Flashback 1: Last year (1998) there were so many films in release with
paranoid scenarios that it would seem possible to parody Vince
Lombardi’s famous adage and say that paranoia isn’t
everything in American movies—it’s the only thing. This
is true to such an extent that it might even make sense to
postulate a paranoid genre which would include a number of movies
made in the last decades, including disaster movies, terrorist
movies, movies about the imminent destruction of the planet,
science fiction movies about hostile aliens, etc., since the
theme obviously admits of a wide range of variations. The
X-Files is a prime example, combining two elective themes of
the hypothetical genre: that of aliens from outer space and that
of conspiracy in high places. And what was Titanic if not
a powerful disaster movie ineptly decorated with a love story
straight out of the soaps? Yet it would be precipitous at this
point to lump together movies such as The X-Files, Godzilla,
Armageddon, or Enemy of the State: if the
theme allows numerous variations, the way it is worked out in
specific movies exhibits a correspondingly wide range of nuances
which need to be taken into account But all of these films follow
what might be called a classical paranoid scenario, one in which
there is a very clear division between persecutor and victim. In
its most simple form, in a movie like Brian De Palma’s Dressed
to Kill (1980), these roles are taken over by the individual
characters; in the more recent productions, the first role is
typically assumed by the American populace--or even humanity as a
whole—and the second by remote, abstract forces only
represented on screen by space aliens, mutant reptiles, impending
natural disasters on a global scale, or Machiavellian plotters
working for faceless but highly powerful government agencies or
equally faceless and powerful multinational corporations.
Not surprisingly paranoia on the screen
seems to coincide with moments of national crisis: the early
years of the Great Depression, the hysteria of the Cold War, the
disillusionment following the Vietnam War and Watergate. But even
though no crisis of such magnitude exists today, no one would
have to look far to find causes for the current vogue of paranoid
movie scenarios. The "evil empire" may have crumbled
but the threat of nuclear war--as the recent rivalry between
India and Pakistan attests--certainly has not. At home, although
the economy may be booming, this momentary wave of prosperity
hardly offers a reassuring contrast to racial conflict, urban
violence, loss of faith in the political system, and the
pervasive commercialization of American life. In the face of such
problems, it hardly seems necessary to emphasize how paranoid
fantasies in the popular media hardly represent an adequate
response. Rather than looking for objective causes, such
fantasies offer slick explanations which in turn frequently
appeal to racist or xenophobic impulses. In many ways, although
it deals with real historical events, D.W. Griffith's Birth of
a Nation, which virtually blames the Civil War on African
slaves and their Abolitionist proponents, is an archetypal
paranoid movie scenario. At the same time, today, as in the past,
these fantasies often provide the only channel through which
collective anxieties find expression in motion pictures. Rather
than simply dismissing out of hand typical specimens of the
genre, it would seem more profitable to place them in a larger
context.
Although the theme of paranoia had not been
absent from older American movies, it only begins to emerge in
its full glory in the 1950’s, after undergoing important
changes. Before that time, the theme—with one important
exception to be discussed subsequently—mainly shows up in
horror films, especially in the memorable productions of the
early 1930’s. In them the persecutor—vampire, mummy,
monster or whatever—represents the return of repressed
instinctual forces or—as in the case of King Kong—natural
ones, often with a strong sexual coloring. By contrast, starting
with the first of the aliens from outer space movies of the
1950’s, Howard Hawks’s The Thing (1951), these
polarities are reversed. The persecutor appears as the embodiment
of violent, destructive power; however, this power has its origin
in technology, not in nature or the unconscious. Even in Forbidden
Planet (1956), Dr. Morbius’ id can only take shape and
wreak havoc by means of the advanced technology of the
planet’s original inhabitants. Moreover, where the
persecutor in the older films was an aggressor par excellence, it
was always an autochthonous one; in the newer films, it is always
perceived as an "outsider" even if it is human in
nature—for example, a terrorist. If the persecutor in the
first case could be labeled an "aggressor," that in the
second might be most appropriately described as an
"invader."
