Introduction (2020)
If you think you've read this article before, perhaps you have. It was published under my given name (the one Mum and Dad gave me; it's also on my bank card and driving licence) in a science fiction magazine in the early noughties.
As an article about how world historical disasters in the movies both foreshadow and help us live through and reflect upon world historical disasters in real life, it feels timely... though I'd been intending to put it on this site anyway; I'm doing it in part for the prosaic reason of encouraging myself to write more (fiction as well as cultural critique).
As this was written a decade and a half ago, there are things in it which sound dated ("Dad, what does 'straight to video' mean?") and things which now strike me as silly - for example, the McDonalds Corporation experiencing a bad financial year during the Dubya Presidency doesn't now seem to have been any kind of straw in the wind (bad quarter for McDonalds? that's nothing, I remember when the Westlands helicopter crisis appeared to presage the downfall of the neoliberal world order), and I'm no longer sure that Disney's worse than any other media conglomerate. For instance, I quite liked Moana.
Incidentally, S. and I have been watching between one and three episodes per day of The Walking Dead for three or four weeks now; I'm not sure why we should feel somehow helped and comforted in the midst of a global coronavirus pandemic (real; bad) by watching a drama about a zombie plague (pretend; worse) but we do. Pity and fear have something to do with it, I'd say; Aristotle was onto something. Needless to say, we feel at least a dozen times more comforted by praying, reading the Bible etc - we're Christians - but culture has its place.
This article is around 3,500 words long, so would probably take you 15 minutes or so to read.
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Ropes, Planks, Sensible Shoes: Disaster and Resilience in 'Signs' and in the World at Large (2003).
This is to patronise the past, of course - one of the besetting sins of the "so bad it's good" generation. Moreover, Signs is 'about' crop circles in the same sense in which Last Year in Marienbad (1961) is about renewing your National Trust membership, i.e. not really; M. Night Shyamalan, the writer and director, has commented that "for me, supernatural things are all metaphors for the human story." They are devices for "testing people and finding out what people are made of and getting people to say what they need to say to their loved ones."
Ghosts from space
In Signs the circles are navigation aids, written onto the agrarian landscape by aliens who will later appear over two hundred and seventy four Earth cities ("rising to four hundred within the hour"). These aliens need to be fought and repelled by humankind as a whole; as it turns out, they also need to be fought hand-to-hand, one at a time. Signs looks back at revises, in a minor key, some of the big, brash alien invasion and cosmic disaster movies of the 1990s, such as Armageddon (1998), Deep Impact (1998) and Independence Day (1996); as some of those films themselves did, it also looks back and revises previous alien invasion films, back to such 1950s classics as War of the Worlds (1953), The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), It Came From Outer Space (1953) and so on.
(It was often said by critics in the months after September 2001 that the sorts of world-disaster movies common in the 1990s - which often had audiences cheering events such as the destruction of the White House - could not now be made; indeed, they haven't been. It seems strange but fitting that the filming of Signs began on 12th September 2001, with a death scene; this film's internalising and deepening of some of the same material could, to a trivial degree, be thought of as contributing to a long cultural process of coming to terms).
If Signs is an alien invasion or cosmic disaster movie, it also looks like a psychological horror movie in which our own emotional disturbances come back at us, changed. Most of the action takes place at an isolated farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where former priest Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) lives, with his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) and his two children, Morgan and Bo (Rory Culkin; Abigail Breslin). Graham Hess has lost his wife in a car accident some six months before the action of the film; he has lost his peace of mind (in the first moments of the film, disturbed by strange noises outside, he sits bolt upright in a double bed, at the side of which stands a family photograph from the good times), and his faith (one room in the house seems overshadowed by the sign of the cross; an atheist now, Graham has removed a wooden cross from the wall, but it has left a dust-trace which no-one has cleaned or covered over). Merrill, who has moved in to support his brother, is (like many inhabitants of this disappointing early twenty-first century, with no world peace and no aircars) haunted by the future that might have been; now working in a gas station, he's the local baseball player who holds not only five Minor League home run records, but also the Minor League strike-out record, "more strike-outs than any two players." In other words, he's marked as someone with a strong right arm, but no team spirit; not the sin of Cain, exactly, but a shameful mark.
