Spectres of the Spectrum, and: Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (review)

Craig Baldwin’s conspiracy thrillers Tribulation 99 and Spectres of the Spectrum visualise the waking nightmare of technologically saturated, media-driven, twentieth-century consumer culture through the familiar icons of sf. Both films construct apocalyptic narratives from found footage: sf films, newsreels, popular science programmes, corporate-produced educational films and advertising. Looking awry, Baldwin juxtaposes this footage with a narrative voiceover to produces a politically charged critique of American imperialism. The sf scenarios Baldwin constructs reveal both the genre’s complicity in fantasies of empire and – simultaneously and contradictorily – its radical potential to read this world order against the grain.

Tribulation 99 recounts a threat from without. Aliens, fleeing the nuclear destruction of their planet Quetzalcoatl, take refuge beneath the South Pole. Too damaged by radiation to emerge from underground, they use telepathy to control Earth culture, distorting it through their violence and hatred. Most of the devastation of the twentieth century – agricultural disaster in the South caused by export-crops for the North, economic collapses caused by neo-liberalism, political assassinations, Cold War-fuelled civil wars – is their doing, and behind that century’s political upheavals is a secret history of heroic struggle against the aliens and their ‘dupes’, constructed beings sent to replace humans. Salvador Allende was assassinated by the resistance because he ‘disrupts the economy’ and ‘alters earth’s polar axis’, causing the earth to stop spinning. Human life is also threatened when ‘our good friend Noriega is suddenly replaced by a grotesque, voodoo-spouting freak’. Baldwin’s combination of pulp sf alien-invasion footage with news footage of real invasions produces an astute indictment of the political unconscious shaping sf. At times it becomes difficult to sort the conspiracy-theory narrative from what actually happened, revealing the degree to which the psychodynamics of paranoia and fantasy animate our media-driven political reality. Tribulation 99 ends in apocalypse: atomic waste melts the polar icecaps, flooding the continents. Only the elite escape in a fleet of stealth ships. Over the strains of the music from the monolith sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick UK/US 1968), the voiceover announces ‘the world comes to an end, for which we are grateful; the chosen ones rejoice at the prospect of an apocalypse … the future belongs to us. The rest be damned, hallelujah!’ – and the screen goes black.

Similarly apocalyptic, Spectres of the Spectrum shows our destruction from within. It begins with a mayday call from AD 2007, the fiftieth anniversary of the Sputnik launch. The New Electromagnetic Order dominates the barren globe, resisted by TV Tesla. Only Booboo – the daughter of star child Yogi, himself the son of a female scientist from Science in Action and a father who is a combination of Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard – can tolerate the EM radiation and move about in the day. The film moves between Yogi’s voiceover (which recounts his youth, recruitment by the CIA and growing disillusionment with the New Electromagnetic Order that he comes to resist) and Booboo’s (which introduces us to her post-apocalyptic world). The former is reminiscent of film noir and Ian Fleming, the latter of poststructuralist critical theory and spoken word poetry performance. In the battle between ‘forces that want to use the spectrum to destroy human imagination’ and those who use it to open up human possibility, Booboo must go back in time to encounter the 1957 broadcasts which include a secret encoded by her grandmother that will ensure victory. This ‘media archaeology’ – going back through the history of telecommunications to find out ‘how we got in this goddamn situation’ – also describes Baldwin’s technique. The monopoly control of broadcasting – from Edison’s destruction of Tesla to RCA’s dominance of radio to Bill Gates’ control of the Internet...