Hollywood Utopia

182 Hollywood Utopia
27. He also directed the classic science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), which was
one of the few films to treat the aliens as benevolent. The film had a strong pacifist message,
which tried to get humanity to step back from the brink of nuclear destruction. This pacifist and
ecologically framed cult film is dramatised by the alien’s ability to stop all artificial power on the
planet. The aliens try to teach humans that they must learn to respect ‘nature’ and stop their
‘senseless wars’ or face terrible consequences.
28. (Post)modernism often uses the metaphor of viruses and disease to describe the state of anomie.
Jameson and Baudrillard describe the postmodernist condition as ‘schizophrenic’, requiring ‘no
experience of temporal continuity’ (Rushing et al. 1995: 17).
29. Scott Bukatman’s essay ‘The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime’, which looks
at the work of Trumbull, asserts, at the outset, that his use of special effects coupled with the
evocation of the sublime is especially ‘contemplative’ (in Cooke et al. 1995: 271). Trumbull
stages ‘an extended encounter with the sublime by including the presence of the diegetic
spectator’. But, unlike Ellie in Contact, Trumbull’s characters ‘do not mediate the experience
through the psychology of characters’ being uniformly ‘stunned into a profound passivity’ (ibid.:
272).
30. Christopher Hitt, recalling words from Thoreau’s short story ‘Ktaadn’, explores a similar
epiphany focusing on the ‘ecological sublime’ as he comes down from a mile high mountain
having failed to complete the ascent. ‘Think of our life in nature - daily to be shown matter, to
come in contact with it - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the
common sense! contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?’ (cited by Hitt 1999: 615).
Hitt continues, however, that contrary to Kant: ‘Reason can never master nature. There will
always be limits to our knowledge and nature will always be, finally impenetrable. An ecological
sublime would remind us of this lesson by restoring the wonder, the inaccessibility of wild
nature. In an age of exploitation, commodification, and domination, we need awe, envelopment
and transcendence. We need, at least occasionally to be confronted with the wild otherness of
nature and to be astonished, enchanted, humbled by it. Perhaps it is time - while there is still
some wild nature left - that we discover an ecological sublime’ (Hitt 1999: 619B20).
31. It should be recognised that Charlton Heston was especially famous for acting in numerous epic
and biblical stories, which involved him ‘witnessing’ and even becoming transformed by the
power of Christian spirituality.
32. Taubin concludes that what the film is ultimately about is the infiltration and paradoxes implicit
in a new age language, expressed in the Wrenwood commune, with its ‘therapeutic notion of
purification in a postmodern age of referential doom and metaphysical disease’ (cited in
Boorman et al. 1996: 213) as against the ideological failure of the Left and its need to look at
itself and how it is losing any effective voice politically and culturally.
33. When asked why it was set in 1987, the director replied that he wanted to place it at the height of