Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography #2

[poparena.livejournal.com]

#2 - It's hard not to stare when you think of what is squeezed inside that skull (#2 The Visitor)

It's still June 1996. The theaters have been packed with summer action movies with films like Twister, Mission: Impossible, Eraser and music video director Michael Bay's second foray into braindead action filmmaking with The Rock. This is all leading up to the biggest film of the year, which we'll talk about in the next entry. In real news, while the biggest scandal going on in the White House was the discovery that the Clintons may have made participated in some not-so-legal real estate investments back in the 70s, the Provisional Irish Republican Army are at the tail end of their struggle to separate Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom with armed robberies and explosives that will result in the formation of the Criminal Assets Bureau, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia are bombed by Hezbollah Al-Hejaz for housing foreign military personal which results in strained relations with Iran, and a fireworks factory in China explodes, killing 36 people.

So it is not to say that the entire world was calm and complacent during the time, merely the United States. While land mines were killing Chechen separatist leaders, Congress was debating Internet decency laws. That said, news media always needs a villain, and in the first half of 1996, they had three big ones: Ted Kaczynski, Martin Bryant and the Montana Freemen. While all of them were very different in their crimes, they all supported an image of being mentally deranged. Eccentric at best, crazy at worst. First, and most famously, we have Kaczynski, most popularly known as the Unabomber, an anarchist extremist who sent out mail bombs between 1978 to 1995, mostly to convince media outlets to publish his manifesto. A recluse who lived in a cabin for over twenty years without electricity or water, his mug shot after his arrest in 1996 that of a bearded mountain man, it was easy to pin the "crazy" label on him.

Meanwhile in Australia, 28-year old Martin Bryant gunned down 35 tourists at the historic Port Arthur prison colony, one of the deadliest shootings perpetrated with a single individual. It was also easy to label him as crazy, a wandering beach bum who had inherited a fortune from an older woman whom he was possibly having sexual relations with. To this date, Bryany's motivation for the attack are unclear, he once claimed it was connected to the Dunblane school massacre earlier that year, in which a man named Thomas Hamilton had walked into a Scottish primary school and killed sixteen children, one teacher and himself.

In a less deadly but no less crazy situation, June saw the end of an 81-day standoff between the FBI and the Montana Freemen, a Christian Patriot movement that declared themselves separated from the United States and constructed their own governing system and currency. This was a third in a line of government sieges against various militia and religious extremist groups, the first being against the Weaver family in at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992 (three deaths) and the second being against the Branch Davidians protestant sect outside Waco, Texas in 1993 (eighty-four dead). To say the least, the US government had no interest in repeating those bloody affairs, and after nearly three months of long-range negotiations the Montana Freemen, who lived in RVs and flew an American flag upside down, finally surrendered.

What all these people had in common was that they were various insanities were easy to identify and they were almost completely indefensible (not that people didn't try, especially in the Unabomber's case). These were the kind of people we all thought about when we saw the silhouette on the Neighborhood Watch signs, the kind of people we thought about whenever America's Most Wanted would come on the screen. Okay, maybe not always to the extreme of these individuals, but in a time before 9/11 made people scared that any brown-skinned man could be a terrorist and Dateline made people scared that any adult male could be a pedophile, it seemed as though the people who wish to inflict serious criminal harm on someone was easier to identify. There's one such individual in the second Animorphs book, a man who approaches Rachel with clear intent of assaulting and potentially raping her. Rachel knows this, we know this, it's very obvious.

And this man is not a Controller.

The Yeerks have no use for obvious creeps and crazy people. They would never infest Kaczynski, Bryant, the Freemen or anyone else who would bring attention to themselves through such extreme behavior. At this point in the series, the two people we know for sure are Controllers are Tom, Jake's upstanding brother, high school basketball star and spokesperson for the Sharing, and Vice Principle Chapman. One of the central scenes in this second book is the attempted rape followed immediately by Rachel being forced to accept a ride from Chapman, and it's Chapman that Rachel stresses about. In an idea that would be repackaged in The Matrix three years later, the Yeerk invasion forces the Animorphs into a position of not being able to trust anyone, not just the obvious "bad people." It is not that, with the Yeerks, anyone is an enemy. It's that everyone is an enemy.

Comments

[teacoat.livejournal.com]

Loving these so far. This is a great way of analyzing the books!

[bdoing.livejournal.com]

These are amazing.

[acts_of_tekla]

It makes the Yeerks scarier not only because the Evil Crazies are easy to identify, unlike the Yeerks, but much easier to fight. Rachel scares the creep away easily, but feels like she narrowly escapes Chapman. The Yeerks have so much invested in remaining covert, that revealing them is part of the Animorphs' plans from the very beginning. While they do have some major wins, they are never able to make the Yeerks actually *stop*, or even rethink their commitment to taking Earth, or even slow it down for a bit, until the very end of the series when Jake goes crazy and turns into General Sherman.

[zedille.livejournal.com]

The connections you make between the social context of the 1990s and themes/events in the books are very thought-provoking. I'm looking forward to more of these essays!