GUEST BLOGGER
Jack Witek
Apart from waging war on digital rights and the commons of information communications technology, facing off against anti-monopoly activist campaigns, ruining beloved intellectual properties in a combine of by-ups, various narcissistic lifestyle cults-cum-quasi-religions, and escape into the embraces of drug addiction and petty criminality, Hollywood has two major obsessions: the military and alien life, and in combination the military facing off against alien life.
Silver Screen Saucers ordinarily takes a critical eye to Hollywood and how its partnership with national security state public relations bumps up against and influences its sci-fi productions, from the 1953 Robertson Panel to the ‘works’ (if we can be generous) of Michael Bay and Peter Berg today. But here I would like to look at three sci-fi blockbusters from this summer, and how they have beat a different track, in spite of their ostentatious major studio backing, and how they each in their own way speak against the cultural hegemony, in a Trojan fashion, via the medium of old-trope genre icons – Star trek Into Darkness, Iron Man Three, and Man of Steel. And not to wander too far from this site’s focus, each film also touches directly on disclosure of alien life. Each of them are essentially first contact films, ‘disclosure’ as it is called, dealing with the aftermath of first contact. Indeed, tapping into UFO lore, in the overture to the main story, Star Trek Into Darkness begins with the Enterprise saving a primitive type-0 civilisation from environmental catastrophe. After the expediencies of the situation force the crew to reveal themselves and their technology in the open, the inhabitants begin worshipping them as gods.
Silver Screen Saucers ordinarily takes a critical eye to Hollywood and how its partnership with national security state public relations bumps up against and influences its sci-fi productions, from the 1953 Robertson Panel to the ‘works’ (if we can be generous) of Michael Bay and Peter Berg today. But here I would like to look at three sci-fi blockbusters from this summer, and how they have beat a different track, in spite of their ostentatious major studio backing, and how they each in their own way speak against the cultural hegemony, in a Trojan fashion, via the medium of old-trope genre icons – Star trek Into Darkness, Iron Man Three, and Man of Steel. And not to wander too far from this site’s focus, each film also touches directly on disclosure of alien life. Each of them are essentially first contact films, ‘disclosure’ as it is called, dealing with the aftermath of first contact. Indeed, tapping into UFO lore, in the overture to the main story, Star Trek Into Darkness begins with the Enterprise saving a primitive type-0 civilisation from environmental catastrophe. After the expediencies of the situation force the crew to reveal themselves and their technology in the open, the inhabitants begin worshipping them as gods.
~
“He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round Perdition's flames before I give him up!”
- Khan Noonan Singh, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
“Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”
“But oh! shipmates! On the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him — a far, far upward, and inward delight — who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth ever stands forth his own inexorable self.”
- Ishmael, Moby Dick.
PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD
Star Trek Into Darknessnot only returns to a Trek favourite in reviving Khan, it solidly returns the franchise to its conscientious socio-political roots. As the Wikipedia entry states: “Star Trek: The Original Series addressed issues of the 1960s, just as later spin-offs have reflected issues of their respective decades. Issues depicted in the various series include war and peace, the value of personal loyalty, authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, economics, racism, religion, human rights, sexism, feminism, and the role of technology. Roddenberry stated: ‘[By creating] a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. Indeed, we did make them on Star Trek: we were sending messages and fortunately they all got by the network.’”
Into Darkness addresses wartime disaster politics. In the aftermath of the genocidal destruction of Vulcan in the previous film, certain figures within Starfleet like Admiral Marcus (reminiscent of General Keith Alexander, the inverse of people who watch the films today and wish they could live in that future age, who seem instead to wish they could have been around in an age of empire) take their cue amid the shock and paranoia, engaging in deeply covert off-planet arms build-up and militarisation of Starfleet. The mastermind of this military coup-in-waiting, Admiral Marcus - after the plucky Enterprise crew stumble upon his designs thanks to Kirk’s vengeance-driven indefatigably irascible irresponsibility - attempts to destroy them in a false flag military attack to be blamed on the Klingons, a believable, sellable, yet utterly overblown threat.
This all begins when Marcus himself comes into contact with a cryogenically frozen super-soldier and condemned war criminal from Earth’s war-ravaged past, Khan Noonan Sing, recruiting his expertise to militarise Starfleet. In an attack obviously reminiscent of the London 7/7 terrorist bombings, Khan, betraying him and going it alone, strikes at Marcus’ underground covert military bureaucracy and development base on Earth. Marcus, in a bid to clean up the situation, manoeuvres Kirk and the Enterprise on a mission to assassinate Khan in an orbital strike conducted under martial law. Kirk eventually sees that he is being played, and resolves to bring down Marcus.
