Regimented bodies

Venom (d. Ruben Fleischer)

Interesting that two movies, Annihilation and Venom, that came out in 2018 have similar imageries of the white human body absorbing aliens without interrupting the integrity of their human physical form, at least outwardly. In the former film, everyone else not white is dispatched to the grave while the sole white heterosexual couple manage to survive the weird alien dance. In the latter, the same thing happens where both white hetero coupling survive the alien symbiote that possesses them, temporarily for the female, while, notably, the supposedly blindly casted but obviously racialized body of the Elon Musk figure is burned alive, meaning to say that figure could not achieve the symbiosis of its white counterpart. A PG-rated movie without blood splatter, another notable aspect is the racialized violence that opens the movie where the Malaysian men in the night market are shown to be pierced, meaning to say bodily broken, unlike he goons in the SF setting who are just clobbered. There is some awareness of race in the movie as the alien inside the elderly Asian woman for some reason knows that she probably won’t be able to get into the US, so it selects the body of a young blonde child. It’s indicative that the alien knows this tiny yet useful bit of info. It’s also a San Fran with just one homeless person and the only Asian person featured is an immigrant rather than an American-born one. The only Latino is a security guard though his kid is going off to the Ivies. No, the POCs in the film are at least a generation behind compared to those who actually populate the Bay Area. It’s telling that a white loser can become a hero with some black power added to his system. Yet another film about multiculturalism pretending to be a sci-fi movie.

#2018 #December