We know, then, that at the outset of the film that this homestead is haunted, if not supernaturally, then by disappointment and loss. The children, Morgan and Bo, have good hearts but are pale, tense and preoccupied; Morgan also has asthma, which here symbolises (as in William Golding's The Lord of the Flies [1954]) vulnerability and a failure to thrive. There are similarities with The Sixth Sense (1999), Shyamalan's breakthrough film, in which a frightened child who sees dead people has a gift to give the world, and with Unbreakable (2000), his second, in which a quiet, preoccupied child sees the loss that pervades his father's life and urges him on towards a supernatural awakening and recovery.
Doug and Dave
Crop circles began appearing in fields across the southern counties of England, particularly Hampshire and Wiltshire, in the late 1970s. The phenomenon has spread to other countries, and the patterns have gradually become more intricate.
Three main theories have been advanced to explain crop circles. One theory states that they are warnings inscribed by the Earth itself: ecological error messages or a form of chthonic self-harm. Another and more popular theory holds that the circles are made by aliens, whether as attempts to communicate with us (much has been made of the supposed higher mathematics encoded into these designs) or, as in the film Signs, aids to navigation. A third theory holds that crop circles are of human origin, created as works of art, practical jokes, tourist attractions (by the 1980s, American tour companies were running crop tours to England, at $2,000 a time), or objects partaking of the nature of all three.
As many researchers (and the effects team for Signs) have found, crop circles are relatively easy to make: one needs rope, planks, good sensible shoes, a ladder and a spare afternoon or night. In 1991, Doug Bower, a landscape gardener from Southampton, was confronted by his wife about his late returns from the pub on Friday nights, and about their car's mileage figures. He confessed to her so she wouldn't think him unfaithful (and later to the world's media for more expansive reasons) that he and his friend Dave Chorley had, for many years, been driving out into the countryside to make circles. Doug and Dave documented, to the satisfaction of the world's media (which isn't always saying much) that they'd made the ones that had started the craze, having had the original idea in The Percy Hobbs pub in Winchester back in the 1970s.
David Sutton of Fortean Times, expressing surprise that crop circles are still often claimed as extraterrestrial in origin, has called them "a valid form of land art... a very British type of artistic expression." Doug, explaining himself, has said that "it was just pure enjoyment, those beautiful summer nights for two artistic people under the stars amid all those cornfields."
Despite the fact that we live in a mature civilisation saturated by technology and science, many people, informed and asked about crop circles, will say that, yes, it does seem as though humans can make them relatively easily, but perhaps some crop circles somewhere are of genuinely extraterrestrial origin. There is often a similar response, not only from untutored members of the public but from scientists with PhDs, after sceptics have encouraged conjurers to 'demonstrate' ESP or psychokinesis, and subsequently to explain in detail exactly how the trick worked. It is almost as if you admitted to an engineer after suitable demonstrations and proofs that the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is of human origin, but that maybe the Humber Bridge is an alien artefact. This suggests two things; first, that the UFO community should fund CCTV in hardware stores (for when they turn up to buy ladders and string) and second that there is in people an inherent will to believe, a strenuous and well-defended overcoming of logic and sense. (1)
It's the economy, stupid
In The Sixth Sense, Dr Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), a child psychologist, having just returned home with his wife after getting a lifetime achievement award, is shot and wounded by a former client, whom he evidently treated and failed to cure a couple of decades ago. This opening scene seems to establish, first, the risks inherent in the therapeutic enterprise and, second, that, well, everybody hurts sometimes.
