Why do aliens care so much about Earth’s geopolitics?
AUGUST 16TH, 2016 — POST 225
It’s that time of year when the movies in contention for the next Academy Awards start to rear their heads. For Denis Villenueve — director of last year’s Sicario, today saw his next awards contender get its first trailer. Titled Arrival, the movie — like Sicario before it — seems to have a bit more going on that most typical award bait (there are no hints at prosthetic noses or masculinity in crisis, for example).
Instead, the “alien invasion” Arrival is lead by Amy Adams in the role of a translator — “You’re at the top of everyone’s list when it comes to translations,” (sorry, what?) — tasked with making first communicative contact with an alien species that is landing craft on Earth soil. Well, kinda. The craft hover.
If the trailer is accurate, the aliens don’t really provide a direct threat. Instead, they’re apparently more interested in seeing us destroy ourselves. The imposition of this alien race apparently turns nations of Earth into frenzy pitting people against each other. If this sounds familiar, good. It should.
The alien invasion genre of movie saw its heyday in the 1950s — a time where the West, but specifically America had a very real fear, and as such paranoia, around invasion. Whether commies were coming from the East in the Soviet Union or arriving on the West Coast from China, Korean, and Vietnam, the U.S. feared itself overrun and possibly even conquered. Now, movies that depicted a Communist threat hit a little too close — this was a real possibility. Instead, Hollywood capitalised on this fear by swapping out a Communist force for an alien one. Part campaign of enemy dehumanisation, part move to put an audience more at ease.
1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one of the more potent examples. The aliens of the movie are something resembling a plant — a plant that consumes humans and takes their form. Your neighbours look the same, but are they really? But 1951’s The Day The Earth Stood Still arguably (and perhaps not particularly convincingly) serves as a preeminent counter example.
The alien that arrives on Earth is actually concerned with world peace. He’s seen the nuclear arms race taking place on Earth and fears these weapons might unintentionally leave Earth and destabilise the galaxy. So as much as these alien races dwarf the Earth in technological power, galactic reach, and cultural purity, they’re still bothered to weigh in on exactly how we’re doing stuff. The threat, the alien professes, doesn’t come from without but rather from within.
And the aliens in Arrival seem similarly motivated, but with graver methods. It isn’t them we have to worry about, it’s those we already share a planet with: Russia and China are both implied as threats in the trailer. And again, these aliens are no slouches. Their enormous craft hover impossibly and look designed by Jony Ive’s evil twin. Their message to Earth, if one can presume one from the first trailer alone, is “Beware thy neighbour”.
As much as it can feel ham-fisted to start drawing long bows, it’s hard to divorce the alien invasion genre from its roots. So there is probably an argument to be made that left-leaning Hollywood wants to illustrate that if there are threats on America, they don’t come from across the borders, from Mexicans or Muslims. They come from those inside, with red (or more likely orange) necks, who — like the aliens — might have a hard time understanding the difference between a weapon (notably depicted as a crate full of military-style assault rifles) and a tool.
So aliens don’t and won’t care about Earth’s geopolitics. But alien invasion movies — where the alien race is the most pure analogue for the other, the unknown, the without — just can’t help it.
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