The 9/11 Effect: Time Travel and Redecorating Shows

There's a lot of time travelling going on in this summer's movies, and it provides a window into what's really bothering us right now. In Tom Cruise’s latest move, Live, Die Repeat: The Edge of Tomorrow, the entire plot relies on his ability to go back and forth in time to try to solve a key problem in the present. In X-Men: Days of Future Past,  we see the same thing: Wolverine is sent to the 1970s to stop an event which will have devastating consequences for the future. Both are attempts to re-write history, to prevent the present from ever happening. Science fiction fans may recall that this used to be the greatest sin of all in time travel. Anyone who went back in time had to be very careful not to change anything, since that could result in a domino effect, preventing people from being born, governments from being elected, wars from being won. It was considered a form of temporal genocide. But this summer, killing the future is explicitly the goal. So why such a huge change?

I suspect that 9/11 is the culprit. In the years since the attack, Americans have come to see the rest of the world as a scary and hostile place. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been traumatizing, and appear to be unwinnable. It appears that American citizens who leave the country are at risk, and can be killed in terrible ways, which will be broadcast. During this period, Americans reacted as individuals do when confronted with terrifying situations: they regressed and withdrew.

The best proof of this comes from what happened on cable television. In the 2000s, The Learning Channel (TLC) stopped showing programs about the rest of the world and got rich broadcasting home renovation programs. Food, redecoration and makeovers became the big winners for ratings, which led to copycat programs on other lifestyle channels. These shows were signs that Americans were withdrawing into themselves, the television equivalent of nesting and cocooning. The outside world was terrifying, so it was time to go home and stay there. Television provided the opportunity to remake the home, the meals, our faces and wardrobe, over and over again. Live, redecorate, repeat.

Those shows appealed mostly to women, but men also found a way to withdraw. Before 9/11, National Geographic specials and The Discovery Channel broadcast programs that took place all over the world. National Geographic specials took viewers to the ends of the Earth, to meet Pygmies and other tribal peoples,  to explore mysterious ruins, and of course to see nature in all of its glory. During the 1990s, I worked as a writer and producer of documentary series for The Discovery Channel. Back then, Discovery was a science and nature channel, but liked to feature stories of adventure, too. So, I worked on series that featured explorers searching for Cleopatra’s Palace in Egypt, as well as historical documentaries that featured stories from all over the world, such as the Titanic’s sinking, the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, and warships being dragged through the African Jungle.  The world was our oyster, and it didn’t matter much if the main characters were Americans.

But after 9/11, the appetite for stories from around the world dried up. Both National Geographic and Discovery shifted their focus to stories that occur in America. What’s amazing is that the appetite for strange people and places remains, but now it is being satisfied by focusing solely on Americans. The naked tribal people are now white Americans roughing it in the bush ( Naked Afraid). The adventurers are crab fishermen in Alaska (Deadliest Catch), or guys who live off the land (Yukon Men). When viewers want to see strange cultures and people, they no longer expect ( or want) to go to the Amazon. Instead, they sit back and marvel at American hillbillies (Moonshiners), the Amish (Breaking Amish) little people (Little People, Big World) , or the morbidly obese (My 600-lb Life). Americans have the same interests as before, but they want to satisfy them all on their home soil, since the rest of the world is too scary to visit, even virtually.

American popular culture has been imploding since 9/11, and the effects are being seen in the movies, too. The reboots of Planet of the Apes and Star Trek have both placed new emphasis on Earth, rather than the more exotic settings of their originals ( such as the Earth in the far future, or outer space). In Star Trek, the plots of both movies have hinged on events at StarFleet on Earth, and, like 9/11, there is a city-destroying attack in the second movie. In Live, Die, Repeat, we meet aliens who can invade Earth from space, but lack the ability to fly once on Earth, making them an earthbound threat ( which makes no sense, of course). The emphasis on Earth in these movies ( and many others), is part of this 9/11 effect. With the exception of Star Wars, which seems like a fairy tale, we don’t want stories that take us far from home. However, on movie screens, we can admit what we don’t want to admit in reality: we feel like we are being invaded, and we don’t know how to fight back. As the ISIS debacle in the Middle East proves, the last decade’s efforts to ‘solve’ the terrorism problem by invading Afghanistan and Iraq have not worked. The present seems terrible, and we don’t know what to do.

But unlike reality, the movies can give us the answer we so desperately desire. Oddly, the solution is not the invention of a new weapon that will kill off the invaders. Perhaps our experiences in the last decade have shown us that there is no magic bullet, no drone or technology that will fix this mess. So the movies propose a different answer: stay home, and change time itself. Make it so that this whole nightmare never happened. Time has replaced space as the battleground. If only 9/11 had never ocurred. If only we hadn’t invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. In the movies, those wishes are coming true, as our heroes stay home, but travel in time to stop the invasions.

If only it were so simple in real life….

