Knowing (WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS)

Greetings. Whilst the thick, gloopy strands of Azathothian entropy have entangled us further and drawn us deeper into the unreflective depths of cosmic ennui, we at Ghooric Zone are still making the occasional attempt - as the mood takes us - to pass on our reflections on Lovecraftian popular culture. In all probability no one is listening anymore, but being the good Lovecraftians that we are, we don’t care and will continue spouting our jibber-jabber into the audient void (often to the sound of atonal flutes and monotonous drumming).

On to business. If The Mist was purportedly a movie of existential horror with (as I have argued previously) an implicit moral message, then I’m about to suggest that Knowing is at its core a movie of existential, materialistic (and, dare I say it, Lovecraftian) horror masquerading as a ‘feel good’ movie (albeit one concerning the end of the world). Please be warned that the following contains major spoilers regarding the film's plot. In fact, I'm about to tell you how it ends.

Broadly speaking the film is a category (though not in the strictest sense) of what Brian Aldiss has elsewhere called a ‘shaggy god’ story , where religious or biblical themes and stories turn out to have science-fictional causes. It is also a film the where the ancient astronaut hypothesis is implicitly invoked; additionally, Knowing shares a certain kinship with M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, where an apocalyptic science fiction premise is actually concealing a spiritual message about hope subverting meaninglessness and the existence of life –after-death. In brief, Knowing is about how space aliens (who turn out to look a bit like angels) save some children from the end of the world and spirit them off to an Eden-like planet (replete with Biblical Tree of Knowledge) along with some pairs of animals (rabbits, actually - quite useful being the fast breeders they are and hence providing a potentially indefinite supply of protein) a la Noah (the film-makers certainly seemed to enjoy mixing their Biblical metaphors). Oh, and somehow along the way the atheistic astrophysicist Nicholas Cage (whose mechanistic materialism is a consequence of his wife meaningless death in a fire - a bit like Mel Gibson’s character in Signs) finally comes to believe in life after death (a bit like Mel Gibson’s character in Signs), helpfully reconciling with his pastor father before Cage, his remaining family and the rest of the Earth’s population die horribly in a conflagration caused by a massive solar flare.

The mirroring of the intervention of the aliens with the story of Noah seems to be the locus of this spiritual message - that there is hope, that death isn’t really the end, that there are more things out there than are dreamt of it our philosophy and so on. But wait a minute...the film implies that nothing happens without a reason - death isn’t a matter of random unthinking chance. Does this mean that the end of the world was itself part of a bigger plan? Given that in the film the space aliens - following the ancient astronaut hypothesis - are the secular analogue of God (or at least His angelic instruments) might this imply that they themselves instigated the apocalypse? Interestingly, when taking human form the aliens do seem to conform to the ‘Nordic’ or ‘Aryan’ extraterrestrials beloved of most right-wing ufologist crack-heads. Perhaps after all, they really were space-Nazis conducting a eugenics programme on a massive scale? Hmm...maybe they should have got Mel Gibson to play the part instead. At least the aliens had the good sense not to take Nicholas Cage with them.

On a more serious point, if as I suspect the film makers were trying to putting a re-enchanted New Age spin on things akin to what Shyamalan attempts in Signs, I wonder if this aspect of the film might not again unwittingly point to some of the more problematic aspects of Theosophical-New Age-ufological apocalypticism? Especially those tinged with the suspect racialist undertones of Victorian social evolutionism (if not the outright discourse of ethnic ‘cleansing’), and wherein the perfect ‘Nordic’ or ‘Aryan’ extraterrestrials are coming to save the chosen from an ‘impure’ world. In this respect, the children in the film who are ‘the chosen’ seem to have remarkable knowledge and innate telepathic abilities - perhaps a reflection of real-world New Age beliefs surrounding ‘indigo children’ (as well as some of the ideas regarding human-ET hybridisation emergent from alien abductee narratives) who are seen to represent a more ‘spiritualised’ step in human evolution. The rest of us, being unnecessary and 'impure' throwbacks can be consigned to the dustbin of history as the ubermensch forge ahead to create a perfect and 'pure' world. (I use the terminology of purity and pollution here purposely, as I think it perhaps one of the most powerful sets of symbols/metaphors that humans have deployed for social and political ends - especially in the discourse and practice of racism, ethnic violence and genocide).

I’m prone to put my own sly spin on what this movie might be about: that in fact its use of dodgy alien astronaut tropes actually undermines the very point it (seems) to be trying to communicate: that even the most secular of atheists must eventually abandon their disbelief and accept the comfort that there is ‘more’ (in a spiritual sense) to this world than this world itself. Cage’s character’s reconciliation with his religious father and seeming acceptance that death is not the end is problematic because the saviours appear to be aliens and not angels. The film seems to pushing toward a recognition that perhaps the aliens look like angels because perhaps they really are angels. But the other subtextual possibility that the film seems to contain is one emergent from the very same demythologising alien astronaut hypothesis that Lovecraft prefigured in his work: that there are, in fact, no angels; angels and other representations of the supernatural are simply the symbolic cloth in which we clothe the nuts and bolts matter of extraterrestrials. This seems to be supported by the fact that the ET’s craft first manifests in a form akin to the vision of Ezekiel which is referenced earlier in the film: all wheels within wheels. In any case, this infers that the ETs certainly have interfered before in human history. In other words, the aliens don't look like angels; rather it is the case that we have constructed our image of angels based on extraterrestrial interventions in our past history.

This being the case, there doesn’t seem anything to contradict the notion that the end of the world as it happens in the film is anything other than meaningless random chance. Or as suggested above, perhaps an act engineered by the aliens themselves. Indeed, the more I think about this the more I consider it to be a distinct possibility according to the logic that underlies the film: if the aliens possess the godlike power of fortelling the future, why could they not have stopped the solar flare with their technology? Given that they knew this was going to happen so far in advance and (presumably) harbour such altruistic attitudes towards humans, why didn’t they take the time to save all of the world’s population? In fact, their altruism only seems to extend toward children with special powers, not us ‘less evolved’ primates. Or maybe they weren’t fortelling the future but using their technology to manufacture it and pass their well-laid plans as ‘prophesy’ (here I’m of course following the Clarkean adage that any sufficiently advanced technology will look like magic. Or in this case, religion). Cage, then, has simply (and understandably) fallen into the very human trap of manufacturing hope where there is none as a means of alleviating anxiety in the face of, well, a horrible death. Could I be right, then, that the belief that ‘this isn’t all there is’ turns out to be false consciousness (in this case, engendered by our alien overlords)?

I would like to think so. I’d also like to think that this was the subversive intention of the film-makers (especially in the context of the litigious New Age science-fictional clap-trap spiritualities that appear to be rampant amongst the Hollywood hoi-polloi - what happened to all the Satanists?), but I imagine that’s beyond the realms of possibility given that this is a movie starring Nicholas Cage, which is about unsubtle as you can get.