Like Tears in Rain: Meditations on Science Fiction Cinema (9 page)

Jingoism and the Culture of Fear

A Look at the Politics of
Star Trek Into Darkness

Having seen 
Star Trek Into Darkness
 twice now, and having very much enjoyed it, my aim is to avoid spoilers here whenever possible, for the sake of those readers who might intend to see the film but haven’t gotten around to it yet. That said, if you’re 
really worried
 about it, I’d say close your browser now and get to the nearest cinema. It’s a movie well worth your time (and money)—and is perhaps the best space opera film since 1980’s 
The Empire Strikes Back
.

It isn’t perfect, of course. There’s been
 a bit of backlash over the controversial racebending of one especially beloved 
Trek
 character. And Captain Kirk’s womanizing is in full force, despite the six or seven years that have elapsed since the last Abrams 
Star Trek
 picture. Damon Lindelof even issued an apology for the gratuitous, half-nude Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) scene.

The film also features a few eye-rolling moments of scientific impossibility played out casually and without alarm or explanation. Not that you really expect a
 
Star Trek
 movie to be free of such “artistic liberties,” you understand, but nevertheless they are noticeable.

But what I took to be profoundly bold, and dealt with in a tasteful, mature manner, is the film’s commentary on post-9/11 jingoism and the culture of fear that has taken root in the West in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s presidency. There are two principal villains in the film: one alienated from his homeworld, whose motivations are at times hard to grasp; and one who holds high office in Starfleet, whose actions and authority make clear his warmongering agenda.

I’d argue that 
Into Darkness
’s plot is not deeply allegorical, but rather an intelligent exploration of our notions of good, evil, and the whole spectrum between—of our notions of deterministic destiny, choice, and justice.

Back when the news hit of Osama bin Laden’s
 assassination by SEAL Team Six, I recall feeling a deep sense of dissatisfaction. What had we gained? An alleged corpse. The great CIA story that became Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 zeitgeist film 
Zero Dark Thirty
. Was it justice? I’m still unsure.

At the time, I was taking a mandatory college course, called
 
Reflections: Suffering, Evil, and Hope
. When the professor asked for our gut reactions to the terrorist’s death, I was the minority opinion. The only one, in fact, who was not elated at the news of bin Laden’s death. Later that day, I said to my ethics and philosophy professor, Dr. C. Hannah Schell, “We’re bloodthirsty,” meaning 
we
 as a nation. As a Western way of life: Our culture of fear.

Spock (Zachary Quinto) remarks to Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), in Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of the
 
Star Trek Into Darkness
 script:

“While I harbor only the ultimate disdain and contempt for the individual known as John Harrison, and desire strongly that he receive the punishment due him, I must point out that there is no Starfleet regulation that condemns a man to die without a trial—no matter how egregious his offenses.” (Kindle e-book edition, Simon & Schuster)

In the final, filmed version of Quinto’s dialogue, Spock instead adds something to the effect of, “—a fact which you 
and
 Admiral Marcus seem to be forgetting.”

It seems fairly evident that screenwriters Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof saw the villainous John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) as an opportunity to explore not only the growing threat of domestic terrorism, but also the problems that arise from institutionalized revenge—thanks, perhaps, to the troubling politics at play in American foreign policy.

When Kirk, Spock, and Lieutenant Nyota Uhura land via shuttlecraft on the barren, warlike planet of Kronos, it quickly becomes evident that the Klingon race is a stand-in for the political and cultural 
other
. Most likely, given the subtext of more or less every quasi-political Hollywood film of the past decade, for the Middle East in particular.

The irony at play in this action-heavy sequence is that Uhura warns of the Klingons’ capacity for torture and murderousness; then, after Harrison intervenes by opening fire upon them in the middle of her efforts at diplomacy, she proceeds to draw the blade of the Klingon warrior in front of her and stab him in the leg.

The Klingons as a group are discovered to be far less of a threat than the former Section 31 agent Harrison, despite Admiral Marcus’s earlier insistence that war with Kronos has become increasingly inevitable. Yet they’re the ones Kirk’s crew has been ordered to attack.

