Communion with Nature in The Grey and Godzilla

By Vincent M. Gaine

“The arrogance of men is thinking nature is in their control and not the other way around. Let them fight.”

Ishiro Serizawa

[SPOILERS]

The Grey (Joe Carnahan, 2011) and Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014) are both stories of conflict between human and the Other, and the Other takes the form of dangerous animals, wolves in The Grey and prehistoric monsters in Godzilla. Throughout both films, humans are in danger and both films maintain a consistent mood of dread and menace. However, closer inspection reveals an underlying interest in communion between humanity and nature, although it takes different forms in the two films.

     

The Grey, based on a short story Ghost Walker by Ian MacKenzie Jeffers, is explicitly philosophical. It concerns a group of plane crash survivors who are marooned in the Arctic wilderness and must contend with killer wolves. The protagonist, John Ottway, was hired by the oil company that employs all the men to protect oil workers against wolf attack, so he understands the animals as well as how to survive in the wilderness. Zoologically, the film is pure fiction, as the wolves that appear are far larger than any actual wolf and their behaviour as described by Ottway does not correspond with any actual research into wolves – specifically, wolves tend to avoid humans and attacks are extremely rare. This inaccuracy led to criticisms against the film for a misleading and therefore damaging depiction of wolves, an interesting view but not one I agree with. Wolves have been persecuted and exterminated for centuries, mainly because of competition for food, to protect livestock and for “sport”. One more fictional representation is not likely to change that. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the wolves in The Grey do not really represent wolves – they represent untamed, unmitigated nature, a manifestation of nature’s savagery and indifference that is more killable (and therefore useful for narratives) than an avalanche or a snowstorm. Faced with the power of nature, the men are far removed from civilisation and must become as savage as their surroundings in order to survive.

In Godzilla, nature invades civilisation as monsters stomp through cities as if they were tall grass, demonstrating humanity’s insignificance. Military firepower is of little consequence, including nuclear weapons - both Godzilla and the MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) barely notice bullets and explosive shells. Their regard for humans is similar to that of our own regard for ants – they barely notice us. Whereas previous Godzilla films featured monsters destroying cities (usually Tokyo) because they were there, or because the monsters were controlled by aliens bent on conquest, in Edwards’ film the destruction is incidental. While the monsters are clearly dangerous and destructive, they are not vicious or malevolent – they are simply doing what they do. There is a mating ritual between the two MUTOs that recalls a scene in Edwards’ debut, the low budget romance/science fiction/road movie Monsters, which features an eerily beautiful sequence between two alien creatures. Despite the gulf between their production contexts, Godzilla echoes the director’s earlier effort in its dwarfing of humanity within landscapes, much as The Grey takes place almost entirely in external locations.

The cinematography of both films includes multiple wide shots of natural landscapes, often placing humans and animals within them. Godzilla begins and ends with images of water – the title sequence features imitation stock footage of 1950s nuclear tests in the South Pacific, with huge reptilian scales breaking the surface of the sea. In the final shot, Godzilla plunges back into the ocean, returning to his habitat having restored the balance of nature. While the viewer could be left with a sense of triumph and awe at Godzilla’s besting of the MUTOs, this final image is remarkably tranquil, suggesting that ferocity and serenity are part of the same balance. In much the same way, humanity is a part of nature, as evidenced by the continued mise-en-scene that incorporates Godzilla and the humans in the same wide shots. The MUTO are not included in these shots, ensuring that they remain Other and threatening. Similarly, the wolves of The Grey are hardly ever seen clearly, mostly appearing as dark shapes or glowing eyes. But the men of The Grey cannot escape this creeping presence, and over the course of the film are gradually integrated into their environment.

The Grey, dir. Joe Carnahan (2011)

This integration is violent and enforced in The Grey, as the group of survivors are steadily picked off. Ottway does what he can to keep them alive: making fire, seeking out water and defensible positions as well as improvising weapons, but it proves futile as he is unable to keep any of his companions alive. The Grey presents nature as irresistible and all consuming, and death is a constant presence that must be acknowledged. This is the film’s existential conceit, as the survivors of the crash each encounter death in their own way. For most of the film, this involves a desperate fight to stay alive, but at the beginning and towards the end, death is embraced as the natural conclusion of life. In an early scene, before the plane crash, Ottway almost kills himself with his own rifle but is interrupted. His motivation is essentially grief – he lost his wife and would rather die than continue living without her. Later, when only Ottway and two other survivors, Diaz and Henrick, are left, Diaz opts to die rather than push on. He decides that his life has been meaningless and he would rather die in the wilderness than go back to his worthless life. Diaz finds meaning in death, crucially because he is in a natural environment. He tells Ottway and Henrick that he will never live so well, never taste his own existence so acutely, as he has after fighting for their lives so hard, and he will never be anywhere better than the Alaskan mountains. The film shows us nature at its most beautiful and terrible, and Diaz communes with it for literally the rest of his life. As Diaz is left alone, the sound of wolves approaching offscreen is heard, but the viewer does not see them because it would be unnecessary. Whereas the other men died fighting nature, Diaz simply accepts nature, and we see his communion in a single shot in which we share his view of the mountains.

