The idea of
monster in Hollywood

By Dharminder Kumar

As the millennium rushes towards its end, there is an increasing tendency to invent cinematic motions of finitude in a variety of fantastic ways. Jurassic Park, Independence Day and now Godzilla — are grand efforts to construct an apocalyptic view of the world with incredible convincibility.

The apocalypse is secular where the linearity is ruptured by a monster let loose amidst the centres of human civilisation. The monsters are so frequently incorporated in movies that they carve into existence a whole new genre of threat from either the precursors of humanity (creatures like dinosaurs or mutants) or the successors (the aliens with superior technological prowess or extra-human capacities).

The monsters in Hollywood cinema have been variously interpreted. The flurry of movies about monsters in Hollywood in 1950s was interpreted as an expression of McCarthyite paranoia against communists. Paul VeerHoeven, the famous director of RoboCop and Total Recall says, "The USA is desperately in search of an enemy".

The communists were the enemy, and the Nazis before them, but now that wonderful enemy everyone can fight has been lost. Sci-fi films give us a terrifying enemy that’s politically correct. They’re bad. They’re evil and they’re not even human".

This genre of threat has more to it than such overtly political polemic. The monsters, which are central to these disaster movies, help understand the nature and politics of threat which is being played up to become a collective nightmares of the earthlings.

From Frankenstein to Godzilla, the monsters have been variously portrayed by Hollywood. They can be broadly categorised into three kinds — the monsters who grew out of human beings or human beings converting into monsters, the primaeval creatures who once lost in the struggle for survival or creatures of lower order grown into giants and aliens from some other planets who are usually more intelligent than us.

Monster in a horror movie has been interpreted as ‘the return of the repressed’. Gad Horowitz in his theory of repression says that all cultures live with surplus repression as against basic repression which is necessary and inescapable. The basic repression is our ability to accept the postponement of the gratification. Surplus repression is specific to a culture. It is generated in the process of cultural conditioning of a person whereby he or she has to take up predetermined roles in that culture and abide by cultural norms. This surplus repression emerges in our "cultural artifacts" such as movies. The monster grown out of human body (vampire, zombie etc.) is the distortion of human; the outer distortion symbolising the inner distortion also. Monster is a variation of human and an ugly and disproportionate one (with fangs or horns or big limbs) at that.

Monster is the other of the human self. And human self projects its surplus repression on this other so that what is repressed in the human self can be hated or feared.The monster as inhuman is only the flip side of human.

This dual concept of other/repressed in dramatised in the motif of monster is the cinema. Monster disrupts the existing order, the proportionate, linear world. In movies, the monster usually haunts either a family or a couple both being the emblems of a sane or sanitised society. Monster ruptures the sane world and the sanity is restored only when the monster is overcome or killed.

In the horror movies, the monster is pitted against the cultural order while in sci-fi monster is a threat to the civilisation hence the apocalyptic message of the movies.

Here the monster is not the other ensconced in ourselves but the alien other, the invader, who is out to devastate the human race. The narrative patterns and suspense strategy remain the same only here the threat is collective as against individual in a horror movie.

Here also the monster breaks the linear order. The linearity that is broken by the monster is shown to be of the capitalistic world. For example, Godzilla playing havoc in the business districts of an American city or more aptly aliens aiming at the White House in Independence Day. The creature or the alien is shown to be anything but human, not even remotely related to the human race.

This helps in setting up the categories of human race and the alien where the multiplicity inherent in human race (for example, political or economic orders other than American or Japanese) are glossed over in the face of enormity of the outer threat.

The only representation of human race which is constructed against the alien monster is the capitalistic political and economic order. The elements that are responsible for final defeat of the alien monster belong to the particular order (US armed forces flushing out the aliens or killing the monster reptiles).

These movies reinforce the myth of one-worldism which can only be formed under the aegis of capitalistic forces. It also underlines that the only saviour of the world is capitalism.

It is efficient, it delivers the goods. This forcible appropriation of leadership exhibits the politics of threat genre. It can be inferred from above that the sci-fi monster movies are not so much the dramatisation of the threat or apocalypse as the countering of threat or subversion of apocalypse.

The giant reptiles and alien monsters in Hollywood cinema indicate a movement in time to a lower and upper stage of evolution respectively.

Now that the whole world has fallen prey to the capitalistic forces the dream of colonising the backward and forward spaces on the continuum of evolution are constructed. The dinosaurs and aliens from other planets are mere vehicles to express a more ambitious colonialist urge which is adventurous enough to assert itself in past and future by mapping the time-spaces of evolution.

After winning the contemporary, it’s the turn of both predecessors and successors. Thus the cinematic presentation of aliens or primeval creatures is not the fantasy about the past or the unknown but it is the politics of the known and the present.