Is Gotham’s venality, then, a class issue? It seems so, until the Catwoman warns wealthy playboy Bruce Wayne, “There’s a storm coming. The rabble-rousing villain of “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012) empties Gotham’s prisons and inspires the newly freed riffraff, the 99%, to rise up against the rich. On the pop culture front, in the same way that invaders from outer space were eager to make off with Earth’s oil and uranium, or just breathe our fresh air, so they too couldn’t wait to avail themselves of the pleasures of being human, as they did in Robert Heinlein’s 1951 novel “Puppet Masters,” translated to the screen in movies like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956, 1978).įor awhile, the trilogy seems to blame corruption that gnaws at the moral fiber of Gotham on the poor. And who can blame them? Simply put, humans were the be all and end all of creation. Thus, the creatures that inhabit our myths, fantasies and fairy tales, from Pinocchio to the Tin Woodman of Oz, all aspired to be human. Ever since Darwin, humans have been regarded as the ripest fruit of evolution. Science, meanwhile, freeing humans from religious dogma, affirmed human exceptionalism. It was seen by an estimated 9 million people. It opened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955 and toured the world. A collection of photographs assembled by Edward Steichen called “The Family of Man,” was a testimony to our common humanity that the Nazis had done so much to destroy. But the good guys, after all, had won the war and America, virtually the last nation standing, rode the crest of a worldwide wave of heady optimism, the result of which were new institutions like the United Nations.
#THE MONSTER WITHIN US FULL#
If ever there was a time to question the humanity of humans, it was after World War II, when the full scope of Nazi atrocities was first revealed. What happened to that lush, green planet? Humans happened. If escape is not an option, people plunder other worlds for ore and minerals, bringing them back home where they sell them for a tidy profit, as they do in the “Alien” franchise and “Avatar” (2009). Humans from the year 2149, when the planet is beggared by too many people and too little food, choked by pollution and starved of natural resources, transport themselves to a Jurassic world, where they find that living cheek by jowl with raptors is preferable to their life in the future. If characters can’t put some physical distance between themselves and Earth, in shows like Steven Spielberg’s “Terra Nova” (2011) they jump back in time, to an era before everything went sideways. It turns out that humans have made a mess of the planet, and it’s our turn to hightail it to other worlds.Ī year later in “Interstellar” (2014), Stephen Hawking’s remark, “Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space,” has sent Matthew McConaughey on a lengthy journey through space in search of a new home for humans escaping a planet-wide blight. Fortunately, the show was dropped before they could implement their plan. They wanted what we had, and didn’t hesitate to help themselves, like the ocean suckers in 2011’s “Battle Los Angeles.” In NBC’s “The Event” (2010-11), the advanced inhabitants of a dying civilization plot to exterminate the human race to make room for their entire population of undocumented aliens pouring through one of those ubiquitous portals that have turned our world into Swiss cheese.
Once upon a time, Earth was the envy of the universe, a lush green world that was repeatedly set upon by aliens from “shithole” planets who had carelessly burned through their raw materials and were trying to help themselves to ours.
#THE MONSTER WITHIN US SERIAL#
As a character in AMC’s long-running zombie series, “The Walking Dead,” put it, “All this time running from walkers, you forget what people do.”įirst on the bill of attainder is that people are planetary litterers, serial polluters, pissers in their own pond. They have been denouncing humans for some time.
On reflection, if you’ve been watching our movies and TV, there was nothing surprising about it. Shocked, columnist Charles Blow wondered in the New York Times, “… how are there so many Americans willing to accept Trump’s corrosion of our culture and our discourse, to gleefully follow him as he plumbs the depths …” When President Trump mocked Christine Blasey Ford at a rally in Mississippi earlier this month, the crowd, which presumably included rape victims, as well as mothers, fathers and other relatives of rape victims, roared its approval and greeted his parody of her testimony with laughter.
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