Blight Of Nature: Underworld Awakening

It would really be great if the aesthetic and cool factor of the Underworld franchise could be harnessed for characters who actually care about humans instead of just feeding off them. Alas, the problem with Underworld: Awakening is the same as with all previous editions of the story: we are asked to identify with a hero who hates us.

Selene almost always has weapons and that illusion of power is very appealing to people who do not constantly make an investment of faith and leave their lives up to God. I will not hesitate to confess that I wish I could take an axe and storm Congress like the Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer trailer, but the kind of power and action Selene takes in the Underworld series is not the kind of action that Christians are called to take, so the element of power and control vampires seemingly have undermines the most basic tenants of Christian faith when we are called to pray and have faith in God and leave vengeance to him (and granted, other films do this as well, GI Joe Retaliation will do this, for example, but there is a difference, a very fine line between sitting back and doing nothing and being a willing instrument of God's grace and taking power into your own hands and the later is what Underworld and like films do and why Christians have to be vigilant about them).

So, why should we care?
I'm not, by any means, saying, go out and see this film so you can expose yourself to it and feel the eroding in your soul; but Hollywood invested $70 million dollars to make this film, and it hasn't even grossed $60 million worldwide (which is the good news, maybe they will stop making them). That's an enormous amount of money to invest in a venture but, given the success of films such as Twilight and TV shows like Being Human, why wouldn't Hollywood producers think they could make money off this?

This is a great shot because it really provides the information that we need about this heroine with whom we are asked to sympathize with and identify. Please note her hair: hair is symbolic of the thoughts, it visualizes how our thoughts are holding together and taking shape; her hair is separating (the separate strands by her face that have been gelled to hold them together and apart from the rest of her hair), which is exactly how she thinks. Throughout the entire series, Selene makes up the rules as she goes along, she has no guiding principles and nothing is sacred to her, her thoughts are as separate and disparate as her hairstyle.

Why does American society so easily become entranced with vampires?
Because vampires have a threefold ingredient list making them appealing to younger people and people who have no spiritual grounding in their lives: first, their is usually some element of glamor; secondly, they appear to have power and, thirdly, vampires manage to find a dark place in a person's soul and bring that out, making the audience member think that they have vampire tendencies because sometimes they feel like outcasts or lonely (I did some posts on vampires last October and this post will build upon those; please see For the Dead Travel Fast: Dracula, The Undead: Nosferatu, The Children Of the Night: Dracula 1931, False Light: Interview With the Vampire).

Kate Beckinsale is a very beautiful woman, and has been named some men's magazine's most desirable woman in the world before and her beauty contributes to the aesthetic and glamor of the vampire (just as Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas and Brad Pitt contributed their good looks to the aesthetic in Interview With the Vampire). The different elements of Selene's outfit gives us a better understanding of how un-connected her thoughts and beliefs are. She wears a corset, military style boots and a black S & M leather body suit. While the corset is meant to emphasize her femininity, or at least her sex appeal, her boots are meant to show that she has a masculine will (feet symbolize the will) and in Selene's case, we know that she's "a warrior" because that is her reputation and legacy, which usually belongs to a man. Lastly, her body suit, tight and slick, puts her in a sexually dominating position above males. In short, Selene is a Frankenstein monster of a vampire and so is her code of conduct which Thomas (Charles Dance), the leader of a coven of vampires, points out.

We have to remember: a vampire is a vampire is a vampire.
Symbolically, a vampire drinks the blood of humans, because those humans have failed to drink the blood of Christ and find for themselves eternal life in the Light of God. Instead, these films will show the damned souls as living a comfortable life, usually in a large castle or manor house, and with great wealth wearing cool clothes, drinking blood from expensive crystal glasses and they are always beautiful and eternally young. Even when the "vampire self" comes out in Underworld, it retains that semblance of beauty and power and makes the damned life desirable.

Please note her eyes, which, beside a slight elongation of the canine teeth, are the only indications that the vampire self is taking over. Why are vampires always beautiful? We could say it's an extension of the deadly sin of vanity: because they were so beautiful physically, they didn't care how they looked spiritually, and hence they were open to becoming evil because their main priority was to stay looking beautiful, not gain eternal life. What Underworld does differently than say, Van Helsing, is that in Van Helsingthe thin veil of glamor is torn asunder and we see them how they really are: demons from hell.

Vampires appear to be powerful.
I do not deny that evil has power (it most certainly does) something I will discuss at length in my next posting on Ghost Rider, but there is a strong difference between the power--as in the type of power of Good and the Soul that is devoid of evil that we find in Mary and the saints--and earthly that its use not only corrupts but leads to damnation (because you are use to using it to protect yourself and get what you want, so you completely depend on it and do everything you have to to keep it as if it were life itself). In Underworld, Selene can jump, fight, shoot guns, run fast, but what's the point, really? In an isolated context, this seems like cool stuff, but when compared to the soul's loss of grace, it is nothing, but that is never brought out.

The child of Selene and Michael, a hybrid vampire-werewolf, Eve. The fight for her really comes down to a power struggle in the film because Eve is supposed to be the most powerful of them all.

Lastly, vampires exhibit human characteristics which "feed on" the dark places within our souls to forge a bond with them so we start to identify with them and ultimately, want to become like them, they become role models. Vampires are demons, and that is all there is to it hence, they no more exhibit human characteristics than the heavenly angels who watch over us because both sets of angels are pure spirit that have nothing earthly about them. Selene, very much, is an evil Christ figure, the kind of Christ figure that Judas Iscariot wanted: God who would come down and fight, with swords and guns, our political and personal battles and make us rulers over the earthly world. These are people who reject the Good Shepherd, the Crucified One, the Eucharist and when we allow ourselves to be tempted by these visions of power, so do we.

