collisionwork | Inspirational Text for the Day #5 (Reply)

The original show I have planned for this August, Spacemen from Space, is a serial play in episodes that parodies the form and content of old movie serials and other Space Opera and Monster movies, primarily from the 1930s and 40s. That, like the use of film noir in World Gone Wrong, is the surface layer, and, if you want to enjoy a pleasant, funny show, all you need look at.

Underneath, as WGW was really a portrait of a contemporary USA where something like the moral system of noir had taken over, so SFS is actually about anti-intellectualism in the USA, in many forms but most specifically in regard to science and scientific thought, using the Space Opera form - where all Science is cool, beautiful, misleading, and impossible - as the happy, pop-culture vessel for some deeper, angrier thoughts.

It's been fun watching and/or rewatching these old serials and movies I grew up loving -- comfort viewing -- which I often haven't seen since childhood. At the same time, as much as I love them, it is impossible to take some of the ideas in them seriously, of course. Unless, that is, you so desperately need to that you can turn off certain centers of judgment in your head. And then the trouble begins.

I've been reading some back entries on Craig Keller's Cinemasparagus site, which I've only occasionally looked at before, but will now be a regular reader of, and was struck by a paragraph and a half in his discussion of an independent film called Indigo, a fiction film about the phenomenon of the supposed "Indigo Children." It's a bit sideways to the main thrust of SFS, but it's somewhere, shall we say, in the spectrum of what I'm going for . . .

Indigo'ism is an ideology or conviction-system (keyword: system) like any other — Christianity, etc. Hence Stephen Simon's Indigo, founded on the ridiculous and assuredly outmoded principle that "the children" are innocent lambs who, withal, can point us in the direction of ego-chloroformed thought, unitchy/ants-less rolls in the grass, and Roubini-appeasing economic safeguards. Or so we'd be led to believe.

It says something about adults so adrift, and so shallow, that they experience repeated, even (let us say) post-

Vinelandian urges to stare backward into the (hindsought) blank slate of childhood, to chase the dream of the Holy Idiot, with the notion it will justify their own blankness of idea-actualization, or of actual ideas, and, in the parlance of regression, synch up with the discovery of some way 'out' from the piles and piles of traumas, disappointments, and outright abuse that they themselves have endured through their largely ineffectual, and/or hair's-breadth-from-abusive, bluebirdbrain'd (jackdraw'n? <— ink enough?) American lives.

And the list of things to be dealt with in Spacemen from Space grows and grows and grows . . .