the glow from his power source lights up the entire mobile home in which they are travelling.
Rantes’s power is demonstrated mainly by his intense stare. If the eyes are the seat of the soul, this metaphor is a striking indicator of the potentiality of Rantes’s soul. With his eyes he can not only move items, such as plates of food to a poor family in a restaurant, he can also move his fellow inmates at the asylum. His healing power is subtle; no one is ‘cured’, but the men seem to get better. He touches the forehead of a catatonic man and places his jacket around his shoulders, to which the man warmly responds. Rantes claims to have no feelings, and his unblinking, luminous eyes rarely betray emotion. His blank face may seem to reveal feelings, but often it is simply the actions and looks of those around him that impart emotion to his face.22 He says he is merely ‘programmed’ to respond to stimuli, explaining to Dr. Denis, ‘I’m more rational than you. I respond rationally to stimulus. If someone suffers I console him. If someone needs my help I give it.’ Rantes is also a brilliant organist, and Beatriz (Ines Vernengo) reveals that he can deliver babies and is building a computer out of discarded electronic components. Yet it is only in his eyes that his extraordinary intelligence and compassion are revealed.
The films under investigation all begin with descent from the sky: Newton plunges in a humanoid-shaped stream of white light, crashing into a lake in New Mexico; the Starman arrives in a beam of light that crashes into the Wisconsin wilderness; the Brother is portrayed in his spacecraft before he tumbles into New York Harbour. Rantes, however, describes rather than demonstrates his descent from above.23 But there is no question that these beings originate in the sky, evoking the archetypal symbolism of the sky and the figure of the sky god.
As Mircea Eliade observed, ‘Simple contemplation of the celestial vault already provokes a religious experience … The ‘most high’ is a dimension inaccessible to man as man; it belongs to superhuman forces and beings.’24 These forces and beings include a wide range of spiritual beings, depending upon which religious tradition is consulted. Sky gods are characterised as those who have come to Earth to participate in the creation and then withdraw to become dei otosi, absent gods.25 Unlike angels, who are not originally from Earth but return there frequently to help individuals, sky gods are mysterious and remote beings whose Earthly appearances are associated with times of cosmic creation or collective crisis. It is the archetypal pattern of the sky god that can be traced in the careers of our cinematic aliens. Each of these aliens, despite tarrying on Earth, remains remote. Unlike the angel Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946), they cannot really relax and enjoy human company. Newton, for instance, dreams of his celestial home and family and begins to withdraw into television and alcohol addiction. But when he reveals his ‘true nature’ to Mary-Lou, perhaps in an effort to renew intimacy, this leads to an increased sense of alienation. In a spectacularly bizarre sequence, filmed in low light and with unusual camera angles, he emerges from the bathroom as a hairless, nippleless, cat-eyed creature. Mary-Lou shrieks and drops her glass, repulsed by the sight of her tender lover transformed into a ‘monster’. She tries to make love with him, to accept him as he is, but Newton does not seem to be there. He daydreams: the scene is intercut with shots of coitus on his planet, two glowing creatures embracing and exuding a gleaming liquid. When he reaches out, leaving his luminous bodily fluid on Mary-Lou’s skin, she runs from him, screaming and crouches trembling as a wide-angle lens distorts her almost beyond recognition. His innate distance combined with her knowledge of his ineffable otherness destroys their intimacy. The once inseparable couple must part.
The Brother’s alienation is evident in his inability to speak. Although he is able to communicate using hand and body language, his distance is apparent because he is often spoken to without an expectation of a response. Randy Sue (Caroline Aaron), who gives him room and board, drones on and on about her absent husband. Hector gabbles at him in Spanish. Ace (Liane Curtis), the video junkie, never taking her eyes from the blips on the screen to even acknowledge his presence, complains in a monotone of her dissatisfaction with slow video games. A rookie, white police officer talks confidently of his delight at working in Harlem; his crouched, self-protective posture, however, reveals his actual discomfort. Malverne Davis (Dee Dee Bridgewater), removing her false eyelashes in another room, blithely reminisces about her past. Although he appears to be accepted by those around him, the Brother, in truth and in silence, remains apart.26
The Starman’s separation is demonstrated primarily – and effectively – by plot device. He simply must leave again. His comrades are returning for him in three days27 regardless of whether he falls in love with Jenny. He cannot survive long on Earth even with the relationship.