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker and writer in Toronto. www.milton2.tv.

stephen.milton@yahoo.ca

There's Something Missing on our Spaceships

This weekend, I went to friend’s Star Wars birthday party. As a kid, he had seen the first Star Wars movie at the age of ten, and was hooked right away. He decided then and there that he wanted to be in the movie industry when he grew up, and now he does payroll for feature films. To celebrate his birthday, we watched the first Luke Skywalker film again, which now seems incredibly cheesy, with bad acting, bad directing, and terrible writing. But despite all of that, it is still magical, especially with its vision of a world filled with strange aliens.

But as I watched, I noticed that on board the spaceships, there was something missing. As I came to think about all the other space movies I have ever seen, I realized this missing element applied to just about every one. Space ships always have lots of technology, various types of engines, weapons and living quarters. But there’s one thing that is missing which says a lot about who we are as a civilization, and the trouble we’re in now.

To appreciate what’s missing on spaceships, it helps to see the world through the eyes of our ancestors. A few years ago, I went to an art gallery exhibition of early Renaissance paintings from Florence. For the most part, it was religious art, featuring crucifixion scenes, but they weren’t what caught my eye. Instead, it was a document written in the 14^th century that had been placed on the wall. It was gorgeous. In the center, there was hand-written text ( the printing press had not been invented yet), but all around the borders there were intricately drawn vines and birds. Each page had these lovely embellishments. But the document had nothing to do with nature. It was actually a legal document, something about commercial law. In other words, it was totally boring and utilitarian, like a computer manual now, yet it was covered in drawings of nature. Why?

This sort of natural adornment was not restricted to legal documents. It shows up in all sorts of manuscripts, most famously in religious texts like prayer books and bibles. Virtually every page has some kind of imagery from nature, usually forests, vines, birds or animals. The strange thing is that most of the time, the stories being told in the text have nothing to do with nature. These nature drawings are ornamental. They show that at this time in history, the people who made these books could not imagine the human world without the natural world. It was simply part of their world view and consciousness. Humans existed in nature, even when discussing laws that only affected humans. The implication was that humans could not be extracted from nature, we are a package deal.

Now, spin forward to the era of spaceship movies. Human beings hurtle through space in ships that look like all sorts of Earth-based models, from cities to hotels, battleships to submarines. They are populated by humans and their alien friends, all of which are intelligent. But in the vast majority of films, there are no other life forms from Earth on board. No plants, no animals, no fish, no meadows or forests. Not even a houseplant here and there. Nada.

You may wonder, well so what, why would they want any plants or animals on board? Simple: because in real life, we need them. Scientists have discovered that patients who have been ill recover faster in hospital rooms which have a window looking out onto green trees and plants. In fact, even a painting of nature helps more than a blank wall. This is one of the reasons why real offices have plants in the corners. People like to have nature nearby, even inside, because at a subconscious level it makes us feel more at home, more at peace. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has named this feeling “biophilia”  , and he believes it is innate in all of us.

It may seem strange to argue that we love nature in an era where corporations and governments are burning down rainforests and turning up the global thermostat. Collectively we don’t seem to express much biophilia, but at the individual level, it is a different story. Rich people provide a particularly striking example. Studies of wealthy neighbourhoods have found that they usually include more trees and plants than where poorer people live .  Gated communities have trees, ghettoes don’t.  Rich people are also the folks who own expensive country homes, and penthouse apartments with views of the nearest park, like the wealthy denizens on Park Avenue in Manhattan. Although at work, CEOs may be wrecking the environment, when they come home, they drive through tree-lined streets, and spend the weekend at expensive cottages.  Given a choice, we want nature with us. It is part of our nature.

Why aren't there plants on the Enterprise?

When we imagine going out to space, that love of nature goes out the airlock. If the Enterprise really was like a city in space, it would have dogs in the hallways, perhaps the small ones like condo owners walk to the park. Why doesn’t Uhura have a houseplant strapped to her work station? Why can’t there be a real meadow or forest inside the ship, instead of a holodeck? If spaceships were like real human environments, there would be plants and animals.

One might assume that the reason is ultimately technological, not psychological: plants and animals would take up too much space or be a drag on scarce resources. But in fact, the opposite is true. When NASA imagines taking human to Mars, plants will be on board to provide food, and to clean the air and water. The weight of bringing all the food and oxygen for the long trip is simply too great, so a sustainable organic system is actually more practical. Future real spaceships would include plants simply because this type of life support system works better than current artificial models for long-haul trips.

Granted, movie spaceships have never claimed to be very accurate scientifically, but instead tend to draw their inspiration from past types of ships like submarines and air craft carriers. But here, again, reality includes nature. World War Two submarines were home to small dogs whom the crew kept as mascots, and were valued for their calming effect. Sea dogs were a regular part of the crew of sailing ships, and during the  World Wars, mascots of all kinds of species could be found among sailors, pilots and soldiers.  If our spaceships really were inspired by actual ships, then nature would be on board, too.

So what’s going on with these barren movie spaceships? Why is it that despite our persistent desire to bring nature with us, there are no pets or plants on board most of these spacecraft? I think the key is that the movies are a form of collective dream, which frequently portrays our deepest desires and wishes, long before we consciously recognize them. In the 20^th century, the movies depicted spaceships where human society was depicted as living in a vacuum, completely divorced from nature. This was not a nightmare, but a dream, the next stage in our evolution.

