Reflecting America in alien eyes

[NoraReed]

Okay, so I've been thinking about something, and I think maybe you guys could help me come up with either some coherent examples of it or some counter-examples. Or something. I might want to write an essay on this at some point.

So I was playing Mass Effect and hearing all the explanations of what humans are like in it, the stereotypes about humans, and how we're seen as sort of violent and fiercely independent. Indiscriminitely shooting wildlife, for example, can provoke a reaction from alien companions saying "this is why humans have such a violent reputation".

And I was sort of thinking that "humans", there, probably means "Americans". The aliens are pointing out things that dominate our understanding of our (American) culture-- independence, a dependence on violence over other means, etc. I'm a bit reminded of http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/08/30/guest-post-why-do-the-japanese-draw-themselves-as-white/ this essay on how we view cartoon characters as white when they lack defining racial characteristics, and it seems like this is sort of a version of that only drawn on humanity as a whole-- when we create a blank human, we make them, by default, American, and when we make a blank human culture, that too is American. (I vaguely recall an Escape Pod story some time ago where humans exported TV and movies and nothing else, which is even more blatant. Anyone recall which one that was? I think it was back in the double-digits.)

This is also somewhat related to my recent observation while watching Torchwood that I was a little bit surprised when the aliens landed and wanted to talk to the PM of Britain instead of the President, and then I stopped myself and was like, why are we so important? Why would they talk to us, and not, say, the United Nations, or the leaders of all the nuclear superpowers at once, or the largest countries by land, or the one that had the most of some arbitrary alien-defined important resource? What if the aliens are really primarily interested in moist towelettes, wouldn't they then go to the countries that produced the most of those? (Sorry, tangent.)

I guess I'm just interested in the way that science fiction writers (or artists, or creators, or whatever medium we're talking about) reflect humanity in their work, and whether the way that aliens talk about us reflect the way that we think about "us", with "us" being the dominant culture of wherever we live. Are there any examples of sci-fi from the east, for example, that show humans as a whole as having particularly eastern dominant traits? (We might need some cultural translation here.)

So, um. Discuss?

[Scattercat]

I just remember how, in the old Godzilla movies, the Japan of the Future was naturally the leader of the whole world more or less without much question or explanation, which is why the alien monsters always tried to take it over.

[Sgarre1]

Some of this in movies, though, is just expediency.  Aliens land in and attack, say, England because, well, it's an English movie.  There were movies that acknowledged the rest of the world for global scale events, usually through a quick cut-away to some stock footage of the United Nations (or a quick tour of various cities, with title cards, as in DESTROY ALL MONSTERS* or INDEPENDENCE DAY), but in the end the action is going to center around where the main character lives, and the main character is almost certainly going to live in the country of film production (for ease and budget of setting, if nothing else).

I'm not sure I agree with "when we create a blank human, we make them, by default, American, and when we make a blank human culture, that too is American.", especially if the definition of America is being "violent and independently minded" - and I'm going with film depictions here.  The majority of economies in the world are based on Capitalism (in one form or another), and America is seen as the pinnacle of Capitalism, so there's a generalization right there that seems to say "America = the world" but doesn't, really.  Almost all, if not all, cultures, have armies and police forces, fights wars and experience crime. Almost all cultures, if not all cultures (my Anthropology studies peeking through) have a somewhat xenophobic or at least "wary of the different" element, from basic primate programming if nothing else.  Any number of Italian, British and Japanese sci-fi movies hinge on the idea of "violent humans react badly to alien encounter" - heck, all of Gerry Anderson's CAPTAIN SCARLET series is based on it, as is the conclusions of CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED, and probably one of the takes of QUATERMAS, off the top of my head.  It's a cultural staple from THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (and parodied effectively in MARS ATTACKS), if not earlier, and evolves out of the realization of what the cold-war mindset was doing to us.  To put it another way, if you remade E.T. in South Africa or Jamaica, I don't imagine the movie still isn't going to feature the authorities coming after E.T., whether they be a government or local police force.  In fact, the reverse trope is easily as prevalent, the "well-meaning scientist" who's always blurting out "we have to try to communicate with them", even as the thing is eating his skin.

