Citizen Spielberg

3. "Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear": Spielberg's Monster Movies

3 “Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear”: Spielberg’s Monster Movies The Monster Movie The monster movie, or horror film, has much in common with the sciencefiction and fantasy film genres discussed in chapter 1; all three incorporate elements and creatures beyond ordinary reality. They compel audiences to confront difference, or “otherness,” in a wide variety of formulations, whether nonhuman creatures, alien beings, or deranged men and women. Narratively, Robin Wood’s basic formula for the horror film, “normality is threatened by the monster,” aptly fits films within the three genres. “Normality ” might be defined as the status quo at the start of the movie, and “the monster” as the embodied force that seeks to alter or destroy it (Wood 78). Noel Carroll posits the “deep structure of the horror fiction” as a three-part movement from normality, to disruption, to the final confrontation and defeat of the monster (200).Orcs,replicants,and Norman Bates all represent malevolent, destructive deviations from what Lord of the Rings, Blade Runner , and Psycho posit as acceptable conventions and normative behaviors in their vastly different societies. Though these genres contain fundamentally similar plot structures, their practitioners generally intend their narratives to evoke different responses from spectators: the fantasy film provokes amazement, the science-fiction film speculation, and the horror film fright. Carroll bases his entire philosophy on the complex series of emotions these “art-horror” movies elicit from the viewer. He argues that while watching these films, “the emotions of the audience are supposed to mirror those of the positive human characters in 120 . citizen spielberg certain, but not all, respects” (18). The attitudes of the characters, therefore, create dissimilar responses to the monsters in different types of films; so, for example, normative figures in the horror movies usually regard these creatures as “abnormal disturbances of the natural order,” while those in fantasy films see their antagonists as evil forces in their everyday worlds that threaten their existence. The result is that the monster in the horror film is “an extraordinary character in an ordinary world, whereas in fairy tales and the like the monster is an ordinary creature in an extraordinary world” (16). While our rational consciousness understands that these are fictional creations with no power to harm us, we share the emotions of the characters trapped within the narrative unfolding before us. Even though they are filled with dark and terrible creatures, fantasy films are fundamentally playful and quite distant. They overtly foreground their status as make-believe. The most elaborate fantasy films create worlds of such imaginative breadth that few apparent connections exist between our lives and those fantastical scenes enacted on the screen. The space between our world of Happy Meals and sitcoms and their world of incantations and trolls remains too great to substitute one for the other.We cheer the bravery of daring fantasy heroes and recoil from the evil creatures who oppose them, but we never mistake their world for ours—too many stark contrasts exist between the two. This explicit dissimilarity remains the central appeal of fantasy films: they transport viewers to radically alternative realities governed by different rules, exciting adventures, and strange beings. The fantasy film grows out of what we normally categorize as the impossible,defying physical laws and conventional constructions of reality. Unlike fantasy films,science-fiction movies usually originate from a potentially possible, or at least speculatively imaginable, premise and proceed to ask, “If this is true, then what would happen if [fill in the blank] were to occur?” The critical discourse surrounding these films often questions how much they rely on current scientific data or deviate from or conform to what can and cannot actually be done; in other words, they assess the likelihood that events depicted in the film might actually transpire given the current state of scientific knowledge and technological advancement.Thus possibility, often stretched to its most fragile thinness, remains essential to the appeal of science fiction.Viewers must be convinced that events on the screen remain within the realm of what is (at least remotely) possible outside the theater, and filmmakers strive for levels of realism sufficient for audiences to accept the reel world as roughly similar to the real world. If we do not believe that essential elements in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or RoboCop (1987) are monster movies · 121 congruent with our understanding of daily existence, then they slip...