So I saw this film last night and for about the first 20-30
minutes I was charmed. It brought me back to some of the classic sci fi flicks
of the 70’s and 80’s, such as ET, Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind,
and Goonies.
But as the film progressed, a vague unpleasantness followed.
It really was just like those films. Too much like them really. The
aforementioned films often got away with shockingly poor character development
because the filmmakers could count on audiences to be soaked up in the magic of
the special effects. Well, we’ve had special effects for a long time now and
they just aren’t very special anymore… They are just effects.
Feminism! What
feminism?
I’ll start here. Though hardly the biggest problem, Super 8
suffers from ‘trophy girl’ syndrome. Alice (played by Elle Fanning) has a sort
of interesting character set up, though clearly she is intended to play second
fiddle to Joel Courtney’s Joe Lamb. Not much is done after that set up though.
Words are said, she is captured, her Dad says sorry and apparently that takes care
of it all. It’s a pretty empty redemption since the Father does very little to
earn anyone’s trust. This lack of meaningful reconciliation is made far worse
by the reduction of Alice’s character to damsel in distress after the monster
inexplicably captures and holds her for food. She’s a trophy, a thing to be won
by either the good hero or the evil black villain. Alice starts as an engaging
female character but quickly devolves into the basest of cinematic stereotypes.
Joe Lamb’s mother, the only other significant female in the
film, fairs no better. Introduced to us as a tragic foil, I eventually began to
wonder about the choice to make her a factory worker. It’s as if Rosey the Riveter
has to get out of the way for our young Lamb to discover himself. This theory
bears fruit when we learn Alice’s drunkard dad called in sick the day of her
death, forcing Joe’s mom to clock in when really she should have just stayed
home. Hear that women? Work overtime and expect to get squashed. It’s better
that way though, because with you gone the white father’s and white sons of
this suburban paradise can go about the business of restoring their cherished
but fractured hierarchy.
Why does the black
man bring all this trouble to our happy little world?
The dearth of female characters is matched by the lack of
black characters. The few that do exist fall into some pretty predicable camps.
You’ve got the biology teacher, who has an unusually powerful affinity for
imprisoned monsters (slaves) and decides to set this thing loose in a populated
town even though he knows how dangerous it is. Black man brings trouble.
Then there is the black soldier working with the colonel,
the guy who cruelly and pointlessly steals the necklace that Joe Lamb has been
coveting, which happens to have a picture of a beautiful white woman in it. I
felt like I was watching a reboot of Birth of a Nation. Where are the white
women at? They’re in the necklace. Black man brings trouble.
The skin color of the alien may or may not be relevant, I don’t
know. That said, this film clearly caters to a kind of middle America xenophobia.
Alien gets taken captive by white overlord, breaks free, causes ruckus in white
suburban paradise until Joe Lamb (need I discuss the Christian symbolism of
that name?) convinces him to go back to his weird ass planet. Black man brings trouble.
What a missed
opportunity
When it comes to it, there is something magical about the
style of the film. The whimsical enthusiasm of the boys, the creepiness of a
monster we don’t see for half the film, the adventurous music… these things
work and have a place in our films. But the outdated politics make Super 8 more
like a relic than it should be in this day and age. Imagine a film with the
same aesthetic appeal but with a more stringent devotion to character growth,
an awareness of America’s diverse nature, and a heroine who does more than look
pretty and get saved. It’d be pretty good I bet. Sadly, this film seems like a
last desperate appeal to a kind of Reagan era white nuclear family idealism in
which women and black people exist primarily to help the white man cope with
his troubles and learn responsibility. This nonsense should have been left in
the past. To be clear, it’s not that the film needed to present us with a
contrived slate of diverse characters… it just needed to not use the non-white,
non-male characters it does have in such a stereotypical fashion. Super 8 was a
chance to show us that some of the old techniques still entertain, can still
enchant us… and it totally blew that chance.
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