Aliens Reveal Important Messages
There’s more to sci-fi than meets the eye
BY Maggie Helwig
Reports of strange objects in the sky, often described as vehicles of some kind, go back nearly as far as recorded history; but modern UFO sightings entered the public consciousness through a wave of incidents in 1947, associated at the time with US pilots on the lookout for Soviets, but encountering, apparently, aliens instead. Stories of sightings and even abductions flowed out at a great rate during the height of the Cold War, subsiding for a while and then re-emerging early in the Reagan presidency; there often seems to be a relationship between a spike in “sightings” and a state of inchoate political tension.
Similarly, aliens on television and in the movies are highly variable signs; but their representation almost always says something interesting about where we ourselves are, socially and politically. Depending on the public mood, and the outlook of the writers, we may encounter benevolent and superior aliens such as Klaatu, of The Day the Earth Stood Still, who rather resembles an exceptionally good UN Secretary General, or the vaguely Jungian creations of Steven Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.; or there may be invading hordes with no discernible motive beyond human-crushing and general galactic supremacy. Others may be invaders on a more personal level, such as the pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, who were initially presented as a parable about Communism but instantly received as an indictment of McCarthyism and social conformity (indeed, the debate as to which, if either, was the intended meaning continues in film criticism even now). Sometimes, aliens are not really aliens at all, but our own creations, and may be connected to us even on the level of our DNA, as in the revived version of Battlestar Galactica. Then there was at least one classic representation that managed to combine elements of every one of these ideas, the maddening and intermittently brilliant X-Files, which, at its best, employed its self-contradictory alien narratives to destabilize the very meaning of words like “truth” and “human.”
This current American television season has been rather remarkable in the arrival of three different alien invasion narratives at the same time. One of the three, Surface, can be quickly dealt with; it rollicks through all the basic genre tropes efficiently and is quite refreshing in its lack of subtext. In fact, it nearly lacks a text, beyond perhaps, “Monsters! Cool!”
Invasion is a much stranger and more interesting show, harder to pin down to a single meaning. Highly suspicious of authority in general and military authority in particular, it plays with visual references to current events, but seems to be expressing a miasmic anxiety that attaches primarily to the family; to family relationships and breakdowns; and to a kind of claustrophobic uncertainty about how small communities can function, or fail, in times of confusion and danger. The slow and confusing unfolding of the plot owes far too much to Lost, last season’s sleeper hit about a group of castaways on an enigmatic island. That show’s attitudes towards women are disturbing (they seem to function mainly as tokens of exchange between the male characters, and spend an undue amount of time without much clothing), but Invasion has the potential to be an interesting exploration of intimate disasters and fears of contamination.
The most polished and obviously commercial of the three was the recently cancelled Threshold; it was also by far the most politically off-putting. While “government cover-up” has become a nearly essential component of the invasion narrative, I had never before seen it presented in such a positive light, entirely from within the government perspective and with the need to withhold information from the public so relentlessly driven home, episode after episode. The invaders in this case, though invisible and enigmatic, were waging their campaign with “a signal”—a form of coded information—which they were attempting to disseminate through email, radio and other means. Ordinary “good” people, if exposed to this “signal,” would rapidly mutate, develop superhuman powers and set out to further propagate the signal in any way possible. The American public, we were told, must be protected, not only from this coded information, which could deform them beyond recognition, but even from the knowledge of the existence of this information. (The “infected,” unsurprisingly, were represented in ways that obviously or subtly code them as terrorist sleeper cells.)
Threshold’s authoritarian narrative revealed a really astonishing level of social and political anxiety. The much-stressed intelligence and sophistication of the invaders and the extreme ease with which they can turn “us” into “them,” spoke to some kind of fundamental insecurity in the current US mood—as if, somewhere in the subsconcious mind of the supporters of American militarism, there is a belief that their opponents, whether internal dissenters or external foes, have some kind of seductive power, some perverse desirability, that the forces of authority can neither understand nor easily combat.
But it would seem that the creators of the program calculated the public mood wrongly, and that, as the Iraq adventure declines into catastrophe and the popularity of the Bush administration plummets, the American viewers are no longer as receptive to such militarized solutions and are leaning more towards the hapless, confused, possibly helpless, but essentially anti-authoritarian heroes of Invasion. One hesitates to take too much encouragement from the decisions of network programmers, but it is, at the very least, an interesting trend to watch.
