The State of the State of Emergency Life under Alien Occupation in Gareth Edwards’ Monsters Steffen Hantke Unlike the post-9/ 11 giant creature films it references, Gareth Edwards‟ Monsters (2010) replaces the military spectacle of the alien invasion with an examination of life under alien occupation. With various visual and narrative strategies - relegating the alien creatures to the background, retaining their mystery and sublimity, and constantly redefining their figurative significance - Monsters expands the range of allegorical possibilities for the giant creature film. Like in few other texts from the same historical period, this expansion aligns the film to the reality of the Bush administration‟s decree that the socalled „war on terror‟ would know neither temporal nor geographic boundaries. A decade after the traumatic events of September 11, 2001, the film accounts for the loss of historical immediacy and the shifting of historical priorities in ways that uncouple the subgenre from its militaristic overtones. Its status as the first film of its kind about alien occupation rather than alien invasion promises a significant paradigm shift within the post-9/ 11 discourse. 1. Introduction: A History of Giant Creatures The trope of the giant creature has had a long and distinguished life in popular culture - from King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, 1933) to Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1954), from the giant insects in Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954) and Tarantula (Jack Arnold, 1955) in the 1950s to the hypertrophied animals in 1970s films like Food of the Gods (Bert I. Gordon, 1976) or Empire of the Ants (Bert I. Gordon, 1977) and on to films like Alligator (Lewis Teague, 1980) or Q - The Winged Serpent (Larry Cohen, 1982) in the 1980s. From Cold War anxieties about nuclear war in the „50s to environmental worries in the „60s and „70s, giant creatures have embodied whatever happened to ail the culture at any given time. The giant creature has proven to be a flexible metaphor, a particular variant of the alien AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 41 (2016) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Steffen Hantke 26 intruder, and thus of the alien invasion narrative in science fiction and horror cinema. It is the size of the alien invaders that lends itself to military spectacle, to catastrophic end time scenarios, and to an apocalyptic imagination that reads destruction and decay into the vast urban agglomerations that define industrial modernity. Thus it was hardly a surprise when after the events of September 11, 2001, films about giant creatures would receive a boost in popularity, as images of massive urban devastation would be imbued with renewed urgency. Roland Emmerich‟s 1998 reboot of Godzilla, as far as critical consensus was concerned, might have simply been an awful film, but its crucial failure was rooted in the lack of exactly that topical relevance that would animate the nameless creature laying waste to New York City in Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) ten years later. 1 In one regard, the most recent examples of giant creature films suffer from the same problem as alien invasion stories in general. After more than a decade, the memory of 9/ 11 and the urgency of its cultural mandate have been fading with each year that has gone by. The alien invasion narrative has started responding to these changing historical conditions by shifting from stories about the alien invasion to stories about the invasion‟s aftermath - stories about life under alien occupation. Recent television series like Falling Skies (2011- ) and recent films like Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014) have moved the traumatic alien invasion from their narrative into their respective opening credits: a brief montage sequence in both cases summarizes the invasion as an event in the recent past before the film opens its narration within this radically altered fictional world. This gesture is not a complete narrative erasure but nonetheless striking in its relative disinterest in exactly that same subject matter that used to be at the very center of the preceding cycle of alien invasion films: from War of the Worlds (Stephen Spielberg, 2005) to The Invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007), from Threshold (2005) to Invasion (2005), the spectacular alien arrival and takeover used to be at the center of all of these narratives. Especially those films in this cycle with a strong military component, like Battle Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebesman, 2011), would allow their audience to relive the memories of September 11, 2001. 2 Ten years later, the traumatic impact of this historical moment would begin to lose its grip on the popular imagination. Stories about alien occupation have a long and varied tradition within science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke‟s Childhood‟s End (1953) imagined be- 1 For a broader discussion of Cloverfield, see Hantke, “The Return of the Giant Creture: Cloverfield and the Political Opposition to the War on Terror,” Extrapolation, 235-57. 