Aliens Make Great Movies By Patrick Henry

Great old Science-Fiction films are not released today, When metallic strangers taller than lone cowboys landed to say Their masters ruled distant weird worlds now at galactic war With this frail Earth unless we wise up to the danger. The Capital of Science-Fiction must be The United States. All those terms together add up to slick money-spinning deals. The Capital bankrolls The Science that invents machines that The Fiction casts Heroes and Monsters in copy-ads for the salesmens' spiels.

Already their literature is packed in every far-out creature: An invisible six-foot rabbit, a sad, lonely singing whale, A talking wood puppet; an urchin adrift on a vast river. All white, you notice. The black keeps a low profile, Ducking blows, riding the sucker-punch to bide his time, To emerge the Dark Avenger of the fight-game ring. In The Heat of The Night, The Cassius Right, the clinch of Luther King. Black crises seethe inside, but worse from outside looms The Alien. Forget The President, control means the head of the Hollywood Film. That Wizard of Oz a Disney Guy like Uncle Walt, The Man Inventing America's nightmare and day-dream: Snow White his desired pure perfect heroine. Seven Dwarfs, The Workers, plain, comic, of no account at all.

Pinocchio, the dumb hick hooked by the sly fox on the quick sell. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, joke-bunglers who win by being All-American, Confident no matter what or whosoever they screw-up on, Like Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Boys, Chaplin and Keaton. The President a lame-duck nobody who can act the part of no-one, A Mid-West or Deep South peanut farmer, haberdasher or cattleman, Fears impeachment, the bullet, The Wall Street Crash will come. The man-in-the street now feels 9-11 no story for a film.

After decades of Science-Fiction fears, King Kong, that shark's Jaws, Are Disaster-Movies no more? They're shutting out real nightmares Of Famine, Genocide, War that fill Third Worlds each day: Unpleasantness from which your nice Simpson's and McDonalds turn away. But here's a swell movie script, the ultimate Science-Fiction. The White House boss's brain is invaded by An Alien. Word get round, the thought is frightening. Each Press-Call Bush gives away something is wrong. Could such weird drivelling nonsense come from any human? So when he mutters he might atom-bomb Iran For building a too-fancy power-station, And hating his Israeli friends Sol and Liza Cohen, And being Muslim and flash enough to own more limo fuel Than our great General Motors and our Standard Oil; Georgie's minders could straight-jacket him before he pulls the switch, Or if he has already, disown him as a madman with a fatal twitch. So The USA survives and the box-office comes well out of it, With yet another wizard Sci-Fi movie hit.

Copyright ©2006  Patrick Henry

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