The particles on the walls were drifting free once more. Now they seemed to telescope back, returning to her face and body . . ./And suddenly, in a whoosh, all the particles returned, and Julia was full and beautiful and strong as before, and she pushed me away from her with a contemptuous look . . . (471)
In the final confrontation, we then get both Julias side by side, the glimmering Julia composed of the swarm and the exhausted real Julia:
Julia came swirling up through the air toward me, spiralling like a corkscrew—and grabbed the ladder alongside me. Except she wasn’t Julia, she was the swarm, and for a moment the swarm was disorganized enough that I could see right through her in places; I could see the swirling particles that composed her. I looked down and saw the real Julia, deathly pale, standing and looking up at me, her face a skull. By now the swarm alongside me become solid-appearing, as I had seen it become solid before. It looked like Julia. (476)
Here, we are not talking about science, not even problematic science, but one of the fundamental fantasy scenarii, or, more precisely, the scenario of the very disintegration of the link between fantasy and reality, so that we get the two of them, fantasy and reality, the Julia-swarm and the “real” Julia, side by side, as in the wonderful scene from the beginning of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where food is served in an expensive restaurant in such a way that we get on a plate itself a small patty-like cake which looks (and probably tastes) like excrement, while above the plate, hangs a color photo which shows us what we are “really eating,” namely a nicely cooked juicy steak . . .
This, then, is how one should read Prey: all the (pseudo-)scientific speculations about nanotechnology are here a pretext to tell the story of a husband reduced to a domestic role, frustrated by his ambitious corporate vixen of a wife. No wonder that, at the novel’s end, a “normal” couple is recreated: at Jack’s side is Mae, the passive but understanding Chinese colleague scientist, silent and faithful, lacking Julia’s aggressiveness and ambition.
The production of the couple in Hollywood . . .
A variant of the same motif, the impasse of paternal authority and its restoration, secretly runs through all key Steven Spielberg films—ET, Empire of the Sun, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List. . . One should remember that the small boy to whom ET appears was abandoned by his father (as we learn in the very beginning), so that ET is ultimately a kind of “vanishing mediator” who provides a new father (the good scientist who, in the film’s last shot, is already seen embracing the mother)—when the new father arrives, ET can leave and “go home.” Empire of the Sun focuses on a boy deserted by his family in war-torn China and surviving through the help of an ersatz father (played by John Malkovich). In the very first scene of Jurassic Park, we see the paternal figure (played by Sam Neill) jokingly threatening the two kids with a dinosaur bone—this bone is clearly the tiny object-stain which, later, explodes into gigantic dinosaurs, so that one can risk the hypothesis that, within the film’s fantasmatic universe, the dinosaurs’ destructive fury merely materializes the rage of the paternal superego. A barely perceptible detail that occurs later, in the middle of the film, confirms this reading. Neill and the two children, pursued by the monsters, take refuge from the murderous carnivorous dinosaurs in a gigantic tree, where, dead tired, they fall asleep; on the tree, Neill loses the dinosaur bone that was stuck in his belt, and it is as if this accidental loss has a magical effect—before they fall asleep, Neill is reconciled with the children, displaying warm affection and tenderness towards them. Significantly, the dinosaurs which approach the tree the next morning and awaken the sleeping party, turn out to be of the benevolent herbivorous kind . . . Schindler’s List is, at the most basic level, a remake of Jurassic Park (and, if anything, worse than the original), with the Nazis as the dinosaur monsters, Schindler as (at the film’s beginning) the cynical, profiteering, and opportunistic parental figure, and the ghetto Jews as threatened children (their infantilization in the film is striking). The story the film tells is about Schindler’s gradual rediscovery of his paternal duty towards the Jews, and his transformation into a caring and responsible father. And is The War of the Worlds not the latest installment of this saga? Tom Cruise plays a divorced working-class father who neglects his two children; the invasion of the aliens reawakens in him the proper paternal instincts, and he rediscovers himself as a caring father—no wonder that, in last scene, he finally gets the recognition from his son who, throughout the film, despised him. In the mode of eighteenth-century stories, the film could thus also have been subtitled “A story of how a working father is finally reconciled with his son.” . . . One can easily imagine the film without the bloodthirsty aliens so that what remains is in a way “what it is really about,” the story of a divorced working-class father who strives to regain the respect of his two children. Therein resides the film’s ideology: with regard to the two levels of the story (the Oedipal level of lost and regained paternal authority; the spectacular level of the conflict with the invading aliens), there is a clear dissymmetry, since the Oedipal level is what the story is “really about,” while the external spectacular is merely its metaphoric extension. There is a nice detail in the film’s soundtrack which makes clear the predominance of this Oedipal dimension: the aliens’ attacks are accompanied by a terrifying one-note low-trombone sound weirdly resembling the low bass and trumpet sound of the Tibetan Buddhist chant, the voice of the suffering, dying evil father (in clear contrast to the “beautiful” five-tones melodic fragment that identifies the “good” aliens in Spielberg’s Encounters of the Third Kind).
No wonder, then, that the same key discloses the underlying motif of the greatest cinema hit of all times, James Cameron’s Titanic. Is Titanic really a film about the catastrophe of a ship hitting an iceberg? One should be attentive to the precise moment of the disaster: it takes place when the two young lovers (Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet), immediately after consummating their amorous encounter in the sexual act, return to the ship’s deck. This, however, is not all: if this were all, then the catastrophe would have been simply the punishment of Fate for the double transgression (illegitimate sexual act; transgression of the class divisions). What is more crucial is that, on the deck, Kate passionately tells her lover that, when the ship reaches New York the next morning, she will leave with him, preferring a life of poverty with her true love to a false and corrupted existence among the rich; at this moment the ship hits the iceberg, in order to prevent what would undoubtedly have been the true disaster, namely the couple’s life in New York. One can safely guess that the misery of everyday life would soon have destroyed their love. The accident thus occurs in order to save their love, in order to sustain the illusion that, had it not happened, they would have lived “happily ever after” . . .
But this is not all. A further clue is provided by the final moments of Di Caprio. He is freezing to death in the cold water, while Winslet is safely floating on a large piece of wood; aware that she is losing him, she cries: “I’ll never let you go!”, all the while pushing him away with her hands—why? Because he has served his purpose. For, beneath the love story, Titanic tells another tale, that of a spoiled high-society girl in an identity crisis: she is confused, does not know what to do with herself, and, much more than her lover, Di Caprio is a kind of “vanishing mediator” whose function is to restore her sense of identity and purpose in life, her self-image (quite literally, also: he sketches her image); once his job is done, he can disappear. This is why his last words, before he disappears into the freezing North Atlantic, are not the words of a departing lover, but, rather, the last message of a preacher, telling her how to lead her life, to be honest and faithful to herself, and so on and so forth. What this means is that Cameron’s superficial Hollywood Marxism (his all too obvious privileging of the lower classes and caricatural depiction of the cruel egotism and opportunism of the rich) should not deceive us: beneath this sympathy for the poor, there is another narrative, the profoundly reactionary myth, first fully deployed by Kipling’s Captains Courageous, of a young rich kid in crisis whose vitality is restored by a brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.
The ridiculous climax of this Hollywood procedure of staging great