2 It is noteworthy that the turning point in this historical development comes with the reboot of V, a television series that transferred anxieties about alien invasion from the outside into paranoid fantasies about the repressive alien otherness of the state itself. The State of the State of Emergency 27 nign aliens occupying earth for humanity‟s ultimate benefit, while, more sardonically, Thomas Disch‟s novels The Genocides (1965) and Mankind Under the Leash (1966, based on the short story “White Fang Goes Dingo”) would imagine humanity transformed into, respectively, vermin and pets in regard to their alien occupiers. More recently, Robert Silverberg‟s The Alien Years (1997) used the trope to explore the political history of a single family during a prolonged state of alien occupation. Film and television would start showing an interest in the 1950s with fantasies about takeover and domination by communist fifth columnists (e.g. The Whip Hand [William Cameron Menzies, 1951], Red Nightmare [George Waggner, 1962], or, in the vernacular of science fiction, films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers [Don Siegel, 1956] or Invaders from Mars [William Cameron Menzies, 1953]). Though the various intersecting genealogies might make things a little complicated here, even the recently popular zombie apocalypse qualifies as a variation on the theme of alien occupation. From I am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007) to The Walking Dead (2010- ) and World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013), these are stories about life in times of perpetual emergency, no matter what the diegetic excuse may be for the occupational force‟s essential otherness. While the ongoing „war on terror‟ with its most recent permutations - like the civil wars in Libya and Syria or the territorial conquests of ISIS - has kept xenophobic paranoia alive for the alien invasion narrative in general, the fading memory of the urban catastrophe of 9/ 11 has stripped the giant creature film of some of its urgency. What makes matters worse is that giant creature films have not been able to make the same transition from „alien invasion‟ to „alien occupation‟ by which Falling Skies, V, or Edge of Tomorrow have begun to adapt to the passing of time. Either they are altogether unconcerned with the allegorization of 9/ 11- as the latest installment of the Jurassic Park franchise in 2015 promises to be. Or they return to the true and tested formula of their franchise, as Gareth Edward‟s Godzilla reboot in 2014 turned out to be. One might wonder whether „alien occupation‟ is even an option for the giant creature film. In fact, it would seem nonsensical to produce a film about characters in an environment in which one or more giant creatures are afoot if these creatures themselves were not the film‟s major attraction. As resoundingly as Emmerich‟s Godzilla in the 1990s failed commercially and critically, and as little as that film had to show for in terms of topical urgency, the studio‟s greenlighting of the project was motivated by one attraction earlier giant creature films did not have - computer-generated visual effects. As the audience for Edwards‟ 2014 Godzilla will testify, little has changed in this respect: what we come to see in a giant creature film is - needless to say - the giant creature. Edwards disappointed his audience whenever he decided to withhold the film‟s eponymous monster from sight: most Steffen Hantke 28 unhappy reviews of the film would revolve around the complaint that there just was not enough Godzilla in Godzilla. 3 To those who had been following Gareth Edwards‟ astonishingly brief career as director, this visual strategy could hardly have come as a surprise. Edwards‟ being entrusted with Godzilla, budgeted at an estimated $ 160,000,000 had been primarily the result of his single preceding accomplishment, Monsters (2010), budgeted at a modest $500,000 shot with digital cameras and on location, and edited on a home computer in Edwards‟ apartment. 4 In fact, Monsters had been garnering considerable critical praise and admiration for exactly that - keeping the film‟s eponymous monsters out of sight. In Monsters, this strategy did not hurt Edwards. In fact, reviewers in overwhelming numbers would make this the central part of their critical evaluation of the film. Because Monsters was shot on a shoestring budget, it needed to limit the use of computergenerated effects for budgetary reasons; for the same reason, the film also would also adopt the popular „found footage‟ aesthetic. The fact that Edwards turned this handicap into a consistent aesthetic strategy for the film, and that Monsters beautifully deploys its limited CGI elements in the interest of an engaging narrative, would become the lynchpin of the film‟s critical success, turning it into the crucial stepping-stone of Edwards‟ career so far. As critics were praising Edwards‟ ingenious balance of economy and aesthetics, what failed to receive due