- And David Brin the persistent idiocies of the UFO cultists
We watched the new film about a potential nuclear war, A House of Dynamite, last Sunday on Netflix, and then I watched it again on Netflix Monday evening (while Y was on the phone with work). It’s a taut, well-made film a contemporary missile crisis, roughly analogous to the situation in Fail Safe (book and film reviewed here), in which a foreign missile is detected heading for the US, origin unknown, intent unknown — is it real? An accident? More to the point — as in Fail Safe — if it really is a nuclear bomb and it detonates over its target, Chicago, what does the president do? All sorts of potential response strategies are alluded to, just as they were discussed in Fail Safe.
Further, the current movie is told in tripart fashion, repeating the critical 18 or 20 minutes from detection until impact three times, from the points of view of three major characters: the head of the White House Situation Room (played by Rebecca Ferguson); a commander of US Stratigic Command (STRATCOM) (played by Tracy Letts, both an actor and a playwright; I first noticed him in the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s INDIGNATION, reviewed here); and finally the president of the United States (played by Idris Elba).
And each of these sequences, which overlap, ends with a question to the president: “Mr. President, What are your orders?”.
Then, after two brief ambiguous scenes, the film ends. We don’t hear the president’s order, or know whether the missile hit and destroyed Chicago.
Some viewers have been outraged by the film’s lack of closure. *What happened*? Did the missile destroy Chicago or not??
My main thought is this is about a violation of the narrative bias that is part of human nature. Humans think in terms of cause and effect, beginnings, middles, and ends, and any violation of this order causes consternation.
My secondary thought is to wonder why the precise ending even matters, in this case. If Chicago were destroyed, or if the missile was a dud and Chicago wasn’t destroyed, that wouldn’t change any of the drama and tension and uncertainty that went on before. The situation today isn’t much different from how it was in Fail Safe. That’s the point. Whether or not it was an accident or intentional, whether or not it resulted in the destruction of Chicago or of the whole world, isn’t the point; that part is contingent, accidental. The point is that this potential accidental catastrophe is still possible.
At the same time, for all the many discussions and reviews of this film I’ve seen, I haven’t seen anyone discuss the implications of those final two scenes. Per Wikipedia, the first of those scenes shows government officials arriving at a bunker at the Raven Rock Mountain Complex in lower Pennsylvania — not all that far from Washington DC, actually — but, IIRC, in a rather unhurried manner. The final scene shows the head of the fort in Alaska, seen earlier, as he kneels to the ground and touches his head to dirt. Then– credits.
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Second for today. David Brin, the SF author and rationalist/skeptic, has a post this afternoon criticizing Bill Maher, among other things.
Facebook, David Brin, today: David Brin’s Post
Bill Maher is supposed to be the impudent questioner of standard dogmas. Yet he brings on guests to rave on and on the standard popular tropes on UFOs. The exact same idiocies I’ve heard every year since I was five – now 75 – about government coverups so deep that ALL presidents were kept in the dark, WHILE tens of thousands of our best scientists have been studying alien tech in a “Manhattan Project” going back EIGHTY years, without a single ‘alien-level’ tech to show for it and none of those tens of thousands of our very best minds ever spilling the beans? And WHY do that at all?
He makes this crucial point, about UFOs:
But there are a MILLION TIMES as many active cameras on Earth than in the 1950s and far better ones, in far more hands. And yet the ‘images’ keep getting FUZZIER! Has it occurred to you to ask whassup wit dat?
My interest is in these comments, which reflect my comments about religion, yesterday.
No, what I deem worst about this UFO mania is how incredibly DULL the speculations are, so standard in their masturbations to Bigfoot-style pareidolia and “suspicion of authority” chic, without recognizing – ever – how thoroughly and uniformly and unimaginatively cult-like it has always been.
Also:
PS WHY does no one point out the consistent pattern that goes back to the tribal origins of human mythology? How our ancestors on all continents believed in forest elfs who flitted about on the edge of perception, teasing and kidnapping villagers and — oops I mean aliens who snatch or tease or go booga-booga at us now. It’s the same deeply human seeking of superstitious thrills. Happy Halloween.
Well, of course, many of us do see this.
