Anyone who had been following the news will have seen reports of Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza. It’s often difficult to find a concise background for a current news story, but for anyone who is interested, this documentary, “Occupation 101”, effectively conveys the story of Israel and Palestine. It also outlines the seldom-reported funding of the Israeli state and military by the US, and why global powers have turned a blind eye to the injustice suffered by the Palestinian people for so long.
*Spoilers Ahoy! Don’t read this if you haven’t seen the film.*
The Mist Poster
About ten years ago, in the throes of teenagehood, I read Stephen King’s collection of short stories entitled “Skeleton Crew”. His writing is as wonderful as ever, of course, and many of the stories are absolute belters. “The Mist” is the tale that opens the book. A good 150 pages long, it’s actually more of a novella than a short story. It tells the story of a group of small-town residents who find themselves stranded in a supermarket when the eponymous Mist appears, bearing within it all manner of nasty beasties.
Ostensibly, it’s a good boogeyman story, but it’s less about the monsters outside than how the people trapped in the supermarket react to these extraordinary circumstances. The plot focuses particularly on the hero of the story, David Drayton, who must contend with Mrs. Carmody, the local bible-basher who sees the monsters as manifestations of God’s vengeance for Man’s iniquity. In the same vein as Carpenter’s “The Thing” or Boorman’s “Deliverance“, the threatening environment is merely a stage within which the real drama of human conflict is played out.
Frank Darabont’s film version of the book, which was released this year, is actually his third King adaptation, after “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile“. And yet, it’s the first one that could be considered an out-and-out horror. So yes, it’s a big thematic change. But the resulting film suggests that Darabont can do horror. In fact, he absolutely knocked it out of the park.
Firstly, he nails the human conflict perfectly. The roaming camera picks up on stolen glances, casual comments that demonstrate the mounting fear in the crowd. Much of the film’s opening hour revolves around Drayton and his friends’ attempts to convince the others that something is in the Mist. Most react with typical incredulity, and the universal small-town spats and biases rear up; noone wants to be made a fool of.
The Mist
When the threat becomes readily apparent (in a series of brilliantly-staged attack scenes), the crowd begin to give more and more heed to Mrs Carmody. Played superbly by Marcia Gay Harden, she embodies the attractive power of religion purely as a means of rationalizing the unknown. At the outset, most people are laughing at her brooding piousness. But she makes a couple of lucky predictions about people’s deaths and the creatures being “sated” – and suddenly she is God’s unquestioned loudspeaker.
Towards the end of the film, she is holding sermons in the aisles; her followers baying for blood to appease the horrors outside. They find their scapegoat in Wayne Jessup (Samuel Witwer), who admits that the Mist and the monsters have been the result of military research into the existence of parallel dimensions. The were looking for a “window”, he says – but “they opened a door!”, says Carmody. Jessup is promptly thrown outside for the creatures to devour.
At this point, Drayton, his young son, and the few non-Carmodyites left decide to make a break for it. They get into his truck and try to get clear of the mist, though it may already be across the globe, for all they know. They keep going until the fuel in the truck runs out, but are still surrounded by the mist. There seems no end to it. With creatures ululating in the distance, Drayton takes the only action left to him, which the group have agreed upon; he takes a gun and shoots each of them, one by one, including his son (who he had promised that he won’t “let the monsters get him”).
The Mist
However, Drayton has no bullets left with which to kill himself. He stumbles out of his car, screaming for the creatures to come and get him. But instead of a monster, what emerges is a huge military cleanup operation, destroying the Mist and its denizens. Drayton falls to his knees and wails in despair.
Darabont cuts right to the heart of King’s story, and in doing so, takes the film way above and beyond the trappings of a standard creature feature, and mines the true meaning of “horror”. How does he do this?
Firstly, the struggle between religion and rationality is brilliantly played out. M. Night Shyamalan’s film “The Village” explored the need to perpetuate the idea of outside threats to maintain an internal order; allusions to Bush’s “Axis Of Evil” worldview were obvious. However, there’s an implicit suggestion that without the politicians who demonize these perceived threats, people could in fact function in a rational and self-sufficient manner.