In the closing lines, which are included in the trailer above, Selene prophecies that not only will the vampires survive in the world, but reclaim the world back from humans. Riding like a parasite upon a weak and tragic love story that would be familiar to humans, Underworld and other vampire films package anti-Christian practices and temptations to lure us away from our faith and the difficult path of eternal life. The problem is, all too often it works. If we know the aesthetic and the techniques, we can show others--especially our children--why these films are full of poison that must be rejected by Christians. It's not enough to say, "Don't watch that because I told you," by articulating the strategies of these films, we will teach others to recognize the forbidden fruit, the sugar-coating they put on evil, and why it means only death for us.

What I Saw This Weekend

I got in three films this weekend: Underworld: Awakening, which was released a while ago, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance which came out this weekend and also released this weekend, This Means War. Once upon a time, I thought that critics were paid to say that a film was good regardless of how bad it was; now, I know from empirical evidence, that you can judge the amount of morality in a film by how much critics hate it. While Underworld Awakening was exactly what I was expecting, Ghost Rider was better than what I thought it would be, but very much like Underworld; This Means War, however, was much better than what I was expecting (I just don't like rom-coms) and it's because of the morality that critics don't like it. I will be getting those posts up asap and tweeting them when they are up!

Why does this shot of Selene (Kate Becksindale) say everything we need to know about her?

Promiscuity & Gender in the 1950s: The Thing From Another World

Howard Hawks' 1951 Sci-Fi essential The Thing From Another World contains what is probably the most important dialogue trapped in celluloid during the 1950s between Nikki Nicholson (Margaret Sheridan) and Captain Patrick Hendry (Kenneth Tobey).  Using his sophisticated trademark techniques,  (the uncredited director) Hawks gives us an alien, "The Thing" (James Arness) who is a psychoanalytic projection for two characters, Pat Hendry and scientist Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) providing Sci-Fi fans with a unique and high-stakes battle between dominant forms of masculinity; Nikki, however, aptly shows us the feminine gender crossing over into the masculine, numerous times and the consequences for not only women but men as well.

What I believe to be the most important conversation in film of the 1950s between Pat Hendry and Nikki Nicholson:
Pat: That was a dirty trick you played.
Nikki: Now, Pat, don't lose your temper.
Pat: Why did you do it? Just tell me why.
Nikki: Well, your legs aren't very pretty.
Pat: You didn't have to write a note and put it on my chest. Plenty of people got up before I did.
Nikki: I'm sorry, Pat.

The scene wherein this conversation takes place.

Pat: Six people read it before I woke up. Now the whole Air Force is laughing at me.
Nikki: Not so loud. They'll hear.
Pat: They probably all ready heard.  The only place it hasn't been is on a billboard.
Nikki: Oh, I didn't know you had such a nasty temper. Now, Pat, just be careful. Now take it easy. Now wait a minute. We had a lot of fun when you were up here. Then when you asked me down to Anchorage, you deliberately fed me a lot of--
Pat: Tell me something, did you really drink all those drinks?
Nikki: Hm-mm.
Pat: You didn't throw any away? Not a one?
Nikki: No. 
Pat: Holy cat. I thought I was good. And another thing, why did you leave? When I woke up in the morning you were gone."
Nikki: "I told you I had to take that cargo plane back here."

This title card is done well: the light coming through the darkness to form the words is like certain images in the film coming through the darkness of plot and history to reveal to us who is the thing and where this other world is.

Captain Hendry and Nikki have had a sexual affair without being married, and everyone in the Air Force knows about it. "When I woke up you were gone," clearly indicates that they spent the night together, after both being heavily intoxicated. To say the least, this kind of expose in the 1950s--why it might have become common place in practice--was still scandalous to mention so abruptly in film, but it is this exact moment that gives birth to the whole rest of the film. To know someone in the Biblical sense (to have sexual relations with them) without knowing them ("My," Nikki says to Pat, "you have a nasty temper" because she's just now finding this out, that is, coming to know him) is to create a Frankenstein monster of them, choosing what you know and don't know about them, and that is why The Thing, when finally destroyed and shriveled up into nothing, is electrocuted like Frankenstein's monster. 

The opening shot of the film, the Officers' club in Anchorage. It's interesting because when we first meet Pat Hendry, he's playing cards, poker, specifically, and the comment is made, "Everyone knows you can't fool the captain unless you're a woman" and Pat ends up winning that hand; when he meets with Nikki, however, he says, "That was a dirty trick you played," and the correlation between playing cards and playing a trick shows us what his friends were thinking about.

When you are watching the film, the first style-defining characteristic to sit it apart from other films is the dialogue: Hawks doesn't hesitate to have several people talking at once, over each other, interrupting, and this is an employment of noise (just like Steven Soderbergh in Contagion and Christopher Nolan in the upcoming Dark Knight Rises). There are several people talking, for example, during the opening card game in the officers' club, and that reflects how we, the viewers will be listening to the film: we won't hear everything that is being said because we will get distracted or not understand what is trying to be communicated. But, with several viewings and careful attention, we can, like gold miners, separate everything out and find the golden nuggets.

The group has found a flying saucer and groups around the ice-enclosed shape to distinguish its boundaries. However, what is really "alien" about this shape is that it's a source of life: it's shaped, with the tail, just like male sperm. What's the purpose? The "passenger" from this "sperm shaped craft," was thrown out, meaning that the purpose, nature and gift that a man's sperm is has been separated from his very self and destroyed because he looks at it merely as an aspect of the sexual instead of the vehicle of life. When a man denies the importance of his sperm, i.e., he gets separated from it like the passenger and the craft, he becomes a vegetable just like The Thing because he forgets his spiritual calling and the great dignity of his physical body.

As I said, The Thing is a psychological projection for two characters in the film, Pat Hendry and Dr. Carrington, because both men, while seemingly different, actually exhibit similar characteristics, but the battle of The Thing gives us an idea about their qualities and values. The Thing is a walking vegetable able to regenerate itself and it lives on blood. Its purpose is to make more of itself.

