The Cult-TV Faces of: Pets

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Horror Lexicon 14: Mob Justice!

One of the most common -- and long-standing -- tropes of the horror film is mob justice. This genre convention might be described as the idea that local people, when faced with fear and anxiety, may seek to take the law into their own hands to remove any monster, being, or personality they determine is a threat to their safety and survival. 

The problem is that a mob is susceptible to group-think, the concept that, in a group or mob, many people suppress their individual sense of morality, or responsibility for decisions. So the mob in these horror movies often acts, and acts violently...and without any sense of wisdom or proportion.

Going way back to 1931's Frankenstein, a key visualization of "mob justice" is forged: the villagers with lit torches, marching against an individual they deem guilty of a crime. As late as 1995, and John Carpenter's Village of the Damned, the horror movie has provided viewers with related imagery of frightened people, confronting "the other" with torches.  Humans murder, and burn, that which they fear, this image reveals.

By 1968, mob justice had become "posse" justice. In an outbreak of the zombie plague in rural Pennsylvania, roving bands of citizens, joined with local law authorities, went out with shotguns and rifles to shoot those they deemed monsters. In at least one incident, they targeted people instead of zombies, murdering Ben, the last human survivor in a farmhouse.  Ben had survived a night of horror, interpersonal conflict, and danger, only to be killed on the dawn of a new day.

Animal attack movies are also notorious for featuring instances of misguided "mob justice."  Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) features a scene with (drunken) Amity locals rushing their boats and going out on the water to go hunt the great white shark.  These locals bring back an innocent victim -- a murdered tiger shark -- and display it in town as a trophy.  

Grizzly (1976) from William Girdler, offered a similar scene, though set in a national park. A group of hunters -- ignoring the prominent "No Hunting" sign -- descend on the woods to find and murder the bear attacking campers. One of the hunters experiences a close call with the bear, and no doubt thinks twice about his actions.

The trope of mob justice has even found its way into slasher and rubber reality films, as well. In Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), a group of Haddonfield rednecks and drunks learn in a bar (while drinking and watching TV) that Michael Myers has returned to their town on Halloween nigh, twenty years after his last attack.. Instead of letting the police handle such a difficult situation, these drunkards and loud-mouths go out into the night and start hunting their quarry. They end up killing an innocent man, Ted Hollister, instead of the Shape.

In a very real way, the origin of Freddy Krueger is about mob justice, even if the mob-justice doesn't occur on-screen in Wes Craven's original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).  When child-murderer Freddy escapes justice on a technicality, a mob of parents get together, trap him in his boiler room, and burn him alive.  It is that act of mob justice, ironically, that allows Freddy to seek his revenge from beyond the grave.

Looking at these examples, one sees a mob kill our hero (Night of the Living Dead), murder an innocent man (Halloween IV), spawn a deeper evil (A Nightmare on Elm Street), harm nature (Jaws), and also hurt a being, or "monster" the audience sympathizes with (Frankenstein).  

Therefore, the lesson of this trope in the horror lexicon is simply this: beware the mob.  The mob is more dangerous than any so-called monster, out there, hiding in the woods. 

And mob "justice?"  There's no such thing.

What's the Worst That Could Happen? (Time Travel Edition)

Back in November, I posted about the sci-fi movie and trope of suspended animation, and all the myriad things that have gone wrong in its usage in pop culture imaginings. In the second edition of "What's the Worst That Could Happen?" I look at another common genre convention: time travel.

So, time travel gets invented -- the genie is out of the bottle -- and what's the worst that could happen? Modern pop culture has more than a few answers for us.

10. You, an enlightened and compassionate person of a Utopian future age, travels to the past, and by saving a woman in a traffic accident from dying, end up altering history so that Nazis win World War II. (Star Trek: "City on the Edge of Forever.")  No good deed goes unpunished, right?

09. You time travel back to Scotland in 1334 A.D, contract the Black Plague, and are promptly captured by the locals, only to be burned at the stake for being witches and heretics. (Space:1999 "Journey to Where.") 

08. You travel back in time to the 1950's and accidentally prevent your parents from falling in love, thereby erasing yourself from existence. And by the way, your teenage Mom has a crush on you. (Back to the Future).

