Distributed Mind

In honor of the passing of our special day honoring fear, I will repost this article which originally appeared on Cassandra:

Interestingly, I note that two of the best made movies about alien invasions are also about religion. Signs is both an excellent alien invasion movie and an excellent spiritual crisis movie. That sounds like an odd combination, but it works in practice. The truth, by the way, is that Signs is not about aliens invading at all, it really is about the main character's loss of faith. What is ironic is that it manages in the process to be probably the most entertaining and suspeneful movie about aliens yet.

Signs is clearly inspired in part, however, by a much earlier film about alien invasion, the famous War of the Worlds. War of the Worlds is also a well made movie on the topic - which it goes without saying is a rarity. Unlike Signs, War of the Worlds is primarily about aliens, not faith. Although it shows some limitations of the era, it is one of the best-made science fiction films prior to the advent of modern science fiction films (which you could probably place at the release of Star Wars). It competes with Forbidden Planet visually. So what does this all have to do with religion? The ending of War of the Worlds explicitly portrays the sudden death of the aliens as "a miracle," even while giving a scientific explanation for the aliens' death, and then attributing that scientific cause to God's foresight. I wonder what prompted this ending, as, although I have never made it around to reading H. G. Wells novel, I know that both Wells and the novel are anti-religious. Nevertheless, it makes a strong statement about God and nature, and faith, even if it is more or less "tacked on."

It occurs to me that both of these movies also emphasize the role of predestination: In Signs, everything turns out to have a purpose. In War of the Worlds the presence of the bacteria is attributed to God's foresight (though again this is really almost tacked-on.

So all of this makes me wonder, why this connection between these two seemingly disparate themes? Are aliens invading just so scary that it is natural to look to faith as the answer to the possibility? Or is there something more subtle going on here?

And as an adjunct question, what other good alien invasion movies are there? (I want to make a list; if it gets good, maybe we can throw them all together and watch them as I have been threatening this for a while. My original play list was War of the Worlds, Signs, Lilo and Stitch for a lighter conclusion, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which has a very different feel than the two movies I discussed here.)

Ben, Sunday, 04.07.04