His next client is a child who claims to see ghosts. Dr Crowe is initially sceptical, but it gradually becomes clear that Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) really can see dead people. These disturbing and unwanted visions (which, considered as special effects, are extremely well-realised) allow Cole to bring hidden crimes into the light of justice; they also allow him to see the judicial cruelty and vindictiveness that underlies these supposedly more enlightened, redemptive times (though it's a moot point whether any nation that still allows capital punishment fully commits itself to enlightenment and redemption - and this is to say nothing of Bush, Rumsfeld and Guatanamo Bay).
In The Sixth Sense, you either see the crucial plot twist coming or you don't; either way, you've watched a film whose self-consistent and respectable supernatural economy (ghosts, like God, angels and unearthly kinds of people, but unlike crop circles, are venerable things; humanity has been visited by them throughout recorded history) backgrounds a similarly self-consistent but more modern set of truths about the wounded healer, suffering, redemption and unbinding.
The Sixth Sense, in other words, can readily be received as a unified aesthetic whole, a closed circle; as Iris Murdoch has suggested, the production or reception of these kinds of works of art, which either are or seem to be more than the sum of their parts, help us to live more fully, performing and receiving personhood as likewise more than the sum of its parts. (2) This kind of art, and this kind of readiness to receive it, have, in these post-structuralist times, come to seem unfashionable or reactionary; better, according to some practitioners and theorists, that we recognise the extent to which each reader constructs her own experience of Things To Come (1936) or To The Lighthouse (1927) and that we abandon the mystificatory notion of the person as gift in favour of the notion that people are products of (according to one's particular theoretical emphasis) social and economic forces, physics or language.
If The Sixth Sense is circular and self-contained like the Sun (a key Platonic metaphor for the Form of the Good, of which any person or artwork is necessarily a fourth or seventh or tenth order imitation; they didn't know about sunspots or solar flares back then), Signs looks like the kind of crop circle in which various odd spokes and flags lead out of a system of interlocking wheels. At first, the film seems composed; the opening track by film composer James Newton Howard gives way to silence, and to a series of quiet moments which seem like compositions, still lives. Later shots of the farmhouse look like paintings. However, this invitation to the audience to play with the process of composition, and with notions or sensations of figure against ground, gives way to some rather strange spokes, inconsistencies, omissions. As examples, one could cite the following:
- The aliens fear water; in fact, it is fatal to them. They have come to devour us. Given that the human body is 75% water, they're probably not going to enjoy lunch.
- In one of the best moments of the film, Graham Hess confronts an alien he knows to be hiding behind the pantry door of a neighbour's house. He pretends to be a policeman: "We already took some of your friends downtown in a paddy wagon," he warns, then grimaces at the absurdity of what he's saying. It's absurd for both obvious reasons and subtle ones; 'paddy wagon' became New York slang for 'police car' because of the large number of ethnic Irish people in the NYPD and so to use this term in Bucks County, Pennsylvania is to take the filmed language of the metropolis, then to apply it directly to life only to find that it doesn't fit. If art's can teach us how to 'be in the world', we need to do a little more than just to listen and repeat.
- The aliens, who have presumably travelled light years to see us, have technology far in advance of what mere humans can conceive. They seem to have a lot of trouble with wooden doors, however.
- This is a Hollywood film with a reasonable budget. The renowned special effects firm Industrial Light and Magic worked on it. When we see the first alien, however, we're clearly seeing a bad actor in green body paint (perhaps on day release from one of Brian Slade's videos in Velvet Goldmine [1998]). This manifestation is so unscary that it's as thought Shyamalan is taking a leaf out of Brecht's book and inviting us, the huddled masses of the sofa or of the darkened auditorium, not to suspend our disbelief.
- After the aliens appear above our cities, the children argue about whether or not to erase a treasured videotape in order to record the moment. Morgan tells his little sister that "everything they wrote in science books is about to change"; moments later on the TV, the newscaster repeats exactly this phrase. These sorts of word-for-word repetitions are rare; when something similar does happen, as with people rhetorically asking, "Where was Superman? Where was Bruce? Where was Arnie?" in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, it's because we all tend to reach into a bag of clichés when responding to trauma (in the right context, they work (3)).