“The Mist” dismisses this as wishful thinking. It looks at how, when faced with true terror, most people will willingly sacrifice everything they believe in, just to generate some semblance of social and psychological order. That’s one of the attractions of aggressive religious speech, as exemplified by Mrs Carmody. It breaks the world down into Manichean factions; black and white, good and evil. It offers the simplest type of order, a beacon in the climate of fear.
One scene addresses this issue directly. Drayton’s friend Amanda argues that “People are basically good, decent (….) We’re a civilized society.”
David replies, “Sure. As long as the machines are working and you can dial 911. But you take those things away, you throw people in the dark, you scare the shit out of them, no more rules…. You’ll see how primitive they get.”
Another character continues, “You scare people badly enough, you can get them to do anything. They’ll turn to whoever promises a solution. Or whatever.”
The Torture Of Prometheus
Another standard horror theme that the film addresses brilliantly is that of the Faustian pact. The military, in their search for biological weaponry, have opened the door between two dimensions and caused the creatures of another to spill out into ours. Of course, this idea is nothing new; humans messing with what they don’t fully understand has long been an archetypal fear. Prometheus took fire from the Gods, Victor Frankenstein destroyed God’s position as sole giver of life.
(That fear of the unknown has never left us. The CERN hadron collider at Geneva has recently been the subject of scrutiny, since it was revealed that microscopic black holes could appear during their newest experiments into the origins of the universe, which will recreate the conditions of the Big Bang. A former Nuclear safety officer from Hawaii unsuccessfully filed a suit against the organization in an attempt to stop the experiment from taking place.)
Mrs Camody exploits this fear explicitly when she accuses the military of continuing the long tradition of “…going against the Will of God …. walking on the Moon! Or splitting his atoms! Or stem cells and abortions! Destroying the secrets of life that only God above has any right to!”
Horror has been arguing this since time immemorial; but what is so astonishing about “The Mist” is the feeling of utter finality of what has happened as a result of Man’s hubris. This thing is upon us, and there is little or no explanation as to its origins. In a stunning scene near the film’s end, Drayton, with his son and friends, stop their truck and watch a gargantuan creature stride past. It is impossibly huge, a skyscraper, and its footsteps are like earthquakes. The looks exchanged afterwards say it all. This is ultimate horror; not the loss of civil liberties or even a loved one; but the loss of reality itself. Every book ever written, every discovery ever made, every human advance ever achieved is instantly forfeit, and these monstrosities are all we are left with.
Towards the film’s climax, Darabont uses the funereal “The Host Of Seraphim” by Dead Can Dance as a recurring theme. He himself described its use as “a requiem Mass for the human race”, and the film’s tone captures that perfectly. This isn’t the slow-burn apocalyptica of “Independence Day” or “28 Days Later”, where humanity can and must fight back. This is after the fact; the End of Days has been visited, and that’s that. We’re done, it’s already finished. And in that sense, The Mist is not just scary – it’s also brutally melancholic, something that most horror never achieves.
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Dead Can Dance: “The Host Of Seraphim”
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And then there’s the film’s conclusion (which is actually more downbeat than King’s own ambiguous ending). When Drayton, seemingly left with no other option, shoots his son and friends, he is doing the right thing. He is sparing them a much worse fate at the hands (claws?) of the monsters. But when the military appear, dissipating the Mist, it turns out that all his goodness has been for naught.
In fact, it has been precisely Drayton’s bravery, his virtue, and love for his son that has led them to his situation. Had it not been for him, they would all have stayed at the supermarket and been rescued by now. Mrs Carmody’s followers, for all their shrieking fervour, are now safe and sound. Despite their fundamentalist idiocy, their judgement was correct. Drayton has taken the route of every classic hero; he stayed calm and collected, thought rationally, tried to save as many people as he could, did the right thing at every point. But those choices have led him to voluntarily slaughter four people, including his son. In that single shot of the military emerging from the Mist, Darabont takes this seemingly incomprehensible horror and condenses it into Drayton, creating for him an entirely new nightmare, arguably worse than the one he has just escaped.
