Tratamiento Constitucional de los Beneficios Laborales

As we know, Abrams wrote, directed, and produced Super 8, but he took his baby boomer adoptive Uncle Steven along for the ride. Abrams’s penchant for quoting Spielberg in images, in cinematic style, in script style, and in theme has been commented on by everyone. Some people can’t stomach this level of hero worship. To be honest, if I personally believed that was the real story, I wouldn’t be writing this essay. I like Spielberg’s films just fine, and I never miss one, but he annoys me enough to discourage any writing from my end (I’m sure he’s devastated . . . ). Spielberg’s simplistic moralizing, his inability to recognize when he’s said enough, the out-and-out obviousness of his symbol choices, the total absence of subtlety, and most of all the self- serious self-indulgence . . . well, I have said enough, but he insults the intel- ligence of his audience and leaves nothing to their imaginations. Yet I prefer him to most of his generational cohort, since it doesn’t look like he sold out.

On the other hand, I like Abrams’s version of Spielberg better than Spielberg. There is a deconstruction of Spielberg in Abrams (I am far from the first to say this, of course). Part of the reason I like Abrams is that, in a way, the Goonies are better the second time around. The setting of Super 8 is exactly calibrated with Abrams’s own childhood (more on that shortly)— it was a weird, in-between time to grow up. Abrams is too young to be a baby boomer, but as the oldest of the Gen Xers, he really isn’t quite a child of the eighties either. The year 1979, when this movie is set, was a cultural void. Disco and southern rock had gone rancid, Zeppelin was moribund, Springsteen was on hiatus, and we were still listening to Hotel California. Stirrings of the eighties were under way, for sure, but Abrams chose not to bring in the music of 1979. That was a conscious decision, I’m sure. He must have judged that it would detract from the mood he wanted to cre- ate. This was not primarily about nostalgia for that year. It was more about what was scary that year.

The Iranian Revolution was under way (but no one understood what it meant). Carter was still president, but the country wasn’t going to be recov- ering from Vietnam, Watergate, and the oil crisis. The president had given a

speech, now dubbed the “malaise” speech, in which he told us that we were living beyond our means and that if we didn’t make sacrifices now, consume less, and pay down our debts, our economic future was very uncertain. That displaced feeling of being betwixt and between, a sort of aimlessness as the nation’s industrial base disintegrates, pervades Super 8. One hardly knows what to think today, as the film opens with a scene of a still-functioning steel mill, something that would be extinct before too many more years elapsed. Abrams said in an interview that the whole film grew from the idea of hav- ing someone change the safety sign at a steel mill. If that writing decision doesn’t give us a clue that this movie is about truly scary stuff, then we are pretty slow.

But fear isn’t the same as terror. They are related, but it isn’t easy to understand how vague fears grow into total terror, especially for kids who haven’t got enough life experience to have their fear generalized into exis- tential angst. As every storyteller knows, things have to come apart gradually and build into an apocalyptic moment. You can’t escalate fear into terror by having things jump out from behind trees. Terror takes time.

Abrams wanted to capture that transitional time in our history, a time almost no one takes the trouble to remember—post-seventies, pre-eighties —and to make it vaguely scary. Not much was going on, but there was one thing good about 1979: the box office. It is important to remember that Abrams grew up in L.A., in a movie-making family. It was a big year out in L.A. There was Apocalypse Now and the (very) first Star Trek movie (ironi- cally), and Kramer vs. Kramer, and most importantly, this was the year Alien came out. Our monster in Super 8 is modeled on the monster from Alien, and the camera technique of Ridley Scott and Derek Vanlint, showing parts of the alien without allowing the audience to get a sense of the monster as a whole, is repeated in Super 8. Obviously they weren’t the first to come up with the idea, but the technique had become a cliché by 1979. Scott and Vanlint resurrected it with powerful effect.

Many writers and critics have remarked that Alien signaled a real change in Hollywood. It had been foreshadowed with Jaws (1975) and Dawn of the

Dead (1978), but with the release of Alien, no longer would moviegoers be

bothered with the complexity of needing to empathize with the monster. In 1979 the requirement of conscience that marked the sixties and seventies, in which Mary Shelley’s softer sensibilities about monsters would domi- nate, suddenly retrogressed to the fifties (taking Sigourney Weaver’s pants along with it—so not everything would be like the fifties . . . ). Back in the

duck-and-cover fifties, you were allowed, nay, expected simply to be horri- fied at the alien invaders, at their shear otherness. You weren’t expecting the Frankenstein scenario, the misunderstood-monster-is-the-mensch moment. Weaver’s nemesis in Alien wasn’t misunderstood, it was evil, violent, and planning to eat us all.

