Expecting visitors?

Commonweal, Nov 22, 1996 by Frank McConnell

At this point it's difficult to read the movie listings, or channel-surf in prime time, without coming across an invasion from outer space; and it's going to get even more difficult as we surf toward the emblematic year, 2001.

Of course, bad guy/good guy alien stories have fascinated us throughout the century of millennium's end. Science fiction, the unique literary voice of our century, would scarcely be imaginable without them. Still, as we approach millennium's beginning, the fascination is approaching the obsessive-compulsive level.

The most significant event of summer 1996 was not either political convention, not Dick Morris, not the Atlanta Olympics, not even the prospect of O.J. revisited: it was Independence Day, a medium-budget, high-tech, bad-space-guys-come-to-kick-earth's-butt-but-we-kick-their-butt epic that, with cheesier effects, would have fit right into the 1950s. And yet it generated lines around the block, and it is one of the few movies ever to have been a cover story on both Time and Newsweek - before its premiere.

Mere hype? Sure. But don't underestimate hype as an index of the national psyche. The trick of advertising is not to tell folks what they should like, but to tell them it's okay to like what they already do like.

And Independence Day is only the tip of the iceberg - or, better, the leading edge of the saucer. Hollywood has already scheduled a baker's dozen and more of invader films - including the much awaited Mars Attacks, by the wonderfully eccentric Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands). On TV for the last three seasons the most interesting, classy show has been Fox's "The X-Files," whose ongoing premise is that aliens have landed, are here, and the government is covering it up: something, by the way, that a scary number of folks really believe. Fox and the three other major networks have all written into this fall's schedule a slew of new series centering around the alien-invader theme - including one with the eloquently economical title, "Dark Skies" (ABC). The fact is that, even if actual saucers never actually land here, we have been invaded by aliens - not from outer, but from inner space, from the abandoned - we thought - mineshafts of the imagination. Look around: they're here.

But just who are they? A little history will help.

The first invasion of Earth from another planet occurred in 1898, in H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. I hope someone will organize a suitable centennial celebration, since this is the sort of literary event that does not often happen: no one before Wells had thought to envision an advanced, unsympathetic, murderous force showing earthlings their pathetic littleness. Science fiction had begun - as had twentieth-century Angst, which, of course, is the tonic chord of science fiction altogether.

1898: two years before 1900, which is almost as apocalyptic a number as 2000, and when international tensions and military buildups throughout Europe had virtually ensured that the First World War would, sooner or later, break out. Wells's novel spoke to just that sense of dread of the future century: in fact, his invading Martians were the future century or, even more plainly, the future.

And no sci-fi invader story has ever, really, trespassed the boundaries of Wells's original invention - which does not mean that there haven't been brilliant, unexpected variations on the theme. The aliens are always the future - yours and mine. They can be purely malevolent, as in War of the Worlds; they can be semidivine and kindly, as in Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind; and they can be a puzzling mirror of our own moral complexity, as in "The X-Files" or the brilliant, recently resurrected Series from the eighties, "Alien Nation" (get the pun?). But they are always a projection of what we feel ourselves to be now, of where we think we're headed now. Science fiction is not, to use the dismissive academic phrase, "escape literature." It's more like no-escape, no-way-out literature. It's about the "future" only in the sense that your life is about the future when you climb out of bed in the morning. Or, as someone once observed, sci-fi is always "about" the precise year in which it was written.

In fact, you could write a revealing spiritual history of Anglo-American aspirations and expectations just by tracking the various ways the aliens, since 1898, have appeared.

Do they come to damn us or save us? Are they commies or missionaries? Or are they just - as in, say E.T. - feel-good imaginary friends, straight from the New Age nonthink tanks of Marin County? Whatever they are, at various times, all these things - they are always mirrors, barometers of our hope. They're also, of course, as is all sci-fi, deeply religious manifestations. As we approach millennium - an artificial, Eurocentric date certainly, but just as certainly inescapable - our quantum physicists grow more mystical, our philosophers and theologians become more obsessed with the ancient, this-world-is-merely-illusion wisdom of the Gnostics, and prophets and madmen of every stripe plan for the End of Reality as We Know It. And the rest of us watch more and more movies and TV shows about alien visitors.