APOCALYPTIC STORIES IN THE CORONA AGE

/originally published in Taste of Cinema/ The Covid-19 crisis has put the spotlight on classic SF films. Such entertainment has always provided a safe way of dealing with fears and anxieties. Now that we are facing a real-life Pandemic, we suddenly see a deep link between our lives, and science fiction. The best apocalyptic stories are those that challenge our existential concepts. For this list, I have chosen three masters of psychological subversion.

1. Alien
The alien is a space monster who stalks the crew members of the spaceship Nostromo in Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic. The alien was named a ‘’xenomorph’’ due to its shape-shifting abilities.
True to its name, the xenomorph defies description by its very design. The creature is found on a desolate planet, hiding in leathery ‘Easter eggs’ as a crab with tentacles. When the crab attaches itself to an astronaut, he gives birth to a chicken-like worm. The worm grows into a ‘biomechanoid’, fusing human organs with technological objects.
The Xenomorph’s shape-shifting defies the coordinates of human civilization. To get through the day, we rely on stable concepts of identity, gender, philosophy and politics. The creature explodes all of these with darkly satirical humor.
The first victim of the creature is the male astronaut Kane /John Hurt/. The alien impregnates him, and in the infamous ‘chestburster’ scene, Kane gives birth to its offspring. The film was released in 1979, which makes this gender-bending assault extremely powerful. In this period, society privileged men as the dominant gender. The alien kills captain Dallas /Tom Skerrit/, asnd deputy officer Ripley /Sigourney Weaver/ takes charge. This was the first time in science fiction history that a female acted smarter than men.
As the Xenomorph unexpectedly changes its shape, the crew of the spaceship cannot keep up. Their own sense of self erodes in the face of uncertainty. Unable to cope, they begin to feel like animals in a slaughterhouse. Acting as a psy-op weapon, the alien outwits the crew on every level. In an iconic scene, the captain chases it through the ship’s labyrinthine pipes. At one point, Dallas is paralyzed by his inability to choose between left and right. His psychological alienation results in a loss of spatial awareness. When science officer Ash /Ian Holm/ is exposed as a corporate robot, human identity dissolves even further. The corporation is just as Darwinian as the alien, having only reproduction on its mind. In the end, we cannot tell if the humans are xenomorphs, or the other way round. This is the alien’s smartest subversion.

2. The Thing
The Thing is another shape-shifting monster from John Carpenter’s seminal film /1982/. The Thing attacks a team of US researches on a remote Antarctic station. The monster can assume the shape of its victim.
The Thing uses many of the themes that made ALIEN famous. It almost plays out like a sequel to Ridley Scott’s film. While Scott already introduced a criticism of corporate abuse, Carpenter conjures an even darker social nightmare. Unlike the Xenomorph, the Thing does not simply use mimicry to fool its human hosts. It also literally recreates the victim’s identity to become his or her ‘’Doppelganger’’ /dark double/.
According to Wikipedia, impersonation is the highest level of social engineering: pretending or pretexting to be another person with the goal of gaining access to a system or building. The monster causes massive paranoia in the Arctic team. They cannot be certain that one of them isn’t a replica. But they also cannot trust themselves. Am I a human, or a space monster? The Thing attacks the very notion that we are individual persons.
On the nth level of this puzzle, the Thing is able to incarnate nothingness. This is a nasty challenge to our concepts of the body/mind relationship. If there is nothing inside, and we are already simulated creatures, that means that the Thing’s replica is a simulation of a simulation. Our bodies, supposedly hosting souls, stand for an empty shell.
In the film’s most traumatic scene, a scientist is having a heart attack. Someone tries to save him by electro shock, but this only leads to the scientist’s body bursting open. The creature that crawls out of his chest seems to mutate endlessly. It is as though every pore of the Thing’s body created an infinite number of copies. Not only is personal identity a diseased cell; social identity also behaves as a form of cancer.
For all of its grim pessimism, ALIEN kept the hope that Ripley could retain some connection with her cat. At the end of THE THING, there is absolutely no hope. We see the film’s two anti-heroes dying in the ruins of their research station. All they can muster is a toast to nihilism. The Thing is on the loose, and it will soon devour the entire world. This monster is even smarter than the Xenomorph. The shape-shifting alien forced us to question our humanity. The Thing makes us fear that humanity never existed in the first place.