This disturbing dream was on screen long before the environmental crisis hit, further proof that art can be a powerful guide to the human psyche. Now that the world is getting warmer, and thousands of species are going extinct due to habitat loss, it is slowly becoming clear that we cannot afford to imagine ourselves as separate from nature. Our love of nature needs reinforcement, on the streets and on screen. As individuals we are drawn to nature, but increasingly, only on our own terms. Shrinking dogs to fit into our increasingly cramped world is not the answer. Our ancestors knew that humans were embedded in nature, there was no way to separate us. We need to regain that consciousness, and it may require artists dreaming of it in new ways before it ever becomes policy. This is not a problem that will be fixed if houseplants are added to the next Star Trek movie, but it wouldn’t hurt. More important is to realize how strange our world has become – that, surely, is something worth making movies about.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker in Toronto. www.milton2.tv.

He also runs a website devoted to nature, www.torontonature.com.

Homicide Shows: What They Don’t Tell You About Murder

Some years ago, I worked as a writer on documentary series that featured real homicides. Each show would focus on one murder case that had gone through the courts, resulting in a conviction ( enabling us to use court evidence to reconstruct the story without fear of getting sued.) My particular episode was about a gruesome murder at a fast food joint, where an employee was beaten to death. The series usually featured a few suspects whom the police investigated for a bit, then dropped, to focus on the actual murderer. The trick was, in show after show, the murderers were rarely the kind of people who show up on fictional crime shows like Law and Order,  or CSI. In our series, the perpetrators were almost always poor people, whereas on TV, murder is committed by middle and upper middle class people, who occasionally hire thugs to pull the trigger.

The discrepancy got me thinking about the strange divide between television crime and real crime. On television, crime is big business. Prime time would be hard to imagine with crime shows. How would the networks get by without all the CSI and Law and Order spinoffs? For the past few decades, crime shows have composed on average about 25% of the primetime fare, not including news programs . Those statistics were compiled at a time when people didn’t have as much choice about what to watch online or on demand. I suspect once you throw in Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, all the vampire shows and the rest of cable, the rates would climb higher still. When we tune in to watch  crime, we want to see murders.

But what's on television,  and what’s really happening on the streets are very different. Over the past few decades, murder rates on television have been steadily rising. Studies have found that in the 1970s, homicide made up about 25% of all crime shown on television, whereas by the 1990s, it had shot up to 79% . But out in the real world, the exact opposite was true. Property crimes like theft make up most crime, whereas the homicide rate has been steadily dropping since the 1990s. New York City is a fascinating case in point: the home of Law and Order and CSI:New York was actually getting progressively safer as those franchises took off in popularity. In 1980, 2,228 people were murdered in New York; by 2012, it was down to 684, a reduction of almost seventy-five percent. Similar decreases were seen in other major cities, but you would never know it from watching CSI:Miami, CSI:New York or CSI.

Television is also wrong about who does the killing. On CSI and other crime shows, the murderers are usually people who are middle class or wealthier. In reality, it is generally poor people who kill, and get killed. Specifically, murder rates are highest in areas where there is significant income inequality. That means that living in a poor country doesn’t create high homicide rates, but living in a country where there is a wide gulf between you and richer people does result in more murders.  It is the income disparity of unemployment, and dead-end low wage jobs that create the frustrations and the short tempers that result in homicides against family members, friends, and less often, strangers . These patterns persist across nations, not just in the United States. America has a high income inequality rate, whereas countries like Canada redistribute income from the rich to the poor through taxes and social welfare programs. Canada’s homicide rate is much lower than America’s, despite sharing a common culture, and watching the same television programs. (Gun laws also play a role here, but the point I want to make  is that it isn’t rich people who are shooting each other, but poorer people).

So, on television, the cops are focusing on all the wrong people. They shouldn't be finding so many rich victims, nor should they be searching for rich suspects. What's more, they should slowly be going out of business, with fewer murders each year. Instead, they should be solving the murders of poorer people. In theory, television could make more shows like The Wire, which portrayed  poverty-led crime among drug dealers. But our society doesn’t want to admit that the land of opportunity is dependent on a vast underclass of people who are kept poor, and are at risk of murder. So, instead, it presents a different society, where most people are well off,  but they are at risk of being murdered. The enemy is not the system, but each other – your co-worker or your spouse. We are all potential murderers, so watch your back. This is a total fiction, but we happily go along with it, and broadcasters get rich on the perpetuation of this myth. We should be careful, though: when entertainment is mistaken for reality, the results can get ugly. Americans consistently vote for candidates who are tough on crime, and keep their gun laws intact, despite little proof that the middle class and the upper class are in any real danger from violence. If the livelihoods of the well-off are at risk, it is from job loss and smaller pay checks. But short of becoming a serial killer, you won't get into a cop show for being downsized.

All of this helps make sense of the one crime show I wrote for television. In our documentary, after the middle class suspects had been ruled out, the real murderers were found. They were two unemployed kids who were looking for drug money. That's what real homicide looks like, but you won't find it on prime time.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film producer and writer living in Toronto.

www.milton2.tv.