attention, however, was the film‟s larger thematic agenda. Aside from providing a broad commentary on the basic plot points of Monsters, most critics ignored the film‟s relation to the tradition of the giant creature film, especially the cycle of films since 9/ 11, and the way in which the film works the central metaphor of the giant creature in innovative and politically interesting ways. It is these variations on the trope of the giant creature that I would like to examine in more detail in the following discussion. My claim is that, by tweaking the metaphor of the giant creature, Monsters announces a new stage in the way popular culture is responding to post-9/ 11 discourse; that, in the development of science fiction cinema, it deserves special credit because it is, in fact, the first film to do so. Since Edwards went on to direct Godzilla, and since Monsters has generated a sequel, Monsters: Dark Continent, directed by Tom Green - both in 2014 - I will close my discussion 3 See, for example, Lucas Shaw, “„Godzilla‟ Screenwriter Explains Why There‟s So Little Godzilla in „Godzilla‟”, The Wrap (May 14, 2014). 4 Both figures are listed at IMDb.com, though estimates vary depending on the source. Peter Sciretta on the film blog Reel pegs the figure at only $ 15,000 (“‟When we reported that the film had a production budget of just $15,000 “but looked 700 times more expensive”, some people in the comments freaked out - “you can‟t make a monster movie for $15,000! the crew costs more than that! The camera costs more than that! ‟”). The State of the State of Emergency 29 with some remarks about the interactions between independent film and mainstream cinema. 2. Monsters: Passing Through the Infected Zone Monsters tells essentially two stories - one in the foreground, the other in the background. The background story is that of a more or less accidental alien invasion that takes place six years before the events portrayed in the film. When a contaminated NASA probe crashes upon re-entry in Mexico, it brings back with it alien creatures that begin to proliferate around the crash site. Incubating as luminescent pods throughout the jungle, these towering multi-tentacled Lovecraftian behemoths now roam the landscape, their size and mobility a double threat to the human infrastructure. In order to curtail their actual or merely anticipated spread, the northern part of Mexico has been turned into a quarantined zone reminiscent of “the Zone” in the Strugatzkis‟ Roadside Picnic (1972), or, respectively, Andrej Tarkovski‟s Stalker (1979), or Area X in Jeff Vandermeer‟s Southern Reach trilogy (2015). Within this enclosure the alien life forms are contained but not fully controlled. While entry and passage are matters of strict surveillance and selection, a constant low-level military campaign against the alien infestation is being conducted by forces the film never clearly attributes to either Mexico or the U.S. As the border between the two countries is defended as an impressive bulwark against the alien spread, the war has taken its toll on the civilian population on both sides. The extent to which this defense is ineffective becomes obvious in the film‟s final scenes showing an evacuated and largely devastated border zone on the U.S. side of the wall. Just as the duration of this military campaign is ill-defined, so its space seems barely circumscribed, despite the arrays of military and bureaucratic measures shoring it up. This background plot is unfolded in the opening of the film, which features title cards with exposition as well as a brief sequence in which a group of American soldiers on patrol confront and attack an alien creature. The sequence is shot with a shaky hand-held night-vision camera, and ends with a live feed from a cruise missile or air-launched rocket homing in on the creature. The feed ends abruptly - as audiences have been taught to expect by iconic footage from the first Gulf War - with the missile‟s impact on its target. As if to make it clear that what we have just seen has come to an end for the rest of the film, and that something entirely different is about to start, the film‟s title appears right after this cut superimposed upon the black screen. We now abandon the stylistic conceit of the hand-held camera and transition to the actual film, presented in style that still feels loose, casual, and improvisational yet abandons the „found footage‟ conceit. Steffen Hantke 30 After this preliminary expository segment, we now enter the story that takes place in the foreground. Traveling in Mexico, freelance journalist and photographer Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) receives orders from his boss back in the U.S. to escort his daughter Sam Wynden (Whitney Able) back home. Both Andrew and Sam are sympathetic, even attracted, to each other, but emotionally engaged elsewhere - Sam with a fiancée back home, and Andrew with a young son from a failed marriage. As both get stranded in the semi-legal area bordering the quarantined area, they decide to cross the zone directly in order to reach the border wall and enter