Man, I had heard it was bad...but not this bad. In today's Wall Street Journal, Joseph Rago takes on the political undertones of M. Night Shyamalan's new horror film, "The Happening" (warning--potential spoiler alert):
Few major studio releases are so thoroughly pro-death, so deeply anti-human. We have arrived at a strange moment in American pop culture when movie-goers spend two hours in the theater being informed that we all deserve to die.
The "happening" is millions of men, women and children killing themselves, usually in creative ways, as when a zookeeper invites lions to chew off his limbs and a lady offs herself by French-kissing the toaster. The deaths, first believed to be terrorism, are actually acts of nature. Trees are releasing an airborne neurotoxin, as revenge against mankind for global warming, pollution and nuclear power. The genocide, we are told, is condign punishment for our ecological crimes.
"The Happening," Rago points out, is yet another example of the disturbing rise in "earth good, people bad" political-environmental rhetoric:
Today the position persists along the fringes of the "deep ecology" movement, where adherents can still be found chanting, "Four legs good! Two legs bad!" But the message also has some mainstream appeal: A best-selling book last summer was "The World Without Us," in which science journalist Alan Weisman gleefully imagined how nature would respond if man abruptly went extinct and how great it would be for the planet. "The Happening" merely takes this misanthropy to its logical extreme.
On the political stage, we've also seen it with Al Gore--if we "wage war" on the earth, it's bound to fight us back--and subtle hints of it in Obama's "this was the moment our planet began to heal" campaign rhetoric.
The good news is that, especially with a potentially tanking economy, extinction chic is unlikely to take off soon. The bad news? Sometimes, subtle cultural narratives have a way of taking hold over time.
Also, those of us who actually liked M. Night's crop circles movie from a while back (hey, I admit it) are facing yet another box office disappointment.