Shortly after this, Henrick drowns and Ottway is left alone. Furious at the unfairness and indifference of the world, he bellows at God:

Do something. Do something. You phony prick fraudulent motherfucker. Do something! Come on! Prove it! Fuck faith! Earn it! Show me something real! I need it now. Not later. Now! Show me and I'll believe in you until the day I die. I swear. I'm calling on you. I'm calling on you!

[receives no response]

Fuck it. I'll do it myself.

That is the view of the world in The Grey – do it yourself or something else will do it to you. In the final scene, Ottway faces the wolf pack alpha and readies himself for a final battle. Much as a wolf is armed with teeth and claws, Ottway tapes a knife and broken bottles to his hands, making himself into as savage a beast as that which confronts him. His communion with nature is a savage one, all pretence of civilisation or humanity stripped away. Significantly, before the fight he abandons the wallets of the men who have died, that he carried in the vain hope that he could tell the victims’ families what happened. Hope is lost, all that remains is the Wild, a wild that Ottway willingly embraces.

This embrace is the film’s communion with nature – from nature we come and to it we must return. The final responses of Ottway and Diaz are quite literally poetic, encapsulated by Dylan Thomas’ poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”. Diaz does exactly what Thomas urged against, going gentle into the good night, while Ottway rages against the dying of the light. Of course, poetry runs through the film as well, Ottway repeating a poem that his father wrote:

Once more into the fray

Into the last good fight I'll ever know

Live and die on this day

Live and die on this day.

Is it a good fight? It is at best a fight to stay alive, and to fight for life is to live and die, experience everything, feel life in the moments of death. Ultimately it does not matter – nature will consume all within it whatever we do. There is purity in Ottway’s final declaration of existence. He is nothing but a desire to survive, and whether he survives or not (the film is ambiguous in this respect), he embraces the savagery of the world without hesitation. Communion with nature can be a savage business, but The Grey presents it in a way that is honest in its brutality.

Godzilla, dir. Gareth Edwards (2014)

Godzilla is far gentler in its communion with nature, and cynically this can be credited to the film’s status as a major commercial product by its studio. It is available to a wider cinema audience than The Grey and remains open for a sequel (which has been green lit). But despite commercial concerns, Godzilla’s interest in communion with nature is consistent. Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (a direct homage to a character in the original) warns Admiral William Stenz: “The arrogance of men is thinking nature is in their control and not the other way around” and that, rather than trying to intervene in the course of natural events by attacking Godzilla and the MUTO, the best thing for the humans to do is “Let them fight”. Godzilla demonstrates that nature is beyond humans, and the best we can do is try to survive it, much like the men in The Grey and, indeed, any animal. Godzilla himself is closely associated with elemental forces, such as a great sea swell that surges through Honolulu and heralds his arrival. He seems of the earth, or more precisely of the ocean – great, mysterious and powerful. Very little is seen of Godzilla in the first hour, until he confronts the male MUTO at Honolulu Airport, after his arrival flooded most of the city. This further associates him with the forces of nature, which largely remain invisible except to sophisticated equipment. We see the results of nature, such as rising sea levels, changes in weather patterns, tremors in the earth and volcanic ash and lava, but the forces which cause these changes are generally hidden, such as increased CO2 in the atmosphere, changes in ocean salinity, and a giant monster that normally lives on the sea bed.

The contrast between human insignificance and nature’s power reaches its climax in San Francisco, where the MUTO attempt to breed. Their spawn will doom for humanity and so must be stopped, but initially the military effort is misguided. Serizawa urges against the use of nuclear weapons, and the audience are allied with him because it has been made clear that the monsters feed off radiation so assurances that the blast itself will kill them are unconvincing. The film quickly proves the scientists correct as the female MUTO uses the bomb to fertilise herself while it ticks down towards detonation, which will kill thousands. But before her eggs can hatch, both the US military and Godzilla intervene. The joint effort is incidental – Godzilla attacks the MUTO because they are competition for him while a bomb disposal unit attempts to disarm the warhead. But the incidental nature of this joint effort is crucial. Godzilla and the MUTOs fight because that it is what nature intends for them, and the humans’ contribution is to remove the intrusion of the nuke. Furthermore, while Godzilla fights the MUTO, the lead human character, Lieutenant Ford Brody, destroys the eggs with fire. The technology of the nuclear warhead is out of place in Nature’s Battle of the Titans, but fire is primal and basic, Ford completing the film’s movement back to nature. Across the film, there is a steady reduction of technology – the MUTO can release an electromagnetic pulse as a weapon that renders all electronics useless. To protect the nuke against this pulse, a mechanical timer is used, which also proves to be a mistake as Ford’s disposal team cannot disarm it in time. But with the bomb being carried away from a populated area, Ford resorts to the elemental force of fire to protect his species and fight his enemy, which proves effective as the eggs are engulfed in flame.

Godzilla’s most important moment of communion comes shortly after the destruction of the eggs, as Godzilla defeats and kills the male MUTO. Exhausted by the battle, the giant monster collapses into the rubble and is swallowed by billowing clouds of dust. Ford witnesses this collapse in awe, much like the audience. But before Godzilla disappears, he appears to see Ford and the two share a look and have a moment. It is brief but significant, Ford and Godzilla seeming to recognise their kindred spirits, their shared involvement in the current situation. There is communion between man and monster, not because Ford has tried to get closer but because nature has brought them together. Nature’s power and might is emphasised throughout Godzilla, but this moment highlights that humans are not separate from nature, but as much a part of it as these great creatures.

