Inner space

Not that Independence Day is the only film preying on this morbid fantasy. Last year Stargate and Species toyed with the terrors of extraterrestrials. Next year will see such close encounters as Tim Burton's tabloidishly titled Mars Attacks! with Jack Nicholson, as the American president, heading a stellar cast; and Robert Heinlein's xenophobic sci-fi classic Starship Troopers, with Paul Verhoeven bouncing from the demi-monde of Showgirls to the distant planets. Apart from a planned adaptation of the TV sit-com My Favorite Martian, these films depict heavenly visitors as unfriendly and unstoppable, threatening the utter annihilation of our species through covert conspiracy or overt invasion.

Why the need to be entertained by the spectacle of life as we know it imperiled and obliterated by alien juggernauts? Carl Jung would immediately recognize the enormous, symmetrically striated disc of Independence Day as a mandala, "the symbol of totality well known to all students of depth psychology," as he explains in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. Writing in 1958, at the height of the Cold War and the H-bomb terror, Jung posited one cause of the proliferation of "UFO" sightings at this time as instances of "psychological projection" for which there must be a "psychic cause . . . an emotional tension having its cause in a situation of collective distress or danger, or in a vital psychological need. This condition undoubtedly exists today . . . "

And in 1996 as well. Although Jung limited his study to UFO projections in the sky -- and in dreams -- he might as well have included in his discussion the projections of UFOs on movie screens. The films of the '50s were marked by their near-hysterical fascination with flying saucers. Then, as now, these symbols of totality, or of the repressed, are images of what we sense is lacking in our souls, an inkling of something within that we fail to recognize and that can heal, or destroy, us.

Healing was the message in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), a fable about an alien visitor who threatens the world with destruction if it does not end its warlike ways, and who, for good measure, rises from the dead. But for the most part the visitors had no such benevolent intent. The War of the Worlds (1953), Invaders from Mars (1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), and Children of the Damned (1963) reflect not just a terror of conquest by the invincible forces of communism but, yes, a perverse desire for it also -- a desire for annihilation, or submission to mind-controlling conformity.

More recently, aliens have been the good guys. During the late-'70s "Me Generation" era and the "Greed Is Good" Reagan '80s, extraterrestrials offered spiritual solace to a selfish and materialistic age. Both Steven Spielberg's quasi-messianic E.T.: The Extra-terrestrial (1982), the number one box-office hit of all time, and his Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which ranks at number 33, depicted the formerly hostile invaders as touchy-feely New Age saviors. So did Starman (1984), Cocoon (1985), and John Sayles's The Brother from Another Planet (1984), which offered aliens with godlike powers but with the disposition of Forrest Gump.

Things were more monolithic in these last days of the Evil Empire. We knew there was nothing we could do about the various catastrophes that threatened us. Neither did we feel compelled to confront comfortable self-centeredness with genuine spiritual growth. So it was safe to search the celluloid skies for surcease and phony salvation.

Now, though, it seems the future might be within our control, which is a more frightening position than helplessness. We find no overwhelming nemeses lurking in the real world, only niggling and insidious problems -- Bosnia and the Middle East, the environment, the economy -- that require solutions. So what a relief to be confronted by imaginary perils from the universe that are beyond our control.

The dominant religious impulse, moreover, is not one of healing but of fundamentalist intolerance and punishment. No longer are the omnipotent others from the heavens seen as a redeeming Christs or saving angels; they're avenging destroyers, wrathful Jehovahs, and they come in the forms that most frighten and fascinate the popular consciousness. Aliens 3 (1994) posed the alien as the unborn, and the film's murky exploration of the abortion dilemma may have been as responsible for its commercial failure as its turgid cinematics. Species featured an alien in the form of a beautiful woman broadcast to our planet through a radio telescope -- a ruthless, lethal career woman with a single-minded urge to procreate and a tendency to morph into monstrosity, reflecting perhaps a dread of and delight in the changing image of women propagated by the media.

Other sexual and gender anxieties arise in Roland Emmerich's Stargate, in which a mandala-like stone monolith transports a government team to a planet populated by an ancient Egyptian society ruled over by an alien disguised as Jaye Davidson of The Crying Game. Fear of the Third World is evoked as well here. And this "problem" of illegal aliens is at the heart of the recently released The Arrival, wherein extraterrestrials disguised as either swarthy South Americans or sleazy government bureaucrats plot to destroy the environment by releasing what look like giant blue globes of flatulence into the atmosphere. Compounding the dangers of the Third World and of big government is the creeping specter of the communications explosion -- as in Species, the aliens operate through radio telescopes, and there's a climactic scene atop a giant satellite dish that's identical to one in The Cable Guy.

In this election year, all these fears about unsettling changes leading to potential disaster -- whether from sexual and gender uncertainty, immigration and the influences of other cultures, the telecommunications revolution, big government, or environmental catastrophe -- are focused on one image: Washington, DC. Whatever the film might do, the trailer for Independence Day (directed by Roland Emmerich), which shows the annihilation of the White House under a disc the size of DC itself, has captured the spirit of the present day. Perhaps it suggests merely a wish-fulfilling fantasy cure for Whitewater: Bill escapes but Hillary is killed.

There's a more sinister interpretation, however: the awesome disc as a mandala of the desire not for totality but for total destruction. Although militias and apocalyptic cults seeking liberation through self-destruction represent only a fringe element of the population, their anarchist, nihilist impulse may be deeply rooted in a culture confronting a treacherous, fragmented world. Whatever the outcome in November, the best way to foresee the future is to heed the warning from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers: "Watch the skies!" Which is the same as saying that we must look into ourselves.