Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art

Performing Migration

Rocío G. Davis, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, Johanna C. Kardux, Rocío G. Davis, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, Johanna C. Kardux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136922114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

This volume analyzes innovative forms of media and music (art installations, television commercials, photography, films, songs, telenovelas) to examine the performance of migration in contemporary culture. Though migration studies and media studies are ostensibly different fields, this transnational collection of essays addresses how their interconnection has shaped our understanding of the paradigms through which we think about migration, ethnicity, nation, and the transnational. Cultural representations intervene in collective beliefs. Art and media clearly influence the ways the experience of migration is articulated and recalled, intervening in individual perceptions as well as public policy. To understand the connection between migration and diverse media, the authors examine how migration is represented in film, television, music, and art, but also how media shape the ways in which host country and homeland are imagined. Among the topics considered are new mediated forms for representing migration, widening the perspective on the ways these representations may be analyzed; readings of enactments of memory in trans- and inter-disciplinary ways; and discussions of globalization and transnationalism, inviting us to rethink traditional borders in respect to migration, nation states, as well as disciplines.

Part I
Border Crossings and (Trans)nationalism in Film

1
Paradigms of Attitudes Toward Immigration

Science Fiction Films as Allegories in the Mid-Century

Juan Bruce-Novoa

Guard yourself from the terrible empty light of space, the bottomless Pool of the stars. (Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.)

“Quia Absurdum,” Robinson Jeffers

Science fiction allegorically stages contemporary problems through the lens of impossible events. From depicting a laboratory-assembled ideal man in Frankenstein to H.G. Wells’s prophecy of worlds at war, from allegorized social conflicts in Metropolis to Bioy Casares’s prescient exploration of virtual romance in La invención de Morel, science fiction introduces visions of alternative resolutions to fundamental crises. While immigration may not be remembered as a major sociopolitical problem in the post–World War II U.S., especially in comparison with its position among the concerns of the U.S. electorate (tied with the Iraq War according to an NPR newscast of May 30, 2008), it actually did represent a multifaceted issue of political and cultural concern. And the film industry has always exploited social concerns in its search for larger markets. Although a few films directly stage immigration, like George Pal’s When Worlds Collide (1951), interplanetary in this instance, others, like the two studied here, dealt with the topic more obliquely and closer to home.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Great Depression, combined with security concerns about the impending European conflicts, produced a sharp drop in immigration between 1930 and the end of WWII at which time it averaged just over 50,000 persons annually, its lowest point in the century. However, as the country emerged as the world’s leading economic power, untouched by violence, postwar immigration figures rose rapidly toward previous historical high marks until they approximated 60 percent of the figures for the period between1920 and 1930. This demographic influx forced the U.S. to factor new global migrations into its social and political policy.¹

As the 1940s wound down, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was deployed on multiple fronts to respond to pressing needs. The humanitarian crisis of war-ravaged Europe was paramount with its millions of unsettled refugees and displaced persons. “By 1946 there were still about a quarter of a million Russian, Armenian, Assyrian, and Saar refugees demanding international care; and also about some 111,000 German refugees and 212,000 Spanish refugees,”² and that represents just a portion of the post-WWII global situation. In addition, an inordinate number of war brides were returning with decommissioned soldiers. Exacerbating the situation was the thorny question of the Bracero Program, which during the war had brought into the country more foreign labor than the average number of immigrants, not all of whom returned when their contracts expired. The program survived under various guises to reach 107,000 workers in 1949, almost double its wartime high, and continued to rise to 192,000 in 1951;³ President Truman’s 1951 Report on Migratory Labor supported the agribusiness position that it had to be continued. The U.S. State Department’s stand on Bracero Program renewal was that it was needed to combat communist influence in Mexico—thus subsuming immigration under cold war international politics. Public Law 78 (July 1951) renewed the Bracero Program. The mere existence of this conscious, multifaceted agenda of immigration control bespeaks a deep concern for the opposite: uncontrolled illegal immigration.

FILM ANALYSIS

Hollywood addressed alien encroachment in a number of films, some directly on topic—like The Stranger (1946), G.I. War Brides (1946), I Was a Male War Bride (1949), Border Incident (1949), A Lady Without Passport (1950)—and others that can be viewed as implicit commentaries, like the two science fiction films destined to become classics that I am studying here. Although The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing from Another World, both from 1951, are commonly considered responses to the post-WWII realignment into the cold war,⁴ I will read them as stagings of paradigmatic U.S. attitudes and responses to uninvited alien incursion into the homeland. Theoretical justification can be extrapolated from Gregory Pfitzer’s postulation that science fiction films extend the U.S. myth of frontier expansion into the realm of space exploration, reading/writing aliens through the Native American image.⁵ Pursuing Pfitzer’s intuition, one could suggest that if science fiction appropriates the frontier myth, it implicitly addresses the Spanish/Mexican presence, which after the Mexican-American War raised questions of immigration along the new international border.