The communion reappears (again incidentally) at the film’s climax, as Ford is trying to get the nuke away from San Francisco by boat. The female MUTO seems to attack him as if in revenge for the destruction of her offspring, but Godzilla saves Ford by attacking and finally killing the female. Godzilla collapses and appears to have died, but then rises and departs, TV reports describing him as “Savior of Our City?” As he leaves San Francisco, he causes no further destruction, wide shots capturing him as well as the people he has saved, albeit incidentally, before he plunges back into the sea as mentioned earlier.

Godzilla demonstrates that nature is beyond human control, and the best we can do is try to survive it. In this regard, the film illustrates communion and, like The Grey, a journey to a place outside of normal human experience. Stenz explains to his troops that no one is prepared for the situation they face, before Ford and his team perform a halo jump from high above the city. The jump sequence is both terrible and beautiful, and uses the musical piece Gyorgy Ligeti's Requiem, a piece also used in key sequences of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Much as Stanley Kubrick’s film presented travelling “beyond the infinite”, so Edwards’ film presents travelling outside of human experience. Rather than travelling forward to a further stage of human evolution, Ford and his team are travelling backwards, literally away from human technology as they jump out of a plane into a battleground between forces of nature. Similarly, technology in The Grey fails to protect its characters as a plane crashes, forcing the men to rejoin nature however hard they fight it. Both films demand reconnection with nature and, while it may not be pretty, it is inevitable and a powerful reminder that, indeed, nature is never in our control.

Godzilla, dir. Gareth Edwards (2014)

With The Power To Frame The World Comes Great Responsibility: Gareth Edwards' Monsters

Cynicism, Freedom, and the (Neo-Liberal) Polis

by Phil Hutchinson

Monsters, dir. Gareth Edwards (2010)

For a low-budget sci-fi film by an unknown director, Gareth Edwards’ 2010 film Monsters received a considerable amount of pre-release publicity in the UK, publicity that mainly focussed on the (relatively) small budget and Edwards’ impressive ability to multitask. Edwards had previously worked as a digital visual effects designer and Monsters was his first feature as director and screenwriter. Seemingly undaunted by embarking on his first stint in the director’s chair, Edwards also took on the task of designing the digital visual effects on a consumer PC located in his bedroom.

By current Hollywood standard, Monsters was produced on a tiny budget, employing both standard guerrilla film-making techniques, such as making use of members of the public to play roles in the film while on location, and innovative techniques available to Edwards because of his CGI skills and the advances in consumer PC processing power. This meant that while on location Edwards could shoot scenes in the borrowed premises of his amateur actors and then render those ‘sets’ very cost-effectively in post-production back home in his bedroom on his own PC.

This would not have been a money-saving strategy if Edwards had been obliged to employ digital video effects designers to do this work in a post-production studio. His ability to carry-out this work at home on his own consumer-class PC transformed a hitherto costly and therefore luxury procedure into a contemporary addition to the guerrilla film-maker’s lexicon of techniques. So, for example, in one pivotal scene in the film, we see the central characters, Andrew and Sam, in a ‘ticket office’, which was in reality a café. The ‘actor’ who in the film sells the ticket to Sam and Andrew is the café proprietor, the ‘ticket office’ in which the scene takes place is the café digitally transformed in post-production (the menu on the wall is transformed in to a map of the “infected zone”).

These stories are interesting and serve to make Edwards’ achievement as a first-time writer-director even more impressive; they might even ultimately serve to give him a status and mystique comparable to that enjoyed by Werner Herzog, based on the parallels between the story of Edwards making Monsters and that of the young Werner Herzog travelling to Peru with a stolen camera to make Aguirre: The Wrath of God (on which, more later). However, I would like here to shift the emphasis away from Edwards’ practical and innovative resourcefulness and his standing as the person who has given us cause to reassess our ideas about guerrilla film making. My argument in what follows is that Monsters stands as an example of film as political philosophy. 

I shall suggest ways in which Edwards’ film can be read as a philosophical meditation on, and maybe even a therapeutic dialogue exploring, the extent to which a certain conception of freedom, which is currently predominant, becomes, via cynicism, a destructive un-freedom; where, in the name of freedom, individuals and their societies imprison themselves, both psychologically and practically. Furthermore, I want to suggest that we find expressed in the film the thought that achieving liberation from such a destructive conception of freedom-as-non-freedom is only genuinely possible politically, through institutionalised, organised collective action.

The point I want to make is that the film (rather brutally it transpires) offers the attentive viewer the thought that individual realisation of, and attempted flight from, such a destructive conception of un-freedom and politics is simply not secure without societal and institutional transformation. The film implicitly contains an argument against ‘voluntaryism’. Voluntaryism is the thought that it is enough merely for individuals to change their behaviour to institute sustainable political change and this thought, I will argue, is little more than a politico-conceptual artefact of the descent into cynicism that the film helps one work through. Moreover, it is, arguably, the somewhat brutal rejection of voluntaryism that serves to frame the whole film.