When they first meet The Thing face to face in the greenhouse. The greenhouse could be a polar symbol for the Garden of Eden, since mention is made of keeping it locked up because the Eskimos like to steal the strawberries (the stolen fruit in Eden). This is likened to Pat stealing sexual favors from Nikki although they are not married. As in Them! when it's Dr. Patricia Medford who first sees the giant ants, so we know to correlate the ants as a symbol for her, in The Thing From Another World it's Captain Pat Hendry who sees it so we know to correlate The Thing with him.

The qualities Pat and The Thing share is self-dehumanization. Pat's illicit affair with Nikki not only dehumanizes himself--because he has failed to treat his own body with respect (which includes getting really drunk)--but he has dehumanized himself before the entire Air Force by his behavior which they all know about. Pat wanting to have a sexual relationship with Nikki, but not a committed sexual relationship, is the prominent feature Pat shares with The Thing because it is by our committed relationships that our own humanity is not only expressed, but perfected. Without a doubt, this is a theme in the film because the day The Thing lands is November 1, All Saints' Day and the day Pat arrives at the pole is All Souls' Day November 2. Scott the newspaper man (Douglas Spencer) mentions two Biblical references: the parting of the Red Sea by Moses and Noah's Ark.  

When Pat tries to get the door closed on The Thing, he gets its arm stuck in the door. It's in the dog attack that the arm is completely torn off. Symbolically, for both Pat and Dr. Carrington, the dogs attacking are (for Pat) his authority being attacked by the scientist who disagree with him and so undermine his strength as a Captain and for Dr. Carrington, his authority as a Nobel Prize winner is undermined by Pat not allowing him to examine The Thing.

The landing of the craft on All Saints' Day acts as the collision between the spiritual and earthly realms, the natural and the supernatural, reminding us that we are all called to be great saints and the story contained within the film is going to show us how to avoid becoming a vegetable instead. The reason Scott mentions the parting of the Red Sea in conjunction with the space craft discovery is because every man is called upon by God to be like Moses and Noah, to serve the Lord and thereby save the world, not be monsters and aliens who destroy it by their immoral behavior. The parting of the Red Sea was God leading his people from the bondage of sin to be his own (foreshadowing Christ leading us by the Crucifixion).

The Thing bound by ice. It actually looks like a child, still in the mother's womb, but because we know this monster is a projection of Pat, we could say that because Nikki is being an "unnatural woman," so she has an unnatural womb, and by failing in her femininity she fails to help Pat be the man he was called to be. So instead of the womb being a warm place, it is ice cold because there is the lack of the warmth of love just the heat of lust.

Then, Scott mentions in his closing news cast that, just as Noah saved the world from the flood by the ark, so they have saved humanity by the arc of electricity. Why did God destroy the world and only leave Noah to survive? Because of the flood of sinfulness into the world caused by mankind. The electricity that was used in Frankenstein to give the creature life is used in The Thing From Another World to take false life so genuine life can thrive.
What does that mean?

There is another interesting dimension connecting Pat to The Thing: his arms. When he and Nikki are talking about her visit to Anchorage, she says that his arms were like an octopuses' because they were all over her. The Thing has his arm torn off and is studied by the doctors and realized to be vegetable, not animal. This relates to Pat because instead of using his arms to defend Nikki and love her (genuinely) he abused his strength (again) to fuel his appetites instead of using the impetus of his emotions, his attraction to Nikki, to start a deep and meaningful relationship with her (which he attempts throughout the rest of the film).

"False life" is a standard of living according to the world, the idea of "living it up," and doing what you want to, going with your appetites; "genuine life" is a life lived according to the spirit, not the flesh, and by acknowledging the spirit, we acknowledge the needs of the spirit: God, prayer, the sacraments and abstaining from sin which destroys grace within us and our very identity (because God is our creator, not Satan, God wants us to fulfill our destiny and the potential of our soul, whereas Satan wants to ruin and destroy our identity just as his was destroyed when he revolted against God). This brings us to how The Thing is also a projection of Dr. Carrington. He says: "Knowledge is more important than life," and elsewhere, " We've only one excuse for existing. To think. To find out. To learn. . . . nothing counts except our thinking. We've thought our way into nature, we've split the atom," and then Eddie says, "That sure made the world happy, didn't it?" which references, again, the atomic bomb.

Carrington trying to "make friends" with The Thing.

Carrington, by denying the spiritual aspect of man's existence (we live for God and eternal salvation, not just to think) is also making man into a vegetable the same way that Pat is making himself into a vegetable by not having a meaningful relationship with Nikki. The Thing From Another World, then, is a man who is neither spiritual nor emotional, and exists in a world that is very much what the earth is becoming as the number of people continues to increase who exhibit these characteristics. Of The Thing's "seed pod reproduction" (as opposed to sexual reproduction), Dr. Carrington says, "No pain or pleasure as we know it. No emotions, no heart. Our superior, our superior in every way." And that is false, because our emotions are a gift from God (they can be a curse when we fail to use them appropriately or develop them into maturity) but our emotions are one of the ways that God guides us through life. Carrington, surely an atheist by the way he talks, wants humans who have no emotions, no pleasure, no pain, no relationships: vegetables.

The pods that Carrington grew from samples taken from The Thing's hand that was chewed off by the dogs. He planted them and gave them plasma to grow them and the scientists can listen to them breathing with a stethoscope: "Almost like the wail of a newborn child that is hungry." If The Thing is like Carrington and Pat, how are they trying to reproduce themselves? Pat is reproducing himself by everyone in the Air Force knowing what he has done and so they will start to behave just as he does. Carrington makes more scientists like himself because he gets the others to disobey Pat's order and they try to get The Thing when it returns to the greenhouse (another aspect of the Forbidden Fruit).