One recent example of the genre, The
X-Files****, although it includes some standard features of
classical scenario--the hostile aliens theme as well as the sense
of impending doom hanging over helpless humanity--owes a good
deal more to this modified scenario that surfaced in 1950's
science fiction films like Howard Hawks’s The Thing,
William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars, and most
of all, Don Siegal’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Appropriate to the Cold War era with its fears of Soviet agents,
Communist conspiracy, and the threat of imminent nuclear attack,
the persecutor in this scenario was often not some manifest
antagonist like Kong or the Frankenstein Monster, but a more
devious adversary—like the aliens in Invaders from Mars
or Invasion of the Body Snatchers—capable of
brainwashing its victims and turning them into robots. The themes
are not those of immediate danger and overt physical conflict but
of loss of identity and conspiracy. In The Thing, for
example, the enemy is not so much the vegetable alien, still
patterned after the Frankenstein monster, but the renegade
scientist who seeks to protect it at the risk of betraying his
own species—an oblique allusion to the atom spy trials that
undoubtedly registered with many viewers in 1951. These films in
turn anticipated, if they did not influence, two brilliant films
that explicitly thematized Cold War paranoia, Robert
Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and John
Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, and
which depicted paranoid fantasies as the logical concomitant of
the oppressive political climate.
Of the films mentioned above, Armageddon°
follows the classical scenario most closely and also plays the
trump of doom card most loudly. The website for the movie even
included the passage from the Book of Revelations (16:1,16-21)
should anyone miss the allusion to the last judgement, which the
NASA director Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) glosses as
"Basically, the worst parts of the Bible..." Produced
by the redoubtable Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Michael Bay,
a graduate of MTV videos, the film hardly has more of a plot than
an old-time cliffhanger. At the very beginning, an asteroid is
discovered heading towards earth; before the first reel is over,
pieces are trashing downtown Manhattan. But help is at hand in
the shape of a crew of non-conformist oil drillers who are
transported into outer space to blow up the asteroid with a
nuclear bomb—a task they accomplish after having to undergo
a series of improbable crises. In the vein of Independence Day,
the movie concludes with scenes of crowds offering prayers of
thanks as the astronauts return to a hero's welcome on the once
more safe Earth. In appearance, this resolution would seem to
contradict what was said above about the role of technology in
later examples of the genre; however, what the film shows is much
more an equivalence between destructive natural forces and
technology, since nothing short of an A-bomb is capable of
destroying the asteroid. In the logic of paranoia, one disaster
equals—and cancels out--another.
At the same time, in Armageddon
technology itself seems often to be little more than an extension
of Yankee know-how and rugged individualism—this is a
Republican apocalypse—and scientists are generally treated
just as derisively as they are in The Thing, as
bureaucratic nerds. Here the movie furnishes an interesting
counterpart to Titanic, nearly a sermon on technological
hubris. Armageddon’s implicit confusion between
natural and technological forces figures quite explicitly in the
latter film, in which the collision with the iceberg has the
significance of a punishment for the owner’s desire to make
a record crossing to New York. But the ambivalence about
technology which Titanic plays with was certain not to be
lost on viewers who experience an anxiety attack every time they
board an international jetliner. It would seem almost trivial to
point out how limited a conception of
technology—"good" in Armageddon,
"bad" in Titanic—operates in both movies.
In the first place, in either movie, technology is simply a
given—in Titanic, the gift of the devil possibly and
in Armageddon, that of the angels presumably—but in
neither is there the least suggestion that it might be the result
of collective human intelligence and effort with the implied
possibility of rational choice in its use.
Moreover, a sense of fatality presides over
all these movies. "This is the Earth at a time when the
dinosaurs roamed a lush and fertile planet. A piece of rock just
six miles wide changed all that. It hit with the force of ten
thousand nuclear weapons. A trillion tons of dirt and rock
hurtled into the atmosphere creating a suffocating blanket of
dust the sun was powerless to penetrate for a thousand years. It
happened before. It will happen again," the voice of
Charlton Heston solemnly intones at the beginning of Armageddon,
as the disaster is reenacted on screen. With its overtly
eschatological appeal, Armageddon goes farther in this
direction than its rivals last summer, Deep Impact and Godzilla,
but the underlying moral of all these productions is identical:
violence is inescapable. Ironically, although Armageddon
is a paean to American self-reliance, it virtually excludes the
possibility of meaningful human action by treating history as
little more than a series of recurrent natural disasters. Not
only does the film tacitly equate natural and technological
forces but it also tacitly effaces what Giambattista Vico--as
cited by Marx in Capital I--saw as the difference between
natural and human history: that we have made the one but not the
other. Nevertheless, since apocalyptic disaster is averted in the
last reel, these films can still foresee a rosy future for the
human race—as if it were possible to wrap up all the
world’s ills in one package and dispose of them at a blow.
