![]() Alternatively, they may just help to hypnotize us and keep us in the dark. But movies can also provoke nightmares, too, and those nightmares don’t necessarily end upon waking. Movies have been equated with dreams, since they employ the language of dreams to powerful effect. They also have the capacity-and the power-to exacerbate social distress. But it works the other way around as well just as movies can reflect social distress (thanks to this often unconscious collaboration between filmmakers, writers, actors and audiences). That is why the cinematic portrayals of aliens can tell us so much about what’s going on in human minds. The individual collaborators may not be aware they are doing this (often they are not) and the results may surprise all the participants. Given this dynamic, films have a unique ability to capture the zeitgeist (the cultural ethos and values of a society) and represent a social dream. This dynamic isn’t limited to any particular place or time if the film is successful and has something to say then the audiences of generations to come will be invited to become collaborators, too. However, without the viewer’s imagination, the film would be dead on arrival. ![]() A very interesting dynamic arises from this collaboration what the screenwriter imagines when he is putting words down on paper is not the same as what the director imagines while she’s shooting the film or what the actors imagine while they’re performing. Unlike books, films are a collective medium that calls on creative collaboration involving the director, the screenwriters the actors and ultimately the audience. By bringing these conflicts to light, moviemakers, whether they are conscious of it or not, are trying to explain the sources of tension and showing us a possible way out of our dilemma. And there is probably no better vehicle for expressing our social dreams and for revealing the conflicts that society is grappling with, than the movies. What holds for individual dreams is true of the social dream. A good case can be made that dreams are an attempt to work out conflict. And although the meaning and purpose of dreams are a perpetual subject of dispute and speculation, there is no doubt that dreams are frequently characterized by tension. That experience-societal and individual-is the raw material of the dream. The social dream emerges from aggregate social experience just as our own dreams are based to one degree or another on our life experience. This collective dreamlike experience, which arises as result of an evolving dynamic between the individuals and their culture, is constantly being transformed, sometimes incrementally, sometimes in quantum leaps. Societies dream just like individuals do. The distinction between what is out there-sometimes, as in the case of extraterrestrials, way out there-and what is within us begins to disappear.Īliens are a kind of social dream. Or they can usurp humans like parasites, turning them into zombies. Aliens can assume familiar forms they can look like members of our own family or our friends. We shun them, we deny that they exist, but we can’t get away from them-and no wonder: we don’t necessarily recognize them when they’re standing right in front of us. Yet aliens are not always treated as malevolent beings that have come to usurp our societies, seize control of the planet, and pilfer our resources: the human/alien crews in Star Trek represent a social dream that society perceives as desirable.Īliens fill us with dread and yet they exert an inescapable attraction on us. During the Cold War era some of the prevailing social dreams were haunted by the specter of nuclear annihilation, and the idea of alien threat continues to make up the majority of film science fiction productions. There are as many types of aliens as there are social dreams. Aliens appear in human folklore because they are equipped by us with traits and characteristics we secretly desire such immortality. Movies are similar to dreams and nightmares in that they employ the language of dreams to powerful effect. And it works the other way around as well: just as movies can reflect social distress, they also have the capacity to add to, or exacerbate social distress. Cinematic portrayals of aliens can tell us much about what is going on in human minds. The notion and images of aliens are for the most part an outcome of collective societal occurrences that often consists of personalized accounts of encounters with other beings, and in many ways are like our own dreams which are based on our life experiences.
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