In other words,
 
Star Trek Into Darkness
 shows the manner by which we tend to place all blame for any grave injustice not upon entire nations, or specific political blunders, but instead upon a single human scapegoat, regardless of how dubious or vague the facts surrounding a particular conflict prove to be. Even if the war itself ultimately has little to do with the one declared responsible.

We want quick gratification. A name and visage toward which to direct our collective hatred.

But with tears streaming down his face, something truly haunting Harrison behind those chilly eyes of his, we can’t help but question the narrative at play. Question our justifications for even the most clear-cut of wars. There are those who assert, for instance, that the organization known as al-Qaeda is little more than a fiction of the English-speaking world’s media. Where that’s true or not is irrelevant: Either way, we need a humanistic, peacekeeping force like Starfleet—like the United Nations, like Amnesty International—to propagate the gifts of peaceful coexistence, understanding, and, most importantly, the idea of forgiveness.

Abrams’s
 
Into Darkness
 forces us to give pause, and reconsider the motivations at play behind militaristic campaigns and their xenophobic leaders—the “Masters of War,” as Dylan calls them.

As Captain Kirk reflects in the film’s ending, to seek revenge upon wrongdoers is to risk losing
 
our own
 sense of right and wrong. In Foster’s novelization, the captain goes on to say in his speech:

“We are gathered here to pay our respects to fallen friends and family. We take solace in the knowledge that we honor those who lost their lives doing what they believed was right. And no matter what path they took, we hope that in death they can find forgiveness.” (Simon & Schuster)

That is something I fear we may be hard-pressed to find in the Western world, even twelve long years after the atrocities of September 11, 2001. To forgive is such a foreign concept to us. And yet in a sense, sealing Harrison away in cryostasis is a sign that we’re somehow, as Kirk would put it, 
getting better
—but as a nation whose deep-seated ideologies stem from the war crimes and bomb scares and genocides of the twentieth century? Well, we still have so very far to go.

I applaud the filmmakers and studio heads at Paramount and Bad Robot not only for being willing to admit this, that our collective kind hasn’t quite learned to forgive and get along with one another, but also for having the fullness of vision to dedicate the movie and its bold message to those brave souls who have served among U.S. and NATO Coalition forces in the wake of that single, unforgettable morning that shook the innocence from our once-great nation forever.

Alone on the Moon

Looking Back at Duncan Jones’s Directorial Debut

I’m sitting with a group of friends in the Seminary Street Pub, familiar faces here and there casting shadows upon near-forgotten memories, making plain the slippery nature of time and life. Red neon lights drench the dark paint of the walls. I watch my last beer swirl, dizzying, half-gone, inside a green glass bottle as I peel off the metallic label. . . .

After we went to dinner, my fiancée suggested we skip out on 
Iron Man 3
. There’s always tomorrow, she pointed out—and quite rightly. Hell. We can always watch 
Silver Linings Playbook
 at home. True, true.

Days later, I’m still thinking about Duncan Jones’s
 
Moon
 anyway. About the column I was supposed to write half a week ago. Loneliness fostered by distance and time and sheer solitude.

One can only imagine how it must feel to live alone on the Moon.

Sam Rockwell’s performance—performances?—may be the closest we’ll ever come to knowing for sure. Certainly I wouldn’t advocate for some lone maintenance man patrolling a lunar harvesting field, digging up barrels of helium-3 and firing them off toward home. How long before you’d break? Before you’d be willing to take your life’s work, and just overturn it all?

Rockwell’s character, Sam Bell, represents the best in science fiction cinema. He’s a curious little man, childlike in both his ignorance and curiosity; he dares to challenge that which he finds suspicious or otherwise dissatisfactory.

Through his stumbling about, watching his mirror image deteriorate before his very eyes and then seeking to unleash knowledge upon an unsuspecting, corporate-dominated world . . . we expect and demand great things of him. We feel the pain of his loss as he realizes that he’s lost his wife already, even before he was born—and as it dawns on him that he’ll only last for the three brief years it takes to fulfill his “contract.”

