“This has been a long and difficult shoot, fraught by many problems. But the one thing that kept me going, through it all, was the certain knowledge that one day I would drive out the gate of Pinewood and never come back, and that you sorry bastards would still be here.”
– James Cameron, on the set of Aliens
You all know this story. In the summer of 1950, Enrico Fermi, the Italian-American physicist and atomic pile-builder, went to lunch at Los Alamos National Laboratory and joined some colleagues there and asked them a question. “Where is everybody?” This confused his colleagues, obviously, because they were sitting right there with him, and then he had to clarify that he wasn’t talking about them. He was talking about the space aliens.
You see, this was only a few years after the supposed flying saucer crash at Roswell, New Mexico, and even though that turned out to be nothing, nothing AT ALL — Merely a downed weather balloon piloted by small hairless men with slits for mouths — still, America had gone saucer-mad, even famous scientists who were eating lunch.
Fermi’s reasoning, if I may paraphrase badly, is that the universe is so vast that it stands to reason there should be other intelligent life out there, and the universe is so old, that unless we were the very first civilization ever to evolve, we should have some evidence of their existence by now, and yet, to the best of our knowledge, we are alone. “Where is everybody,” asked Fermi, and his colleagues had no answer.
Fermi then went on with the same blunt logic to disprove fairies, Sasquatch, God, the possibility of love, and thereafter, as you know, Enrico Fermi ate alone.
– John Hodgman, A Brief Digression on Matters of Lost Time
Last night, KT and I rented the first X-Files movie so we could get caught up for the sequel. Given that it came out ten years ago, I wasn’t sure how well it would hold up, but it was fun, and now I feel like I’ve got enough of the storyline back in my head that I’ll be able to appreciate the sequel. Both KT and I remember being confused when we first watched the movie in the theater. This time, it was much clearer. (“Oh, that’s what they were doing with the bees!”) The only things that took me out of the story were the size of their cell phones and getting used to the way they speak to each other again. Honestly, I had forgotten how much Mulder likes the sound of his own voice.
Scully: (impatience) Mulder… when a terrorist bomb threat is called in, the logical purpose of providing this information is to allow us to find the bomb. The rational object of terrorism is to promote terror. If you’d study model behavioral pattern in virtually every case where a threat has turned up an explosive device. If we don’t act in accordance with that data — if you ignore it as we have done — the chances are great that if here actually is a bomb we might not find it. Lives could be lost –
Scully, engrossed in her own argument, realizes she’s been the only one speaking for the last short while. She stops walking.
Scully: Mulder…?
Mulder: What happened to playing a hunch?
Scully almost JUMPS out of her own skin. The voice has come not over the phone, but from two feet away where:
ANGLE TO INCLUDE AGENT MULDER
Standing in the shadow of a large air conditioning unit. Cracking a trademark sunflower seed between his teeth. Clicking his cell phone off. Moving out.
Scully: Jesus, Mulder…
Mulder: The element of surprise, Scully. Random acts of unpredictability. If we fail to anticipate the unforeseen or expect the unexpected in a universe of infinite possibilities, we find ourselves at the mercy of anyone or anything that cannot be programmed, categorized or easily referenced…
I was going to write a review, but instead I’m going to quote from an email Miles sent me, because he puts it better than I ever could:
“It cracks me up how schizophrenic it is between apocalyptic horror and tongue-in-cheek wish fulfillment. On the one hand: Alien slavers colonize the earth! They’re sterilizing humanity, draining the ocean for minerals, and infesting our ecosystem with hostile alien species. On the other hand: everyone of any significance to the story is a Physics PhD! SUPEREMPOWERED NERDS DUKE IT OUT FOR THE FATE OF HUMANITY! You spend the entire game running around with a 22-year-old babe who’s a self-taught physicist, roboticist, electrical engineer, sniper, and alien-technology hacker; she’s a crack shot with rifle, pistol, and shotgun alike; she climbs walls like a parkour master, and high-kicks zombies so hard that their heads come off!”
And a bonus paragraph from a letter that Miles is “mentally composing to Gabe Newell about ep2,” complaining about the death of CENSORED.
“I mean, I know that you’re Valve and hl2 is a Dark Catalogue of Human Nightmares like war, zombies, Orwellian fascism, environmental collapse, and extinction, but get real: The player has spent nearly the entire game tear-assing around the Bavarian forest in a chopped muscle-car with his electrical-engineer / commando / babe sidekick crawling across the hood to ride shotgun, with a literal keg of whup-ass hooked to the back bumper, earning the raucous cheers of the men when he uses said keg to dispatch looming alien tanks (with great dispatch, even.) It’s the height of insensitivity to cap this all off with, ‘and then two monsters came out of nowhere and killed
CENSORED.’”
Let me tell you about the first one:
I think I was fourteen. I met her when she came to my best-best-friend-across-the-street’s birthday party. They spent the entire night flirting, but I was too dumb to tell. I must have made some kind of impression on her, though, because she wrote me a letter. I wrote her back and found out that she lived in the next city over. A long ways away for a 14 year old. We hit it off, and somehow suckered our parents into driving us back and forth all the time.
She and her family seemed really nice, and I enjoyed spending time with her. After several months, I ended up staying the night at her place, and we had really bad virginal sex. It sucked, but we didn’t’ know any better, so we still tried. Her parents found out we were having sex almost immediately. I forget how, but I think she told them. They were cool with it. I didn’t know at the time how creepy that was. Parents just shouldn’t be into their daughter losing her virginity to some schmuck kid from the next town over at age 14. Anyway, the really weird stuff hadn’t started yet.
She was completely, psychotically into me. She would write me these epic love poems that would rival the Odyssey in complexity and spend hours talking to me on the phone. She thought we were in love, and I didn’t know any better, so I just rolled with it. I seem to remember being aware that I didn’t love her, but not really knowing it would be a big deal. Maybe I thought I’d grow into it or something. She was convinced we were going to get married. She knew what kind of furniture we would have. Her parents would make wedding jokes around me.
Then they revealed the alien stuff. This family was convinced that aliens were visiting them every night. My mom’s kinda into new age stuff, but this was a whole new level of strange for my young mind to understand. I must have looked really confused, because she tried to reassure me. “Oh don’t worry. They won’t come for you. You’re a Normie.” (short for “normal”, I assume).
The really strange thing is I don’t remember being that upset by this at the time. Despite the fact that my girlfriend of nearly a year was completely freaking insane, I was still okay with it. She told me that she had been impregnated by the aliens several times, but that the aliens took the fetus each time. The whole family went to group hypnosis sessions together.
Just before our one-year anniversary, she revealed to me that she had made out with another guy in her class (I still remember his name… it was Spanish). She said that it was really good, and she was kinda confused by it, but that she still wanted to go out with me. We tried to stay together for awhile, but when she did it again, that was too much, and I broke up with her.
Then the obsessive phone calls started. She would call every night and cry. I remember sitting on the phone and telling her that it wasn’t her fault (wrong) and that it was all about me. I was a bad person, and she was a good person, and I was terribly sorry (I wasn’t). I had the feeling that if she had a car, she would have stalked me. Over the next several months, the calls tapered off, and eventually she stopped calling altogether. She probably hooked up with Spanish boy and started freaking him out.
Well, now that I think about it, that wasn’t the only reason I broke up with her. I was starting to get really into another girl who actually went to my school (the idea of a local relationship was very appealing). After we broke up, I started dating the new girl. I’ll tell you about her later.