the U.S. As they make their way through the zone, they begin to fall in love. When they arrive on the American side of the wall, they witness the encounter between two of the alien creatures up close before they are picked up and separated by a military unit responsible for patrolling the border zone. The film ends with this separation, the further fate of the couple uncertain and unknown. At first glance, Edwards‟ choice of these two characters as protagonists - Andrew a little more than Sam - ensures the audience‟s identification with an American perspective on the spatial other beyond the wall. This perspective comes with considerable ideological connotations: one might think here of the xenophobic paranoia in earlier post-9/ 11 films about Americans in peril abroad like Turistas (John Stockwell, 2006) or Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005). But the film works hard to strip off the connotative layers. For one, neither one of the two characters, despite their nationality, is in a position of privilege within the geographic zone they must cross. Just as the Mexican officials they bribe and cajole, the guides they hire, and the civilians they encounter along the way, they are at risk - perhaps increasingly more so as their financial resources are depleted. As tourists, they are, in fact, even more unmoored because they lack the social bonds and skills that organize Mexican life around them. Edwards‟ look at Mexico might be that of the tourist, attracted primarily by otherness, but it steers clear of sentimental or chauvinistic projections on to people and landscape. The privilege of Andrew‟s and Sam‟s American citizenship does not kick in until they have actually crossed over into the U.S. But even here, that privilege remains vague. The military patrol that comes to pick them up may come to rescue them, but treats them harshly for their trespass and separates them against their will. Meanwhile, the America they enter looks eerily like the Mexico they just left behind on the other side of the wall. For most of the film, being American is a privilege largely without practical benefits. In this regard, Monsters has more in common with films like Salvador (Oliver Stone, 1986) or Missing (Costa- Gavras, 1982) than with the imperialist agenda in global road-movie narratives like the James Bond franchise or reality-TV like The Amazing Race (2001- ). On both sides of the wall, Edwards imagines a perpetual low-level state of emergency, enforced by repeated flyovers of military planes, the The State of the State of Emergency 31 distant sounds and sights of air strikes against the monsters, and, ultimately, the border fortification itself. Like this massive wall, the uniforms and guns are real, of course. But to the same extent that the network of military occupation is stretched thin, its presence in many places is more symbolic than real. Despite the disciplinary grid, life in the quarantine zone has gone on: deals are made, goods transported, people move about and even occupy the niches where surveillance and control reach only intermittently. The fight against the alien intrusion is conducted unenthusiastically by invisible, distant agents largely as a matter of routine. The casualties it produces seem arbitrary, more a matter of accident than design or strategy. Collateral damage is as frequent, or more so, than damage inflicted by the alien intruders. Compared to this topical background, the development of the romantic plot in the foreground receives far more visual and narrative attention. Much like the background being sketched in rather than explored with deliberate and detailed focus, the alien creatures themselves are moved into the background. Sparsely glimpsed, they are a latent presence at best. For much of the film, Edwards reduces them to sounds or a shadow below the waters as it lifts a crashed fighter plane and then submerges it again in the river. In the scenes that grant us a glimpse, the aliens‟ metaphorical significance is parsed much like the military conflict that takes place in the background story. At times, their presence defamiliarizes and enchants the landscape; it renders the jungle as alien as they themselves obviously are. At other times, they appear as the equivalent of the military forces engaged in their containment: they move fast, appear fleetingly, and carry the potential for violence that is often more arbitrary than deliberate and specifically targeted. The only moment in which the film breaks with this strategy of visual reticence is the final scene in which Andrew and Sam are waiting for the military patrol to pick them up on the American side of the wall. Stranded at an abandoned gas station, they witness the approach of two of the giant alien creatures. Instead of the scene turning into a climactic battle, or even just a desperate chase to safety, it posits Sam and Andrew as passive observers on behalf of the audience. After some initial uncertainty, they themselves are largely ignored by the creatures. As the first creature begins carefully to explore the inside of the gas station