3. A Nightmare on Elm Street
In Wes Craven’s A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET /1984/, Freddy Krueger is a child murderer who was burned by vengeful parents. Freddy’s ghost returns to kill off the kids in their nightmares.
As the old Freudian cliché goes, people dream what they wish for. We usually dismiss this by saying ‘’it was only a dream’’. In this way, we retain the right to control our desires. But this brilliant villain turns Freud upside-down. If Freddy can actually kill people in their dreams, then the dreams are no different than so-called ‘reality’. This is such a powerful statement that Freddy retained his cult status for 36 years. Given the impressive number of reboots and offshoots, I don’t believe he will ever leave the screens.
How can we explain the longevity?
Psychology always held a special appeal for cinema fans. We like to think about ourselves, analyze each other’s dreams, experience our boring lives as a myth, etc. Film is just another form of dreaming. As the camera projects fantasies on the screen, we project our own ‘inner camera’ on these images. The boundary between dream and reality is already blurred – as soon as the film begins.
Freddy is smarter than cinema. He knows that there is another element between reality and dream. A wisecracking party pooper, he constantly interrupts the cinematic fantasy. A powerful scene has him attacking the teenager Nancy /Heather Langenkamp/ via the phone. Nancy picks up the call, and Freddy’s lascivious tongue protrudes from the headset: ‘’I am your lover now, Nancy’’. The audience gasps, Jesus, I really thought there was a phone ringing in the cinema hall. You realize that both Nancy and the viewer receive the message from ANOTHER PLACE. It cannot be reduced to dream, or reality, in any meaningful sense.
Good psychotherapy tries to teach us that there is a limit to fantasy. We can only grow out of our illusions if we accept life’s disappointments. In this way, Freddy is the best psychologist among the villains. He recreates, in highly entertaining fashion, the ambiguity of desire. There is a beautiful quote from Shakespeare illustrating Freddy’s 'therapy': O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

JOKER'S DOUBLE BIND

Joker is an ambiguous playing card. He can replace any other card in the deck. Taken on face value, Joker means nothing. In this way, the card invites all possible readings, while at the same resisting any reading. Take this concept to the cinema, and you get Todd Phillips's JOKER - a film that plays Poker Face on its audiences.

Joaquin Phoenix is Arthur Fleck, a failed stand-up comedian with a laughing disorder. Living in a co-dependency with his ailing mother Penny, Arthur is jobless and depressed. He has no social life – people reject him because of his strange laughter. He gets beaten up, harassed and abandoned by the social services. Arthur becomes violent, killing three people in a gruesome subway incident. The violence inspires Gotham City’s underclasses to start a masked revolution.

Arthur never gets a diagnosis, but his ambivalent laughter may be likened to double-bind communication. The double bind refers to a simple psychological concept: an individual receives two contradictory messages, with each message negating the other. A typical example is a mother telling her child: "Be spontaneous." If the child acts spontaneously, he is not acting spontaneously because he is following his mother's direction. As a result, the child may lose his grip on reality.

When Arthur meets his presumed father, billionaire Thomas Wayne, the father disowns him. Penny Fleck’s hospital records reveal that Arthur might have been adopted. It is unclear whether Arthur even had a true mother, or a father. His mental illness could be causing hallucinations. In a telling sub-plot, Arthur is dating a black girl from the neighborhood. Some days later, it appears the girl is a figment of his imagination.

True to his family name, Arthur represents nothing. To become the Joker, he must first establish himself in society. Opportunity arrives when Murray Franklin asks Arthur to appear in his comedy show. This is yet another contradiction. On the one hand, society is showing acceptance, finally giving Arthur a chance in the spotlight. On the other hand, Murray invited Arthur only to ridicule his lack of talent. Arthur’s pent-up anger turns into a violent rebellion. Finally, he becomes the dreaded anti-hero Joker.

But the triumph is fleeting. Joker’s success comes from violence and murder. His creative impulse turns into destruction. Even worse, his role as a vigilante serves Gotham city’s sinister authorities. The system scapegoats Joker’s violence as the culprit of evil. Meanwhile, the government’s creation of social inequality remains hidden.

The film’s very design is a double bind. Everything seems real, and unreal, at the same time. Shot in retro-1980 style, JOKER recreates, with gritty realism, a fictional Gotham City. There are allusions to films like TAXI DRIVER, KING OF COMEDY, PSYCHO, or THE SHINING. In all these films, the anti-heroes are rebels against the very system that produces them. Similarly, the film JOKER carves its path on the basis of cultural references. On the one hand, the film contains the legacy of its predecessors. On the other hand, it is contained within that legacy.
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The four-dimensional Hypercube provides a nice illustration of the film's visual structure:

Imagine that the smaller cube represents the film JOKER. The cube is inside a larger one that may be viewed as the audience. When the cube rotates, it appears as though the film contains us, and we are starring in Joker's show. In the fourth dimension, you can imagine an infinite number of cubes containing smaller cubes. The ''fictional'' and ''real'' world exist in the same double bind. In this way, the body of the film is extended across multiple realities.

Polarized reactions confirm the impact of this poker-faced design. Leftists see the Joker as a social justice warrior. Liberals see him as a righteous vigilante. Christians recognize a crucified Jesus, or the God of vengeance. Boomers might think of a failed Anarchist, Millennials might cheer the modern Nihilist. Common to all these reactions is a shared feeling of paralysis. The thought that we can neither live in an unjust system, nor succeed as individuals.

The double bind is difficult, but not entirely hopeless. As Einstein said, ‘’No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.’’ There are two ways to approach this. We can embrace the double bind, enjoy our suffering in a failed system. Or we can think of the double bind as an opportunity to create something entirely new.