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The Monster and the Mensch
- The University Press of Kentucky
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131 the Monster and the MensCh Randall E. Auxier Why save the best bits? J. J. Abrams’s film Super 8 reaches its climax when the young hero, Joe Lamb, and heroine, Alice Dainard, are being chased through the subterranean nest of an escaped alien being—a being something like a giant spider. We have had the grand moment set up for well over an hour with various characters indicating that the “monster” is empathic and it communicates by touch. We have also been prepared to assume that Joe really understands monsters. He spends his free time building models of them, and when it is time for Alice to play a zombie in the kids’ own Super 8 film, she asks Joe how to do it. His description, while still kid-like, is on the money and Alice turns out to be a natural. We also have the information that our monster (1) is hungry, (2) is terrified , and (3) wants to go home. I felt that way when I saw the first Alien movie. That isn’t a good combination for anyone, least of all an intelligent being that has been imprisoned for over twenty years and held among aliens it regards as hideous insects (i.e., we humans). And our Super 8 monster has every reason to see us this way. After all, we never touch the creature except with probes and prods, and for it, touching is the basis of communication, and hence the primary evidence of the existence of a moral conscience. As far as the monster can discern, humans have no such capabilities. To analogize, at best we seem like reptiles to this being, and at worst, yes, cockroaches. In twenty years of imprisonment, the alien has never had the opportunity to discover that we have any moral feeling at all. Thus, in the key moment, the alien catches Joe, scoops him up, and starts to eat him, but feels (and thereby notices) that Joe, while perhaps afraid, is trying to see the monster, to study the monster’s face. Studying faces is another thing Joe does, as is made abundantly evident in his work as a makeup artist. In that crucial instant, the monster pauses, ponders, feels 132 Randall E. Auxier Joe seeing him, offers his own eyes for Joe to look into, and then suddenly grasps that human beings do with their eyes what the alien beings do by touching. The alien realizes that Joe is “touching” with his eyes, and while it is a strange thing, and hard to understand, the alien is, after all, far more intelligent than a human being, so the matter is puzzled out. The alien is able to grasp, in that moment, why all the humans have responded as they have. To them, the visual appearance of such a spiderly alien is terrifying, while to the alien, the withholding of touch is barbaric, a kind of unimaginable torture. But now the alien knows that humans did not understand, could not understand, its own moral frame of reference. In that climactic realization, the alien becomes aware that it is wrong to feed on these beings and that its first and only imperative is to get off this planet and go home. And what is more, the alien being now knows how to do it—how to build a ship that will take it home. It may not be obvious to those who haven’t reflected on the matter, but the motive force that creates the alien’s spacecraft is a kind of love, in the form of desire to touch, to hold, to be near, to possess. The parts are drawn together by empathy. That is why the sad little piece of the alien spaceship that Joe takes home from the site of the train wreck “wants” to be with the other pieces. The ship is made of and powered by something like longing. When the alien becomes aware that humans actually do have love, or more precisely, longing within themselves, it also realizes that it can use anything that anyone loves (in the relevant sense) to rebuild its craft. That is why, in the denouement, only some things are drawn upward into the water tower and fused into the ship. The things being drawn up are things that someone loves. That gun the soldier won’t relinquish, that cool car, and yes, the necklace that Joe’s mother wore and that he has invested with every ounce...