What Will We Do When We See Aliens?
A couple of days ago, I watched Asteroid City by Wes Anderson, a star-studded movie (Tom Hanks, Scarlet Johanson, Margot Robbie, Adrien Brody, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Steve Carell, Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton,…, it doesn’t stop, so check out the cast to get the scale) about the itinerary of some nerdy teenagers and their parents to an enigmatic American desert.
Spoiler Alert: the following contains spoilers for the movie Astroid city.
Besides the once-in-a-while atomic explosions that are heard throughout the movie, the police chase at the beginning, the look-alive part of the war photographer’s car, the children and their parents, everything else is normal. (Okay, maybe nothing’s normal!)
But in the middle of the movie, something extraordinary happens: an alien comes to Asteroid City – the imaginary site they have traveled to – to pick up the meteor that landed there, we don’t know when.
After this, there is just chaos. Those people encountered something strange and beyond-worldly. Not once had they experienced something as unknown and uncertain as this black, slender, and cute alien. So how should they react? What should they do? How to respond?
It truly is a scary experience.
Imagine this: you are in you’re car driving home with your family, talking to each other, having fun, and laughing when suddenly a green light layers the darkness of the night sky, and you can see, from your windshield, a humongous spaceship as big as your neighborhood or maybe as big as a city approaching the earth. What is going to be your reaction?
What’s the military is going to do? Would you have a cardiac arrest? Would you get out of the car shouting and screaming? How would you digest such phenomena?
And the thing is, it could happen, right? We are living in a world with infinite possibilities and infinite galaxies. So there may be advanced aliens out there. They could come to earth and surprise us.
In the movie, we can see a myriad of reactions. They don’t know what to do. The military speculates that it could be a Russian or Chinese agent, or maybe the alien is not Russian or Chinese, but what if they know that something like this happened in America? What are they going to do? They think maybe the aliens want to wage a war against humanity. So should they be ready to attack if they come again? The government tries to hide the incident for at least 100 years and quarantine the site with its residents. They don’t want parents to tell anyone about this. They don’t want any pictures leaked.
You can see Maya Hawke’s June baffled and stunned. She questions her knowledge as a teacher. Maybe she doesn’t know anything about space. The children are curious. Montana (The Cowbody with blue jeans) says the military will figure it out. He reasons there was no war the US didn’t win, so they will win this too – if there’s going to be any war.
Near the end, the alien appears again to give back the asteroid. This time, they are not just looking at him to go back. They immediately start firing at him. The scene is chaos. It beautifully shows our reactions to uncertainty and the unknown. The movie shows how fragile and weak we humans can be. It shows how unaware we are. Asteroid City shows we live in an infinite world with infinite possibilities, and when we feel the threat of one of them, we can do nothing.
It also shows how violence, conspiracy, and destruction is the first thing we do in the face of challenge. We just want to kill and destroy things. Probably, we are wired that way. I don’t know, maybe we are supposed to be like that.
It’s not just about the aliens, though. It could be anything. There could be a comet hitting us; it could be World War III; It could be zombies; Maybe Climate Change: we are reacting bafflingly and irrationally because we are unfortunate or fortunate enough to be lost in the infinitude of our world as limited creatures.
So, maybe we have to think more about possibilities and think about them more multi-dimensionally. Or maybe, we just have to have fun because we don’t know what will happen and can’t do anything. I just want to say we are so fragile against the scale and cruelty of the world we live in.