The analysis can be contextualized by recalling Diedrich Diederichsen’s observation on Hollywood’s tendency to divide migrants into two distinct types: those who productively contribute to the melting pot and their opposites, the phobically perceived, natural disaster-like subhuman floods of evil masses that threaten to undermine the national welfare. Of course, alien visitation films share a fear of the unearthly, nonhuman origins of the migrant. Both aliens considered here begin as undesirables: more than merely the unknown, they present a potential threat materialized in the violation of earthly boundaries presumed inviolable. In terms that are lost on present-day viewers, both aliens’ ships are tracked during their unauthorized entry by a form of radar, a twentieth-century invention for defense raised to cult status during World War II. Furthermore, both ships exceed earth’s scientific and military capacities of the time, in Thing by the enormity of the ship’s weight, and in Day, its speed outstrips that of a ‘buzz bomb,’ the term for the German missiles that terrorized the British during the war. However, while one alien confirms its menacing potential, the other wins over key elements of the cast with whom the audience can relate, hence ameliorating the initial apprehension.

The respective positive or negative charge is communicated through production details, even from the opening shot. The title The Thing from Another World appears from a dark nowhere, gradually burning up and out through a blackened screen void of specific geographic location to convey a secretive, isolated destructiveness that emerges out of a negatively marked unknown. In contrast, The Day the Earth Stood Still zooms in all at once, clearly set against a dappled backdrop of the bright, starry cosmos itself set against vast outer space, and as the movie credits fade in and out, the cosmic scenes fade from one into the next to imply movement that eventually approaches earth. Credits in Thing, on the other hand, are set against a single shot of a frozen, windswept, desolate night, reminiscent of the opening of William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939). The intertextualities purposefully tap opposite associations: in Day, the heavens are associated with clear, bright illumination; in Thing, with a hostile darkness that harbors nightmarish beings.

Day’s opening scenes establish an international context. As the saucer flies over many nations, their languages are heard discussing the object’s global transit; the alien vessel fosters world unity by becoming the common object of attention and the subject of multiple discourses. Thing opens on an ice-frozen Alaskan U.S. military base where only English is spoken. Informed of an unidentified flying object near an even more isolated base “two thousand miles north,” Captain Hendry remarks, “It could be Russians, they’re all over the pole like flies,” evoking a cold-war context wherein two superpowers clash on civilization’s fringe with no sense of the rest of the global participants. In Day, suspicion of the Russians is also expressed, but just briefly, only to be countered by Klaatu, the alien played by Michael Rennie, who always insists on earth’s multiplicity of nations and peoples, underscoring the global openness of the film’s vision, especially in his intolerance of traditionally closed borders. In contrast, Thing’s numerous cold-war allusions and references—and the Arctic setting itself—reinforce a context of ideological conflict in the primary metaphor of mid-century terminology.

Both films respond to alien arrival by dispatching military forces to surround the ship but within radically different contexts. Thing’s ship lands at night, sliding under surveillance to immediately disappear under the ice, distant from human observation; hence it must be found and brought within a controlled space. Day’s flying saucer appears in Washington DC at midday in full sight in the middle of that combination of public/private space called a baseball diamond in a park where common people play America’s game. Thing’s alien is brought back encapsulated in ice, while Day’s walks out under his own power and speaks a message of peace. Yet both elicit fear and violence from soldiers, producing a state of conflict between humans and aliens that results in numerous casualties. The Thing kills several scientists and some sled dogs and wounds a few soldiers; Gort, Klaatu’s robot companion, melts down military equipment, including a tank from which not all of the crew escapes, and disposes of two soldiers. Yet the aliens’ attitudes and characters differ on almost all points of comparison.

Both films depict humanlike aliens, but whereas Klaatu looks and speaks quite normally, the Thing is a grotesque giant incapable of speech. Klaatu dons earthly dress to move among humans and gain understanding; the Thing has no costume changes, maintaining his visual distance. Klaatu in Day not only speaks, he also displays admirable rationality in his ability to enunciate calm, measured alternatives to the panicky opinions of the earthlings. The English-born Michael Rennie gives Klaatu that upper class foreign air with a British accentuation commonly used by Hollywood to characterize esteemed, elite, yet different cultures, like those of Rome or Greece. Rennie also utilizes human gestures—facial, like smiles and bemused surprise in his eyes, or bodily, like a friendly open hand to show diamonds to a boy or a good-bye wave to the female lead—gestures that bring him closer to the audience within a shared code of bodily expression. Key to this rapprochement is Klaatu’s use of small motor movements to handle everyday objects like chalk, a flashlight, or a small music box, gestures associated with homo faber. Deprived of even Hollywood’s semblance of a foreign language, the Thing is limited to animal expression: snarls, screeches, and growls—“grotesquely inarticulate grunting.”⁶ In addition, he is allowed no fine motor movements, and his facial gestures are severely restricted; in effect, he gets little screen time and no close-ups to capture facial nuance, although for at least one critic this constituted one of the film’s best virtues: “The monster’s unseen presence creates an aura of escalating fear that elevates the picture into a classic exercise in suspense rather than a mere ‘monster movie.’”⁷ When seen, his body movements are writ l...