Abstract
Falling Skies, produced by Steven Spielberg and Robert Rodat, ended its fifth season last summer. A sci-fi tale about the 2nd Massachusetts Militia Regiment (an allusion to the unit that fought the British in the Revolutionary War), a band of resistance fighters and civilians who, having survived an alien (the Espheni) onslaught from outer space, struggle for survival and then fight back against the occupation of their planet. With the world’s military and 90 percent of the human species destroyed, this is no small task, as the aliens move to enslave the remaining elements of human kind. Spielberg has mentioned that he thought of this TV series as a family drama set against an alien invasion. Led by U.S. Army Captain Dan Weaver (played by Will Patton) with Tom Mason, a Boston College military history professor (played by Noah Wyle), as second in command, much of the drama centers on Mason and his sons, set against various other colorful characters, the most interesting being the character John Pope (played by Colin Cunningham), a former convict, self-centered personality, and sometimes coward who happens to be a gourmet chief and explosives expert. With strong female leads such as Anne Glass-Mason (played by Moon Bloodgood), a pediatrician turned combat surgeon, and Maggie (played by Sarah Carter), there is no place in this world for traditional patriarchal female roles. As an integrated fighting force, strong roles are given to African Americans and Asians.
The most obvious comparison is with The Walking Dead, another widely popular show with a large fan base that also centers on the familial dramas of a small band of survivors who attempt to move from place to place avoiding the zombie hordes when they can, dispatching them when they cannot, and in the meantime dealing with other irate humans who do not have the best interest of each other at heart. Aside from the obvious family dynamics, weapons, action sequences, and Southern geography, both shows were located in the Southern part of the United States. What emerges over time is both an attachment to the characters and the feelings of loss when they die. Favorite characters end up not surviving a season often eliciting intense fan reactions.
While guns are ever present in Falling Skies, swords, crossbows, and the occasional gun make their appearances in The Walking Dead and the violence is close up and graphic. Zombie killing is placed in an almost normal atmosphere of induced pathos. While the two shows are vastly different in intent, they are united in a contemporary atmosphere of survivalist chic. In both cases, the normal order of things has disappeared and the world has reverted to a more primitive state of “kill or be killed.” In both cases, what has to be protected is the family, defined broadly, at all costs. In Falling Skies, that family is further threatened by the enslavement of children. The alien Espheni Overlords and “skitters” attach parasites to children forcing them to act as laborers for constructing their killing machines. Adults are considered disposable until the fourth season when the aliens decide that they too can be converted to the cause even at the expense of horrible mutations. Resisting this overt violence requires military planning and lots and lots of guns.
What are the types of dynamics at play and what do they say about our world now? Aside from the most obvious elements of the breakdown of law and order, the struggle for survival in a neoliberal capitalist system where the 1 percent hold the power over the rest of us, the felt loss of control, and the resistance to that loss underlie this genre. The homelessness of the remaining survivors mirrors the forced mobility of the working class and a declining middle class in America. The need to accommodate our differences is structured into the plots where survival depends not upon our individual ability to do our own thing (which has serious consequences), but banding together collectively as a tribe, united against aliens, and united to defend against mindless zombie hordes. The collective can be thought of both negatively in attempting to abolish difference (this is revealed in the Esphani alien indoctrination center, a newer version of a Nazi youth camp) and positively in accommodating differences that support the group without abolishing individuality, such as the reluctant embrace of John Pope. It is not an accident that Tom Mason discovers a copy of Alex de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America giving it to one of his sons to study for a future self-governing America free of multinational corporations and celebrity politics.
But, there is another element here, which few commentators seem to have captured and that is the baroque quality of the emotional elements in the stories. The ever-present settings of ruins, death, decay, blood and gore, as well as the gun battles with aliens (a nice stand in for the brutal Nazi soldiers in Spielberg’s Shindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan) is a modern fantasized war aesthetic. The everyday landscape is filled with ruined buildings, battered vehicles, shattered homes, and a general sense of dirt and decay. In David Mcnally’s (2001) analysis of Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1977), he makes references to the manner in which the very quality of baroque drama conveys a futile situation, beyond hope. The only hint of redemption is accepting the hopelessness of the situation since heavenly powers are not available for saving one’s skin. Where the world is destroyed, the only hope comes from the overt depiction of destruction. This allegorical framework is at work here in the stripping down of the human race to bare bones, to scratching for survival and in that stripping down finding meaning in each other. Easy symbols of reconciliation such as religious beliefs prove to be illusionary as do military solutions depending upon a large military industrial complex, which no longer exists. Only by sticking together and using what little skills they have, can the human race survive, even when they are finally assisted by another alien race (the Volm) who have had their own world devastated by the Esphani. Being on one’s own in this world is deadly, as shown in numerous episodes. The individualism of consumer society is abandoned in favor of collective efforts to facilitate group survival.
Loved ones are lost throughout the show. Wives and husbands losing their respective spouses and children, and lovers separated by war. Amid the tears and grief, the family and members of the second Mass struggle to maintain their humanity by not turning on one another and accepting their loss with a dignity even when that seems impossible. When Weaver loses his daughter to the Espheni, turned into a hideous version of the alien skitters, she cries out, “They cannot erase us, they cannot control us” (Season 4, Episode 4). This defiance is set against the narcissism of John Pope who finally turns on the second Mass when he has lost someone close to him, blaming the Masons for her death. Hence, the struggle to remain united to fight the occupation is neither simple nor easy. Not unlike contemporary America where widespread inequality threatens our social cohesion and political corruption defines our politics, taking a moral stance is a risky business. In one telling scene, speaking to the concerns from the 2008 financial debacle, two brothers appear to befriend Mason, only to turn on him offering him up to the alien Overlords. One of the brothers reveals himself as a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who also gave away his wife and children to the aliens to save his own skin. These allegorical turns appear throughout the series speaking to the contemporary anxieties of American audiences. Weaving the tales of a modern baroque drama, both of these shows speak to the pathos pulsating at the core of a declining middle class and a working class that increasingly views its future as dim at best. The expanded anger and rage waiting to be tapped mirrors the felt paranoia by many against immigrants as well as their own corporate Overlords. This year we are seeing how opportunistic politicians have decided to use this anger. It remains to be seen what the outcome will be and whether we will choose a politics of difference as reflected in the second Mass or a politics of exclusion.