- Towards the end of the film, the newscaster announces that a way was found to defeat the aliens but that "we have no further details at this time." Something to do with water or germs, presumably, but this kind of plotting is perilously close to the 'it was all a dream' ending that your English teacher warned you about in seventh grade; having seen War of the Worlds, we can infer a plot device for ourselves but we can also realise, existentially speaking, hojw little the technical details matter.
- At the beginning of the film, the dog, frightened by something unearthly, has peed on the floor; the children look on, and Graham Hess begins to clean up, at one point holding a soaked cloth. (This never happened to Mad Max). This scene associates water with pervasive infantile guilt; in its sheer oddness, its use of 'the uncanny' as a philosophical and aesthetic category, it resembles surrealist paintings such as Max Ernst's Two Children Menaced By a Nightingale. Through this lens, Shyamalan's choice of crop circles as a subject looks like the surrealist enthusiasm for the forgotten past - nineteenth century line drawings or found objects from flea markets representing those half-remembered psychodramas enacted amongst the furniture and other accidental contingent 'stuff' of yesterday. (4)
Unheimlich manoeuvres
Science fiction, in literature and film, has been a teleological genre; even the hokiest 1950s creature feature seems to look forward more than back, urging us to watch the skies, maintain readiness and subscribe to inexpensive popular science magazines because, after all, you never know what's out there. Some films have also attempted to prophesy (in the Judaeo-Christian sense, meaning not prediction, but the discernment of the seeds of the future in the here and now); for example, films like The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) or Silent Running (1972) suggest to us that we can't go on living like this.
Even films like Independence Day - which can be enjoyed sincerely for the special effects and cynically (though there are reasons for giving up cynical liking; it looks unbecoming after a certain age) for such plot details as the American President-cum-fighter pilot who leads his troops into battle, and the finale in which July 4th becomes an "independence day" for the whole world - can seem prophetic if they warn us about something just out of awareness. The latter half of the 1990s was a time of unprecedented material prosperity and possibility, undercut by epidemic levels both of clinical depression and of disenchantment with the mainstream political process; anti-globalisation protestors, subvertisers and others attempted to fight a mediated, spectacular society which often looked like a Klein bottle (a closed four-dimensional space with no inside or outside). Meanwhile, while we looked the other way, various forms of antidemocratic fundamentalism were mobilising (the Islamic variety, of course; ecoterrorists; the ultra-left; the armed libertarians and racists of the American ultra-right; and Christian fundamentalists with penchants for radical eschatology and anti-science who would love to close America's mind and then throw away the key); destruction has always been easy for people with a mind to it. Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact and the rest - even Titanic (1997) - may have been attempts at some level to face this kind of cognitive dissonance; recognitions of what some sensed but could not articulate or knew but could not say, namely that a Big Terrible Thing was coming. (5)
There is both a moral purpose and a sense of urgency behind some of the conceptual game-playing and frame-breaking of Signs; the film's tag line was "It's not like they didn't warn us." In what looks like a symbolic self-attribution of guilt (reminiscent of the Catholic Good Friday liturgy, which asks the congregation to act the part of the Jerusalem crowd, calling for and so helping to bring about Christ's death), Shyamalan himself plays Ray Peddy, the truck driver who killed Graham Hess's wife; he asks forgiveness but also warns of the menace which is on its way. The book on extraterrestrials that Morgan Hess reads, containing images of an American homestead in flames ("that looks just like our house... same windows") is by Dr Bimbu, presumably an Indian-American like the director. When Graham Hess tries to calm his children, but also to push the subject away for his own comfort - "that's enough from Dr Bimbu for now" - he makes the name sound a bit disreputable and silly.
I don't accuse Shyamalan's character Graham Hess of even covert racism here, of course, just of a momentary lapse of full, disciplined attention (there but for the grace of God - but some such lapses can, as when driving, prove fatal). Conversely, it is a transcendent moment of realisation, involving Graham's memories of his wife's death (his own previous account of her death, speaking to his brother about the firing of nerve endings, was partial and brutally reductive; his awakening recollection shows the moment to have contained inexpressibly more than that), which allows him to break the preoccupying stranglehold of grief and despair and to act, finding a use for his brother's previously shameful overenthusiasm with a baseball bat.