As for "how the aliens talk about us" - maybe there's something like what you're looking for in Stanislaw Lem, perhaps?  or ALIEN NATION (movie and series)?  I can't imagine, in globe-spanning stories or scenarios in which we're privy to the alien's thoughts, that there aren't any "here they have many things and consume more and more of them, while here they have almost nothing and can barely survive making all the things for the ones who consume more and more" type overview scenes. ("But I don't own slaves" she says and The Doctor says "No, but who makes your clothes?").  On a smaller, regional scale, you get into the almost unavoidable possibility of charges of propaganda - a scenario in which aliens achieve contact in the Middle East and offer up an alien-eye's view of the conflict is going to probably be picked apart by both sides of that conflict, regardless of how nuanced a depiction it makes.  And if it's so generalized that no one complains, then we're back to the default setting of "barbarous and paranoid", which I don't really see as a default American setting (and believe me, there's no knee-jerk nationalism at all behind that statement, as I'm the first to think the worst about us).

I guess I see what your saying in the idea of say "aliens arrive in Sweden" and the Swedes don't immediately blow them away, but a lot of that has to do with the particular scenario as sketched by the creator. The "boat people" aliens of ALIEN NATION end up becoming third-class citizens in America (I can't recall if they were in any other countries), which says something about that particular view of American culture, I guess.  THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH might be another avenue to explore, or BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET.

And on that note, let's exit on Bowie:

"There's a starman waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds
There's a starman waiting in the sky
He's told us not to blow it
Cause he knows it's all worthwhile
He told me:
Let the children lose it
Let the children use it
Let all the children boogie"

*As a quick aside, here's the really interesting, non-alien thing about GODZILLA films - while arising out a symbolic embodiment of the atom bomb, Godzilla and all the other daikaiju end up also generating a series of films where Japan - which in the real world wasn't allowed to have a standing army after WWII - *has* a standing army equipped with high-tech beam-weapons and the like.  So the Japanese audiences were allowed to get pumped up (Akira Ifukube's  great music for these films were almost all marches) in scenes with a mighty force rallying against the invader... even though said mighty force was invariably crushed and trod upon and blasted out of the sky.  Interesting psychology there.

[Scattercat]

I think one factor that will be impossible to separate from the others is that movies (and by extension, most all pop culture) primarily originated in the United States.  That is, to a large extent, the US invented pop culture entertainment, and it's still more or less our number one export and the basis on which all other movie industries ended up basing themselves.  Ditto for music and even literature, although books might be going back to Britain rather than the US. 

Obviously, it's not that everyone slavishly imitates the US, but I think a lot of subtle influences just in the basic structure of narrative will be difficult to tease out as saying something about the US versus humanity in general.

(And Japan's weird military attitude could and has filled dozens of books by now.)

[Gamercow]

Money.  This is the reason, combined with Scattercat's. 

Most media is designed to sell to the most people possible, and the best way to do that is to have the target audience be the ones who spend the most money, and/or can identify with the characters and/or locations in the piece being sold.  Americans are consumers par excellence, and as such, we are easy targets. 

[stePH]

The "boat people" aliens of ALIEN NATION end up becoming third-class citizens in America (I can't recall if they were in any other countries), which says something about that particular view of American culture, I guess.  

That one, I can explain: the ship crash-landed in the Mohave desert in California, and most of the occupants were absorbed into the population of greater Los Angeles.

[kibitzer]

I think one factor that will be impossible to separate from the others is that movies (and by extension, most all pop culture) primarily originated in the United States.  That is, to a large extent, the US invented pop culture entertainment, and it's still more or less our number one export and the basis on which all other movie industries ended up basing themselves.  Ditto for music and even literature, although books might be going back to Britain rather than the US.

Geez. Not sure I'd go with that statement.

[Scattercat]

Notice that I didn't say the US makes the best (or even very good) pop culture entertainment.  We just set the tone for a lot of it via Hollywood.

[eytanz]

I don't think it's controversial that the US dominated world pop culture for many years. Invented? That's not so clear.

ETA: formatting for emphasis

[Scattercat]

Hollywood is pretty much the epicenter of the whole mess.  I'm not making a specific factual claim here; I have no idea who actually physically invented movies.  But Hollywood and by extension America has had a deathgrip on the modern form of storytelling more or less since its inception.  It's only recently that other countries have even had a shot at getting international attention for their own stuff.