Before I commence, a word of caution: In what follows I bring out some of the threads that make up the film by way of example. I believe the film has many such threads, and there is more in it than it is possible for me to cover here in this paper. Repeated viewings pay dividends.

Cynics and Cynicism

The Ancient Cynics—I’m thinking particularly of Diogenes of Synope here—can seem to our eyes a somewhat eccentric bunch. For, concerned to roll-back the extent to which social norms might serve as constraints on the freedom of individuals to act in accordance with their true nature, and thus, for the Cynics, in their own self-interest, they often engaged in some rather extreme—to both our eyes and those of their contemporaries—public acts. Diogenes of Synope, was wont to stand in the Athenian market place masturbating. Why he did so is the subject of some disagreement, but that he did so as a statement seems, so far as we can tell from such a historical distance, true.

Diogenes of Synope is something of an Ancient ideologue, who in place of the written word engaged in public acts, designed to both shock and unsettle his peers with a view to dislodging them from their complacent acceptance of constraints upon their individual freedom. When I write ‘unsettle’, I don’t mean simply that he set out to emotionally unsettle them (though he does seem to have achieved that), I mean, rather, that he meant to unsettle their latent assumptions about the extent or degree of their own freedom. He wanted to show them that their shock, their disgust and their condemnation of his actions were themselves expressive of the extent to which they were unwitting captives of their culture’s norms (or rules). We might say their disgust evidenced that aspect of their self that is the encultured self (what in Aristotelian terms we might call their second nature).

Diogenes of Synope

Diogenes wanted to bring about their realisation that their disgust was not correctly identified as originating in his behaviour (his public masturbation) but rather in the cultural norms that they had internalised, and which thereby acted as constraints. It is these social norms, these culturally-given rules, that led Diogenes’ peers to be afflicted by disgust on being confronted by his behaviour. Such social norms, such culturally-bestowed, internalised rules, it is proposed, are to be seen as constraints just as are more obvious and more widely discussed practical constraints, both physical (walls, railings) and juridical (laws enforced by the state apparatus, such as the police, penal system, immigration authorities and courts).

For the Cynics, any human being will need to overcome the fetters bestowed by these enculturated social norms if they are to achieve genuine liberty. For, even when one’s polis is structured according to liberal principles, institutionally-enshrining individual liberty, individuals can still suffer under the liberty-constraining tyranny of the (extra-political) culturally-bestowed rules of behaviour, that lead one to both reign-in one’s own desire to pursue self-interest (Diogenes of Synope had overcome this), and to react negatively to others pursuing theirs (the citizens of Athens had failed to overcome this, hence their reaction to Diogenes’ public masturbation).

The contemporary use of the word ‘cynic’ and ‘cynical’ might be thought to have departed somewhat from what knowledge of its etymology tells us. It has evolved, it seems. But let us think for a moment about how the word is now used. A ‘cynic’ in contemporary parlance is one who stands at distance from the norms of his own culture (and possibly those of other cultures too), and treats with a degree of scepticism those norms blindly followed his peers. Furthermore, he sees those social norms which demand of him that he act in the service of things beyond self-interest as illegitimate impositions. Because, for the cynic, it is self-interest that motivates individuals, and therefore culturally-bestowed norms that demand individuals to act in anything other than self-interest are no more than illegitimate impositions.

But cynicism goes further than this, because the cynic is also committed to the belief that others act in their own self-interest, irrespective of whether they claim to do otherwise. The cynic assumes that appearances and claims notwithstanding, the world is populated by self-interested individuals. The cynic takes him- or herself to be a seer, seeing through the artifice of altruism, of demands for and expectations of compassion and so on. Alternatively, or in addition, the cynic might see themselves as having greater courage; refusing to comfort themselves with self-serving myths of the virtuous person; the cynic has the courage to see things as they really are: all is self-interest.

I want to emphasise the aspect of cynicism which is related to ideas of freedom. My thought is that a politics in which pure negative liberty—freedom conceived purely in terms of individuals being free from constraints on their ability to do as they choose—is the primary goal, axiom even, where the political community is structured in the service of pure negative liberty only, is a context in which cynicism is likely to flourish. Put another way, a society in which all talk of freedom is framed in terms of the removal of constraints (pure negative freedom), and not as putting into place enabling conditions (positive freedom), is a society where it is possible to see such things as duty to another, which might flow from love, or care, or compassion, as impositions, as trammels on one’s freedom. A preoccupation with pure negative liberty militates against loving, caring and being compassionate. It will militate against trusting that others might, in a non-self-interested way, hold the wellbeing of their peers, both familiars and strangers, as important; it has a corrosive effect on trust. Indeed, cynicism which might flow from an obsession with negative liberty ultimately militates against acknowledging the humanity of others.

*********************

Monsters

The film opens with on-screen text informing the viewer that six years ago a returning NASA space probe, having collected samples of extra-terrestrial life, broke-up on re-entry over Mexico. Since then, the extra-terrestrials have become established in Northern Mexico: the Infected Zone. We later learn more about these creatures: they appear like giant (five storeys high and more) members of the cephalopod family, though unlike cephalopods we are familiar with on Earth, these are not restricted to marine existence. These extra-terrestrial cephalopods seem as much at home on land as in water.