The residents of 1979 live on the cusp of Reagan’s cruel world, and they don’t know it. The slow creepiness of the eighties hasn’t yet poked its way out of their bellies and into their consciousness. These characters still think it’s the seventies, and in a way it is. But the struggle for the souls of mov- iegoers was well under way (after all, one last monster-mensch needed to phone home, in 1982, before the good guys lost), and the main change was that the public was given permission to refuse the moral chore of seeking the monster’s point of view. Abrams remembers all this. In retrospect he has also been able to see something of its meaning, so the writing, set decora- tion, art direction, and even the acting in Super 8 capture that time and its insensibility of the future. It’s a world with no war-mongering neoconserva- tives, a world in which airlines and utilities and the telephone company are regulated by the government in the public interest, and a time when steel mills still made steel. No Wal-Mart, no Internet, no stadium seating at the movies, no MTV, and, by the way, no Rubik’s cubes (Abrams missed that detail—but the geek squad on imdb.com has several dozen other anachro- nisms you might want to note; none of them hurts the film). The more you study the details of the movie, the more you’ll be able to grasp the compara- tive innocence of the moment.

(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding?

So, if that’s 1979, then why 1979? The movie is autobiographical in many ways, and Abrams came from a movie-making family and started making Super 8 movies when he was about eight years old, so by the time he was thirteen, he was probably pretty far into what he would do for a living. He did enter film contests when he was a kid, and I wouldn’t be shocked if there was a Super 8 zombie movie in a can somewhere from, oh, about 1979. But nothing depends on that hypothesis. Instead, I stake my case on this: we all have to concede that age thirteen is the paradigm for the last year of innocence. Many critics have remarked how good this movie is at making them feel like kids again, and there is the gotcha device that the film uses to make you care, to evoke not just your sympathy but your empathy, your

identification with the characters. Not all of us lost our mothers or had drunk fathers, but we all were thirteen once. If I were a writer-director and I wanted to capture thirteen, I would use my memory rather than just my imagination. Setting this film in 1979 enables Abrams simply to remember his way through a million decisions.

But I think there is more. I see the middle-aged man Abrams, at the height of his artistic powers, reflectively at work here too. There is a retro- spective understanding that intensifies this particular year, this time, and it isn’t nostalgia. These kids are the first Gen Xers, but of course, they also don’t know that yet. Capturing this variable innocence and ignorance in his characters as well as his setting was, in my view, important to the message Abrams wanted to convey, and it is the retrospective understanding that is crucial to building the terror. I think most thirteen-year-old kids in America during that year heard Elvis Costello ring out the death knell of the seven- ties with the following repeated lament:

So where are the strong? And who are the trusted? And where is the harmony?3

I suppose one could say that 1979 was the year that we collectively ceased pretending to care about the absurd Age of Aquarius and the ridiculous promise of Woodstock. It was the year the baby boomers became honest with themselves about wanting a lot of money. Not everyone went along, of course. Spielberg didn’t, for example. But for Abrams, the experience of Gen X was beginning. The baby boomers were too self-absorbed to notice the path of cultural and political destruction they were leaving in their wake. There was nothing but scraps and hair bands for a boy like Abrams, born in 1966. But my oh my, there were scraps. Super 8 doesn’t just quote them, it is made of them.

Tom Wolfe famously described the 1970s as the “Me Decade,” in con- trast with the sixties, and with some justice. But if that was true of the sev- enties, then the eighties must have been the “not you” decade, for then, in our boredom, we took the opportunity to ignore interests beyond our own narrowest ones, deregulating everything and everyone, declaring war on labor, taxes, public support for education. Our free-market fundamentalists opened the gates to global exploitation of the poorest of the poor so that we could send domestic working-class jobs to places with no laws or unions

protecting the men, women, and children who took on the work—often suf- fering on the brink of starvation, but conveniently out of sight. We decided to arm any group of thugs who would do our bidding in tiny countries too poor to resist their tyranny and, unsatisfied with doing this sort of thing passively, we organized coups to take down independent-minded democ- racies. Yes, all was done with the cooperation and full approval of the baby boomers. They didn’t want jobs in the steel mills, they wanted executive salaries, and they didn’t want to think about what some child was doing for food in Bangladesh or Indonesia. By 1989 it was over—both the Cold War and the transformation of the Third World into the unseen, unheard, and underfed sweatshop to sate our consumerist appetites (not that they ever

can be sated, really).