At this moment of decision, an alien is cradling Morgan Hess in his arms, in an attitude which recalls both traditional religious paintings of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead Christ, and Max Ernst's ambiguous variation on a theme, Pieta or The Revolution by Night (which shows the artist cradled by his father, the potential for Oedipal struggle giving way to a dreamlike confluence). This moment, expressed in a second surrealist image that overwrites the first, of choosing to act, of redemption and unlocking, is in all senses the crux of the film.
Swing away
The aliens which are faced down and defeated in Signs remain inchoate; though they travel across light years, they are allergic to water and "have trouble with pantry doors"; they work their way from India and the American heartlands, through places like Wakefield, England (what, Wakefield near Leeds...?) and only then to the world's major conurbations, beginning with Mexico City. The other weekend, carrying out scrub clearance at Emer Bog (with the Hampshire Conservation Volunteers, in the picturesque heart of Doug and Dave Country), I thought both of the fecundity of nature and of the human imagination, and how we as citizens ought to intervene in order to live comfortably and harmoniously with both. In Britain, it's often necessary to cull prolific, invasive species such as willow, rhododendron and ragwort in order to preserve and encourage biodiversity. (There is very little true wilderness left in Britain, almost none in England; the question that faces British ecologists, as it faces the world's citizens now that the weather is becoming an artefact, in what sort of garden we shall live in). It's likewise necessary to wield a good sturdy Blakean scythe against the kinds of religious and secular fundamentalism mentioned earlier, as against the toxic neoconservatism that plots the world as a fossil-fuel war and which lies to a supine public about its long-term aims, and that wild strain of neoliberalism which, failing or refusing to see its own big-business free-market ideology as culture, ends up deploying it as a universal solvent against other cultures.
In a world where George W. Bush is in the White House and in which Disney stunts our children's minds by plundering the world's stories and re-rendering them as Middle America in fancy dress (in a world where McDonald's recently announced its first ever annual loss, there are also reasons to be cheerful), why in the name of Shyamalan would we fail to act? As Merrill says to Graham at the critical moment, "swing away." With luck and grace, we can put aside narcissism and false shame in articulating our own specificities and localisms against the wearisome machine. Then, of course, we kill the alien degenerates and put the fear of God back into the Episcopalian Church.
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Notes
(1) This section is based on reporting from the Observer (25th August 2002) and ABC News (2nd August 2002), and on commentary by Carl Sagan for the Baltimore Sun (3rd December 1995).
(2) See Iris Murdoch on 'Conceptions of Unity' in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), pp 1-25.
(3) David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest (1996), is interesting about the redemptive power of cliché in a Salon interview with Laura Miller (8th March 1996). He talks, among other things, about the use of tokens or tags such as “one day at a time” or “it works if you work it” in addiction recovery fellowships; by the standards of the academy these sound depthless, but by ordinary human standards holding to them and affirming them can save lives. I wrote about David Foster Wallace, sort of, for Banana Wings once (link).
(4) For a brief, lucid introduction to surrealism, see Jonathan Jones' 'For better perverse', published in the Guardian on 8th September 2001. In looking at Max Ernst's Two Children Frightened by a Nightingale - which Jones discusses - note among other things the challenge to the way in which pictures are conventionally framed; for a discussion of Max Ernst's Pieta or Revolution by Night, see Jonathan Jones' separate short article about this painting in the Guardian on 23rd June 2001.
(5) This paragraph makes reference to Peggy Noonan's article, 'There Is No Time, There Will Be Time', first published in Forbes magazine (30th November 1998) and then republished by Salon, the Wall Street Journal and - doubtless - other outlets in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The link here is to this article archived at Peggy Noonan's own website.
Attribution for 'Signs' theatrical poster used above: by source, fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=992953