And this is, without a doubt, one of the main ideological
functions of the paranoid genre.
Where Armageddon is manic, Deep
Impact* is depressive. Although its effects are rather modest
in comparison with those of Armageddon, Deep Impact,
directed by Mimi Leder, has excellent performances by Vanessa
Redgrave as the mother of the heroine and Robert Duvall as an
aging astronaut. For the larger part of its length, it is a
straightforward, well-made movie about a comet headed towards
Earth that has certain similarities to the science fiction novel Lucifer's
Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Astronauts are
sent into space to avert the disaster by destroying the comet
with nuclear weapons--just as in Armageddon--but when they
fail and the comet fragments, all seems lost. Up to this point,
the film would seem to be tapping into a gloomier strain that
occasionally manifests itself in older science films like Kurt
Neumann's Rocketship XM (1950) especially when the
astronauts decide to sacrifice themselves in an attempt to blow
up the larger part of the comet. Unfortunately, Deep Impact
betrays this promise: the astronauts do succeed in destroying the
comet--and themselves along with it--and rescuing Earth at the
last moment, although the smaller fragment does collide with the
planet, sending a tidal wave six hundred or seven hundred miles
into the Eastern seaboard, wreaking destruction on an enormous
scale. Nevertheless, at this point Deep Impact and Armageddon
wholly converge, the film concluding with a nauseating apotheosis
in which the President (Morgan Freeman) announces that the danger
is over while the teenage boy who first discovered the comet and
his girlfriend watch the dawn of a new day.
Since Roland Emmerich, the director of Godzilla**,
had previously made Independence Day, another hugely
successful exercise in marketable paranoia, it would have been
reasonable to expect no better a picture than Deep Impact
or Armageddon. But the movie turns out to be the joker in
the deck. In the first place, the movie is a good deal more than
just a remake of the Japanese film directed by Inishiro Honda. It
has a quite well-constructed and funny screenplay (by Dean
Devlin) that adds to the basic plot a story about French
intelligence agents who are trying to cover up their government's
role in the gestation of Godzilla as well as a love story about a
young biologist, ably played by Matthew Broderick and his college
girlfriend, who are happily reunited as the lizard rampages
through Manhattan. Secondly, the change in locale from Tokyo to
New York has the interesting effect of inevitably conjuring up
memories of King Kong--which seems to have been as much in
the back of Emmerich's mind as its Japanese predecessor. Who can
watch Godzilla romping through the streets of New York wreaking
havoc without recalling the scenes in which Kong terrorizes the
city's inhabitants? Yet the total effect is quite different. When
the airplanes take off at the end of King Kong, a sense of
pathos intrudes upon the action, since the viewer knows that the
giant ape is going to confront a force that will ultimately
destroy him. In Godzilla, by contrast, when the saurian
trashes skyscrapers and easily demolishes the armed forces' most
sophisticated weapons of destruction, it is as if the creature
had embarked upon a grandiose potlatch of the goods of advanced
industrial civilization like a spoiled child breaking all the
crystal in an expensive boutique. In fact, Godzilla's
tongue-in-the-cheek sense of humor may account for the movie's
somewhat disappointing show at the box-office as much as the
media oversell. Audience's want their paranoia unalloyed with
ironic self-regard.