with its tentacles (an homage to War of the Worlds, both in Byron Haskins‟ and Stephen Spielberg‟s version), we are led to believe that an action scene is imminent. However, when a second creature approaches, all attention is drawn away from the human agents. Their function now is to witness the incomprehensible spectacle, a function that registers with long close-ups of their awed faces. The aliens engage in an ambiguous act of social interaction - perhaps a moment of communication, a moment of erotic attraction, an encounter between two individuals who, after some separation, encounter each other again Steffen Hantke 32 for the first time. 5 Given the fact that the scene, near the end of the film, anticipates the imminent separation of Andrew and Sam - our two protagonists who have barely found their way toward each other in the course of their journey through unfamiliar territory - it is easy to see the alien creatures‟ metaphorical use as representations of the emotional dynamic between the two human protagonists. As the creatures walk away into the night, Andrew and Sam look bereft, a forlornness that leads to their first romantic kiss, which immediately precedes their separation at the hands of the military. Though the visual elements in the production design and the staging of the scene suggest certain connotations - communication, mating, etc. - the film refrains from offering an explanation for the encounter. With our protagonists relegated to passive witnessing, and without further narrative legitimization of the scene, the alien creatures are preserved in the emotional register in which they are framed by the reaction shots - as instances of the sublime. They are not a scientific problem to be solved, a military challenge to be met, or a political or personal obstacle to be mastered. With the massive fortification of the border wall between Mexico and the U.S., it is impossible not to read the film as a commentary on issues of immigration in recent years. In the grandly hyperbolic computergenerated image of the wall, we recognize the fence built alongside the Mexican-American border and the expansion of border patrol units as parts of the integrated system of militarized law enforcement within Homeland Security. Reviewers have picked up on this: Amy Biancolli states that the film‟s “obvious analogy is illegal immigration” (November 5, 2010, italics added), while Jeannette Catsoulis reprimands the films explicitly for what she takes to be its “clunky immigration message” (October 28, 2010). While the wall is, in Andrew‟s words, “the biggest manmade structure I‟ve ever seen,” and thus beautifully visualizes “how America looks from the outside” (Bradshaw, Guardian), the film is, in fact, not really interested in immigration as its theme. Unlike the crazed hordes of the undead climbing all over each other to breach the human enclosure in World War Z, to mention just one recent example, there are no streams of illegals climbing that wall or tunneling underneath it. In fact, Andrew and Sam find themselves oddly alone as they walk up to the wall. Neither does the American side of the wall appear substantially different from its Mexican counterpart. There is a state of military occupation; civilians have been evacuated. Abandoned and devastated, the post-catastrophic landscape seems inhabited only by a single woman who wanders briefly through the frame, lost and insane - hardly the Land of Opportunity! 5 Karina Longworth calls this fully visualized final scene “a cheap-shot plot device, but also visually spectacular” (Village Voice, October 27, 2010). The State of the State of Emergency 33 More importantly, however, Andrew and Sam discover an ancient structure, a temple or pyramid, in the jungle. Having climbed to the top of this structure, they see the wall for the very first time. Both the temple and the wall are alike in their state of human abandonment and their failed promise, inherent in their size and density, of surviving whatever historical changes might be heading their way. Sam admits that she cannot say for sure how the sight of the wall makes her feel - an ambiguity of feeling that translates into a cognitive ambiguity in which we cannot be sure exactly what the single metaphorical meaning of the wall is supposed to be. Like the alien creatures, the two architectural structures are large and powerful, yet inscribed with signs of their impending demise, their fragility and temporary nature. They evoke the fear and awe characteristic of the sublime, architecturally and biologically, yet also subtly undercut it at the same time. Though the romantic story in the foreground of the film is clearly impinged upon by the presence of the alien creatures and the system of geographic zoning and surveillance constructed around them, the film strictly refuses to bring the background forward and develop it into an integral part of the overall narrative. Andrew is not provided with an opportunity to act heroically, just as Sam does not need to be rescued. Though the journey brings them together, neither character experiences a crucial epiphany