So this is the big question: why blood?
It doesn't really make sense for a vegetable to live off blood, does it? But the dog that is drained, and then the two scientists hung up in the greenhouse rafters as in a slaughterhouse, gives us a progression of the appetites. As we become more dehumanized, so we dehumanize others; as we become holy, so we treat others with greater respect. The dog that is locked away in the box and drained of blood is Nikki, because both she and Pat were giving into their appetites and acting like animals; the blood symbolizes life itself, and because--just like in the iconography of vampires--we lose our life if we are not drinking the Blood of Christ and our blood is drank instead by those who wish our death (whether monsters or other people wanting to use us to satisfy their appetites). The two scientists show Carrington's appetite to destroy other scientists so he can have all the glory of this new discovery (which is living giving to him the way the sexual act is life giving to Pat) and the scientists giving in because they don't know any better.

The idea of The Thing re-generating its life is the same as Pat wanting to "start all over again" with Nikki, that is, grow a new relationship. Just as The Thing is bound in ice, so Pat is bound with a rope. Just as the warm blanket melts the ice on The Thing, so Nikki's affections and confession about how much she likes him warms Pat and frees him from otherwise being gentlemanly with a more feminine woman.

The last important item: Nikki.
Remember, just as Them! opens in the New Mexico desert, so The Thing From Another World opens in a desert of ice and snow but instead of being frigid, Nikki's red hot (like Nikki says towards the end, before The Thing is dead, "If I start burning up again who will put out the fire?"). Why does Nikki return from her time in Anchorage on a cargo ship? Because she is cargo and her repeated bad behavior has dehumanized her to the point that she has lost her femininity and is no more spiritually advanced than a vegetable herself. But Nikki's bad behavior isn't as much a focal point of concern for The Thing From Another World as the men's bad behavior is: she can out drink a man, let everyone in the military know she's slept with Pat Hendry, take a hit on the chin, and propose marriage, but male promiscuity and scientific arrogance are the forces at work in 1951 threatening to turn the world into "another planet" full of people "completely alien" to what we are used to thinking of as human. (But we shouldn't forget how Nikki feminizes Pat by saying, "Your legs aren't very pretty").

When Nikki reads Dr. Carrington's notes to Pat, before they set out to find the crash site, she reads, "Such deviation (12 degrees) possible only if a disturbing force equivalent to 20,00 tons of steel or iron ore had become part of the earth at about a 50 mile radius." What does this mean to the story? From our discussion on The Monolith Monsters, we know how sin is translated into hardness of heart, so the immense crashing comes from/is related to the 12 degrees of the compass being off. The directions being messed up, being unable to find where you are going, is what happens when sin is committed, because then one wants to keep going in a path (think of drug addiction) that will let you hold onto the sin but you can't go towards your goal (God, remember, this is All Saints' Day) and keep living in a state of sin. The immense amount of steel is the film's attempt at conveying to its audience how serious sin is and its consequences, like the flood during Noah's time, our personal behavior is to the rest of the world and humanity.

Truly a reference to Frankenstein, so we can understand how things have changed as a result of scientists developing the atomic bomb (just as Frankenstein was a scientist) and how we need to get back on the "true path" (note, please, the walk way upon which The Thins is standing; the path we are to take gives our soul life and, simultaneously, robs sin of its power over us).

The Thing From Another World is an essential film to see because of its documenting of what was happening to us as a result of the dropping of the atomic bomb and our experiences which forced us into World War II and changed us as individuals and as a country. The changing social norms were disrupting sexuality and relationships, practically rotting us from the inside out, and the changes was working in conjunction with science, trying to guide us into a new kind of dehumanization that film makers such as those for The Thing From Another World were seeking out religion and art (Frankenstein) to guide us in a different direction. As with other films of the era, The Thing From Another World uses a code of symbols in which to communicate with the audience, but symbols that still speak to us, warning us to "watch the skies," and commands of the Lord who lives there, so we won't become aliens to ourselves and those we love.

And the Beasts Shall Reign Over the Earth: Them! Finding the Political Other Within

Gordon Douglas' 1954 Sci-Fi thriller Them! about giant mutant ants birthed from radiation resulting from atomic testing in New Mexico has withstood the test of time (it has a 100% approval rating from critics at Rotten Tomatoes). One of the reasons is that, politically, it has always been thought that Them! was about the Soviets, the Communists who were waiting to take over the world and end our capitalist way of life. To be fair to that interpretation, ants are usually associated with workers, and the proletariat, upon which the communist system is based, can clearly by symbolized by the worker ants. My thesis, however, is that we were more interested in ourselves after World War II than we were in those who were across the ocean, behind the "Iron Curtain" and far from being about the Soviets and communists, these films, including Them!, are about us.

The recurring motif of nuclear radiation throughout science fiction films of the decade is, more than anything, a reminder of  the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the films, therefore, can be seen as expressions of intense guilt and fear that culminates in Steven Spielberg's Jaws (which I shall be posting shortly); for example, Dr. Medford (Edmund Gwenn) specifically states in the film that in 1945 the very first atomic test was performed in that general area, White Sands, so that testifies to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings being on the minds of the film makers, and the "lingering radiation from the first atomic bomb" causing the giant ants, not later tests

Original theatrical lobby card for Them!

 In the trailer above, the advertisement says, "Even civilization itself, threatened with annihilation because in one moment in history-making violence" referencing the atomic bomb (this post builds upon my previous posts The Second Original Sin: Art In the Atomic Age, The Decade Of Turmoil: Film In the 1950s, Love In the Sonic Age: Attack Of the 50-Foot Woman, One Of Us Has To Die: The Incredible Shrinking Man and the Sexual Revolution of the 1950s and The Salt Of the Earth: The Monolith Monsters).  The key to understanding, and undermining the communist interpretation, of Them! is sugar. The ants being after sugar symbolizes "the sweet life" which is a part of the capitalist mentality, not the communist. It is the average person, in pursuit of la dolce vita, the sweet life, that becomes dehumanized and brings this "nameless horror" of losing their human identity upon themselves and everyone else.

