The Problem with Paradise

The Eagles' song "The Last Resort" begins with these lines:

She came from Providence 

The one in Rhode Island

Where the old world shadows hang heavy in the air.

She packed her hopes and dreams like a refugee

Just as her father came across the sea.

It's a song about emigration, about westward movement, the colonization (and destruction) of the continent.  With each westward move, to the farthest coast and then to the islands beyond, the colonists believe they've found Paradise, the ultimate place of rest and beauty.

But there's a problem: no sooner do they arrive than they begin to turn Paradise into a wasteland.

I was thinking about this song when I watched After Earth, the Will and Jaden Smith vehicle.  Not a bad film, as summer sci-fi fare goes; if you want a full review, check out my other blog, YA Guy.

But what got me thinking about the Eagles song as I watched this film was the theme of emigration and colonization, in this case emigration away from earth and colonization of distant planets.

In After Earth, humans have destroyed our home planet's environment, and so they leave, seeking a new, more hospitable planet.  It's a theme we've seen in a number of recent fantasy/sci-fi films: Avatar, Wall-E, Battle for Terra.  I wrote about those films here.

And what I wrote is that I find such films disturbing, because--for all their ostensible environmental awareness--they suggest that even if we trash this planet, there'll always be another planet waiting for us.

Some people actually believe this.  Should earth become uninhabitable, they say, we'll simply pull up roots and terraform the moon or Mars.  That such a feat is far beyond our current technologies isn't the main problem with such thinking.

The main problem is that, unless we can overcome such thinking, no matter where we go we'll start doing the same thing all over again.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with Paradise: we don't really want to live in it.  We want to devour it and move on.

The Eagles song ends:

And you can see them there on Sunday morning

Stand up and sing about what it's like up there

They call it Paradise

I don't know why

You call someplace Paradise

Kiss it goodbye.

What's going to save us, if anything is, is not another place "after Earth."  There is no such place, or if there is, it won't be safe from us for long.

Paradise can't save us until we decide there's something worth saving.

Faith and Fantasy

My son's persistence finally wore down my misgivings, and I took him to see Clash of the Titans today. Turns out he wasn't bothered by the violence at all; I guess the threshold is a lot higher these days. But seeing it again did give me a chance to reflect further on the film's representation of human-divine warfare or, more broadly, on the film's position regarding the sacred.

To put it simply: the film's position is that the sacred is pretty much a farce. The gods are petty, grasping, egotistical thugs; the heroes are uniformly disdainful of worship or even of common courtesy toward the immortals; and the only human in the film whom one might call religious--a street prophet who warns his people not to spurn the gods--is depicted as a wide-eyed lunatic who drags the unoffending Andromeda to the sacrificial altar and who burns his own flesh to prove his devotion to his deities. If you were looking at this film alone, you'd have to grant some validity to the Religious Right's accusation that Hollywood is openly hostile toward its audience's spiritual values.

And really, when I think of the fantasy films I know, it's hard to find one that endorses traditional Western religious values. Just to name some recent examples: Avatar locates the sacred not in the spiritually bankrupt human society but in the earth-worship of the indigenes; The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus eviscerates Christianity as so much wish-fulfillment and mumbo-jumbo while mustering considerable sympathy for the Devil; and The Lovely Bones conjures a Limbo state that's far more an expression of digital wizardry than of godly design. One of the previews before Clash pretty much summed up the dominant fantasy-film attitude toward the divine: in the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, when one dream-stalked character whispers, "Oh, God," he's answered by Freddy Krueger's snarl: "No. Just me."

What are we to make of the smearing of the sacred in fantasy film? Maybe it is because Hollywood is full of atheistic, liberal elites who wish to tear down the moral fabric of the nation. Or maybe it's because fantasy, as otherworldly entertainment, has no room for the traditional belief systems most oriented toward the otherworldly; maybe fantasy, in its fulfillment of humanity's immortal desire for something beyond this mortal realm, crowds God out of the scene and off the screen. In this sense, the plot device that drives Clash of the Titans perhaps signifies an impulse deep in the history of fantasy (and fantasy film) itself: Perseus's defiance of his creator mirrors fantasy's impulse to create a world wholly of its own. And the reaction against this impulse looks back to an equally old distrust of such godlike powers of invention. The Israelites were punished for worshipping images of their own devising; the Puritans hated the stage because it jeopardized God's monopoly on the making of men. Perhaps fantasy will always find itself pitted against its society's most deeply held systems of belief. Perhaps it could not be fantasy if it did not vaunt against the gods.

An Oldie But a Goodie

An earlier blog post of mine, "E-Pocalypse? Not!," was just published in the environmental zine Canary. It's been revised and expanded to take into account the mega-phenomenon of James Cameron's Avatar, which I see as another faux-environmentalist fantasy. (Though some conservatives, I was astonished to discover, see the film as a recruitment vehicle for eco-terrorists. I guess conservatives see terrorists everywhere they look.) Personally, I think the additions--not only about Cameron's film but about real-life space colonization schemes--make it a stronger essay. But read for yourself and let me know what you think!