Such is the curse of the blue-collar man in today’s world. We are obliged to spend so much of our precious lives on the clock, toiling in the midst of some great machinery at once incomprehensible but also quite basic. Inching our overlords toward some fabled bottom line.

But I think the gift of Jones’s quiet science fiction film may be the sense of hope, of
justice
, that is to be grasped from the larger tragedy of the working individual’s life amid tedium.

We have those rare opportunities to expose indiscretions, and to show the world what profit-obsessed institutions are capable of inflicting on human beings at the level of the underpaid, more-than-likely
 
desperate
 individual.

How our jobs take us away from the ones we love and the moments we treasure, leaving us with little more than the fading memories of some idealized past, held in high regard but only ever glimpsed in the act of reflection: in some dusty old mirror, near-forgotten in the attic of the mind.

Iron Man 3 as Critique of Techno-Darwinism

War Machines, Broken
Toy Soldiers, and the Quest for Godhood

Iron Man Three
 surpasses its predecessor, Joss Whedon’s 
The Avengers
, in one very exciting and fundamental way: it feels more like an actual comic book than any single Marvel flick before it—hell, maybe more than any comic adaptation, period. It celebrates the humor and cool-gadgetry flair of the first two 
Iron Man
 flicks while simultaneously shoving billionaire “mechanic” Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr. in the role of his career) into his proverbial dark night of the soul. No small thing for a former military industrialist-turned-Avenger.

Defying expectations at a number of cleverly scripted turns, the film proves to be the most intelligent in the series by a marked degree. Whereas in previous installments Stark remarked that he and the hot-rod red suit were a single heroic entity, Shane Black’s first entry in the series establishes that the man makes the suit, not the other way around.

It does so by having Stark wear the suit, oddly enough, as rarely as possible. And the movie is no weaker for it. Honest. In fact, we grow to know Tony Stark’s visage as the true face of Iron Man; in 
Iron Man Three
, anyone might be behind the mask. Or no one, even—the suits are now equipped with a Jarvis-integrated AI autopilot system that allows them to act independently of their maker, which makes for some nice 
Mission: Impossible
-style, all-is-not-as-it-seems theatricality.

Without getting too pretentious and philosophical, I’ll just say that the film asks important questions about the nature of humanity and our conception of a “soul,” shedding light (and in some cases,
 
explosive heat
) on the possible downsides to technological evolution and even transhumanism. But it’s not exactly clean-cut or heavy-handed about it; the very same mutagenic technology that gives the Mandarin and his minions such wicked strength and resilience also saves the life of Stark’s beloved partner, Pepper Potts.

A young boy living in rural Tennessee saves Tony’s life at one point. Pepper—and don’t go crying “spoiler,” because it’s in the freaking trailer—dons the Iron Man armor in another tense scene of mass destruction and saves Stark’s life with his own suit.

The movie’s endgame features a grandiose spectacle of unmanned—iron men?—arriving to tip the tide of battle during a final showdown with the murderous Mandarin as he prepares to assassinate the president of the United States in downright savage fashion. And no, I ain’t talking about the paint job on Iron Patriot, renamed thusly because apparently “War Machine” was—ahem—a little too on-the-nose in its description of American foreign policy.

Stark’s army of iron mirror-selves assists him in his battle against the film’s upstaging surprise villain, played perfectly and effortlessly, it seems, by a transformed Guy Pierce. Not transformed in terms of appearance so much as by the seductive nature of both technological progress’s promise of human perfection and its implications for an inevitable social reordering. A spurned admirer from Tony’s past, Pierce plays a scientist named Aldrich Killian who develops a viral mutagen known as Extremis: the next step toward humankind’s ascent to godhood, save for a few vital flaws—for instance, addictive properties and side-effects like causing the user to explode.

The film succeeds so admirably on the grounds of its boldness, risk-taking, and Downey’s voiceover narration, which serves to tie the experience together as a self-contained graphic novel-esque story arc within the larger context of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe and its flagship achievement, 
The Avengers
.