The Angry Red Planet
Where have we seen the footage from "UFC Freedom 250" before? Hint: it's not the news.
Why was it so hard to see this for what it is? The imagery isn’t exactly subtle.
Maybe because for a while it looked so much like something else: America’s split-screen tale of two cities as it played throughout the weekend. The Knicks’ glory on Saturday and the UFC’s Vegas ugliness on Sunday stuck the landing of a meta-sports metaphor that keeps on giving: multiculturalism against Christofascism, diversity against white supremacy, heart and teamwork against biohacking, doping, crypto-scams, podcast and tech bros, franchise grifting, and every other ill rightly laid at the feet of the people who decided it’d be cool to desecrate the Lincoln Memorial with a weigh-in for an apparent Aryan Nation’s fight club.
The two events offered competing visions of America, one shaped in NYC’s Mecca of Madison Square Garden, the other transmitted from D.C. and its regime affiliates. At least that’s how I read it.
Then l took another look at the wide angle shots from the White House lawn. You don’t need to see Disclosure Day to clock what’s going on. Seventy years of science fiction films should be enough to help us to recognize the real thing. Things have felt off in this country for a while now. At least now we know what’s going on.
Writing about the White House UFC fights in WaPo, cultural critic Philip Kennicott cites French Situationist Guy Debord, whose 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle warns that “once you’ve arrived in this land of mass mythology, even government becomes incidental to the seduction of entertainment.” This is a slightly less alarming corollary to the “aestheticization of politics” that the German critic Walter Benjamin warned flowed into fascism (shortly before he committed suicide to escape the gestapo).
But I don’t think either point would trouble MAGA that much. Nor would pointing out that, in putting a cage match on the White House lawn, Trump casts himself as Caesar presiding over gladiators. That too would play along with the regime’s narrative, and our octogenarian Caligula clearly finds this comparison flattering.
That’s why I’m suggesting a better reference point for this weekend, and indeed for the past 10 years. Not the French Revolution, the Reagan revolution, the War on Terror, the Obama backlash, or the return of the repressed, but the same story Steven Spielberg riffs on in his 34th film that premiered the same weekend.
So let’s stop trying to pretend this is about Democrats and Republicans, liberals versus conservatives, straights vs. LGBTQs, white people versus everyone else. The evidence is right there in our faces.
It shows that, just a month after January 6, 2021, certain entities set about erasing those memorable scenes from the Capitol building. Buying cable time and social-media platforms, they attempted a Men in Black-style memory purge, then snuck in a political program so obviously antisocial that its candidate disavowed it throughout the campaign, and—once their efforts and cruel fate delivered him to the Oval Office—turned the death ray on one structure after another, in an effort to raze the republic and assume control of planet Earth.
In his Knicks blogging for the NYRB, Jonathan Lethem briefly nodded toward a cosmic truth when he complained about having to use Trump’s name, which “often and increasingly felt like a kind of concession to Trump’s deep urge to colonize and rewrite so much of our reality, to ‘Cover the Earth,’ as in a Sherwin-Williams paint advertisement.” Cover the Earth. Yeah, he’s getting warmer.
Martin Billheimer gets warmer still with his recent post about UFO encounters and aliens abductions. He calls these “the traumas of the damned—the final absurd cry of those who are certain of only two things: that they have been constantly robbed, and that no one has ever taken them seriously.”
The demographic overlap with MAGA voters couldn’t be clearer (as QAnon, Jewish space lasers, and similar preoccupations suggest). Yet normal American politicians still can’t seem to sell the obvious, that these people in D.C. are more than simply what Tim Walz called “weird.”
It was touching to see another near-octogenarian’s vision of these and related issues last night when we saw Disclosure Day (in which a friend of ours plays a nun! Pray for us, Emily!).
I may write more about it later, but it’s a pretty strange movie: alternately ambitious and intellectually lazy, a story of aliens’ presence on Earth that didn't fully scale, jumping from U.S. farmhouses and truck stops to planet Earth largely through a composite of screens of global TV news near the end.
But it was also a Spielberg mood board, which means a prelapsarian American one: shady government contractors, Watergate-style cover-ups, the surveillance state, early Disney music, wonder, enchantment, plus a very secular Jewish impression of Catholicism along with the director’s weakness for vastly superior who are also helpless children.
The main impression it leaves you with is of humanity extending itself, of seeing decent people whose good qualities are enhanced by alien intervention. The most memorable scenes aren’t an SFX-assisted mothership but of a overtly alien-blessed Emily Blunt walking through a crowd of people like Jesus among the lepers, looking deeply into one person’s eyes and soul, then the next, then the next, verbalizing to each just enough of their recent past or troubled history to get them slain by the spirit, dropping their guns, breaking formation, letting her and her friends pass through.
If nothing else, the film chased the after-images from the White House lawn. A spectacle that presented a 250-year legacy of a collective striving as a bunch of mutants trying to choke each other out. An event that attacked any sense of a collective at all.
What did it show instead? Guys with bulging roid-rage eyes scrambling around the landing gear, flexing xenomorphically, firing off transphobic slurs. A flyover by 12 fighter jets in a V-formation that looked like the invaders of Independence Day. And later that night, a B-1 bomber rumbled overhead, further darkening the skies just a bit more.
In both the NBA Championship and Disclosure Day you saw emotions beyond the ones approved for the White House octagon, which were basically rage, fear, euphoria—animal states. But the Knicks and Spielberg seem more or less OK with being human. The invaders of the White House, not so much. Will it be so surprising when they climb back into their ships and fly away?
Even though Wemby’s nickname is the Alien, the Knicks-Spurs series brought forth an overwhelming sense of shared humanity. The Claw, on the other hand…. it does feel like we’ve been colonized by interstellar mopes whose “conquer Earth” homework involved repeated viewings of Idiocracy.
"a 250-year legacy of a collective striving as a bunch of mutants trying to choke each other out." Amen, brother... just imagine what more we can accomplish if we're lucky enough to survive a few more years!