STEVEN SPIELBERG – MEN IN BLACK
TRILOGY – 2012 (1997-2002-2012)
The general idea is a prodigy of simplicity: to turn a whole
set of successful science-fiction dramas or romances or adventures into a
full-blown comedy and make all these frightening things that make you dream of
a world that will never exist like in Star Wars or in Star Trek hilariously
funny so that the audience just never stops laughing. Steven Spielberg adds to
that a direct allusion to Back to the future but within the science fiction
space adventure genre and it becomes phony more than funny, with me grown up meeting
me four years old.
The first two films are really funny because they remain
within one layer of time. The third one becomes something different, nostalgic,
sentimental even, and that breaks the fun to turn it into fear: the fear the
negated past or the traumatized past may turn the future which is our present
into a nightmare, a PTSS case of time travel trauma, something like PTTTSS,
Post Time Travel Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Welcome to the asylum for deeply
disturbed minds and brains.
The most attractive and fascinating aspect is the phenomenal
palette and variety of extra-terrestrials you are navigating among. Obviously
all of them are just the figment of the imaginations of a band of deranged
probably young people generally called artists though there might be a few
older ones who are more perverse than deranged, or perversely corrugated. You
cannot find them serious. They are all of them just impossible mixtures of all
kinds of living gadgets, except in the last one where one of them is well
hidden in a human body and is deadly frightening, not funny at all.
The next element that is striking is the role of the Black
man in black, just recruited in the first film, trained and excellently
performing and competent in the second film and growing melancholy and
sentimental in the last film when he sees himself when he was four, when his
father was killed under his adult eyes and when with a magic flash the little
boy will only remember his father was a hero. And of course it is his partner
who erases the truth from the little boy’s memory, the partner he meets again
in the present some seconds later at the end of the film. That episode brings
the saga to an end because the fun has been drunk right down to the tea leaves
at the bottom of the cup.
We all, absolutely all of us, have rebuilt the image of the father
we had, in pink or in black, in celestial blue or in fiery red, but what we
remember of our father is nothing but a mental reconstruction, a Lego
reconstruction. All the pieces are true, real and absolutely precise, but the
pieces have been reassembled in any creative or traumatic way and that’s the
image we have of the man we call our father. That’s normal. That’s natural.
That’s the truth if there is one under the sun. Our memory is selective. In
fact, we remember everything without fault but our conscious memory is the Lego
construction I have just spoken of.
You may have in some drawer, or in your pocket, something that
is attached to your father in a way or another and that reached you when you were
three or four. This thing is attached to you and you are attached to it in an
unbreakable union and yet you don’t really know why you’re attached to it and
it is attached to you. It might be a sentence that comes back regularly and
that makes you sick with fear or happy with instant bliss, and yet you do not
know where it comes from, except that it comes from a long, long time ago and
you still have it in your mind because it was a positive or negative trauma,
and, mind you, there are positive happy traumas that have the same power as
negative ones, except that this power makes you excel and not run away and hide
under your bed.
If you want to have some fun in an environment of extraterrestrial
monsters, with some dangerous situations and beings and many happy just in time
right in time epiphanies and salvations, you have to let yourself slide into
these hairy and over-twisted stories and forget about your bills and the fact
that the heating does not work. You’ll survive since these crazy characters did
survive.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:40 PM