Rantes’s separation from humankind is manifest in his blank face and his claim to feel no emotions. Despite his exceptional compassion for others, he avoids getting involved. Even with his fellow ‘agent’ Beatriz, he remains aloof. They sit on opposite sides of the hard, wooden table when she visits him. The camera remains distant, thus making the viewer see them from afar and increasing the sense of Rantes’s alienation. As they dance at the outdoor concert, they hold each other not as intimates but in response to the up-lifting music.28 When Dr. Denis discovers a photograph of Rantes and Beatriz, it is torn, and the piece that should have shown another person standing next to Rantes is missing. The doctor speculates on whether that person was one of his parents. Dr. Denis sadly acknowledges Rantes’s supreme aloneness, and so does the audience. Space aliens cannot make themselves too much at home on earth, for they are true to the archetype of the sky god.
It is typical of sky gods to leave a son or representative to complete their work,29 and these filmic aliens all leave a legacy of some sort. Newton makes a record album that tells his story, hoping that one day his wife will hear it on the radio. The Brother eludes his evil slave-trading pursuers, and they, in embarrassment and frustration, self-destruct. He has, at least temporarily, vanquished evil. The Starman leaves Jenny pregnant with their son, who, he declares, ‘will know everything I know and when he grows to manhood, he will be a teacher’. Rantes has forever changed the lives of the mental patients. Dr. Denis says, ‘The patients didn’t accept Rantes’s death. They said he had gone but that he would return in a spaceship. They would be there, waiting.’30
What is the significance of our fascination with space aliens? I suggest that it is part of our pursuit of origins. We have faith in a cosmic Big Bang creation myth that explains natural and supernatural phenomena – how the world came to be, why things are the way they are, what will happen next. Our perfect beginning involves the fallout from exploding stars. Cinematic space aliens appear to irrupt from the stars, becoming literal, visual representations of our origins. This is where I see the significance of their human appearance. The ancient sky god of the West spoke his desire to ‘make man in our own image’ (Gen. 1: 26), and this statement has often been taken literally in our Sistine Chapelesque (which also requires uplifted eyes) imaginings of a white-bearded human, heavenly Father.31 We are simply more comfortable with recognisably human-looking gods. In seeing the familiar-looking people of the stars, we witness our stardust beginnings.
Their significance does not end with creation: ‘The cosmogony is the exemplary model for every creative situation: Whatever man does is in some way a repetition of the pre-eminent ‘deed’, the archetypal gesture of the Creator God, the Creation of the World’.32 In the movies discussed here, each alien, in one way or another, is a model for correct action. Although the aliens recall sacred beginnings, they are acting in profane time and are actively demonstrating that moral perfection can extend into ordinary existence. In this way they point in the direction of positive social action.
The man who fell to Earth fell for one reason: to search for solutions to environmental problems on his home planet, where a severe drought rages. Although Newton does not warn Earth of impending doom if its environmental problems are not addressed, I think the implication is clear. He hires Bryce to work on fuel conservation. The conservation of nonrenewable resources is a problem we earthlings have been grappling with for some time. However, Newton’s ultimate goal is to develop a fuel-efficient spaceship to enable him to return to his family. He has been forced to leave his wife and family in search of water; overuse of natural resources on Earth may eventually cause similar familial breakups. Many of the products of his company, World Enterprises, appeal to the family – for instance, superior sound equipment and a self-developing camera. In his concern with nonrenewable natural resources – water, fuel and family – Newton appears as a role model for correct living.
The Brother’s plight as an escaped slave opens the possibility for commentary on bigotry of all sorts, manifested in a wide variety of prejudicial comments. Potshots are hurled relentlessly at many races and minorities. Walter, sitting alone at his table in Odell’s bar, rambles on about Haitian and Polynesian ‘diseases’. When Bernice (Ren Woods) suggests Szechuan food to Odell, he proclaims he ‘won’t eat anything he can’t pronounce’. Sam is ridiculed by his buddies because he comes from New Jersey. Mr. Lowe (Michael Albert Mantel), owner of the video parlor, comments, ‘They’re clever with their hands, the coloured, but they forget things’, and ‘They give you a good day’s work, the Spanish, but they have no sense of time.’ Smokey, after encountering the Men in Black (John Sayles and David Strathairn), mumbles in bewilderment, ‘White people get stranger all the time.’ These prejudicial attitudes are never resolved, but their unrelenting frequency during the film leads the viewer to an awareness of our casual intolerance.
The Starman makes it clear that he comes from a more ‘humane’ civilisation. He protests the needless slaughter of animals, asking when he sees the slain deer, ‘Do deer eat people?’ He describes his planet this way: ‘There is only one language, one law, one people. And there is no war, no hunger. The strong do not victimise the helpless.’ As he speaks he is driving through the Arizona desert with a golden sunrise haloing his head, as if to emphasise his purity. He seems a totally responsible, mature humanitarian – a good example for Earth people to emulate. The Starman has not written off the Earth race but is fascinated and troubled by it. When Shermin asks him why he has visited, he replies, ‘We are interested in your species … You are a strange species, unlike any other. Bright, intelligent, but savage … You are at your very best when things are worst.’ Humans may be unpredictable, he implies, but at least they are able to cope with reality. He goes on to admit that his is not a perfect world: ‘We are very civilised but we have lost something. You are all so much alive, all so different.’ The implication is that perhaps superior technology can lead to impersonalisation and mindless conformity.