or transformation. As far as the background story goes, there are no further revelations of any significance. In one scene, when Sam and Andrew discover glowing alien spores throughout the jungle, we are led to believe that we have learned something about the reproductive cycle of the alien creatures - though what exactly that is never becomes clear. The information never translates into a deeper recognition of the aliens‟ origin, their essential nature, or their ultimate motivation. Both foreground and background are so perfectly calibrated that the film uses the alien creatures merely as a means of describing a state of affairs, a condition or situation. While the foreground story moves slowly but unsuccessfully toward romantic fulfillment, the background story remains stubbornly static. This refusal to dramatize or even narrativize the background story strikes me as a unique and fitting way of describing what it feels like to live your life a decade after 9/ 11 in times of the never-ending “war on terror.” Around 2014, a new generation of viewers is beginning to line up at the box office, a generation for which the events of September 11, 2001, is no longer a clearly remembered and consciously processed personal memory. The urban devastation at the core of giant creature films after 2001 has always included that crucial element of technological mediation that was part and parcel of 9/ 11- think of the shaky hand-held camera in Cloverfield. Even these earlier films concede that only to a small minority was the image of the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center in New York City not a television image. Pre-packaged with this Steffen Hantke 34 element of mediated estrangement, the images have now embedded themselves in mediated culture to a degree that direct personal impact is completely and utterly moot. They have solidified into historical documents, and have thus lost their ability to shock and awe. As in the background story in Monsters, these images now play in the background of the culture, while, in the foreground, the small yet timeless personal dramas of everyday life, important to no none other than their participants, play themselves out. And yet, as Monsters shows us, we have not yet reached a state of complete habituation; from time to time, events in the background still have the power to penetrate the membrane and bleed into the foreground. Though their relationship to the background events is always and inevitably assumed - international terrorism is still the default setting whenever a plane crashes or gunshots go off in a shopping mall - their precise origin, nature, and significance tend to remain obscure to most of us. Journalistic accounts of global events often acknowledge that things are complex or confusing, that yesterday‟s enemies turn into today‟s allies, that politics makes strange bedfellows, or that the global secrecy apparatus keeps information from us that would be crucial for generating an informed opinion. Though there is an array of possible meanings of historical events, all the more so in a dramatically polarized political landscape, no single narrative seems to have the power any longer to legitimize the continuation of the background conflict as much as the sheer inertial persistence of the system as a whole. As the film captures this peculiar normalization of the state of emergency and the psychological, cultural, and conceptual response of separating experiential foreground and historical background from each other, its description does not come across immediately as a criticism of the state of affairs. Though Monsters pulls no punches in showing the prize we pay for tolerating this arrangement, it is not satirical, bitter, or strident in its condemnation. If the film can be said to be critical, its way of articulating this criticism consists of simply naming the conditions of life in a world ten years after the start of the war on terror. 3. Monsters in the Mainstream If naming the conditions of everyday life in the war on terror seems like a negligible accomplishment, let me reiterate my praise of Monsters by looking at it in the context of post-9/ 11 science fiction cinema around the time of its release. How remarkable the film really is becomes obvious in a comparison of Monsters with two films that have direct relevance to Gareth Edwards and his work: the sequel to the film, Monsters: Dark Continent - not directed by Edwards himself - and the film Edwards was given subsequently based on the merits of Monsters, the 2014 reboot of Godzilla. Produced on a massive budget, Godzilla was released four years The State of the State of Emergency 35 after Monsters. Superficially, the two films are similar, but only in so far as Edwards resorts to a generic blueprint germane to the giant creature film in general, and not to Monsters specifically. For example, both films strategically parse out glimpses of the monster, only to close with a scene in which full visibility is granted. While Monsters construes this final reveal as an ambiguous and sublime experience to be passively