07. You create time travel, and travel to the future, only to learn that it is your invention of time travel that raises global tensions to crisis level, and precipitates a nuclear war that destroys human civilization. (Logan's Run: "Man out of  Time.")

06. Again, you create time travel,but this time it plunges the world into chaos since the future is forever changing, and therefore hopeless. You must go back in time and kill the people who helped you create time travel in the first place. (The X-Files: "Synchrony.")

05. You time ravel back to 1941 aboard your nuclear air-craft carrier, but before you can defend Pearl Harbor from Japanese attack, the same vortex that transported you through time re-appears.  Do you go home, or change history and save a lot of American lives? (The Final Countdown).

04. You and your companion travel back through time and end up on the Titanic. You endure a number of time-hops to other, equally dangerous eras. Your last time hop, however, is back to the Titanic, meaning you are caught, essentially, in an endless time-loop. (The Time Tunnel).

03. You visit an alien planet the day after a terrible accident has wipe out all life there, only to be hurled back in time twenty-four hours before the disaster. Now you must live through the last 24 hours of the planet. You will either have to save it, or die with the planet at the end of the day. (Star Trek: Voyager: "Time  and Again.")

02. The day of your marriage, you go out riding and are accosted by a strange woman on horseback yelling at you as she chases you on a mountainside. You escape and go ahead and marry. Twenty years later, you are an alcoholic, bitter person living a miserable life with your good-for-nothing spouse. You go out for a ride, and encounter your younger self. You attempt to chase her down, but you never catch her, and she never gets the warning. In twenty years, she'll be...you.  (The Twilight Zone: "Spur of the Moment.")

01. Using an American spaceship, three intelligent apes from an apocalyptic future time travel to Earth in the early 1970's. One of the apes is pregnant. In twenty years, her grown up simian child leads a revolution of our normal apes, and human civilization falls. Thanks, astronauts! (Escape from the Planet of the Apes).

Gerry Anderson's UFO: "Identified"

In 1970 (and in America, in 1971), Gerry and Sylvia Anderson presented 26 riveting hour-long live-action episodes of sci-fi television: UFO.

Set in the far-flung, future year of 1980, this beloved cult series involves a multi-national organization, SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defense Organisation), and its attempts to stop malicious alien incursions on planet Earth.

A splendid example of speculative realism, the series imagines -- again, from  an inception date of the 1969 or so --  a future in which the swinging sixties never ends, so much so that well-established, mature military officers, in 1980, wear radical/punk hair-cuts, and the latest Nehru jacket fashions. 

Modern viewers may find this "futuristic" affectation amusing today, since producers did not imagine the pendulum swing back to conservative fashion and politics in the 1980's, but the series is nonetheless consistent and meticulous in its portrayal of a world in which the swinging 60's becomes the even more swinging 70's and 80's (in terms of fashion, race relation, sexual politics, etc.).

This view of a "progressive" future is coupled with a world in which technological advances explode with great rapidity. Again, however, that explosion is vetted through the context of the Nixon Era. UFO rightly imagines a world in which the computer is ubiquitous, but not the fact that a revolution in "miniaturization" contributes to that ubiquity. So the series is dominated by wall-sized computer panels, with reel-to-reel tapes, and blinking lights.

What remains most intriguing, however, about UFO, may just be its ahead-of-its-time character-touches. The series lead, brilliant portrayed by Ed Bishop, is Commander Ed Straker. He is a driven, workaholic, divorcee. To fight the aliens on Earth, he literally gives up everything and every person in his lie. This does not seem odd to us today, in a world in which the divorce rate has skyrocketed, and technology means that we are never "off" from our jobs. But in 1970, Straker was a new -- and tragic -- brand of hero.

The world of UFO supports the nature of this particular hero. Like the Anderson series that followed it, Space:1999 (1975-1977), UFO imagines a universe of limited resources. During the program's two-dozen or so installments, Straker is constantly at war to get funds for SHADO, since bureaucrats control the purse strings.

Similarly, the aliens themselves, as we learn in the first segment, "Identified," are desperate. While Straker attempts to "harvest" the funds, resources, man-power, and technology to combat his enemy, the enemy is coming to Earth to actually, physically harvest our body parts, to overcome sterility and possible extinction.  This whole idea seems more timely today than it did nearly forty years ago.

