Went to a movie. That is four times in 18 months which is something of a revival as I did not sit in the seat thinking how odd to be at the movies or how odd that I am staring at flickering images on a wall having a group emotional experience with strangers. I quite enjoyed it, the group-tee-hee.
When I was a kid, in that span from say age 12 to 27 long ago, CBC Halifax played a serialized for radio version of the book the Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy but it was in such short chunks that I gave it half attention and never picked up the book in the same way I never went to see Rocky Horror Picture Show on Friday midnights, cold toast in my pockets. Like that movie, I knew about the Guide but was not immersed in it. See, I had a brother who was always dragging sci-fi books home and so, like the Boston Bruins and the other brother, that was never my territory. Sci-fi movies and TV, however, were as I grew up in the era of not only Close Encounters of a Third Kind (grade 8 or so) or Star Wars (I recall seeing The Empire Strikes Back in grade 11 with pals on a summer night) but also Space 1999 on 1970s CBC Halifax TV Saturday night before the hockey but after CTV had the Ali fight, Dr. Who on Maine PBS TV a few years later at Saturday evening suppertime and, of course, the never ending repeats of Captain Kirk and the original Star Trek. What made all these shows differ from every thing from the Star Trek: Next Generation and afterwards was they were pre-ironic. The golden era of slightly prickly pricky irony can be quite specifically dated. It started quietly with the David Letterman’s morning talkshow of the early 80’s and ended with 9/11 – when it was enough to point out that someone didn’t get something, though only a facet, was enough to curse them as not “getting it”, that undefined yet elemental thing called “it”. During that era of irony, crapping on something as light judgment was considered funny and somehow insightful. It lasted long enough that there are actually people raised mainly in that era, unaware that pre-irony existed, who think it is a synonym for humour alone – unaware that it is the humour of the slightly bastardly. Anyway, in the pre-ironic era, people could and did believe in things (baseball, sci-fi, political parties, faith) while having trust in what they knew that was at odds with the belief. I knew my baseball team was bad and would never win the World Series or that a given politician was on the take but was otherwise useful – but it did not colour the entire relationship I had with baseball or politics because I knew there was much I did not know. Hence, the pleasure of supposition concerning the possible.
Now, we think we can know everything, know we must know everything and “believe” in politics, religion and sports teams as absolutes not as things in themselves full of fallible people and not just as sets of particular facts but as global ideals. We have to “believe” because this is the era of serious stuff when the person who raises a particular fact that makes complications for a given ideal is to question the idea and its absolute nature thereby being a heretic rather than someone just noting the reality of the relative – again, we can suffer not “getting it” without the accuser having ever to define what “it” is. In this way, irony and belief are two sides to the same coin. But in the pre-serious, pre-ironic era when we knew bad stuff happened, in the world, to each of us and we took it in stride. Ali was beaten from time to time so we could watch sci-fi and think to ourselves…maybe…just maybe that is who things will work out. The motto of the Hitchhiker’s Guide (meaning the book within the book, radio, movie) of “Don’t Panic” has a ring of “Keep On Truckin'” to it – things will be bad from time to time but life will either go on or it won’t and there is not much you can do about that – going with the flow, sucking up the bad thing that has yet to occur. It is a message of confidence.
That is why this movie and a few others going around lately seem to me to be showing a possible dent in the culture of the serious and absolute, just as 9/11 undid irony, though in no way as swiftly, tragically or cataclysmically. It is fundamentally a movie about the question of the possible turned on its head, sci-fi of the likely in which earth is not Captain Kirk’s center of the universe, but one in which we humans do not have the right answer and where others are indifferent to our fate. Neither technology or governance will protect us from that. In that way, even thought it is a fantasy it is realistic, and so something which has been quite rare in this post-ironic era. Unlike the 1990s movies about the disco era, you are inside the premise of this movie – not asked to watch it as an outsider, mildly ridiculing the past. You know that you are watching you and you know that these are not special times you live in.
So there are three types of people: those who know what the word “Dalek” means, those who believe there is something ultimately profound in the words “red state” and “blue state” and those who may sense some dissatisfaction with both contemporary absolutism and the lingering legacy of irony whatever the cause. The first group has already seen the movie and bought the t-shirt, the second will not enjoy it and will pray for those who made it to find their final repose in hell…but there is some hope for the third.