Although Armageddon was one of the
top-grossing films of the summer, its success pales beside the
international popularity of the television series upon which The
X-Files movie is based, a series which has made an industry
out of catering to public's appetite for paranoid scenarios. Yet
unlike the other recent specimens of the paranoid genre, The
X-Files can boast of something other than expensive special
effects, no doubt owing to the efforts of its creator, Chris
Carter. First of all, it has, in the lead roles as the FBI agents
Fox Mulder and Dana Sculley, two highly talented performers,
David Duchovny and Gilllian Anderson, who have attracted a large
following of their own. Second, at a moment when screenwriting
can hardly rate as one of the strong points of American film
production, the series episodes have often been highly original
and imaginative, at times suggestive of the writing of a great
science fiction writer like Philip K. Dick or even of that of a
maverick figure like William Burroughs. While the movie, directed
by Rob Bowman, relies more on action and rather less on ideas
than do the best of the episodes, the screenplay by Chris Carter
and Frank Spotnitz is still far better than that of any of the
other recent films under discussion here, with the possible
exception of The Truman Show. Last but not least, Carter
and his collaborators over the years have created a very striking
visual style for the series, employing backlighting, unusual
contrasts of light and darkness, and a highly atmospheric use of
color--a style that has been very effectively reproduced in the
movie by the director of photography, Ward Russell.
In contrast to its rivals, The X-Files
taps into a far darker side of the genre, one that goes back to
science fiction movies of the 1950's by way of such later films
as Brian DePalma's The Fury as well as The Manchurian
Candidate and Kiss Me Deadly. (It says something about
the relatively short memories of reviewers that while many of
them were scrambling to find predecessors for The Truman Show,
no review that I saw of The X-Files pointed out what close
ties it has with its more obvious prototypes.) Where Armageddon,
like the great majority of disaster movies as well as terrorist
pictures like Die Hard or threat-of-nuclear-war epics like
The Hunt for Red October, plunges the fate of individuals,
countries, or even the entire human race, into peril, only to
rescue them at the last moment, the dark variant of the genre
paints the future in far less rosy hues--characteristically, the
slogan for The X-Files movie was "Fight the
Future." Although radically bleak endings like that of Kiss
Me Deadly--in which a nuclear explosion concludes the
movie--or that of Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man--in
which the hero is doomed to annihilation--are the exception
rather than the rule, none of these films has what could be
remotely construed as a "happy" ending. Prototypic is
the closing shot of The Manchurian Candidate in which
Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) faces a rainy window and
after eulogizing the dead Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), who has
blown out his brains after killing his mother and stepfather,
says "Hell! Hell! "
In the dark basement of the paranoid genre,
this vein of pessimism often goes hand in hand with a strongly
anti-authoritarian bent, and a suspicion of established
institutions--the bigger, the more suspicious. It is here that The
X-Files, either in its video or screen incarnation, most
clearly reveals its ancestry. But one of the show's real
innovations, of course, lies in making its main characters
employees of one of the most suspect of all government agencies
rather than an outlaw like the father played by Kirk Douglas in The
Fury. On the one hand, precisely their status as insiders
makes Mulder and Scully privy to all the deep, dark secrets that
the government can succeed in keeping hidden from the rest of us
and opens up possibilities of plot motivation that would
otherwise be hard to justify. On the other, Mulder's quixotic
persistence is continuing to investigate the X-files
cases--reports of contacts between humans and aliens which the
FBI wants to suppress--creates the dramatically effective
spectacle of a lone individual pitted against an inhuman,
heartless bureaucratic entity. By making the main character a law
enforcement officer who uncovers dirty dealings that his own
agency wants to cover up, The X-Files has affinities not
only with The Manchurian Candidate or The Fury but
with Costa-Gavras' Z.
But The X-Files' dark side comes out
most arrestingly in its rejection of the messianic strain evident
in older science fiction movies such as Stanley Kubrick's 2001:
A Space Odyssey or Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of
the Third Kind. The X-Files movie commences with what
looks more than anything else like a wicked parody of the Kubrick
film, a prologue in which an alien virus--and not a beneficent
emissary from outer space--arrives in prehistoric times to
colonize earth's first humans. Similarly, the movie does not end
with the advent of a reborn humanity to the strains of Richard
Strauss, but with a shot of a new geodesic dome located in North
Africa, the commencement of further experiments in human-alien
crossbreeding. However, the tone here is not that of the nasty,
cheap cynicism that has become a commonplace of American movies
for some years now but of thoroughgoing disillusionment: The
X-Files is post-Vietnam, post-Watergate and it no more looks
backward to the supposed virtues of a Reaganesque past--as Armageddon
implicitly does--than it does to the possibility of a utopian
future. In a striking incident in the television episode
"One Breath," Mulder's FBI boss, Skinner (Mitch
Pileggi), recounts how as a Marine serving in Vietnam he had
killed a ten-year old boy working for the Viet Cong and then goes
on: "I lost my faith--not in my country or in myself but in
everything. There was just no point in anything anymore."