Following the explanatory text providing the viewer with the backstory, the film commences with a military-shot night-sight scene, involving some army vehicles carrying US soldiers. As the scene begins we hear one of the soldiers whistling Ride of the Valkyries, and remarking that it is his “theme tune”. This is one of a few references to 'Apocalypse Now' in the film (the film contains numerous references to classic river journey films: Apocalypse Now & Aguirre: The Wrath of God being the most obvious). As the night-sight scene unfolds chaos ensues: there is much shouting, screaming, and gunfire; we briefly glimpse a large cephalopod-like creature; the camera shakes and frightened soldiers and civilians are running in and out of shot, as the camera person also seems to be running. We then cut abruptly to an aerial shot, which we come to realize is a point-of-view shot from a fighter jet, which targets and then launches missiles at the creature. The viewer is left unclear as to what ultimately has taken place in all the chaos.

Opening scene of Monsters, dir. Gareth Edwards (2010)

The film cuts immediately to a daylight scene of relative calm, in which we are properly introduced to one of the two main protagonists: Andrew Calder. As the film introduces us to him, Andrew is making his way through a Mexican city as a passenger on a motorcycle taxi; shortly thereafter he is climbing across a bombsite, stills camera in-hand, asking those clearing the site for directions to the hospital. We are provided glimpses of parts of a dead creature, which serves to convey to the viewer the mundanity, the everydayness, of the sight (and site) of both a bombsite and a dead extra-terrestrial for those present: the partially visible carcass seems of no interest to any of those who populate this scene. We later learn that Andrew has been tasked with escorting back to the USA the daughter, Sam, of the owner of the magazine for which he works as photographer. He undertakes the task under protest.

Sam is engaged to be married and has come to Mexico for reasons not specified, though one is led to believe that she is there to ‘clear her head’. While she explicitly professes to be ready for marriage, there are numerous clues that testify to her having reservations. She is at the hospital as an out-patient, having sprained her wrist, and it is for this reason that Andrew has been tasked with escorting her back to the USA. The question as to why one man (her father) feels the need to task another man (his employee) to escort her home is, I suggest, relevant.

'Sam and Andrew', Monsters, dir. Gareth Edwards (2010)

What we learn is that to travel from where they are in Mexico back to the USA entails crossing or bypassing the fenced-off Infected Zone, a zone which has been relinquished to the extra-terrestrial cephalopods. We further learn that the creatures are migratory, and every year, for certain months of the year, the creatures migrate down the rivers and out to sea. The Mexicans seem to have grown accustomed and to accept living alongside the creatures. Throughout the course of the film we see graffiti depicting the creatures. It pays the viewer to pay close attention to this graffiti. 

Graffiti in Monsters, dir. Gareth Edwards (2010)

Andrew and Sam travel to a ‘border’ town, located on the edge of the Infected Zone, with a view to securing passage to the US. They reach the town the day before the official start of the migratory season and at huge cost purchase a ticket for Sam to take the last boat to the US, which leaves the following morning. However, following a night together drinking Tequila, Sam retires to her room alone, while Andrew, having failed in his attempt to persuade Sam to sleep with him, continues to drink, gets drunk and takes a stranger back to his hotel room. The next morning the stranger steals their passports and Sam’s ticket. Sam misses the last boat.

Andrew and Sam return to the travel agent and, using Sam’s engagement ring, pay to be illegally ‘trafficked’ by river and land through the Infected Zone. In the course of their journey we see overgrown, abandoned and in many cases burnt- and bombed-out buildings (such as hotels). Where humans have fled the Infected Zone, nature is reclaiming the environment. As noted above, there are strong visual allusions and even direct references to classic river journey films. In such films the journeys serve a number of intersecting purposes: they serve to show us that in so much that rivers can be dangerous and unpredictable, people are fragile and not in control of, but often subject to, their natural environment.

The 'infected zone', Monsters, dir. Gareth Edwards (2010)

Moreover, nature is at one and the same time beautiful and brutally morally indifferent; if one expects it to be otherwise one has confused or collapsed the aesthetic and the ethical.  In a more figurative sense, the river journey serves as a metaphor for a psychic, emotional or existential journey: e.g. the encroachment of nature on the human world represents the encroachment of the emotional on the rational, as emotions become excessive emotions and take hold, ultimately consuming the rational capacities of those who have descended into psychological pathology. The obvious allusions Edwards furnishes us with are to Herzog’s magisterial and profound Aguirre: Wrath of God and to Coppola’s now almost mythical Apocalypse Now, and the documentary of its filming: Hearts of Darkness.  (I’d be happy to be corrected, but I believe maybe much less so to The African Queen…) I want to suggest that it is important to appreciate the way in which Edwards works in parallel with these two classic river journey films and the way in which he subverts crucial elements of them (and that of their source of inspiration in Joseph Conrad’s original novel, Heart of Darkness).

