Horror in Space: Critical Essays on a Film Subgenre by Michele Brittany

Author:Michele Brittany
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2017-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

A Romantic Moon

At numerous junctures, the plot of Moon hangs on the question of which Bell, of all the possible Bells, is the Bell that has been associated with previous scenes and sequences. The viewer finds him or herself considering the likelihood of apparent inconsistencies and outrageous coincidental interactions, only to, in the final moments, come to understand that the reported sequence of events is indeed perfectly logical. The Bells form a collective perspective, and the viewer’s enjoyment of the film arises, in part, from his or her ability to parse that perspective into its constituent elements. From this, then, it is reasonable to argue that Moon is very much a film about the intersection of perspective and identity. As such, it can be generally associated with the ancient tradition of what Northrop Frye calls the sentimental romance.2 However, in terms of the subject at hand—space horror—the value of this association exceeds the themes of perspective and identity because, according to Frye, the sentimental romance has a particular set of practices for staging the experience of horror—in space or anywhere. A consideration of these practices can inform a viewing of Moon. In particular, it can illuminate just what it is that is so scary about this tale. As we shall see, the real horror in Moon can be understood as the revelation of a botched romantic reunion, one in which our hero, Sam Bell, races into the arms of a supposedly loving world, one that—tragically—has transformed into a post-humanist wasteland in his absence.

Frye’s argument extends from a particular conception of literature—what it is, where it comes from, and how it is expressed in societies. He argues that every human society has a “verbal culture, in which fictions or stories have a prominent place.”3 He identifies the fictions that are most important to a society as myths, and the stories of marginal significance as folk tales. While these categories may have distinct social values, Frye contends that they are often essentially similar in their organization. One contrast he provides to understand these categorical distinctions is between the Bible in the Western tradition and the science fiction serials of the mid 1950s: these are subjects with vastly dissimilar levels of cultural authority, even though they depend on certain common narrative features. He explores these connections under the notion that there are only four narrative movements in myth or folktale, and that they relate to movements between the realms of heaven, earth, and an under or night world. He writes, “All stories in literature are complications of, or metaphorical derivations from, these four narrative radicals.”4 He then notes that in the case of myths and folktales that regardless of their cultural authority they share a common concern with impossible people, places, or things—which he calls “anti-representational” subjects5 because their very nature defies literal representation. Moreover, he notes that, in myths and stories alike, these subjects progress through their worlds under coincidental, rather than strictly cause and effect, encounters. For Frye, the persistence of

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