Rantes states rather plainly that his mission is to assist the helpless, which is why he has lived contentedly in the asylum and worked with the poor in the surrounding area. When Dr. Denis asks about his collection of newspaper clippings of natural and manmade disasters, Rantes explains, ‘We are preparing the rescue of those who cannot survive amidst the terror, those who are without hope … here.’ Rantes exhibits many characteristics of Christ, the Western sky god known for extraordinary compassion toward the meek. He sits quietly hearing ‘confession’, as a long line of dejected men wait to see him. A ‘last supper’ is played out as Rantes, surrounded by men at a long, wooden table, hands out food to them from his own plate. Indeed, Dr. Denis refers to Rantes as the ‘Cybernetic Christ’. He says, ‘Since Rantes was becoming more Christ-like, his end would be the same.’ The doctor refers to himself as Pilate for following the institute director’s order to forcibly sedate Rantes, which leads to his deterioration and death. Rantes’s final words are the plaintive cry, ‘Doctor, doctor, why have you forsaken me?’
What, finally, explains the recent movie trend toward beneficent heavenly Otherness? These beings from outer space, living where other mythological sky gods live, are our celestial divine beings. They are numinous and awesome, technologically advanced crea-tor gods who attract those of us who are fascinated with the myth of science. They are the dei otisi of stardust who until now have seemed inaccessible and withdrawn. We go to space alien movies to look up and ‘worship’. Although we would like to look to the sky for revelation and redemption, the sky today is not always pleasant to regard. Sometimes all we see are palpable clouds of air pollution. Poisonous acid rain pours down from above. The diminished ozone layer permits dangerous levels of ultraviolet rays to penetrate the atmosphere.
But even more dramatic a concern is the fact that the sky may also be regarded as a ‘corridor for chaos’,33 the place from which nuclear weapons fall. G. Simon Harak posits that the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or ‘Star Wars’) was an effort to reinstate the benevolence of the sky. Since historically the United States has considered itself invulnerable to attack because it is surrounded by two oceans, ‘the most apt solution [to nuclear invasion] is … to treat the sky as a ‘third ocean’ and make it, by technology, impenetrable’.34 SDI, in effect, was a modern, rationalistic, scientific prayer to the ancient sky gods, pleading with them to protect humanity from above. In a similar vein, Ira Chernus has written that our relationship with the bomb is marked by the ambiguity inherent in the numinous. Perhaps we look to the sky to actually call upon the ultimately destructive, yet somehow fascinating, nuclear weapons because they, irrupting from the sky, have come to represent our absent gods. This is no doubt a horrifying thought – that the bomb, because of its heavenly realm, may actually be regarded as a saviour.35
Technologically superior modern sky gods have been returning to earth in the technologically advanced art form of the movies for around forty years. Beginning in the 1970s, kinder, gentler aliens began appearing. Perhaps their appearance coincides with years that seemed more fraught with technological peril. Because of the remarkably swift advancement of science (as evidenced by myriad nuclear capabilities), Americans sought compensatory fulfillment through human-looking, extraordinarily powerful and compassionate gods who understand and use technology in nonthreatening ways. In viewing our gods, in hearing our mythic stories, in sitting around the brightly-lit screen in the darkened room, in seeing actors depicting mystery and Otherness, we are participating in one of the oldest human activities – the telling of the stories of the gods. Film scholar Darrol Bryant articulates this well when he writes, ‘Film [is] a response to the ambition of a technological civilisation to discover the alchemical formula that could wed the machine to the transmutation of nature and the deification of human culture. In a word, as we sit and watch a film, we are participating in a central ritual of our technological civilisation.’36 Our spacemen are important to us: They give us hope in a world in which our vision of the stars is obscured by pollution and the potential for nuclear holocaust.
Notes
References
Giannetti, Louis (1987) Understanding Movies, 4th edn. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall).
Hillman, James (1975) Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Perennial Library, Harper and Row.
Jarvie, I. C. (1970) Movies and Society. New York: Basic Books.
Filmography
The Man Who Fell to Earth. Screenplay by Paul Meyersberg from the novel by Walter Tevis. Directed by Nicholas Roeg. Released by British Lion Films, 1976.
The Brother from Another Planet. Written, directed, and edited by John Sayles. Released by A-Train Films, 1984.
Starman. Written by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon. Directed by John Carpenter. Released by Columbia Pictures, 1984.
Man Facing Southeast. Written and directed by Eliseo Subiela. Released by Film Dallas, 1986.