(The fact that Darabont handles each of these old horror tropes with such subtlety and dexterity makes it all the more astounding that this is the same guy who directed The Shawshank Redemption. Not only that, but he worked for a year on a script for Indiana Jones 4, but which was rejected by George Lucas and replaced with the work of resounding mediocrity that was eventually released.)
I think that special mention has to be given to actor Thomas Jane (who plays Drayton), as his performance is these final scenes is stunning. His crushing, guttural screams are punctuated with brief moments of jaded, accepting calm, and seem much closer to a state of total despair than any more classically theatrical turn could convey.
It is the introduction of this type of horror in the final minutes that drives the film home and cements its position as an instant classic of the genre; the idea that being a good person and taking the noble path will not always lead to a happy ending. It’s like Lao Tzu says: “Heaven and Earth are cruel; They treat all living things as straw dogs.” No matter how much you believe in your ideals, how noble you consider yourself, it’s all dangerously relative. Because under great duress, even a seemingly infallible moral compass can lead people to do the most terrible, insane things imaginable.
Over the last few days I have been watching a number of documentaries about the US bombing of the Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945. I would recommend watching these to anyone with even a passing interest in history, warfare, or indeed, America’s current foreign policies.
These were absolutely extraordinary events that are without parallel in any other conflict in history. The bombs were intended to deal a massive blow to Japan, thereby ending the conflict with the US in one fell swoop. And that they did; Japan surrendered just six days after the bombings (though many would argue that the brutality of the attack was at least in partial response for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour four years earlier). The US argument was that many more lives were saved by ending the war so quickly than would have been if it had played out in standard theatres of conflict. However, the fact remains that the bomb was for all intents and purposes an utterly indiscriminate attack, and one that targeted innocent civilians: men, women and children.
The Hiroshima bomb exploded over the center of the city. The Nagasaki bomb, over a Catholic area in the suburbs. In both cases, the devastation was unthinkable. At Ground Zero, the heat generated was ten times hotter than that of the Sun. Air was forced away from the explosion, creating winds of 620 mph. Anyone remotely close to the explosion was vaporized instantly. Many who witnessed from farther away had their eyes burned out of their sockets (and many of those people survived). People’s skin was “shredded and hanging off their bodies”, according to witnesses.
This is a re-enactment of the impact of the Hiroshima bomb, from the BBC documentary, “Hiroshima”.
“People with no arms, no legs, their intestines spilling out. Brains spilling out of their crushed skulls…black, carbonized bodies. People in unimaginable states.” Corpses, skeletons and limbs littered the streets. Particularly awful for the survivors was simply the physical pain of the burns from the blast; any exposed skin was scorched horribly, often leaving mortal wounds or lifelong scars.
There was virtually nothing left of these two huge cities. They had been razed to the ground by the atom, decimating their populations.
140,000 were murdered at Hiroshima. 70,000 at Nagasaki.
160,000 more people later died from radiation poisoning, the effects of which were not well known to doctors at the time (many physicians considered it a “mystery fever”, and had no idea how to treat patients succumbing to the horrendous results of exposure to high levels of radiation).
Aside from the human destruction wreaked by the bomb, there were far more terrible possibilities associated with the Manhattan Project (the military project which developed the weapon). There was, for example, a slim chances that the fission reaction would initiate a fusion reaction in nitrogen present in the air, causing a chain reaction that would “ignite the atmosphere” of Earth and destroy the planet. Not only that, but there was also a chance that the bomb could actually cause a crack the crust of the Earth, with unknown consequences.