"Identified" commences in 1970, as a young Ed Straker, an American Air Force officer barely survives a UFO attack.

Elsewhere, at the same time, a group of British youngsters spy a crashed UFO in the woods, and photograph it. One of the youngsters, however, a girl, is apparently killed, and her body taken by the aliens.

Ten years later, Straker is ensconced as the commander of SHADO, which possesses a base of operations at a movie studio. And the long-ago victim's brother, Carlin, is now an officer in the organization. The various installations of SHADO -- including an orbital satellite, SID, an advanced moonbase, and a submarine/jet combination, Skydiver -- monitor a UFO entering Earth's orbit.

The UFO is shot down by Skydiver, and the alien pilot is recovered from the water. Straker wants to know where the alien is from, who the aliens are, and why they have come to Earth. A medical examination of the pilot provides some troubling answers. The body possesses the organs of Peter Carlin's long-ago dead sister, meaning that the aliens are harvesting humans for transplant surgeries. Straker has the unpleasant task of telling Carlin what finally became of his sister.

"Identified" is a fascinating entrance to the world of UFO, because it accomplishes three tasks in one hour.

First, it introduces the world to the series single-minded lead, Straker. We get a strong sense of the man's mettle, right out the gate. He is serious, dedicated, single-minded, and edgy. He is also, incredibly lonely, and therefore sad.

Secondly, "Identified" introduces the viewer to the many diverse facets of SHADO.  SID is a great and detailed miniature, though Skydiver One does not hold up as well today, perhaps because it is very difficult to get water "right" on miniature sets.

The most fascinating aspect of SHADO's operation, however, is Moonbase. This installation, a precursor to Alpha, is commanded by a woman, Lt. Gay Ellis (Gabrielle Drake), and most of the lead officers are also women. That's a great move for gender equality in terms of the series' imaginings.  On the other hand, these capable, intelligent women also wear form-fitting breakaway space suits, and Lt. Ellis strips-down in one scene. Also, and for no apparent reason, all the women on the Moon wear purple wigs. Stylish and memorable, yes. Practical? I don't see how.

The introduction of the aliens in "Identified" is also fascinating. After an autopsy at HA, Straker speculates about the alien nature and purpose in a riveting, well-acted and written sequence. These extraterrestrial beings are intelligent and highly advanced, but "doomed to extinction" and "driven by circumstance" to take the abundant Earth's resources. Straker realizes the desperation of his enemy, and how it makes them exceedingly dangerous.

Follow-up episodes of UFO focus on alien gambits to acquire more human bodies, or disable SHADO defenses. Other tales, like "A Question of Priorities" and "Confetti-Check A-OK," contend with Straker's personal sacrifices as commander of Earth's last line of defense.

The second episode in the series, "Exposed" adds the final piece of the program's jigsaw puzzle, a young, "action" hero (and dashing lady's man) in the form of Paul Foster (Michael Billington). Foster is a memorable character, but UFO, the series, is all about Straker, a man of iron will and discipline, and a great tragic hero. He makes the series unforgettable, right alongside some of the more mind-bending tales (such as "Timelash,"or "The Long Sleep.")

The Cult-TV Faces of: Gingers

1

2

3

4

5

6

 6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

After Earth (2013)

When I was a young boy, I received for Christmas one year a book with the (now politically-incorrect…) title Adventures for Boys. 

After avidly reading the selections within that anthology, I devoured other, similar stories of outdoor adventure such as Jack London’s (1876 – 1916) The Call of the Wild (1903), and White Fang (1906). 

Those tales featured genuine simplicity -- or clarity -- of theme and morality, and to this day, I find that writing voice and style appealing.

Almost universally set in a harsh climate or natural terrain, these “adventures for boys” also concerned,  specifically, a character’s rite of passage, even if the character in question happens to be a canine.

M. Night Shyamalan’s much-maligned science fiction movie After Earth (2013) is an affair in an almost identical vein. It’s a boy-against nature, rite-of-passage movie, and one uncluttered by story fat or extraneous plotting and incident.

In fact, After Earth is a stream-lined, enjoyable adventure for boys and girls.  And likes its literary antecedents, the film even focuses on a very specific philosophy of life, and explores that (spiritual) way of knowing with a surfeit of clarity, even grace.  