In short, in 1979 we were about to take our selfishness global in a neo- imperialism aimed at making others pay for our party back here at home. That was the alternative Carter failed to mention in his malaise speech.4

There may have been better parties had on the backs of oppressed and starv- ing people, under the reign of Caligula, for example, but I doubt there has ever been a bigger one. I give you genuine human terror. We have met the enemy. We looked in the mirror and failed to recognize that Ridley Scott’s alien was looking back at us. It was a baby boomer’s reflection, a selfish, vio- lent, inhuman consumption machine. It was the USA, in the hands of 78.3 million spoiled fools who have yet to turn loose and probably never will. If I weren’t a baby boomer myself, I’d be pretty cynical.

Generation X watched helplessly and tried to understand. They still do. This younger group collected a reputation for cynicism, for being without ambition and without distinct achievement. Still, it isn’t easy to imagine what they could have done, and many have not been slow to wag a finger at the boomers and say, “Look at the mess you made of everything, you unfeeling murderers of all hope.” And here, here I believe we reach the heart of the matter. The problem that constitutes the moral backdrop for Super 8 just is the problem of empathy. The baby boomers lack it in Super 8—although the only examples we are given would be chubby Charles Kaznyk’s sexpot older sister, Jen, and her drugged-out, lusty admirer, Donny. These fine citizens will soon be in charge of everything.

The adults in the movie are people born during the Depression or dur- ing the Second World War itself. They have lost their power of empathy, not due to hunger for the pleasures of the flesh and pure consumption but from fear itself. The Depression, the war, and the Cold War have done them

in. They were the officers in the Vietnam era, taking their orders from vet- erans of the Second World War and carrying them out without asking too many questions. After all, their elders won the big war and they knew what is best. Not one of the Depression babies would ever serve as U.S. president. They are a silent and lost generation, and the movie captures this, but it also provides one exception: the science teacher, Dr. Woodward, who essentially sacrifices his life to help an alien creature. His last words, to the evil air force colonel Nelec, is an assertion of the primacy of empathy, which comes down to saying that the alien is in him and he is in it. Nelec is unmoved and orders another black soldier to execute Woodward. That’s pretty much how you kill conscience.

It is fair to note that if Dr. Woodward had a Ph.D. in some sort of bio- logical science in 1958, when he was among the scientists the air force chose to study the alien, he was something of a pioneer. There were precious few black Ph.D.s in that day, and those who were around had reason to under- stand the alien’s predicament. Being surrounded by white people who were completely unconscious of their privilege and in deep denial about their racism must bear some analogy to the predicament of the alien. Woodward is transformed by the alien’s touch, but we are not told whether the alien is aware of it—an important detail.

In any case, Dr. Woodward understands that the basic moral require- ment in this situation, for any intelligent being, is that the creature must be set free, at any personal cost. That alien’s treatment is thus a symbol of what fear does to us over time. In short, Dr. Woodward becomes conscious of the

genuine terror, and that is the idea of a world full of pod people, people who

refuse to feel the longing of others, who would defend their own physical safety, and their power and privilege, at the cost of their souls. Being robbed of peace and love for two generations, we lost our capacity for understand- ing. It isn’t funny.

Thus the terror relevant to longing is the way in which we can come to fear losing ourselves, our very souls, to any set of social protocols that requires us to be, well, zombies. The kids in Super 8 are surrounded by zombies— hunger zombies and fear zombies, like those in the military. What are they? As Joe says to Alice, “Pretty much be a lifeless ghoul, with no soul. Dead eyes. Scary. Did you ever have Mrs. Mullin?” All the adults they know are terrifying and terrified, even though no one knows it, because that is what fear will do over time. The Cold War was so old by 1979 that no one could even remember what it was like not to live on the brink of apocalypse, and

so in Abrams’s script, the zombie apocalypse did happen. But it was gradual, so no one knew when to declare it openly. The effect of two generations of Cold War was that no one noticed when our souls were gone and we just became hungry, frightened, consumerist pod people. We were ready for Wal-Mart. And so Abrams did actually make a zombie movie, in the scari- est sense of the word.