Nature in Monsters, dir. Gareth Edwards (2010)

It transpires then that the wall has failed, and as Sam and Andrew enter the US and head North they pass through a recently-bombed and deserted US town, before arriving at an abandoned gas station after nightfall. From here Andrew telephones for rescue and they each then telephone loved ones—Andrew calls his estranged 6 year old son, who, we learn earlier in the film, does not know that Andrew is his father; Sam calls her fiancé. As they end their calls, their transformation is almost complete: Andrew allows himself to be emotional and slides to the ground, finally acknowledging the emotional significance of his estrangement from a son who is not allowed to know that Andrew is his father. Sam finally acknowledges to herself that she doesn’t want to marry.

As Andrew and Sam await the rescue, two creatures converge on the gas station and seem to engage in some sort of greeting, maybe even copulation. Sam and Andrew watch, awestruck, and then they kiss. The moment is shattered by the arrival of their military ‘rescue’ team.

Gas-station scene in Monsters, dir. Gareth Edwards (2010)

Ultimately, Sam and Andrew ‘complete’ their journey, in that they make it back to the USA. But their journey has changed them both. By the time they arrive at the US border, to be confronted by a huge newly-constructed border wall, constructed in an attempt to keep out or stop the further encroachment of the creatures, they are no longer sure they want to go home. To their eyes, home no longer looks so appealing or welcoming.

It is here then that one sees Edwards’ subversion of the standard river journey film conclusion/terminus: in Edwards’ hands the heart of darkness is not the heart of nature, where 'nature' is to be understood as the contrast class of 'urban', nor is the heart of darkness the heart of the jungle, where civilization is absent, as in both Apocalypse Now and Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Rather, in Edwards’ hands, our protagonists’ return to the ‘civilization’ they have been journeying toward transpires to be an arrival at a new perspective on that ‘civilization’. From the perspective afforded them by their experiences, by their existential growth in the course of their journey, they now see the extent to which what they had taken to be civilization has in fact negated itself in and through its obsession with waging war on nature. Arriving home is to enter the heart of darkness.

Andrew’s Journey

One narrative thread that is central to the philosophy of Monsters is the story of Andrew’s existential blossoming. Andrew, as the film unfolds, transforms from one who cynically views others as objects and baggage, (albeit possibly a strategy developed as a psychological defence mechanism, developed so to allow him to carry-out his job as a ‘war’ photographer and so as to allow him to distance himself emotionally from the enforced estrangement from his son) to a person who allows himself to become emotionally engaged and acknowledge the humanity of others and the claim they exercise on him in virtue of the humanity they share with him.

This blossoming, this existential journey is evidenced through the stages flagged in the film: at the outset, Sam only registers on Andrew’s radar as an imposition; he only agrees to escort her to the border under protest and because he is instructed to do so by his employer, who is also Sam’s father. At this stage it is clear that, for Andrew, Sam registers as little more than extra baggage that he has not only been forced to carry but also go out of his way to deliver. She serves as no more than a restriction on his freedom. Andrew’s persona is one of the jovial cynic, the “slacker”, as that term came to be used to refer to the “Generation Xers”. In the course of the film, he makes a number of remarks in an attempt to justify this outlook, remarks which appeal to the way the world really is. For example, in response to Sam’s remark that as a 'war' photographer he is profiting from death, he responds: “You mean like a Doctor?”

As their journey progresses, Sam starts to figure as more than simply baggage and becomes for him an object of sexual desire. This first becomes apparent at the border town as they spend the evening together drinking and eating. Where hitherto he had shown scant interest in Sam, he now employs his own brand of ‘slacker’ charm. Nevertheless, at this stage, though Sam has transformed for Andrew from nothing more than an inconvenient imposition she still remains simply an object, only now one of desire. At this point, there is for the viewer, if not for Andrew, a deeper connection developing: their rapport.

The following morning marks the next stage in Andrew’s transformation. On seeing Sam’s reaction to his sleeping with someone else, he finds himself wanting to mitigate that reaction. This triggers his growing awareness of his emergent non-instrumental attachment to her. Their brief conversation at the quayside is multi-layered: Andrew: “what are YOU doing Sam?” “WHAT are YOU doing?” He still can’t talk about his own feelings. His cynicism is so deeply-rooted that when it, his cynicism, begins to whither he externalises his own transformation.

His transformation thus first appears through his probing questions about her emotions, though crucially asked in a manner that would enable him to disavow that aspect of their meaning and intent. He asks Sam what she is doing in a manner that suggests to those viewing that he is asking about the life choice she is making in leaving him there to return to get married, while at the same time he does so in a manner that he can deny or disavow, by saying he was simply asking her why she ran from his room or why she is stood talking to him on the quayside rather than boarding the boat. Asking the question in this way, leaving its point and therefore meaning hovering, allows Andrew to deny to himself that he has grown emotionally attached to Sam. It allows him plausible deniability. 

Andrew's question is, however, one that can only be asked by someone interested in the thoughts of his interlocutor. Sam has thus transformed in Andrew’s eyes from imposition on his freedom to pursue his goals, through mere object of desire, to a person about whose emotions he is concerned. But right now, he is in a state of denial about this. This marks the point at which we might say of Andrew that he hands back his membership of the Cynic movement, albeit of the contemporary slacker, Gen X, variety. Andrew begins to care for Sam, and as a consequence grow, himself, as a human being. This budding non-instrumental attachment slowly blossoms as he (while retaining his distinctive persona) comes to care more and more, through exhibiting the ordinary virtues of care, compassion and love. As the story unfolds, so does Andrew’s new-found humanity, opening out to include others too.