And I'm not talking about Scientology, either.

In short, the film is more enjoyable, and worthwhile than I anticipated it would be, and much more so than most reviews have indicated.

After Earth is set in the distant future. Man has left Earth behind after polluting and ruining it.  

One thousand years after that exodus and re-settlement on another world, Nova Prime, man has established himself as an interstellar presence. 

Unfortunately, a competing alien race has bred monstrous predators called the Ursa who can smell our fear, and who are engineered to do nothing but hunt and murder humans.

On a routine space mission aboard a ship called the Hesper, a hero father, Cypher Raige (Will Smith) and his estranged, troubled teenage son, Kitai Rage (Jaden Smith) face danger when their ranger ship encounters an “asteroid storm.” 

The ship crashes on wild, untamed Earth, after cracking into pieces.  Alas, a rescue beacon is located on the tail section of the ship…located more than fifty miles away from the fore section’s crash site.

Side-lined by a severe leg injury, Cypher must send his inexperienced son into the wild alone to retrieve the rescue beacon and send a distress call to the authorities. 

Making matters more dangerous, the Hesper was carrying in its hold a deadly Ursa captive, a creature now unloosed on Earth and ready to resume hunting human survivors.

Cypher has mastered the art of “ghosting,” of suppressing his fear so that the Ursa can’t detect his presence.  But his son, Kitai, has no such experience…

In my introduction above, I wrote about After Earth’s central, fully-explored theme or philosophy. 

That philosophy of life -- short and sweet -- is mindfulness: the attentive awareness of the reality of things; of the happenings of the moment.  It’s a Buddhist belief, but also one that has been adopted in contemporary psychological counseling.

Mindfulness is considered one way of understanding life, and of vanquishing emotions that aren’t important, or serve no useful purpose.  And in After Earth, mindfulness is the gateway to adulthood and the key to survival in a frightening situation.  And we have seen in the Shyamalan series how purpose, and understanding of purpose -- clarity of one's destiny -- is a crucial leitmotif.

Specifically, Cypher delivers a lengthy monologue about the nature of fear in the film, and how, via the auspices of mindfulness, he was able to subtract fear from his mental gestalt.  Cypher describes danger as “real” but fear as nothing but a choice, an emotion that is “imaginary.”  

Hence, it can be controlled.

Cypher’s key to short-circuiting the un-real aspect of fear, as he describes it, is his recognition of his immediate, surrounding environment.  He describes a terrifying battle with an Ursa, and how fear left his body.  His eyes registered sunlight.  He describes the sight of his own blood.   But Cypher distanced himself from his emotions even as he tuned into his environment, so he could survive. In a crisis, Cypher suggests, we must deal with what surrounds us, instead of imaginary boogeymen that are unreal, and therefore unrelated to the life-and-death struggle at hand.

Mindfulness is the philosophy that guides and informs After Earth, but the mode of that philosophy’s transmission is of equal interest to the message itself.  This is a film about generations, and about fathers-and-sons, specifically.

Indeed, one might gaze upon the film in its entirety as a metaphor for fathering (or on a bigger scale, parenting in general).  Here a father must share with his child the way he sees the world, and then hope that this very knowledge will be useful when that boy must stand up and fight alone.  

Without being maudlin about it, the movie is about the wisdom we impart to our children. Other Shyamalan films have been, more or less, about the same idea.  Think of Morgan and Bo in Signs (2002), or Joseph in Unbreakable (2000).  Do we pass on our perceptual sets, or do we show them how to see the world in their own way?

And, of course, in this case, it’s absolute murder to see the boy stand up and fight alone, when it’s clear that Cypher wants nothing more than to fight Kitai’s battles for him. 

That’s an urge all parents feel and yet, in some important instances, must resist.  We send our children out into the world knowing that we can’t always be there for them, but that, hopefully, the things we taught them will resonate and prove meaningful. Those seeds will sprout in their memories, and they will survive and endure, and then -- one day -- pass on their version of that knowledge to the next generation.

The father-son relationship in After Earth is emotionally-moving because even a helpful philosophy such as mindfulness can be perceived, in certain situations, as negative.  

From the outside, it looks a lot like distance, or the lack of feeling...the lack of love. 

