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Sometimes it takes a simple movie to awaken us to the possibility that things are not as they seem
for instance: Have you seen SIGNS?
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Jessica
Winter of the Village Voice wrote:
"Signs appears to have
been conceived and written by an actual child, especially once the
crop-crunching terrorist aliens get to conquering Earth on a
Pennsylvania farm. Sitting through the last reel (spoiler alert!) is
significantly less charming than listening to a four-year-old with a
taste for exaggeration recount his Halloween trip to the Haunted
House. The aliens were tall and green, and poison gas came out of
their claws, and they tried to get into this family's basement but
they couldn't, and then everyone fell asleep, and then when they
woke up all the aliens had been defeated, but there was still one
left, and Joaquin Phoenix beat it with a bat! I'm not making this
up. This shit made the cover of Newsweek.
| Not long
ago, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan made the scary
and elegant The Sixth Sense, a ghost story whose
weakness for metaphysical goop and rug-pulling gimmickry
suggested that he should not direct his own scriptsa
hypothesis promptly proven by the embarrassing
Unbreakable. Here the "Next Spielberg" piles on Mel
Gibson as a lapsed man of faith whom the whole
Rockwellian town calls "Father," a cornfield of dreams
where failed baseball player Phoenix wanders in search
of redemptive triumph, and God help us, an affirmation
of religious faith as a weapon of war. Not a whole lot
makes sense in Signs except, of course, the cosmos: The
Almighty watches over everyone, there are no
coincidences, and Everything Happens for a Reason."
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I personally would
go a lot further -so I will!
The whole film preys on sense of town, family and religous belonging.
The sleepy 'uber-normal' homestead or dare i say , 'homeland' where
everyone knows everyone...is thickly and clumsily daubed into the viewers
consiousness...
The alien is strangely lacking in clothing and
equipment for an extraterrestrial invader:
Is this naked humanoid supposed to represent savagry?
the final attack on the intruder is hammily 'justified' and made very
personal- almost as if our very nature as humans is being
challenged...it's a "c'mon what would you do", as the alien grabs the
young boy and threatening to inject him with poison gas from it's claw
(surely not a drug metaphor...),
a stand off ensues and then...Joaquin Pheonix's character lays into the
'alien' with an unprecedented ultraviolence...that seems to last way too
long. Again and again we see (and , perhaps more gruesomely,) hear the bat
swing at the 'alien', smashing , again and again,...
 
I personally started to feel ill, at
this point, because 'Close Encounters of the Third kind', or 'Cocoon',or
even 'THEY LIVE' this was not....
Signs is a attempt at mongering the worst fears of threats from
difference, the unknown, of outsiders in a
worryingly pre-deterministic & puritanical kind of survivalism.
Perhaps even more worrying was the image seen as the Alien enters the
last scene...
as its sillhouette reveals a muscular dark figure in the
doorway...
As I left the cinema ...(my wife had stopped me and physically had to
gag me from saying out loud: "I can't believe this shit..." over and over
again....) I was reminded of a LP record I knew I had at home...so i dug
it out and there was a similar scene...
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As presented on the cover of Ice-T's 'HOME INVASION' (1993), as a dark
figure looms out of the doorway, threatening the 'white boys' innocence
with 'hip-hop' music, Malcolm X literature and Iceberg Slim novels...Ice
meant it as an attack on corporate white fear...and those 'ever popular'
white family values that politicians all go for...This film , however,
dangerously presents that fear and tries to justify it.... Think of the
way early UFO / martian 50's sci fi was used as a metaphoric tool for the
anti-communists...This film is a metaphor for fear of outsiders/
terrorists...or whoever the the new bogey-man on the block happens to be.
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 "We're an 'american' family...a-hur
a-hur..."
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| and just to let
you know how conservative America feels....read this:
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"We in Illinois should understand this and rally behind
films like 'Signs'. It is the only way 'Pretendland' can truly
come to a proper understanding about what "sensible midwest
values" look like. Gibson has not had a moral message in every
film he's made, but as he has matured in recent years, his
best work has been in the films he has chosen. These films
build up families, strengthen the belief that freedom is
costly and was bought with a price, and in his most recent -
God exists and stays with you through the longest and darkest
of nights Stay the course Mel! Stay the course!"
Kevin McCullough posting on FreeRepublic.com
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