With all this in mind, it’s interesting to consider how modern culture looks back on these events – which changed the world, and might even have ended it . It seems to me, at least, that their significance is downplayed. For example, people are a lot more generally aware of Auschwitz, Pearl Harbour and 9/11 than they are of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I understand that the geographical and chronological distance plays a big part, but I don’t think that’s the whole story, either.
American foreign policy has reached a point where they feel totally justified in stepping into any country they consider a threat, deposing the problematic ruler and imposing their democratic mores upon the population. This policy must be supported by popular opinion; otherwise the resulting low morale can seep into the military itself. Vietnam was a great example of this effect; protesters across America and the world constantly demanded that the US pull their troops out.
Celebrities like Jane Fonda even went to Vietnam, putting on shows in which they would deride the stupidity of American militarism. Anti-war papers and pamphlets were left in barracks and dropped on cities. And it worked. Direct disobedience, court-marshals and AWOLs became the order of the day. Many GIs became so disillusioned with their seemingly pointless war that towards the end of the conflict, American soldiers were refusing to leave their bunkers altogether. The US army tried to save face by carpet-bombing the region instead.
However, the relatively free media which fed the public at the time is now part of a vastly different informational landscape. War is now portrayed by television channels as a form of entertainment, like sports or drama. Hi-octane, flashy graphics bookend the reports. The information itself is sanitized; we almost never see actual deaths or horrible injuries. We are presented with weapons of war (and all their “stats”) as if they were anything but killing machines. Even the vernacular of conflict is changed; snipers are now “sharpshooters”. Bombings are now “surgical strikes”. Innocent people killed and maimed are now “collateral damage”. All of this is to minimize the viewer’s association between war and actual human suffering. If people actually thought one begat the other, we may even question the usually flimsy premises of war altogether..
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Here is a clip from the film “Militainment Inc”, a film which examines the link between the military and the media.
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… all of which brings me back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think that it is essential that people not simply associate these names with “the events that ended the war”. The fact is that the level of human suffering inflicted upon these people was unimaginable. The military took the most elemental, devastating force known to man and dropped it on two cities filled with innocent people. Not only that, but they had planned to drop even more:
“The United States expected to have another atomic bomb ready for use in the third week of August, with three more in September and a further three in October.” (Wikipedia)
As terrible as 9/11 was, it was nowhere near the utter humanitarian catastrophe that began when America bombed Japan, and that lasted not for one day but for decades, generations. I have a feeling that it will always be remembered with more solemnity and respect than the dropping of the Atomic bombs ever were, at least in Western media. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (in which 370,000 were killed) are still seen as little more than a necessary means to an end, whereas the destruction of the Twin Towers (in which less than 3,000 were killed) was an “unprovoked” terrorist attack that demanded a brutal response – one that began years ago in Afghanistan and continues to this day in Iraq.
In his address to the nation on September 11th 2001, Bush said: “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America.” It harks back to what Roosevelt said after Pearl Harbour: “A date which will live in infamy…. (but) The American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”
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The question is, where do you draw the line between terrorism and “righteous might”?
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Further Viewing:
Documentary – Days That Shook The World: Hiroshima
The Vietnam anti-war movement is detailed in a great documentary, “Sir No Sir”, available to watch here:
Over the last few days I have been watching a number of documentaries about the US bombing of the Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945. I would recommend watching these to anyone with even a passing interest in history, warfare, or indeed, America’s current foreign policies.
bodies. People in unimaginable states.” Corpses, skeletons and limbs littered the streets. Particularly awful for the survivors was simply the physical pain of the burns from the blast; any exposed skin was scorched horribly, often leaving mortal wounds or lifelong scars.
and that lasted not for one day but for decades, generations. I have a feeling that it will always be remembered with more solemnity and respect than the dropping of the Atomic bombs ever were, at least in Western media. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (in which 370,000 were killed) are still seen as little more than a necessary means to an end, whereas the destruction of the Twin Towers (in which less than 3,000 were killed) was an “unprovoked” terrorist attack that demanded a brutal response – one that began years ago in Afghanistan and continues to this day in Iraq.
Shaun O Connor 