As Kitai's mother suggests, he is a sensitive, intuitive, feeling boy, one who needs a father, not a philosopher or commander.  He doesn't understand why his father is so remote.  There is a price to pay for mindfulness, for always living life in the "ghosting" mode, in the film's vernacular.

In terms of family issues, Cypher and Kitai both experienced a tragedy involving a family member, and Cypher doesn’t know how to handle his guilt.  So he deploys mindfulness in his family life too, but there is a cost to those around him.   It is not difficult or inappropriate to see Cypher as a character like the Reverend Graham Hess in Signs, someone who has suffered a tragedy and changed, withdrawing, essentially, from his children.

Cypher -- adhering to the stoicism of mindfulness -- can’t reach out emotionally, because he believes emotions don’t help in a crisis.  Cypher has been practicing mindfulness in his personal life for so long that he forgets what it means to really connect with someone. In other words, the very philosophy that keeps him alive is the thing that keeps him from truly connecting with his son.

Accordingly, After Earth reaches its zenith of emotion during its climax, when Cypher attempts to express his new-found regard and respect for Kitai in a kind of socially-acceptable but ordered and restrained gesture: a military salute.

Delightfully -- and outside of movie tradition -- Kitai doesn’t reciprocate.  

Instead, he hugs his father, an absolute assertion that sometimes emotionality, not mindfulness, is the key to life.   

Thus, like all children, Kitai has taken his father’s “lesson” and interpreted it in a way that is meaningful to him as an individual.  

That is the very rite-of-passage meted in the film: Kitai’s ability to understand his father’s choice, and then to make his own meaningful choice about whom he hopes to be.

The movie is about nothing more and nothing less than that kernel of an idea: one man’s way of seeing the world and his son coming to understand that “vision..." and divine his own belief system from it.

Sadly, you likely won’t read about any of this thematic substance in the majority of mainstream critical reviews.  Instead, the reviews for After Earth have been harsh, even savage.

That rampant negativity is a result, I suspect, of a perfect storm of bile and jealousy: the continuing backlash against Shyamalan (because he dared to trick us with The Sixth Sense [1999] and then minted a fortune), and the relatively fresh backlash against Will Smith and his son Jaden.

So if hating is the game, After Earth is a two-fer!

I should also state this fact: After Earth isn't a movie about Scientology.  I've read reviewers insist it's about Scientology because -- wait for it -- there's a volcano placed prominently in the action.  I suppose this means that Revenge of the Sith (a whole planet of volcanoes there!) is also about Scientology.  Who knew?

Perhaps more to the point, even if After Earth did feature principles of Scientology, would that fact immediately, a priori, render it a bad film?  Does the same rule apply to Catholicism or other branches of Christianity, or only to unpopular religions?

But I'm not in the business of defending movies, only watching them, interpreting them, and presenting my analysis.  Having seen and enjoyed the film, I conclude that it is a well-made, enjoyable “adventure for boys” (and girls too…) -- nothing more, nothing less --  with an authentic sense of humanity. It is a simple, straightforward "shipwreck" movie, and parts of the adventure reminded me of Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson.  The production design is original and compelling, and the location shooting transforms Earth into the most vividly dangerous of wildernesses.

We live now in a culture of noisy, hectic movie blockbusters, where event piles upon events, where there are feints and counter-feints, and where “surprises” and reversals come at the audience by the dozen (and often in 3-D to boot).  We leave the theater after such films not exhilarated and moved, but throttled.

Refreshingly, After Earth doesn’t care about throttling you, or layering on a multitude of high-intensity incidents.   Instead -- and much like The Call of the Wild or White Fang -- the film simply and directly vets its adventurous tale of extraordinary survival, and of a father and son discovering each other.

The key is that After Earth accomplishes those tasks with heart, and a considerable degree of humanity.  It's a shame people aren't looking at the movie with open eyes and open hearts, but bitterness instead.  It's more fun, I suppose, to fit the movie into another edition of the "M. Night Shyamalan-has-lost-it" narrative than to grapple with the ideas the movie actually presents.

Frankly, I think the critics could use a lesson in mindfulness.  

So you may love After Earth, or you may hate it, I guess.  But when you watch  the film, at least do this much: drop your expectations and biases, be in the moment, and judge the work for yourself, and on its own merits.