This week I’ve been reading David J. Skal’s fantastically
interesting book “The Monster Show” which examines the cultural history of
horror. Although I’ve always known that films generally express social
anxieties, after reading this book it has renewed my fervor for viewing movies
through this lens of interpreting them as reflections of the climate of their
era.
I just watched the 1990 classic Tremors and despite the fact that it’s a film starring Kevin Bacon
and features Reba McEntire for god sake, I can’t help but notice some of the
blatant cultural undertones which speak (albeit probably unintentionally) to
the collective warfare consciousness of the early 90s in America. The film basically
coincides with the US march into the Gulf War and upon consideration there are
some intriguing elements to this flick which present an apt projection of the
fears inculcating society. I can’t say that I’m an expert in the Gulf War, but
from what little I do know, I find that the symbolically loaded connection is pretty
fascinating.
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| Burt from Tremors |
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| Our heroic soldiers standing a militant watch |
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| Actual Gulf War soldiers |
Tremors is
entirely set in a desert location, a familiar landscape to the soldiers in the
Middle East. Our heroes are the hyper-American, beer drinking, working-class,
cowboy hat-wearing, pick up truck driving everymen to which a high percentage
of US soldiers could surely relate. Their southern accents echo that of a
certain President spearheading the Gulf War. These characters are semioticaly
coded as the all-American good-guy soldiers on duty fighting the loathsome
unknown hellions.
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| The team's make-shift tank riding through the desert in Tremors |
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| Actual tank riding through the desert in the Gulf War |
Their weapons of choice are significantly war-related.
Machine guns, explosives, bombs, make-shift tanks… all of these are employed to
fight off the enemies. With a healthy dose of hootin’ and hollerin’ and yeehaws
thrown in for good measure. The monsters in Tremors
are the rulers of the underground. When these monsters, these terrifying
‘others’ are exploded, they reveal a bloody, fleshy mess – chillingly
humanlike, which surely would be a recognized sight on the battlefield. Their
territory is what lies beneath the surface of the earth – an interesting link
to the Middle Eastern domination of oil , reading as an ideological battle of
good (US army) vs evil (Middle Eastern foreigners).
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| Explosion in the desert in Tremors |
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| Explosion in the desert in the Gulf War |
I’m barely scratching the surface here (I haven’t even
touched upon the whole creepy Freudian penetrating phallic symbol and vagina
dentata imagery… not gonna go there) but I must say that I love the fact that
even the most asinine of films can be interpreted as subtextually commenting on
culture. One of the reasons why I love
movies, horror movies in particular, is that cinema is an amazing medium for
not only creating a fun sense of fear, but also as a way of exploring our
communal fears and anxieties society has as a whole. Another thing that I think society in the 90s
should have feared was Kevin Bacon’s horrendous hairstyle in that film. Yamma
hamma.
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| That is a seriously bad hair style |
