Review of Super 8 (2011) by Shiira — 02 Aug 2011

She believes him, but it's a school day, so "no T.V." the mother warns Elliott, who fakes being sick in order to stay home with the alien. Unbeknownst to Mary, whose husband had just recently bailed on her and their three children for sunny Mexico and another woman, there exists a subconscious reason as to why she forbids her son from watching television.

Slowly but surely, she's turning into something else, something other than a mother. Later in "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial", Mary is in the kitchen with her daughter, unpacking the groceries while E.

T., whom the mother presumes to be Gertie's imaginary friend, constantly avoids her notice, in spite of the little girl's vociferations. The domestic scene, on one level, is all about comic timing: the alien who wobbles right pass Mary while she's busy putting food away in the refrigerator, but "Super 8", with its subordinate homage to George Romero, coaxes out another level, which brings to mind the moment in his 1978 shocker "Dawn of the Dead", where the living dead traverse a parking lot as they make their descent upon a shopping mall, because, as one character observes, these non-people harbor memories still of what it meant to be alive.

Just like these catatonic consumers who know the words but not the music of being human, Mary can't see E.T. because she's among the living dead(her philandering husband killed the old Mary), and is only going through the motions of being a mother.

Suburban life has zombified her, exasperated by sexual displacement and the television(which just happens to be on at the time), the same factors that drains all the life out of socialite Cary Scott in "All That Heaven Allows", the 1956 melodrama that stealthily informs the Spielberg film, in which the genre-inspired dialectic is fully intergrated, narrative-wise, and not partitioned off as the film-within-the-film in "Super 8".

Whereas Mary has a divorce impending, Cary(the names rhyme) is a widow, but both women are clearly one and the same, in regard to their negotiation between being a mother and a sexual being. In the Sirk film, Cary, dressed provocatively in a red dress at a get-together among the affluent, causes one partygoer to comment, "It's indecent to have two children and look as young as you do," while in E.

T., Mary, who is acting as hostess to a party for Michael and his buddies, shimmies around in an orange kimono, enticing one of the boys to inch his extended finger toward her extended butt while she tends to the food.

The gesture mirrors the one that E.T. uses to heal Elliott's finger, but that's not the sort of healing Mary needs, and certainly, Michael's friend is too young to provide it. For Halloween, Mary wears a cat suit, which would probably cause Cary's son to exclaim, "Holy cats, mother!"(his reaction to the red dress) and Cary's daughter to expound: "When we reach a certain age, sex becomes incongruous.

" In the absence of a man, Mary unconsciously flirts with Michael's friends because she needs to feel desirable again. They're about fifteen years her junior, the same chronological distance that exists between Cary and Kirby, the gardener who could rescue the widow from the zombie circuit of the Connecticut suburbs.

A zombie, however, is what Cary's children feel comfortable with, so when they chase Kirby away, they buy their mother a sort of surrogate lover, a television set("the world's parade at your FINGERTIPS"), to keep her company.

Conversely, it's the zombies themselves who come for Mary in the form of D.C. men outfitted in astronaut suits, invading the house "Night of the Living Dead"-style. Near the man crashing through the window blinds, the moviegoer pays special attention to the train-set moving along the circular track, an object suddenly foregrounded through its life-sized counterpart that the kids use in "The Case"(the zombie movie), forcing in the moviegoer a rethink of the way Spielberg portrays the suburbs in "E.

T." as the golden wonderland of yesteryear, by its association with the darker "Super 8" where an entire subdivision is used as the setting for a war between the government and the alien, in which the whole neighborhood gets pounded good.

In the Spielberg film, a government agent tells Elliott, "I'm glad he met you first," because had E.T. met the same fate as Aqua(who makes first contact with the millitary), "Super 8" suggests that bedlam would likely have followed.

E.T. is good because Elliott is good; his telekinetic powers, at the employ of benevolence, could easily have turned Carrie-like if threatened, as is the case with Aqua, who grows up in government captivity.

"Super 8" makes us realize that Elliott's friend, likewise, had the potential to kill. As suggested by the period setting of "The Case"(Charles has his leading man wear a fedora and trenchcoat), the children reject the notion that they're living in a golden age(ala "Midnight in Paris").