As Harry Knowles writes in his review:
“The first film saw a 9/11 shock and awe attack on Vulcan that resulted in its complete annihilation. The attack also targeted Earth... In addition, that very first attack – it took Kirk’s father – a father that, in our beloved Trekverse, lived and served as a constant inspiration for Kirk. In JJ’s, old Tiberius has the swagger and the libido of Shatner’s Kirk, but he isn’t prone to preach his ideals to Starfleet. Instead, he’s raised with at least one step-father that he has zero respect for – and is prone to reckless adrenaline rushes. Shatner’s Kirk was an adventurer at heart, marvelling at the infinite variety of civilizations out there around the stars. We can see some of that with Pine’s Kirk – he’s anxious to get out there, but he hasn’t believed in Starfleet for most of his life.
Now – is this Starfleet still based on the idealism of the 1960’s America? No. With Star Trek Into Darkness, the Darkness of the film isn’t Khan. It isn’t the Klingons or the Romulans; it’s the Darkness that has infected policy in Starfleet. In other words, this is a metaphor for post-9/11 America. In JJ’s Verse, he has a Kirk that doesn’t yet value the core beliefs of Starfleet... Meanwhile, the rest of his crew... good souls like Spock and Scotty... They raise these issues with Kirk, but Kirk doesn't want to hear it. He’s us. Kirk has always been us. But just like Kirk, we’ve changed.
Vengeance has become something our Country seeks. Since 9/11 we have adjusted our core beliefs and laws to make things more convenient for a government that has been given a licence to seek vengeance to protect us at all costs.”
Whereas the original Wrath of Khan dealt with the hyper-aggressive military mind of the rogue Khan, in this alternate timeline ‘remake’, it is Marcus as symbol of the military-industrial-complex who is the main focus, and where the original film borrowed heavily from and riffed on Moby Dickin a script peppered with some truly awful dialogue and dodgy exposition, the solidly written Into Darkness explores some of the depths of what Wrath of Khan only hinted at poetically (and iconically). Journalist Chris Hedges, writing in his Truthdig column, in the article Life is Sacred, states that the ascendant metaphor for our corporate political world order is Moby Dick: “All my means are sane,” Captain Ahab says of his suicidal pursuit of Moby Dick, “my motive and my object mad.”
The film’s main arc follows Kirk coming to terms with his mortality, and learning the value of family - of a family he never really had. Starfleet strays, but is brought back into the fold of peaceful civilisation. Kirk breaks the rules, but ultimately learns the hard and fast way why those rules matter so. This much cannot be said of President Obama, whose popularity ratings in real terms must surely be dwarfed by the box-office take of the new Star Trek in the wake of so many scandals and so much open criminality under his watch.
A month before the release of Into Darkness, Nation Books published investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. In a talk with Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman at Harvard university in April, he said:
”We’re here at a time when a popular Democratic president, who is a constitutional lawyer by trade, has expanded, intensified, continued and, most importantly, legitimized, in the eyes of many liberals, some of the most egregious aspects of what the Bush administration called its counterterrorism policy and the Obama administration continues to call its counterterrorism and national security policy. And despite the fact that this very popular Democratic president campaigned on a pledge to radically change the way that the U.S. conducted its business around the world and, upon taking power, issued a number of executive orders that were purportedly aimed at shutting down secret prisons, ending torture and closing Guantánamo, what has actually happened is that the Obama administration has made cosmetic changes, tweaked the language, made a few adjustments to the detention program, to the—what’s called the targeted killing program, but it’s anything but targeted, as we’ve seen so often—it’s an assassination program. And this administration has sold the idea to many liberals in this country that this is a clean war, that it’s a smarter war than the ones that were being waged by his predecessor.”
Scahill also wrote the massive expose Blackwater: The Rise of the world’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, bringing this issue to the public’s attention, so much so that during Into Darkness Scotty cross-examines one of Marcus’ thugs over whether he is a private contractor.
But these undertones of the film are apparently too faint for some to pick out, as seen with this credulous and missing-the-point-much Wired review. But, at any rate, surely you are on the right track with a sci-fi when religious fundamentalists target you over a hinted-at-sex scene.
