CRACKPOT DOCUMENTARIES FROM THE 70’S AND EARLY 80’S
Hi, i’m Andrew Clarke, the famous but down-on-his-luck actor, and i’m speaking to you in a low, authoritive voice while walking around some scrubland in Southern California. I’m going to tell you about a shocking threat to humanity that could send the world crashing into the dark abyss of silence known as 'extinction'*. A threat so huge, so horrific, the very thought of it may sound ridiculous to you, sitting comfortably, safely at your home, or in your office. But, just imagine for a moment, what if... what if these threats were true? The mainstream of society ignores them, forgets them, hides them away - but is it out of embarrassment...or fear? The warnings are growing, out from the past in the lost prophecies of those they would dismiss as lunatics – psychics, mystics, members of a small film-club that puts on regular nights in London Pubs – but soon the warnings will be so loud even SCIENCE ITSELF must accept the threat of: CRACKPOT DOCUMENTARIES FROM THE 70’S AND EARLY 80’S I’ll be back, talking in a low authoritive voice, towards the end of the movie because the makers only paid me for 1 day of filming.
In the meantime good luck and remember: is it a fool who believes, or a fool who ignores the terrible threat of:
CRACKPOT DOCUMENTARIES FROM THE 70’S AND EARLY 80’S
Yes, so I went to a film-night this week run by The Duke Mitchell Film Club (find them here: http://www.facebook.com/thedukemitchell). They put on regular themed nights of trailers, shorts and features, usually involving rare, forgotten and otherwise decidedly odd films.
This month it was a style of conspiracy and doom-laden pseudo documentaries that had their cinematic hey-day just before the explosion of home viewing with the birth of VHS in the 80’s (coincidence or conspiracy? YOU DECIDE).
These films are glorious.
Here’s a link to the trailer trash section of the night put on by The Duke Mitchell Film Club:
While they covered almost all paranormal subjects from ghosts to ESP to the Bermuda Triangle, they found their strongest subjects in ancient prophecies of impending destruction. Watch the second trailer in that trailer trash clip – the Orson Welles narrated THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH – for a good look at the style.
The feature presentation was THE JUPITER MENACE, a 1982 movie about ancient prophecies warning us about how a planetary alignment will cause unprecedentedly destructive worldwide earthquakes in the year 1983.
Here’s a four minute preview:
The glory lies in how incredibly straight-faced and self-important they are while portending doom in some future year that passed us in the real world by decades ago. The audience on the night was in constant fits of laughter, and a good time was had by all.
THE JUPITER MENACE is a pretty good example of the genre, and benefits from being well paced, having some decent production values and for being a brief 80 minutes long.
The film follows the classic template fairly well. The formula is this:
Introduction By a Famous Actor: This time around it’s George Kennedy, a respected character actor (though admittedly I only know him from AIRPORT 1980, a film marginally more silly than AIRPLANE!). These actors are familiar, respectable, trustworthy, therefore what they say is too, right?
And watch him work it in the above Vimeo clip, despite the thin material. His hitching up of his trousers as he leaves the jeep is just great character work. Alternatively it’s proof that the film-makers did everything in one take. YOU DECIDE.
Completely Earnest Tone: There can be no winking in these movies, or the aura of documentary authority would be lost. If the film invited you to laugh at any point, the spell would be broken.
Melodramatic music helps greatly here. (http://www.allmusic.com/album/jupiter-menace-original-motion-picture-soundtrack-r108658).
Trustworthy Experts: Middle-aged, dignified looking, often priests, doctors or scientists, all talking calmly to prove they are confident and trustworthy. After all, if a doctor says something, it must be true, right?
Watch this clip from THE SILENT REVOLUTION OF TRUTH, a more modern take on these documentaries that is actually painfully dry, but features an amazing extended sequence where an ‘expert’ tries to convince us that a bunch of UFO pictures and film are un-faked and believable. The calmly delivered arguments layered on top of the nakedly terrible footage is a masterclass in brazen straight-faced bullshittery. And yet I dare you not to pause for thought at least some of his assertions.
Here is the link: (it should start at 47 mins and 49 seconds).
Hypnotic suggestion and repetition: Partly this is just about saying ‘earthquakes’ and ‘Jupiter’ so many times the audience starts believing in it. But there is also a lot of statements that start with admitting these theories may seem crazy, or cannot be proven with reason, but then asking the viewer to ‘just imagine’ if they were true, to ‘consider the impossible’, or to ‘face your worst fears’.
Schizophrenic Attitude Towards Science: On the one hand, science is constantly belittled for its dismissal of the ancient prophecies, with plenty of references to disasters destroying the works of modern, scientific man but that were accurately predicted by the wisdom of ancient mystics. But on the other, the films constantly turn to science to add weight and respectability to their claims. The documentaries will constantly cut to beeping instruments or men in lab-coats as a shorthand for ‘real evidence’.
If you want a modern example of this, check out the early seasons of THE X-FILES. They are very anti-reason while dressed up in very pro-scientific clothes.
Re-Enactments: Ah yes, the re-enactments. The kitschiest parts of these films, certainly, but dramatising events, however poorly, gives an audience the sense
memory of those events, thus making them more believable. When a ‘scientist’ refers back to those made up events later in the movie, the audience will use memory rather than reason to recall them, and so they take on the aura of a real, past event.