The first image in the film and the only color. There really is no reason that it should be in red and blue, with a faint outlining of white, unless the film makers specifically wanted to invoke the colors of the American flag, thereby clearly establishing that the film is about Americans, not Soviets. At one point, during the secret press conferences about the ants, a news reporter asks, "Has the Cold War just gotten hot?" and the answer is obviously no.

When Them! opens, it's in the desert, and a desert (whether sand or ice or rock) is always a sign of the soul: a soul without grace and a landscape that cannot sustain life. This is the reason why these giant ants have been able to live and mutate in the desert, no one is there, that is, no one has been tending to the soul, like the ants, everyone has been after "sugar," the good things in life, and not the spiritual things. Why is it Dr. Medford who is able to solve the mystery and answer the riddle of the footprint that no one else can identify? When he is meeting with the generals, after they have found the nest, Dr. Medford is at the water cooler, taking a long, deep drink of water (water is a symbol of grace); this is a favorite commentary device of directors like Alfred Hitchcock, because it shows the character "taking in grace" to prepare and sustain them on the upcoming journey.

The little girl from the opening sequence. She's very similar to little Ginny from The Monolith Monsters and David from Invaders From Mars.

Who is the little girl?
It might be easier to say who she is not. She is not the doll she carries. Children are important characters in the Sci-Fi genre because they symbolize the future and also because children are innocent, they haven't committed the same sins and believe the same lies that adults do. The reason why this little girl escapes "Them" is because she is still alive and can recognize when something isn't right. Her family was on vacation and her father, mother and sibling were eaten by the ants; by evidence of the doll's head and her torn robe Sergent Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) discovers, we know she hid in a small cubby hole, symbolic of returning to the womb, the ultimate place of safety (or it was before abortion and Roe vs. Wade). The doll's head cracked really under scores the damage the girl herself has undergone.
But what exactly happened?

Another definite linking Them! makes to humans is in the demonstration of strength and power. Towards the end, when Ben is trying to save the two little Lodge boys, he will be in a tunnel and have to bend back the bars in order for him to get out to get to them and for them to get to safety. Like the ant in the film strip moving the pebble, and the damage done to the house trailer and Gramps' store, so Ben will use his strength to push out the metal bars.

Before we can answer that, we need to know the nature of ants.
In the film strip presentation by Dr. Medford, he describes how "ants are savage, ruthless and courageous fighters.. . . Ants are the only creatures on Earth other than man who make war. They campaign. They are chronic aggressors. They make slave laborers of the captives they don't kill.. . . Even the most minute of them have an instinct and talent for industry, social organization and savagery that makes man look feeble by comparison." In listing off these characteristics, Dr. Medford is not describing the ants, rather, the characteristics of humans, Americans, that Them! wants to talk about and the consequences it is having on society. Thomas Lodge, a man we never see in the film, only his covered corpse, is the key to linking the ants and the humans.

Dr. Medford and Mrs. Lodge (right) whose two sons are stuck inside the ant's Los Angeles nest. It's from her that, as audience members, we can deduce what Them! is trying to tell us. The 700 miles of tunnels underneath Los Angeles is comparable to the model nest being shown in diagram form by Dr. Medford and links humans to the aunts in just another way.

Thomas Lodge worked a job on Sunday and would take the kids, Jerry and Mike, out for a few hours Sunday morning to play and have fun before he had to go to his other job. Because his working was not only taking him away from his family, but taking him away from Church as well, the man had no strength in him (both his arms were ripped off, arms symbolize strength). Thomas Lodge is attacked by the ants because he is an ant, all he does is work, and all that working was causing him to lose his humanity and turn into an ant, an animal. The boys are able to escape, literally, because they see how much all their father's work is costing (not earning) and they don't want to become like that themselves. Now we can talk about the little girl.

Throughout the film, there is the "speaking of cross-purposes" amounting to silence like the little girl's. When the autopsy report on Gramps comes in, they want "the plain verb" and when Pat tells Bob that her father is one of the world's greatest myrmecologist, Bob says, "Why can't we all speak English?" The same thing happens in the helicopter when Dr. Medford is trying to talk on the radio to Pat and Ben insists on the rules, Dr. H. Medford doesn't understand why he has to do it that way. The film is full of little instances such as this, making it a great film.

Her family being on an extended vacation, probably because her father had put in so much work that the FBI had to compensate him, but that wasn't enough. At some point, the family that no longer recognized each other fell apart, and only the little girl was able to see and survive her family's inner trauma and struggle. The sugar was taken from the trailer because "sugar" was what they had been after. Similarly, Gramps in his store had the sugar robbed from him. We know from the head of police that Gramps didn't have an enemy in the world, but he was crushed and there was enough formic acid in him to kill 20 men. That's what happens in real life, the sugar we are after and desire--in whatever form--becomes acid within us, poison and it destroys us. What's interesting about when Gramps is found, is when Ed Blackburn sees the sugar turned-over, there are little black ants all throughout it; the little ants we see mean that Gramps had "little ambitions," but they controlled him instead of him controlling them.

When the little girl is in the hospital, and Dr. Medford has her to smell the formic acid, she screams hysterically and yells, "Them! Them!" because her mother or her father probably "spit acid" at the other in conversation, they got into a fight (because they have been apart for so long) and when her parents started fighting, she realized that they were no longer her family, her family had become total strangers to her, her family had become them, they who have no names or faces, and that's why she ran from them.

So why does Ed Blackburn die?
There is something we know about Ed Blackburn and that is, he's a crack shot, he can hit anything he can see, but, from the way we find out that he is in fact dead, is the ant at the nest chomping on his rib cage, which, in fact, means that Ed Blackburn is "hollow." It doesn't mean that he wasn't a good guy, it just means that he was an ant, too, because he did his job but there wasn't anything to which he had given himself, nothing that made him a deeper person. Therefore, knowing that Ed was a crack shot ends up being the only thing that we know about Ed because there is nothing else to know (and that's why, pictured below, his body can be identified by the gun). He didn't spend his life making a family (we never hear about his widow) or any other projects that would have been meaningful (not that being a cop and public servant, always in the line of danger, giving your life for others, isn't worthy and meaningful, however, he didn't do anything for himself--versus his public service--that made his life meaningful).

So why does Ben Peterson die?
He's such a great guy, he cares so much for the kids, he's heroic and brave, caring and compassionate, why does he die? We could argue that it is just a theatrical device, meant to upset the audience and pull on the emotions, however, if we juxtapose this scene against the upcoming scene when Bob is trapped with several ants, we know it's not an accident or a device. The ant that gets Ben sneaks up, after Ben has taken off his flame-throwing weapon, and gets him right in the middle. How is Ben an ant? He's a workaholic like Ed. He wasn't as bad as Ed, that's how he was able to survive so long and ward off so many of the attacks, but just as the police chief said, don't fold up on us later when we need you, this is the moment that, bitten in half, Ben folds up in half because he hasn't been taking care of himself and living outside of his job. (An observation Ben has made is that both the trailer and Gramps' store was pushed out, not caved in, and when he's pulling on the bars in the tunnel to get to Mike and Jerry, he's pushing the bars out a way from himself).

Definitely the saddest moment of the film and it was good that they did it so that, when we think of those we know and love, we can warn them to take better care of themselves, and help them, so that they don't end up the same way, folded. It's odd because, in place of a wedding ring, Ben has a small bandage on his ring finger, suggesting perhaps that he might be a widower who threw himself into his work after his wife's death, or he had been unlucky in love previously, but something had hurt him to where he would not get married and he never overcame it.

Since we know why characters in the film die, why does Robert "Bob" Graham (James Arness) live? In pursuing Pat (Dr. Patricia Medford played by Joan Weldon) he's pursuing something that will be meaningful in life. Unlike his counter part in the FBI Mr. Ellinson, the little girl's father, Bob is trying to balance his life. He jokes about "getting a fever real quick" if Pat is the kind of doctor who takes care of sick people, but the truth is, it is precisely because he is healthy that he can pursue her. The problem is with Pat: since Dr. Patricia Medford is the first one to see the ant she is the queen ant.

Up to this point (pictured above) we have heard them and people have died, but the audience hasn't actually seen "them."  Usually, the monster/alien appearing to the first person is either the psychoanalytic double of the main person or the fear threatening the hero's existence, in this case, the ant above symbolizes Pat as the queen ant and her relationship with Bob can be traced throughout the film just as the flight of the queen ants can be traced.

Lobby card for Them! Please note the goggles they wear during the sand storm when Drs. Medford go to visit the camp site. When they first get there, Dr. Medford has to be told by Ben to put his goggles on, then he doesn't get them on correctly, and Ben has to straighten them for him. In the film strip presentation, Dr. Medford says, "Ants don't see well at all," and they can only locate things with the antennae. Dr. Medford not seeing well (he usually wears glasses) and then not being able to get the goggles on, is one of the ways the film makers connects us to them, and shows the audience that it's not them we should be afraid of but ourselves.

To begin with, when we first see Pat, she gets stuck in the airplane between the ground and the inside of the passenger bay and we only see her legs. Legs symbolize the will, so we can deduce, upon first seeing her, that Pat is stuck between the man-made world (a male dominated world of science) of the airplane and the natural world of the ground (the traditional roles of women). Because it's her skirt that is caught, that tells us about her problems with her self-identity because clothes offer us information about how we perceive ourselves and want others to perceive us, and Pat has a problem between being a woman and a scientist. Additionally, she doesn't want any help getting "unstuck" and this will be a problem in the rest of the film.

Just before Pat sees the ant for the first time, she and Bob have an exchange when Bob gets upset about how Dr. H. Medford is treating them and Pat defends her father. Pat then goes to look for another print on her own, then seeing the giant ant coming after her. It's fairly typical that, when seeing the monster/alien for the first time in films of this period, that the main character falls, symbolically meaning that they either have a weak will or they have committed some "sin," whether actual or social or psychological to cause them to be in a spiritually/emotionally weakened state.

There is another problem that Pat has: her father.
Dr. Harold Medford oscillates between calling his daughter "Doctor" and "Pat," confounding her problem. When Bob gets upset that Dr. H. Medford is keeping him in the dark, Pat says, "If the 'Doctor' bothers you just call me Pat." Every time something like this happens with Pat and Bob, an ant will have to be killed, because it symbolizes how something "comes between them." Pat is torn between being a scientist, a very good scientist, and "laying eggs and making a nest," the way a woman's instinct takes over at one point or another.

"We may be witnesses to a Biblical prophecy come true. 'And there shall be destruction and darkness come upon creation. And the Beasts shall reign over the earth." What does this mean? The "beasts" being referred to is humans who feed only their appetites and not their soul. When a person's soul is neglected, they cease to exist as children of God and degenerate into being animals which is what the film is warning us against.

If I am correct, and Pat can be taken as the "queen ant" in the film, then she must have a mating flight, and that would be shown here, in this scene when Pat and Robert are flying in the helicopter and locate the nest. But there were two queens that escaped, weren't there? The second wedding flight is when Pat and Robert go to talk to Mr. Crotty (Fess Parker who played American frontier hero Davy Crockett; if we want to be picky, we can say that the "arrival flight" into New Mexico is the mating flight for the established nest they first go into).

The helicopter they are in is the black thing just above the ant.

Let's talk a moment about two important weapons used in the film: bazookas and flame-throwers.
While both weapons were used as early as World War I, there was far wider use and dependency upon them in World War II; the bazookas were used against German tanks and the flame throwers (very flexible and adaptable to a number of conditions, including trench warfare) were primarily used in the Battle of the Pacific and the jungle warfare encountered on the islands. What's important about the presence of these weapons is the distance it created between the one shooting them and the victim, causing, just like in Them! for marines and soldiers using the weapons in World War II to become "exterminators" of human life, to treat enemies, not like people, but bugs, pests and rodents; this dehumanizing psychology American soldiers adapted in order to make it through the war and win is part of what is being targeted as the slow dehumanization process in the spiritual death of the country.

According to our research in The Incredible Shrinking Man, the Pacific Ocean became a site for films that linked up with the hardships fought in the Battle of the Pacific so we should not be surprised that one of the queen ants lays a nest in a boat in the Pacific.

The most important part of Pat's and Bob's relationship is after Ben has died and they are searching for the nest, Bob goes first and there is an avalanche, separating him from the rest of the group. He's attacked by several large ants and is nearly overcome; his gun jams but he manages to stay alive until the others break through to save him. It's not so much that it's Pat being put in her place, rather, that Bob has been put back in his, that he is on the front line, where he wants to be, doing his job and defending his country that his self-respect calls for him to do.

The ants getting 40 tons of sugar from this freight car seemingly proves my thesis: because the night guard hasn't missed any work, but also hasn't taken any bribes or done anything crooked, he doesn't get killed by the aunts because he's not after the sweet life for himself; he does his job and he does his job well, but his job doesn't own him.

When Pat gets to Bob's side after he has survived the ants, she doesn't say a word, but sees that his right arm has been hurt. The right arm, of course, means strength, so he hasn't come out unscathed, but he has survived, and he will be stronger for it. That he has learned to wait before burning the ants shows that he has learned respect for Pat and her knowledge, but her going to his side means that she is ready to find her own, permanent nest.

Them! shows us a society that is deteriorating, from the opening lines about a man "drinking his breakfast," to the alcoholics permanently in the ward at the hospital, to the woman speeding 60 mph after spending the night with a married man, to the loony bin that Mr. Crotty is locked up in, Them! details mounting faults within American society, and the major culprit is the pursuit of the sweet life. Like the Westerns that we will be examining shortly, films in the 1950s were exploring the potential evils and pitfalls of capitalism, they never suggest that we should not be a capitalist society, but the harms that we must individually and collectively look out for and becoming mindless ants, just working all the time, and losing our human identity, is the greatest of them.

Leonard Nimoy in an early, uncredited role.

Upcoming Films & Why They Are Important

Happy Valentine's Day!

It really is important, the films that are coming out, not just because so much money is spent in making films, but because we spend so much money watching films, even for those who don't go to the theater, even if you only have basic cable, these films end up there at some point in their life and you spend a part of your life watching them. But films are also time capsules, social documents of anthropological importance that measures our values (or lack of values) and our fears. Having said that, let's start (the trailer and discussion for Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer can be found here).

The Dictator is set to be released May 11.

We really have to consider this as a serious film.
The tagline reads: "The heroic story of a dictator who risks his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed." Why is The Dictator important? In the old days of the Soviet Union, we had clearly defined and politically correct (or at least acceptable) villains, political "others" that we could explore our own identity against in art; today, we really don't have that ready-made villain we can all unite against. What The Dictator is giving us by surpassing politically correct barbed wire alerts is an understanding of how we understand Middle East dictators to be and why we... don't like them.

I didn't say it wasn't painful, I just said it's going to be important, and why? Because of this impeccable film, Act Of Valor being released next weekend starring real-live active duty Navy SEALS.

What do the two films have in common?
American fear.
The Dictator isn't going to be pulling any punches, especially since it's invoking the 1940 Charlie Chaplain classic The Great Dictator about Adolf Hitler. For example, the "dictator" says, "Ah, America, the birthplace of AIDS," which of course refers to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome which genetic research indicates was born in west-central Africa, not the United States, although it was the Center for Disease Control that recognized the virus first in 1981. The Dictator will be playing off of both why they--jihadists--hate us and why we fear them. Act Of Valor will work with our fears and the confidence that we should have in our exemplary military forces.

Everyone knows I am a huge fan of Mr. Tom Hardy; what is important about This Means War  is the invoking of Fight Club and a re-establishment of masculinity and men's rights in the mating ritual.What Tuck and Foster are doing in This Means War is fighting over mating rights, a long-established right and tradition for men that was made ridiculous by the Feminists movement and the notion that a woman's right to decide who she will mate with is more important than a man's worth. That's probably why Feminists never end up with the really good guys.
I've talked about The Hunger Games, being released March 23, before, but let's take one more look at it:

What if this were really a new and different way of examining the American Idols, the America's Got Talent, the Fame Game in Hollywood and Reality TV Star? Given the death of Whitney Houston this week, the deaths of Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger, River Phonenix, Jim Belushi, Michael Jackson, and countless others, when someone becomes famous in the United States, it's like we're sending them on a death mission, into an arena where "We just want a good show," but very few--if any--will survive. What are the "hunger games," and what do American's "hunger" for? Fame. Fortune. Glory. I have not read the books, and have only seen the trailers, but, as I mentioned last fall, this film will say far more about us as a culture than it will about some distant, far-off science fiction land. Which brings us to this one:

For those of us who lived through the 80s we won't know if we should laugh or hide our heads in shame. BUT, that's not the point, the point is, fame became an industry in the 1980s and it focused on music and we are living with the consequences of it today (whether that will come through in The Hunger Games is just a hunch and could be entirely unfounded). Rock of Ages will obviously set up a stage that will battle between religion and fame as a religion (or, music as a religion, if you prefer that), but that will be a serious undertone, but knowing what we know about history, we also know that religion doesn't win. On the same note of fame, but of a different kind, we go from Tom Cruise to Robert De Niro:

There's quite a bit going on in this trailer. Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger were interesting choices for the two "classic" American writers named. Does he mean they were the best American writers, or just that their writing communicates something that is particularly classic about America and the American experience, in a way other America writers have not? "My father has been manifested as an absence," is a great line, also a deeply philosophical one, because there is a strong dichotomy between presence and absence; there is another strong dichotomy between speaking and writing. Jacques Derrida has said that Western civilization prefers speaking to writing because speaking means presence, whereas writing means absence; so for Jonathan (Robert De Niro) to be a writer but always absent is in keeping to his character. Being Flynn opens March 2, and among these tensions, I will also be looking for any possible references to the founding fathers; I don't know that this will be a very "class conscious" film as I am expecting to see in other films throughout this year, but his constant run-ins with the police and that they find each other in a homeless shelter may surprise me.

Opening March 9, A Thousand Words might be the kind of film a lot of us need to see. Granted, it's in the same vein as many films, such as Liar, Liar, but who is to say that's a bad thing, especially when no one goes to church anymore? In a world full of "idle talk," where we are likely talking just to be talking, saying anything regardless of whether it has value, the premise of the film is a welcomed spiritual reminder of how our speech, what we say and how we say it, forms an intricate and paramount aspect of our identity and our character.
Coming March 9 is Silent House and I just don't know if I will be able to watch this, it just looks too scary for me!

What do we know?
We know the house is a symbol for the soul, and Sarah and her father being there after not being there for a while, may have a family secret that is causing them to "die" spiritually and psychologically. That the "noise" which first alerts Sarah that something is in the house comes from upstairs could mean that "something is hanging over them," but all this is pure speculation. Why? Last year was a great year for film, and so far it really looks like Silent House is the only one keeping p with the momentum and that means anything is possible with this film. If they are willing to go to the trouble to film it in "real time," who knows what else they have the guts to do and I will just have to make myself sit this.

On a completely different note, I give you Butter: there is a contest in Iowa of who is the best butter sculptor and it comes down to Laura (Jennifer Garner) wife of the former champion, Brooke (Olivia de Wilde) a stripper, Destiny, a disadvantaged little girl, and Laura's step-daughter Kaitlyn (Ashley Green).

This is deadly serious, because this greatly reflects how Americans do things and, like The Dictator, hiding it beneath a veneer of "funny" doesn't dampen the message, if anything, it makes it more potent. What is Iowa known for? The Iowa political primary, and the competition, the "vote casting" discussed in this film is about who we want to "shape and sculpt" this country; no, no, this isn't only about butter, ladies and gentlemen, this is about the fabric of America itself! (Ha ha, just a bit of drama). I said that 2012 was going to be a year of class warfare, and (snicker, snicker) Butter may be bringing it to us as social class warfare. I can hardly wait to see this one.
For these next two films, let's just watch the trailers first:

What does Jeff, Who Lives At Home (March 16) and 21 Jump Street (also March 16) have in common? It takes good adults to make good children, and if we are not good adults, we can't expect our children to be good. That thesis is what is at work in the highly anticipated Detachment (no US release date scheduled yet):

I really disliked the remake of Clash of the Titans, I loved the original, but wouldn't even have made it through the first thirty mnutes but that I was watching it with my dad who has horrible taste in films and he made me watch all of it... however, Wrath of the Titans, with new director and writers, could be a different scenario, and I am hoping it will be:

The "titans" are making their second appearance in less than a year in a major action film (Immortals of last fall) and that could possibly have some genuine spiritual leanings... we'll see. But the cyclops is very much like the giants in Jack the Giant Killer coming out this summer, and at least in the later film, I am expecting the giants to be those in American society who are of "giant stature," i.e., the wealthy to be the target of that film. Will Wrath of the Titans take some valuable lessons from Immortals, or re-do what it did so unsuccessfully in Clash of the Titans? We'll see, but with a new staff, I am willing to give it a try.
This is causing quite a stir: "A horror/thriller centered on the origin of the monsters that are born in childhood and are passed on by the family."

A little more information: "Two children living in different countries are visited nightly by a faceless being who wants to take possession of them." The US release date for this has not been set, but like Jeff, Who Lives At Home and 21 Jump Street, this is a film illustrating for us that traumatic and delicate stage where childhood and adulthood bridge and all the things that go wrong. Without a doubt, this will be a psychoanalytic film and possibly very spiritual.
Did you know that Jason Statham was an Olympic swimmer?

Invoking the famous Alfred Hitchcock film The 39 Steps, one of the greatest British films ever made, it also invokes Daren Aronofsky's Pi, because what we learned in Pi makes us willing to accept that a very very very long number can be more than just a boring long number and it has a useful role in the universe. Why is Statham in the film? The film opens April 27 and that's when we will find out who the corrupt people are that the "safe" combination is protecting the world from.
For some of us, this has all ready happened:

I am sure this doesn't really have anything to do with the White House betraying this country, or trying to sabotage the military and make America helpless and incapable of defending itself against all our debtors who are going to come wanting their money after the downgrading to our credit standing; and I am sure that the White House would never lie to the American people. Surely none of those things are in this film and surely it's not going to be anything politically motivated in any way but just some good, old-fashioned, American military might on display... but hey, I'm game for that right now!
Speaking of the conspiracy-that-isn't, here is another installment in The Bourne Identity series:

Specifically, The Bourne Legacy is coming August 3. Before this comes out, I will be going through the Bourne Identity series because they are highly politically motivated and there is a reason they are dove-tailing this one off that series instead of coming up with a new premise; even just the way that trailer is edited should tell us that something is "being kept hidden" and we aren't going to know everything until we see the film.
Some of the films that are coming out this year I have all ready gone through, but will be preparing us for as needed; for example, before Mirror, Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsnman, we will be going through, not only the original written tales by the Brothers Grimm, but the Disney version as well, since that is what most people are familiar with. Likewise, before the release of The Raven, we will be exploring the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe so that we can sit back in the theater and know that we are the informed audience! Thank you, as always, and stay tuned!