Further viewings of the film with this narrative thread in mind pay dividends. One sees much further evidence for Andrew’s existential transformation away from his cynicism. In one of the most significant scenes in this regard, we see Andrew confronted by the body of a recently killed child. What is obvious to the viewer is that he doesn’t photograph the child’s body, what is more important is that he seeks to give her dignity in death by covering her corpse with his coat and placing a flower on it. The decision to take time to provide dignity for the dead is a mark of a non-instrumental humane attitude, an attitude that sees dignity as both of importance and irreducible to the interests of the living, those who survive the dead. Where we would have expected the Andrew to whom we were introduced at the opening of the film to have photographed the child, now Andrew not only chooses not to do so, but he unpacks his camera bag to find something beyond the photographic equipment, a coat, with which to cover the body and provide the child dignity in death. 

This scene, Andrew’s actions here, partially echoes themes found in the writing of J.M. Coetzee; I’m thinking in particular of Disgrace, and the protagonist’s partial redemption through his volunteer work preparing unwanted euthanized dogs for cremation. The point is that there is in such actions a recognition that virtue transcends, reaches beyond, the interests of individuals. In such actions we gesture toward our commitment to the tacit belief that norms of behavior that emerge from virtuous action transcend and are irreducible to the interests of individuals and/or to contractual requirements, whether tacit or explicit. To paraphrase the Bengali hummanist poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, the good life is not achieved through attachment and possessions but in giving-up oneself to ideas that transcend one's interests and one's own individual life. (One might contrast this here to the world as suggested by the Social Contract tradition, whereby ethico-political concerns are justified in terms of individuals having entered into a social contract).

The final example of Andrew’s transformation that I will discuss is that of the way in which he relates to his relationship with his son. As the viewer learns about this in the film, Andrew’s discussion of it is detached and sometimes flippant. In one scene, while he and Sam are on a river boat, he tells her the story of how a year after a brief sexual encounter he received a telephone call in which he was informed that he had a son, that he could know his son, but that his son could not know that Andrew was his father. Andrew tells the story in his now-familiar detached slacker style, and as he sees that the story has darkened the mood (Sam looks moved to sadness by the story) he immediately tries to lighten the mood by asking a deliberately trivial, flippant question, which has obvious connotations: “so.., you got any pets?”

In the gas station scenes at the end of the film we see that the way he relates to his relationship with his son has changed. Rather than engaging in various distancing strategies, Andrew now allows himself to react emotionally to the telephone conversation with his son. He feels, in an emotionally engaged way, his loss of fatherhood. He slides to the ground crying. This is the final increment in the film’s depiction of Andrew’s existential blossoming. Now he can stop viewing the creatures as objects for filmic consumption—instrumentally. He can stop seeing the world through the distorting lens of cynicism, whereby all demands, including emotional ones arising from his own emotions, are seen as potential fetters on one’s freedom. Just as his tying of his persona to the lens of his camera made him see that and those—people, dead bodies, destruction and the creatures—on whom he gazed as instruments in the service of his own self-interest, the lens provided by his cynicism afforded him the justification for his instrumentalism.

Monsters, dir. Gareth Edwards (2010)

The World Viewed, The World Framed

Andrew then symbolises us, and his camera lens symbolises the lens through which we view the world. Like the way in which Andrew’s question to Sam on the quayside, discussed above, hovered between a literal and figurative interpretation, Edwards’ film is interested in the distancing effect of lenses in both a literal and figurative sense. In the literal sense, Monsters is about the lens(es) directed by film makers like Edwards (and Coppola and Herzog, though there is, I believe, reason to think Edwards had in mind Spielberg as director of War of the Worlds too), through which film viewers come to view so much of their world, and maybe by extension the all-pervasive lens of the corporate media. The world thus viewed is a world both framed for one and viewed at distance. We all-too-often meet our world ready-framed and at distance. Monsters is then a cautionary tale for film viewers and a morality tale for directors. For film viewers, the suggestion is that we be cognisant of the distorting influence of the framing of the world we view on film. For directors, Monsters is about the responsibility that comes with directing the lens: with the power to frame the world comes great responsibility.


The preoccupation with the lens that I am suggesting is evident in Monsters also operates figuratively such that the film is also concerned to explore the way in which our world is framed by our values: a commitment to cynicism frames the world in a particular way. Seen through the lens of cynicism, others, one’s own emotional attachments, and the virtues of care, compassion, honesty, integrity and love, will inevitably be seen as impositions, as alien constraints on one’s freedom to do as one desires.


Ironically, this is one of the insights of the Ancient Cynics, the extent to which one’s second nature, one’s encultured self, was so natural as to be not even noticed by most (non-cynics). Here we are turning this claim of the Ancient Cynics on its head: cynicism is not freedom from enculturation but just one among a number of ethics. For the Ancient Cynics it was a self-consciously arrived at ethic, a philosophy for life, like Stoicism that came later. For contemporary variants, I am suggesting, it is often a spontaneously arrived at philosophy, or ethic, arrived at owing to a distorted or partial conception of freedom. We might therefore suggest that in contrast, seen through the lens of what we might call the ethic of compassion (the ethical life that involves tutelage in and establishment of an environment in which the ordinary virtues can flourish), the world, one’s emotional being, and others will look very different.