~
When in 2002, Avengers Assemble mastermind Joss Whedon tried to get his classic show Firefly off the ground, it was shut down by Fox during the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Axed, slaughtered off-guard. Unceremoniously, they even refused to air 3 of the 14 episodes that had been made, and even those weren’t shown in order or broadcast at any reasonable time for a new property. Backtracking, they washed their hands of it, and presumably everything that the show so beautifully symbolised. Over a decade later, Iron Man Three, based on Warren Ellis’ Extremis comic (as is the entire trilogy, though he hardly gets much credit for it) takes an utterly unavoidable, overt line against the War on Terror™ qua mass media manipulation. In the wake of Avengers Assemble, of the alien invasion of New York, Stark is suffering from full blown PTSD. We have our supervillain, the technocrat venture capitalist Aldrich Killian, using as a wind-up menace the terrorist Mandarin, who it turns out is an out of work actor from Croydon, London, with the Vice President of the US in his other hand. As he says in the film, the pinnacle of modern war is to control both sides and profit from the dialectic chaos. As the Mandarin likes to regale: “True story about fortune cookies: they look Chinese, they sound Chinese, but they're actually an American invention. Which is why they're hollow, full of lies and leave a bad taste in the mouth.”
Much as Kirk faces his own humanity in Trek, Stark undergoes a similar journey. The alien incursion into New York from Avengers has left him disturbed and having panic attacks. He obsessively escapes into working on his suits, the luxury of being a former arms-dealing billionaire heir in the technologically exponentially advanced near future. Alright for some. The moral lesson Tony learns, to borrow from Fight Club, is that he is not his company, not his fortune, not his techno-paradise sea-cliff villa, not his fancy suits. He has to learn to deal with his vulnerability, and not hide behind his suit systems - weapons Killian and the Vice President use against him. As he brings down the media projection that is Mandarin, Stark realises, perhaps, the futility and fragility of his own media-based ego that he has always hidden behind. At the end of the first film, when he declares to the assembled press that “I am Iron Man,” it’s a slightly awkward confession, and a stunt. By the end of the third film, when he again says the line, it’s an ironic affirmation of character. And just as in the first film he had the choice to continue to build armaments or to turn his company back around to fulfil its founders’ ambition to bring clean, renewable, cheap energy to the world, in the last instalment of the trilogy, we have the Extremis technology, that, like atomic energy, can be used to heal and to build or to kill and wipe out. Oddly paralleling the healing serum made from Khan’s blood in Into Darkness. The same themes: the power to destroy or the power to create and to mend. A sort of techno-alchemical transmutation of one into the other. And, at the end of it all, he also has to deal with Pepper Pots being more fully an equal for him now that she has been subjected to Extremis.
~
“You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you. They will stumble. They will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.”
- Jor-El, Man of Steel.
Man of Steel, put out by industry iconoclasts Legendary Pictures, is to Superman what Nolan and Legendary’s Dark Knight trilogy was to Batman – a deconstruction of a cultural icon and its rebuilding from the ground up. Gone are the camp red pants, the flamboyant villains, the endlessly iterated good samaritanism and mythic small town rural iconography. Whatever the merits or demerits of any of the previous Superman productions, this is a Man of Steel for the new century, not forsaking its roots, but respectfully getting closure and moving on and up.
Just like with Into Darkness and Iron Man Three, but really going to the heart of this story, are issues and themes of transhumanism. Eugenics. Supes, Kal-El, comes from a civilisation founded on it. In the last days of planet Krypton’s existence, when a sclerotic, decadent political order reigns in a time of imminent environmental crisis owing to energy mismanagement, the military caste, led by General Zod, instigate a coup. Zod is no longer the thug in tight pants and cloak with his gang of intergalactic goons harrying Supes while he tries to rescue kittens from burning trees. Here, he’s more of a Hitler archetype. An anti-Christ figure, in fact. He is a racial supremacist and a genetically engineered military force of nature, who believes he alone and his caste can guide Krypton out of this decline and re-establish the glory of the old galactic empire.
Superman, Kal-El, at this point a helpless baby, is the first child in living memory to be born of natural birth, not genetically engineered and grown. While Zod is the leading military mind of his time, Supes’ father, Jor-El, is the leading scientist, who, if he was listened to, could have averted the planetary disaster. In the end, the counsels and agitations of both are ignored by the ruling class, and all that’s left is to fight and gnaw like rats in a sinking ship. Bertrand Russell, in The Impact of Science on Society, wrote:
“Some part of life – perhaps the most important part – must be left to the spontaneous action of individual impulse, for where all is system there will be mental and spiritual death.” But in Kal-El, shipped off to Earth, in a region of former colonisation, is hope. ‘Hope’ is his house sigil, the symbol on his chest, clearly echoing Obama’s electioneering, and, in a nice last word, actually reclaiming Superman qua Superman from the filthy clutches of career politicians.