witnessed, Godzilla presents it as a CGI extravaganza. If the final battle between the film‟s giant creatures and the lovingly rendered full reveal of Godzilla can be considered sublime, they are, at best, something one might call the digital sublime, i.e. evidence of the endless and awesome possibilities of CGI, or something one might call the financial sublime, i.e. evidence of the film‟s awesome budget. Those who argue that the giant creatures in Godzilla do retain some degree of ambiguity might concede that, while that ambiguity in Monsters is deliberately construed, the ambiguity in Godzilla is the result of topical irrelevance in the latter. Godzilla tries to assign a highly specific referent to the metaphor of the giant creature, albeit one that fails to connect in any meaningful way backward (i.e. atomic testing during the Cold War), or forward (i.e. concerns over nuclear proliferation), or even to the present (i.e. overwriting the Cold War background of the original Godzilla story with imagery of the Fukushima Dajie Nuclear Plant disaster in March of 2011). The Fukushima accident allows Edwards to revisit the idea of the contaminated zone, a heavily policed no-go area from which the military systematically excludes all civilians. However, as the film moves on to its familiar American locations (especially San Francisco, reduced largely to architectural landmarks - an entirely different version of the „tourist gaze‟ Edwards employed in Monsters), the film abandons this location and never looks back. One might argue that it does so because Edwards wants to revisit another trope from Monsters - that of the more broadly defined border zone. In Godzilla, the emergence of giant creatures alongside the film‟s eponymously branded monster requires an international military effort at containment. Though the global menace originates in Japan, the U.S. military quickly takes over the effort of containing the spread of the giant creatures. The border zone between Japan and the U.S. is defined by the choice of Hawaii as the site of the first alien creature confrontation. Since the conflict moves eastward where it terminates in a climactic battle in San Francisco, the border zone is clearly that of the Pacific Rim. With Toho Studios controlling the rights to Godzilla, the definition of this Pacific Rim zone seems primarily dictated by the conditions of the film‟s production and its two largest markets upon release. This thumbnail sketch should suffice to illustrate the inverse relationship between Edwards‟ two films. Where Monsters construes the significance of the giant creature as a metaphor open to various interpretations, Godzilla commits, or tries unsuccessfully to commit, to one specific meaning (no matter whether that meaning has any topical relevance or not). Steffen Hantke 36 Where Monsters relegates the „war on terror‟ consistently, and with good reason, to the background - a spectacle in which we are spectators at best, collateral damage at worst - Godzilla indulges the fantasy that we are all agents in the „war on terror‟. Where Monsters poses the question how lives are conducted in a complex and problematic dissociative relationship with the „war on terror‟, Godzilla insists that all of our lives are crucially invested in this war; that, in fact, the state of perpetual and omnipresent low-level warfare is the crucial determinant in the creation of contemporary subjectivity per se. While Monsters had already moved on to what happens after an alien invasion, Godzilla remains mired in the overly familiar gravitational pull of the invasion itself. As history marches on, commitment to that theme grows increasingly reactionary. As Godzilla ratchets back to the established formula, it reiterates the political interpellation repeated ad nauseam in the early years after 9/ 11, as if the time that has passed since then hardly matters at all. Historical irrelevance is writ large across this project, which is why the film might be more interesting as a meta-commentary on the franchise than a commentary on the state of affairs a decade after 9/ 11. That label should rightfully be reserved for Edwards‟ sophomore effort, Monsters. The second legacy of Edwards‟ Monsters is the film‟s sequel, Monsters: Dark Continent. Here, the basic premise of an alien invasion has been preserved, though its location has now been moved from Central America to the Middle East. The jungle landscapes evocative of American proxy wars during the 1970s and „80s have been replaced with the iconography of America‟s wars after 9/ 11. The superficial gesture at immigration in the original has been replaced with an unambiguous link to the „war on terror‟ in the sequel. Still, Dark Continent preserves and even expands the time lag following that crashed NASA probe, which focuses the film on alien „occupation‟ rather than „invasion‟. The passive protagonists of Monsters, whose function was largely to witness the almost accidental overlap of background and foreground, have now been replaced with military personnel. At first glance, these characters, linked to the aggressive