What Are You Doing?

There is then a question for the viewer, who took themselves to see a sci-fi/monster film. What are YOU doing? For, crucially, the film (Andrew) talks of the lack of demand for, the market non-viability of, good news pics and the thirst for bad news pics. Is this a comment on blockbuster culture, cinema audiences, and their desire for drama, for shock and awe? The film is called 'Monsters', but it is testing you: who/what are the monsters? Do you offer the same answer to this question at the end of the film, as you would have done at the start, and one third of the way through? Do you want a meditation on how we should try to live alongside those we have left stranded in our home? Or did you want a CGI prize fight? Did you come expecting War of the Worlds? Edwards’ lens frames things differently.


Unlike the framing of the mechanical, though in other respects not un-cephalopod-like, alien invaders in Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds, the extra-terrestrial cephalopods in Monstersare here because of our actions. Spielberg (and Wells) makes things very straightforward: the extra-terrestrials are hidden inside their machines of destruction, their Weapons of Mass Destruction, and they are overtly aggressive and murderous. But even having noted this, is there, as Wells and Spielberg implicitly suggest through their framing of the story, simply no prospect of diplomacy: the extra-terrestrials appear and fire on us, we engage them militarily. The fight is to the death.

Edwards frames things a little differently in his film: we’re (we have become, in the militarised, neo-liberal west) monsters, such that it never occurs to us that having kidnapped and stranded these creatures here, far away from the home from which we snatched them, we should try to live alongside them, try to accommodate them, welcome them, show them compassion. Instead, we would rather wage war so that we can go on living our lives just the same as we did before. We treat them like intruders; we see the ways in which they go about their lives not as interesting, not as something we ought to try to understand and respect, not as something we should maybe even support, but as something threatening and disruptive of our existing and settled way of life, and as thus something to be controlled with violence. Yes, they are very different to us, but should we relate to them as Spielberg has humanity relating to the mechanised cephalopod-like extra-terrestrials in his War of the Worlds?

After their night out at the ‘border’ town drinking tequila, as Sam stands at the doorway to her hotel room, a drunk Andrew says to her, “did you know that Dolphins can hold their breath for 12 minutes? They’re mammals.” Sam responds, “does that mean they have belly buttons”. That small section of dialogue resonates throughout the remainder of the film: the creatures are different, they are not humanoid, they are not even mammalian in appearance. Rather like the extra-terrestrials in the film District 9, the extent to which the extra-terrestrials in Monsters are depicted as alien to us is in their likeness to species with which we are familiar but which are, in evolutionary terms, distant from us.

In District 9 the extra-terrestrials are insect- or crustacean-like, derogatively referred to by the human characters as the “the prawns”. In both films, therefore, the alienating force of their appearance is achieved through their similarity to species on different branches of the evolutionary tree. Our alienation from them is not a fact of nature, but a result of our tendency to (mis-)read moral and political significance into biological classifications. Having taken the journey into the heart of darkness that Monsters invites us to take, we come to realise that the responsibility for finding the creatures alien lies with us. It fails to occur to us that they might be worthy of trying to communicate with (the creatures in the film are capable of and attempt communication), worthy of living alongside (the creatures live peacefully alongside humans until they come under attack), worthy of being seen as more than baggage to be shed (they are beings). This failure is our responsibility. The creatures are different, yes, and maybe they don’t have bellybuttons, but that biological difference does not amount to an observation that leads automatically to, that entails, an assumption about their moral status: that assumption is lens-dependent. That assumption results from a particular frame being in place. A politics freed of the ordinary virtues, where cynicism leads us to see the virtues as impediments to freedom, becomes a politics of fear, control and aggression. All becomes alien.

[SPOILER]

The Beginning is the End 

The film begins with a military-shot night-sight scene, involving some army vehicles carrying US soldiers. As the scene begins we hear one of the soldiers whistling 'Ride of the Valkyries', and remarking that it is his “theme tune”. As the night-sight scene unfolds chaos ensues: there is much shouting, screaming, and gunfire; we briefly glimpse a large cephalopod-like creature; the camera shakes and  frightened soldiers and civilians are running in and out of shot, as the camera person also seems to be running. We then cut abruptly to an aerial shot, which we come to realize is a point-of-view shot from a fighter jet, that targets and then launches missiles at the creature. The people, we now know having seen the film once already, include Andrew and Sam. The soldiers are their ‘rescuers’. As the strike comes in on the creature the military vehicle is hit, Sam appears to have been killed and Andrew is carrying her body screaming for help. Their transformation counted for little. This is the heart of darkness, and it is indifferent to the changes undergone by two individuals. Just as nature is brutally morally indifferent in those classic heart of darkness river journey films Monsters inherits, here it is our culture that has become brutally morally indifferent and voluntarily freeing ourselves as individuals of the (second) nature this culture has bestowed on us through enculturation is not enough. We must work to transform the culture to one that pursues harmony rather than war and dominion, to one that promotes the incorporation of the ordinary virtues in to one’s character rather than encourages one to see virtue as constraint.