About a year ago, when I first started hearing of their being a new Superman film, I internally groaned. And I wonder if that is not a similar reaction that people are having to Disney’s The Lone Ranger, which is doing disastrously right now. I could be off, but did people see the cowboy hat, the whorehouse and the train chase in the trailer and just despair a little? Superman, while super, is still a man, a blue-eyed Caucasian archetype at that. A neo-Jesus archetype. But Man of Steelactually subverts the very bedrock of the comic icon by taking the ubermensch figure and making him, in fact, a living retort to the chauvinistic, hyper-aggressive transhumanist eugenics that he paradoxically, inexplicably comes from, and that through the selfless love of his parents he escapes. “What if a child dreamed of becoming something other than what society had intended. What if a child aspired to something greater,” Jor-El muses.
One of the other things that has dramatically changed in the Superman universe is the role of Lois Lane. Whereas before she was clueless to her boyfriend Clark Kent’s actual identity, this time around, played beautifully by Amy Adams (please see her in The Master if you haven’t, she is a scary lady in that film), she is the investigative journalist going against the wishes of the military and putting her own career on the line, who tries to break the story that we have made first contact. Script-writer David Goyer on why they made this change:
“I just thought it was silly. If you're going to make her smart, if she's going to be Superman's love interest, Lois needs to stand on her own as a character; she needs to be really smart and have a lot of gumption, and she can't just be the damsel in distress, or else why is Clark/Kal interested in her? People say that a hero is only as good as his or her villain, but I also think the same is true of his or her love interest. It strained credulity for me that it took Lois ten or twenty years to figure out that Clark was Superman. I call bullshit on it, especially if she's sleeping with him. That was something that we talked about with DC, and said, ‘Maybe it's time to move on from that.’”
Zod, and what’s left of Krypton, including his right-hand-lady Foara, a sort of Eva Braun from space, eventually catches up with him on Earth. They bring a terraforming platform, a World Builder, rescued from an old, abandoned neighbouring solar colony, and get to work turning it against Earth with the goal of turning our planet into a clone of Krypton, making it habitable for them, but In the process wiping out all native Earthlings. Supes, stuck in the middle, and in order to save us all in the face of relentless Zod, in a momentous decision, ends him, snapping his neck, and thus commits pre-emptive genocide against the genocidal. It’s a poetic contradistinction, alright.
But returning: Again, paralleling Star Trek, and Extremis, the World Builder is strikingly reminiscent of Wrath of Khan’s Genesis Device, a life-giving terraforming machine that Khan tries to use as a weapon against the Enterprise in the original film. Which brings us back full circle, to ‘ancient aliens’, to the Biblical iconography and symbolism, to the power to destroy or create, technology as a double-edged sword, even gnosticism. The old guard in literary criticism and theory maintain that the antique is ever contemporary, and that’s certainly an ethos that is partly guiding these new franchises. Actually, you only have to look at the posters to Man of Steel, Into Darkness and Iron Man Three to see Biblical ‘fall’ motifs depicted fairly strongly.
Samuel Johnson said: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” In sci-fi blockbusters like these, one could alter the maxim: We make myths of ourselves, we embody Campbell’s ‘Hero with a Thousand Faces’, to escape the pain of being a human, to escape the tyranny of the historical moment, in pre-emptive artistic retort to what E.P. Thompson called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, with stories. As Laurie Penny wrote recently:
“Ultimately it’s all about stories – who gets to tell them, who gets to be the hero and who’s stuck as the sidekick. Sweeping social change usually happens in stories first, and science fiction often has an agenda. What could be more political, after all, than imagining the future?
It goes like this: somebody dreams up a far-out notion of how the world might look if things were different and writes it down or acts it out and, gradually, people are given permission to imagine other lives. The first black president of the United States cropped up in science-fiction stories in the mid-1960s... People do the work of changing the world – but stories give us permission to reimagine it.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and story writer Katherine Anne-Porter, in her 1940 introduction to Flowering Judas, wrote:
“For myself, and I was not alone, all the conscious and recollected years of my life have been lived to this day under the heavy threat of world catastrophe, and most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meaning of those threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world.
In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.”
Jack Witek is an aspiring academic and sometime blogger, based in the South of England. He lives with his pet cat Adramelech, and personally welcomes our new transhuman overlords. @JackWitek
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