Monday, October 26, 2015

"The Blob" and the Answer to the "?" of Climate Change

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/
"The Blob" is an interesting narrative that is slightly more than meets the eye as we watch the final scenes.  The amorphous globulin blob has shown up to terrorize and consume a small semi-idyllic town.  After oozing its way to dominating the townspeople, Steve McQueen realizes that the one way they can fight this menace is by freezing it. He notices it retreat when it is sprayed with a fire extinguisher, finding that the CO2's temperature puts it in check.

After calling up the powers of the federal government, they scheme to gather up the now extinguisher-frozen blob and parachute it onto the Arctic ice shelf from a plane named the GlobeMaster (hmmm...).

As McQueen hatches this simple plan with the town police chief, his final words of the movie are, "...as long as the Arctic stays cold". Needless to say, we may not be worried about an actual blob unfreezing itself as the Earth's Arctic region is gravely melting as we speak due to climate change, but we must be concerned not only with our assumptions about the inert effects of our industrial capitalist presence on the face of the earth, but our growing, though alarmingly slowly, of our awareness of how hard it has been to finally get it into our minds and hearts that the Arctic ice shelf is actually melting - a thing we never really thought was possible - and is increasingly revealing the dangerous domino-effect born out of the initial inceptions of colonialism's love for environmental exploitation and industrial over-production.

 Modern industrial human presence on the earth has had and is having deleterious effects on every ecosystem on the earth. Modern industrialized humans have created a dangerous context for the earth and its citizens that show the ludicrous nature of the presumption of being masters of this particular globe.  This movie was created at a time in which western society was reveling in its manipulative powers, maximizing its use of extractive industries, plastics, petroleum and artificial chemistries in colonial, settler-colonial and neo-colonial contexts. The very anti-cultural dynamics that were present during the creation of this film were exactly the elements that would answer the "?" in the final shot of the film as the blob gets gently dropped onto the ice.  The anti-cultural context of this film was the undoing of film's narrative.  The modern industrial world is still in the process of revealing if it's context will be humanity's undoing.

"!"