From Complacency to Narcissism

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

For a while, Hollywood milked extraterrestrial creatures as its “other” of the day. Their appearance alone suggested that these alien creatures were not like us. They were huge, gelatinous blobs. They were strange mermen from beyond the stars (or from the bottom of a black lagoon.) They were macrocephlic humanoids with green skin or gray-skinned humanoids with phallic heads. They were crawling eyes. They absorbed prey; devoured prey; and, if their quarry were women, mated with prey.

Something unexpected might bring these otherworldly monsters to their knees. The Blob couldn't stand cold temperatures. The green, big-headed saucer men couldn't bear the bright beams of automobile headlights. Bullets take out the creature from the black lagoon. If there's a theme here, it seems to be that, despite appearances, these otherworldly creatures aren't so tough after all; ordinary, everyday things—cold, headlights, bullets—are too much for them to handle. Sure, such threats may look dangerous, but appearances can be deceiving.

Horror horrifies, until it isn't so horrible, after all, and what makes it not so horrible after all is everydayness. The ordinary deflates, destroys, and dispatches the horrific. We weren't really in much danger, after all. The “otherness” of the other turns out to be not so much different from us, after all; indeed, if anything, we prove more adaptable, more innovative, more powerful—in a word, superior.

That, if anything, was the theme of the movies of the fifties.

What about the themes of the tens—the 2010s?

According to one interpretation, Pathos (2009), set in a dystopian future world in which thought is prohibited and people depend upon artificial intelligence and virtual reality for not only their pleasure, but also their own personal experiences and identities, is a satire concerning consumerism taken to extremes.

Although existentialism suggests that human nature does not exist, but is, instead, created by each individual according to his or her exercise of free will, Loophole (2109) takes something of a Cartesian point of view, suggesting that to be human is to be violent. Instead of Descartes's dictum, “I think; therefore, I am,” Loophole implies, “I am violent; therefore, I am.” According to a film review, these philosophical implications also have religious significance:

Suddenly, mass hysteria takes hold across the major cities of America as people are tested and marked with or without.  In a matter of days, the beginning of a New World Order takes the stage and, quite unexpectedly, we find ourselves in the middle of a Biblical battle that has long been dormant.

For some, the progress of the plot may seem to evangelistic; others are likely to enjoy the movie's religious dimensions.

Two films don't nearly constitute a representative sample, of course, but these movies, alt least, suggest that at least some of the films of the 2010s turn inward for their subject matter, focusing on the eternal questions related to being human: what is human nature and how do human beings fit into the larger scheme of things?

Older sci fi-horror movies were concerned with departures from the status quo: could such deviations endanger the community or even the world? If we lost our place in the grand scheme of things, what would become of us, as individuals? The comforting answer lay in the very everydayness that the extraterrestrial threats threatened. The threats to the existing order were no match for customary, the habitual, the traditional, the routine of people's routine, day-to-day lives.

More recent sci fi-horror films, in part, at least, return to a questioning of the age-old problems of philosophy and religion: human identity, human nature, the human condition, the relationship of the self and other. The eternal quest is undertaken yet again, with the protagonist and the viewer at the center of things; human existence, if not existence-itself, is egocentric. Everything revolves around us; it's all about us. We have gone from complacency to narcissism in only seven decades.