FILM In Which The Guy Wanted To Save Felicity
Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:46AM 
A Sign of Submission
by ALEX CARNEVALE
Super 8
dir. J.J. Abrams
112 minutes
You come down over the trees, you see the stars, and suddenly you think you're in space – wow, you’re not, you're in a forest somewhere. You’re not quite sure where; you might be in a forest on some distant planet. It was Melissa’s idea to use the forest; at first, I thought of having the ship land in a vacant lot. But she said, 'A forest is magical…there are elves in forests.'
Are you experienced at watching things recede into the distance? Do you start out every single one of your movies by killing off the parents of your protagonist? Are you willing to accept Steven Spielberg's name underneath yours, in settings such as official notifications and company stationary? Do you desperately want to remake The Goonies and have very little self-respect?
When pressed, Abrams could not recall the names of his child actors, preferring to address them using only the tu form. It was not as bad as a Bryan Singer set, but it wasn't great. He channeled this frustration into conceiving an alien that would befriend fictional children and satisfy his master.
Of Elle Fanning, he wrote, Screentested Elle Fanning today. She asked me if she was the only one confused by Lost. I took five minutes to compose myself, and then said, "We're not here to talk Lost, we're hear to talk Super 8." Eating fried rice with her hands, she said, "Did you direct Mission Impossible 3 or did a monkey do it?"
What best epitomizes satisfying teamwork between two men with the same limited imagination? In Japan two such people would have a designated relationship, kind of like Rafael and Michaelangelo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Scientists that have reason to know examined the two directors and found an almost identical genome. "They're basically clones," admitted Craig Venter as he sucked on the bone marrow of a recently deceased child actor.
Why, J.J. Abrams might wake up one day over some eggs benedict and be reminded of the way his mother cooked them and work in the alien storyline from there! Or not, I mean, it could go in a different direction, as a reading of Abrams' private journals from 1996 will later attest: Today I thought of Felicity while imagining a film about a really stuck-up girl who does Taming of the Shrew with an alien who wants to revisit his homeland.
Both fabulists wish to replace the cynicism of their peers with a childlike innocence. They focus their identical eyeglass prescriptions on creating movies with child protagonists who uncover the same virulent thread. In this case, the monster only takes mercy on guys who are really into moviemaking. Everyone else is dead meat. The point of all this is to rid technology from our lives, to expunge it and re-enter a more innocent time period identical to that of the creators' childhood. Super 8 pretends the 21st century never came about at all.
Where and when does Super 8 take place? The location is not paramount, details aren't important. A vacant lot is as good as a forest.
For a movie that concerns itself with boys who desire to be filmmakers, not a single other movie is ever mentioned in Super 8. The kids watch TV once to see news about a train crash they're involved in, but they don't have posters on their walls or books by Fredric Jameson or Judith Butler. The children of Super 8 are so self-serious that they rarely even make jokes. They love the idea of filmmaking, but aren't interested in films.
On the set of the movie, Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) falls in love with the daughter of the man who called in sick the day Joe Lamb's mother suffered a fatal mishap replacing him. "It was an accident," Joe Lamb's father (Kyle Chandler) tells the girl's father, and kisses him on the lips in an intimate manuever. With both their wives out of the picture, the implication is that they will raise the children themselves, and that to conserve costs they will go on double dates with the kids, explaining things later on.
The alien constructs his ship in the town's water tower — perhaps the citizens might have noticed changes in the salinity levels of the local water supply, but they do not. No one knows where this creature is except Joe Lamb. He resembles exactly the childhood representation of Cameron Crowe in Almost Famous. It is scary.
Staring up expectantly at something is what J.J. and Steven want you to do. The thrall of technology invade your senses for the first time is a sacrosanct pleasure to men of a certain generation, and they will not let women embrace or enjoy it except as actresses in a dehumanizing role. The way that technology occupies these particular individuals constitutes a retrograde feeling. It is not like being invaded and then abandoned to yourself, it is more like being conquered, and it is only meaningful the once.
tom cruise and elle fanning, the year 2056
When Joe Lamb saves the girl, whose name is unsurprisingly Alice, she wonders why he even bothered to come and get her. Joe Lamb admits that he wanted to ingratiate himself to her, and this fact unexpectedly pleases her, and him. Joe Lamb speaks to the creature and empathizes with it because he suffered a similar loss - the alien continuous torment from government persecutors, and Joe Lamb the death of his mother.
The creature itself is a work of Spielbergian fascination. He appears to be segmented, he has both bipedal function and a variety of other motions, and his chitinous exoskeleton appears very flexible. His technology has surpassed human invention, so it is unlikely that he was imprisoned against his will. He is intelligent and telepathic, and can take no damage from human weapons. He wants to return home out of frustration or loneliness. To a telepathic organism, humanity must seem like never-ending study hall.
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Little Mosque on the Prairie. He twitters here and tumbls here.
"When We Were Young" - Take That (mp3)
"Affirmation" - Take That (mp3)
"Happy Now" - Take That (mp3)
The new EP from Take That, Progressed, came out on June 10th.
Anyway, in my closet, I found this thing on my wall. It's a list of all the people who lived in this room before me - it went back to 1968. Randall Clark... Melissa Stone... Keith Bradshaw... Patty Tagliabue... I mean these names, these people I never heard of... you know, I just started wondering. I wonder where they are today, you know? How much they remember of their freshman year? I wonder if they're all still alive.
