The Enemy Within
Half the fun of watching movies is working out what they’re really about.
Take, for example, the Hollywood science fiction films of the Fifties. Films
like Invaders From Mars, The Blob, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, and Red
Planet Mars weren’t really about ‘invaders’ from other planets
at all: they were about the Cold War paranoia that had swept across the US
at the time, the fear of ‘reds under the beds’. It wasn’t
the aliens who were invading, it was the Russians and their Communism. This
is what’s known as looking at the ‘sub-text’ of a film, and
although sometimes overdone, it can lead to valuable insights, or at least
an interesting take on a film.
I recently saw the new X Files movie, Fight The Future, and boy, does it
have sub-text! You don’t really need to be a Files fan to get this;
all you really need to know is that the film’s story revolves largely
around the existence of a particularly nasty strain of alien that possesses
and grows inside its human host, until it is ready to break out of the shell
that the host has now become. The idea, of course, is not too far removed
from the idea contained in the Alien/Ripley films, of alien organisms that
gestate inside the chest of a living host as part of their life cycle. It’s
scarey stuff, and it speaks of a particularly personal threat. But this time
around, where is the threat really coming from?
It seems pretty clear to me that these more recent science fiction films,
with their biological alien invasions, are really all about the threat of
the rise of corporatism…
It’s true, just like those nasty little alien organisms, the corporations
are quietly taking over all life as we know it. They’re in the process
of remaking society, of turning the private citizen into the corporate
citizen/alien. Even entertainment is being provided by them. So-called
‘corporate private parties’ are all the rage now, with even Bob
Dylan and his son Jakob lending their talents (for big bucks) at one recently
held by a Silicon Valley company called Applied Materials. They are already
an enormous presence in the media. Business forecasts and corporate sponsorships
get saturation coverage. Governments are pretty much in their pockets. We
vote for governments, but they no longer answer to us it seems - they answer
to the powerful lobby groups and corporations that fund their accession.
Eventually they will take over the role of governments. I think they call
it ‘Globalisation’. Even the language of corporatism echoes the
alien invasion theme: takeovers, mergers, market penetration.
Mulder and Scully were never really FBI agents anyway - they’re IRS
agents. And every time the X Files is shut down (as it was at the end of
the fifth season) it’s a win for the corporate sector, an invitation
for market forces to run rampant. When it’s reopened (as it was at the
end of the film), that’s a return to regulation and greater accountability.
It’s all about finding ‘anomalies’, okay? Not that the corporate
sector is too scared about that. In fiXion as in real life, the anomalies
of big business are rarely officially uncovered or prosecuted.
These films (and the tv series) have cleverly tapped into this phenomenon
and given it new expression. And the connections really are there; in fact
they’re right in your face at times. The Alien films feature ‘The
Company’, a shadowy, corporate entity that is always there in the
background, minding its valuable assets and manipulating Ripley and the aliens
to its own ends. In Fight The Future, Martin Landau’s character tells
Mulder: "When you introduce a predator into a closed system, that system’s
extinction is inevitable". Sounds like Globalisation at work to me!