lumière des étoiles

Do these genes go with my shoes?
2007-12-16 12:04 p.m.

On Friday night, we saw I Am Legend. You may wonder a number of things regarding that last statement: 1)Why we went to a movie theatre on a Friday night in North Jersey*. 2)Why we went to a movie starring Gettin-Jiggy-Wit-It. 3)Why we went to any opening night movie, especially one starring Jiggy-Wit-It, especially as that fell on a Friday and we live in North Jersey.

Please, refrain from asking why, and just know this: I am a post-apocalyptic story junkie, fascinated with people's musings on what the end of the world will look like. Steve consumes fantasy-horror-science-fiction as if he couldn't survive the day unless he's reading it. Richard Matheson is a very good author, and we like some of the other movies that have been made from his stories (What Dreams May Come, Stir of Echoes).

And our decision to brave the ravages of the ooogleplex bix box store cinema on a Friday night turned out not to be so bad. The crowd and noise gave me only a mild fit of panic and claustrophobia, and Steve's ability to quickly turn on his Superintendent Chalmers voice-and-demeanor came in handy, as he successfully shushed any gabby middle-school kids seated around us.

The film changed a lot from Matheson's novel. Incorporated into this version, like so many other post-apocalyptic stories before it in recent years, is a discussion of genes. It follows a pattern, actually: outbreak+epidemic+genetic immunity=survivor vs. zombies/vampires/infected movie plot. There was no discussion of immunity/outbreak in Matheson's story (it was written in the 1950s), so this is entirely the concept of contemporary filmmakers, and as I said, fits the direction other films of the genre seem to be headed. Like 28 Days Later, Children of Men, etc., the implications are that there's a sort of superior race or class of people, genetically speaking, who are strong enough to survive (if they can fight off the rest of the inferior population who succumbed to the outbreak and became zombies/vampires/infected) and then must save civilization by re-populating the earth with their superior genes.

This idea, I know, is based in Darwinian evolution, and I dig it. I'm a believer, understand survival of the fittest, want children to learn all about Darwin in properly funded and objective science classrooms. But this string of movies and the thematic repetition of the master race thing I'm finding...odd. The social implications are starting to freak me out, actually, as recently, I've also seen a flurry of articles in popular mags (like Newsweek) talking about - and this is their language - "genetic superiority". Do we know enough about genes to understand superiority? Can we make such declarations yet, or is this all a bit preemptive, not to mention dangerous? Should we be using that kind of language, in other words, given our history of using genes and concepts of "good breeding" to mask racism, suspend constitutional rights and justify genocide?

Perhaps I'm over-thinking Jiggy-Wit-It's film. It was done well, and he played crazy (the character is alone for years)better than I thought he would. It's worth some space on your netflix queue. But that it was enjoyable doesn't necessarily offset my feeling that, placed in the context of the other films and our compulsion with genes lately, we're reverting into Rüdin-esque thinking...

Did you happen to see the film? Whadja think?

*Friday night in New Jersey, ooogleplex movie theaters in big box store complexes are the last places one wants to be if one does not like crowds, noise, noisy crowded places, throngs of SUVs noisily crowding parking lots, feeling captive to a barrage of advertising and directives to consume, seeing people line up en masse to consume thousands of junk food calories, etc.