Towards the beginning of THE JUPITER MENACE, there is a scene where an early Christian missionary talks to some pagans worshipping an idol. The scene ends with the missionary shooting MAGIC LASER BEAMS out of his staff. Godly.
Constant use of terms like ‘immediate’, ‘near future’ or ‘the day after tomorrow’:
The point is to make the threats seem very present but the side effect is, of course, that you can’t disprove things that happen in the future. In the scientific logic of these films, ‘not being able to be disproven’ means ‘absolutely true’.
THE JUPITER MENACE predicts massive earthquakes in 1983, leading to twenty years of worldwide turmoil until there is a ‘pole-shift’ in 2000, leading to an instant-ice age, the sun moving the opposite way across the sky, the Earth ‘falling through space’ and the death of everyone, mostly.
And that’s it. Do these things, and you too can make a documentary predicting the end of the world, perhaps by means of ants, or quantum wobble.
Being evolutionarily advanced space aliens from the year 2012, we can look back and scoff at this seemingly naive fear-mongering, and treat the overly earnest tones of these movies as comedy gold.
But there was something in THE JUPITER MENACE that stopped me laughing, and made me deeply uncomfortable.
Yes, perhaps buried deeply within the of wild ravings of CRACKPOT DOCUMENTARIES FROM THE 70’S AND EARLY 80’S there are genuine, hidden prophecies of imminent doom!
Well, maybe.
Look:
About half-way through, the film shifts from endless cod-science about planetary alignments and vector-graphic simulations of earthquakes, and turns to how people are dealing with this threat of destruction.
We have scenes of survivalists out in the forests of the Ozarks, doing endless military training to defend their lives when society breaks down, and keeping their young children in rundown compounds to keep them away from the decadent influences of the towns. They are ‘on a mission from God’, they say, as they pose in camouflage jackets and rifles.
Then, as proof of the mainstreaming of these beliefs about imminent destruction, the film shows a sermon given by a pastor in a Californian mega-church. This is genuine footage of a real sermon, in a real church. For five long minutes he compares the predictions of one Jesus Christ to recent events: the destruction of temples, famine and starvation, political unrest, business corruption, increased wars and the rumours of wars. On and on, standing high on his pulpit, arms spread wide, using the authority of the God his massive congregation believe in to lend his words the weight of Truth.
Leaving aside the heavy irony of a wealthy, overweight white American male preaching on the horrors of inequality and capitalism, the sequence brings home the unpleasant realities of these pseudo-documentaries.
THE JUPITER MENACE may be peddling nonsense, and the makers may well have been entirely and cynically aware of the emptiness of their claims, but the point is the intended audience is supposed to believe it is real.
My joy at the brazen falsehoods fell away. While the content is false, the fears, ignorance and superstition the films rely on for their power is entirely true.
And the result of these fears is men dressed up like soldiers, hiding their children in military compounds, pointing loaded guns at their neighbours.
THE JUPITER MENACE actually ends with a rousingly apocalyptic quote from Luke’s gospel about destruction, horror, the end of all things and how only looking to the one true God will bring salvation.
The frightening belief underneath all this doom-talk is that not only is this imminent destruction inevitable, it is desirable.
If you watch the trailer trash segment above, you’ll see that the trailers are cut with endless shots of explosions, natural disasters, bombs, devastated cities and human suffering.
Trailers are cut to be as exciting as possible. This is disaster porn.
Right through the bluster of pseudo-science or claims that ‘all religions are false’ (a standard position in these conspiracy theories), is a very reactionary Christian morality – that man is evil, that the world is corrupt and un-saveable, and salvation will only come after death.
Spoilers for a horrible film: In the 2005 film KNOWING, not only does the world explode at the end, but it kind of suggests that man is so corrupt and venal that it is a good thing it explodes. The innocent, pure children are saved by distinctly angelic aliens.
And this desire can also be found both in the belief that the extremely silly THE DA VINCI CODE is based on fact, or that noxious guff like the 9/11 conspiracy movie LOOSE CHANGE speaks the truth.
The point being that, as ridiculous as THE JUPITER MENACE, and all of its genre, is, it speaks to a fearful superstitious need that is very much real and surrounds us every day.
So if you see anyone, Religious or Athiest, left or right, talking of collapse or destruction with the tiny glint in their eye that suggests they might be excited by the idea you can look at THE JUPITER MENACE and perhaps not find their arguments so persuasive anymore.
Hi, i’m Andrew Clarke, the famous but down-on-his-luck actor, and i’m back from my hotel and speaking in a low, authoritive voice as we come to the end of our journey
I’d like to thank The Duke Mitchell Film Club for putting on an excellent night of deeply bizarre film. They have a Trailer Trash night coming up on Feb 5th, dedicated to showing only the rarest, oddest and hopefully most depraved trailers known to man, and their next regular night will be dedicated to... the Bollywood Bruce Lee.
If you live in London, I highly recommend you check these nights out. Find out all the information here: http://www.facebook.com/thedukemitchell
And so I leave you with this: I won a DVD just for answering a question about UFOs at their night, which made me very happy. Now I am writing a blog post all about how great their night is.
Coincidence or conspiracy: YOU DECIDE.
* actual quote from THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH
