JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 133 из 359Neither am I saying that Howard Hawks, Christian Nyby, Charles Lederer (who wrote the screenplay for The Thing ), or John W. Campbell (whose novella formed the basis for the film) fought their way up the beaches of Anzio or helped to raise the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima. But events determine point of view and point of view determines politics, and CE3K seems to me every bit as preordained as The Thing . We can understand that the latter's "let the military handle this” thesis was a perfectly acceptable one in 1951, because the military had handled the Japs and the Nazis perfectly well in Duke Wayne's "Big One," and we can also understand that the former's attitude of "don't let the military handle this" was a perfectly acceptable one in 1977, following the military's less-than-startling record in Vietnam, or even in 1980 (when CE3K was rereleased with additional footage), the year when American military personnel lost the battle for our hostages to the Iranians following three hours of mechanical fuckups.
Political horror films are by no means common, but other examples come to mind. The hawkish ones, like The Thing , usually extol the virtues of preparedness and deplore the vices of laxness, and achieve a goodly amount of their horror by positing a society which is politically antithetical to ours and yet possesses a great deal of power-either technological or magical, it matters not which; as Arthur C. Clarke has pointed out, when you reach a certain point, there is absolutely no difference between the two. There is a wonderful moment near the begining of George Pal's adaptation of The War of the Worlds when three men, one of whom is waving a white flag, approach the first of the alien spacecraft to land. Each of the three appears to come from a different class and a different race, but they are united, not just by their common humanity, but by a pervasive sense of Americanness which I don't believe was accidental. As they approach the smoking crater with their white flag, they evoke that Revolutionary War image we all grew up in school with: the drummer, the fifer, the flag-bearer. Thus their destruction by the Martians' heat ray becomes a symbolic act, calling up all the ideals Americans have ever fought for.
The film 1984 makes a similar statement, only here (the film being largely stripped of the rich resonance George Orwell brought to his novel) Big Brother has replaced the Martians.
Political horror films are by no means common, but other examples come to mind. The hawkish ones, like The Thing , usually extol the virtues of preparedness and deplore the vices of laxness, and achieve a goodly amount of their horror by positing a society which is politically antithetical to ours and yet possesses a great deal of power-either technological or magical, it matters not which; as Arthur C. Clarke has pointed out, when you reach a certain point, there is absolutely no difference between the two. There is a wonderful moment near the begining of George Pal's adaptation of The War of the Worlds when three men, one of whom is waving a white flag, approach the first of the alien spacecraft to land. Each of the three appears to come from a different class and a different race, but they are united, not just by their common humanity, but by a pervasive sense of Americanness which I don't believe was accidental. As they approach the smoking crater with their white flag, they evoke that Revolutionary War image we all grew up in school with: the drummer, the fifer, the flag-bearer. Thus their destruction by the Martians' heat ray becomes a symbolic act, calling up all the ideals Americans have ever fought for.
The film 1984 makes a similar statement, only here (the film being largely stripped of the rich resonance George Orwell brought to his novel) Big Brother has replaced the Martians.