decision-making that steers the background story, seem to enact the fantasy of human agency in the fight against giant creatures that also takes center stage in Godzilla. Like Monsters, however, Dark Continent makes sure that these soldiers are stripped of heroic agency. Recruited from the slums of post-industrial Detroit - not by coincidence did director Tom Green cut his teeth on the British series Misfits, aptly named for its exploration of British working-class disenfranchisement - the soldiers find themselves embroiled in personal rivalries and institutional indifference and incompetence. Like Andrew and Sam, they are marginal versions of the self, stripped of prestige and agency, and stranded in the space of the other. The actual war against the giant creatures, which is complicated further by indigenous resistance against the U.S. military occupation it legitimizes, is again relegated to the background. The State of the State of Emergency 37 Generally dismissed by critics, Dark Continent strikes me as a far more interesting film than Godzilla. 6 Without returning to the trappings of the alien invasion film, it finds a new way to illustrate the paradoxical development in the ongoing „war on terror‟, a development in which civilian life is undergoing a steadily increasing degree of militarization, while, simultaneously, the actual military as a socially relevant demographic finds itself increasingly marginalized. Critics of the film might be correct in seeing its shift to military themes as a watering down of the original film‟s premise and a move toward the mainstream‟s celebration of military aggression. Still, the film‟s faithfulness of Edward‟s original conceptualization of life under alien occupation puts it a cut above Godzilla. Is this a sign that Edwards compromised his artistic vision and political commitment in exchange for a shot at a 160,000,000 $ budget? Or that innovation tends to come from the margins, the small and highly adaptive artistic creations that populate independent filmmaking, while the mainstream is still the land of large, dumb, lumbering dinosaurs? It might be too early to speculate about what the relationship between all three films tells us about the further evolution of the giant creature film a decade after 9/ 11. References Biancolli, Amy (2010). “'Monsters' review: So where are they? ” San Francisco Chronicle, November 5, 2010. [online] http: / / www.sfgate.com/ movies/ article / Monsters-review-So-where-are-they-3247453.php. Bradshaw, Peter (2010). Review of Monsters. The Guardian, December 2, 2010. [online] http: / / www.theguardian.com/ film/ 2010/ dec/ 02/ monsters-review. Catsoulis, Jeannette (2010). “Alien Invaders, Earthling Romance.” New York Times. October 28, 2010. [online] http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2010/ 10/ 29/ movies/ 29monster.html? _r=0. Hantke, Steffen (2010). “‟We Are of Peace, Always‟: ABC‟s Remake of V, Alien Invasion Television, and American Paranoia After Bush.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 35.2. 143-63. ----- (2010). “The Return of the Giant Creature: Cloverfield and the Political Opposition to the War on Terror.” Extrapolation 51.2 (Fall 2010): 235-57. Kermode, Mark (2015). “Monsters: Dark Continent review - disappointing sci-fi sequel.” Guardian, May 3, 2015. [online] http: / / www.theguardian.com/ film/ 2015/ may/ 03/ monsters-dark-continent-review-disappointing-sci-fi. Longworth, Karina (2010). “Paparazzo Boy Meets Idealistic Girl in Alien Love Story, Monsters.” Village Voice, October 27, 2010. [online] http: / / www.vil- 6 The titles of some of the reviews speak for themselves: “'Monsters: Dark Continent' leaves the original far, far behind” (Martin Tsai, L.A. Times); “Monsters: Dark Continent review - disappointing sci-fi sequel” (Mark Kermode, Guardian); “Monsters: Dark Continent, film review: Random plotting and jarring changes in tone” (Geoffrey MacNab, The Independent). Steffen Hantke 38 lagevoice.com/ film/ paparazzo-boy-meets-idealistic-girl-in-alien-love-storymonsters-6428872. MacNab, Geoffrey (2015). “Monsters: Dark Continent, film review: Random plotting and jarring changes in tone.” The Independent. May 1, 2015. [online] http: / / www.independent.co.uk/ artsentertainment/ films/ reviews/ monstersdark-continent-film-review-random-plotting-and-jarring-changes-in-tone- 10217090.html. Sciretta, Peter (2010). “How Gareth Edwards Shot „Monsters‟ On An Incredibly Low Budget.” Reels: blogging the reel world. June 3, 2010. [online] http: / / www.slashfilm.com/ how-gareth-edwards-shot-monsters-on-an-incredibly-lowbudget/ . Shaw, Lucas (2014). “„Godzilla‟ Screenwriter Explains Why There‟s So Little Godzilla in „Godzilla‟.” The Wrap. May 14, 2014. [online] http: / / www.the wrap.com/ godzilla-screenwriter-explains-theres-little-godzilla-godzilla/ . Tsai, Martin (2015). “‟Monsters: Dark Continent' leaves the original far, far behind.” L.A. Times. April 16, 2015. [online] http: / / www.latimes.com/ entertainment/ movies/ la-et-mn-monsters-dark-continent-review-20150417story.html. Steffen Hantke Sogang University English Department