The words could well serve as an epigraph for The X-Files
as a whole.
The series implicitly and the movie
explicitly extend the paranoid scenario back to the remote
origins of the race, on the one hand, and into the foreseeable
future, on the other. Like a wacky parody of one of the favorite
phrases of Jacques Derrida, the elements of the paranoid scenario
are "always already" there as far as history extends in
either direction. But what the movie does in the dimension of
narrative breadth, so to speak, it also does in depth, in the
lives of the characters by involving them all in this ongoing
saga: not only has Mulder’s sister been abducted by aliens
but his father has worked on a secret experimental project along
side former Nazi scientists, etc. The result is a generalized
paranoid scenario which practically implicates everyone. Yet by
pushing it so far, the movie turns the paranoid scenario back
upon itself in a kind of reductio ad absurdum. If this
scenario no longer has any limits, then paranoia is the norm and
paranoid scenarios begin to forfeit some of their fatal
ideological allure. It is not only Scully who provides a
questioning voice of reason to some of The X-Files' more
far-fetched plot situations but the construction of the series
itself. To its credit, the movie makes the paranoid genre into a
question mark—an event that does not occur very often.
Beyond being a highly entertaining movie, The
X-Files certainly makes the most interesting use of the
paranoid scenario framework of any movie since The Fury,
and it does so without any of the obscene manipulativeness of Silence
of the Lambs. Yet this scenario plays as crucial—if not
as obvious-- a role in another of the season’s hits, The
Truman Show. In effect, the movie turns upside-down one of
the most familiar paranoid scenarios: instead of a character who
imagines he’s being watched all the time, it features
someone who really is being watched—by the entire country on
television, no less. The evil deus ex machina behind this
spectacle is the producer Christof—and his off stage
operations certainly constitute the most interesting aspect of The
Truman Show***, not the saga of Truman Burbank. In Peter
Weir’s movie, Marshall McLuhan’s loony dream of an
electronic global village has become a nightmarish reality. It is
not just that the movie points up the way television news
reporting is continually eroding the boundary between fact and
fiction, as several reviewers noted; the film presents a paranoid
fantasy come true—not that of the manipulation of
Truman’s life by Christof, but that of a total
interpenetration of our daily life by the television medium. The
Truman Show’s most brilliant conceit is that the whole
country is slowly changing into an enormous Sea Haven, staged for
the benefit of an ever present audience whose members at the same
time make up the cast of the drama they’re watching. After
all, the irrational logic of paranoia dictates that whatever is
happening to Truman could be happening to any of us right now
without our knowing it.
If The Truman Show had been content
to play this idea for all it’s worth, the movie might have
been the accomplished satire it has been unjustifiably praised
for being. To be sure, it has a number of brilliant touches: the
realization of a nauseatingly conformist vision of the ideal
community; the nearly automated behavior of Sea Haven’s
residents; the glimpses of the television crews at work creating
Truman’s fool’s paradise. Unfortunately, in a gesture
that may have been influenced by Frank Capra’s wildly
overrated It’s a Wonderful Life, The Truman Show
releases its hero from his captivity back into the
"real" world where he can be reunited with his true
love. But it shouldn’t take a moment’s reflection to
realize that these days the "real" world hardly differs
a whit from the made-for-television one. By justifying
Truman’s suspicions that something is going on he
doesn’t understand, the picture neutralizes a far more
disturbing insight: how the pervasive influence of television can
make it at once the agent and object of paranoid fantasies—a
point that John Frankenheimer anticipated in a brilliant scene in
The Manchurian Candidate which shows a television monitor
whose screen, in a potentially infinite reduplication of images,
depicts a congressional investigation simultaneously in progress
on screen. But The Truman Show packs off this idea to the
netherworld just as it does the Machiavellian Christof, whose
actions at some moments—for example, when he tries to sink
Truman’s sailboat—recall those of a totalitarian
dictator trying to prevent one of his subjects from escaping his
state, more than they do those of a media boss, no matter how
powerful.
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