[eytanz]

Hollywood is pretty much the epicenter of the whole mess.  I'm not making a specific factual claim here; I have no idea who actually physically invented movies.  But Hollywood and by extension America has had a deathgrip on the modern form of storytelling more or less since its inception.  It's only recently that other countries have even had a shot at getting international attention for their own stuff.

As someone who grew up outside the English speaking world, I can tell you that that's not true - we had a lot of European cinema, especially French and Italian, in Israel. Indeed, I believe that in most of the previous century, European cinema was more widely viewed in the non-English speaking world that US cinema was. It's only really in the eighties that the balance shifted towards American pop culture, and what drove that was the spread of television, not movies.

[Scattercat]

Fair enough, I suppose.  I just look at how much of what is out there that seems to be driven by the same crap I see back here, and I'm reluctant to attribute that to everyone being stupid all at the same time.

[Scattercat]

Oddly, I tend to equate television and movies, even though the medium is very different and generally serves different masters.  I wonder why they're so blended in my mind.

[CryptoMe]

Hollywood is pretty much the epicenter of the whole mess.  I'm not making a specific factual claim here; I have no idea who actually physically invented movies.  But Hollywood and by extension America has had a deathgrip on the modern form of storytelling more or less since its inception.  It's only recently that other countries have even had a shot at getting international attention for their own stuff.

As someone who grew up outside the English speaking world, I can tell you that that's not true - we had a lot of European cinema, especially French and Italian, in Israel. Indeed, I believe that in most of the previous century, European cinema was more widely viewed in the non-English speaking world that US cinema was. It's only really in the eighties that the balance shifted towards American pop culture, and what drove that was the spread of television, not movies.

And let's not forget Bollywood....

[DKT]

Nora, have you seen District 9? That strikes me as a very foreign/non-Hollywood film (that despite taht, did well in America) that also paints a pretty bleak picture of humanity's failings.

I do find it interesting that aliens in American movies always seek out the U.S. powers, and U.K. films might seek out the British P.M., etc...but I don't think that's anything new. That's just playing to the home crowd, and this is the entertainment business.

That said, you might want to check out K. Tempest Bradford's "Different Day," from JJA's Federations anthology. It's an interesting flash fiction story about how when the aliens arrive, they don't just go to the U.S. President, or the British P.M., as a whole group. Instead the different alien subgroups allied themselves with all the different world powers. It's a quick read if you find it in a bookstore or library, and offers an interesting perspective.

[Sgarre1]

Or "Lollywood", for that matter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollywood

[Gamercow]

Nora, have you seen District 9? That strikes me as a very foreign/non-Hollywood film (that despite taht, did well in America) that also paints a pretty bleak picture of humanity's failings.

I think this all comes back to the "They're just like us", because District 9 was a definite commentary on the slum life in South Africa.  The aliens in any media tend to mimic what the author knows, unless a distinct effort is made to avoid this.

[eytanz]

Or "Lollywood", for that matter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollywood

Actually, I think that Lollywood and Bollywood are more in line of what Scattercat was saying - they've existed in some form for decades within their countries, but have really gotten international traction only relatively recently compared to Hollywood. I may be wrong here, of course; but my point above was that French and Italian cinema (and perhaps Japanese cinema as well, though it didn't really reach Israel much) had a reach that equalled or surpassed Hollywood in its influence on large chunks of the world from more or less the very beginning of cinema.

[Sgarre1]

Oh yeah - I haven't been commenting because your previous post summed up my initial response to Scattercat's statement  - my impression from reading film criticism from other countries over the years is that while America flooded the foreign market with sensationalistic films in the 80's (roughly) - which were very popular, previous to that most other countries had a fairly balanced mix of movies from other countries (some level of multi-lingualism probably helped in many countries) including American films, whereas in America, such materials either got shunted to "art houses" (and thus could be ignored) or got dubbed, and thus immediately attained a "lesser" status (not to say dubbing didn't happen in other countries, of course).  If I had to pick a country in which America pop-culture (re: film) probably had an equal footing with the national product, it would be Japan, which always had a full-on love affair with American pop-culture.

But all of this didn't seem worth posting as we've strayed far away from the initial post intention - in fact, my initial response re-movie plots was just to say that some of those depictions of aliens and their "takes" on human culture/choices of who to contact, were driven less by actual authorial story commentary intention and more by production realities.  I'd assume that people much more familiar with actual sci-fi fiction would pick up the thread.