ShipsofHagoth is pleased to announce its latest book-length message in a bottle: Reviews for Non-Existent Movies, by Eric Goulden Kimball, available in paperback and kindle formats by May 1, 2023.
We must here emphasize that the title is entirely literal! It is a collection of reviews for fake films described in real essays (Marianne Moore’s “imaginary gardens with real toads in them!”), dispatches from across the multiverse. Per the book’s own introduction: “The film review is a genre in and of itself; especially in ours the internet age, the collaborative and communal process of film analysis is often more interesting than the actual film itself. Indeed, Reviews for Non-Existent Movies posits that actual movies have become irrelevant to the modern social ritual of film discussion.
“This collection describes movies that don’t exist, then offers Borgesian summaries and commentary on them, blurring the line between critic and creator. Such an approach has the potential to democratize the already excessively burdened and compromised process of film production, by bypassing the multi-billion-dollar film industry entirely. It posits and explores an entire multiverse of potential cinema, independent of the strictures of the Hollywood system and the corresponding demands of late-stage capitalism.
“(Not to mention that all films became literally non-existent when production ground to a halt during the 2020 pandemic, which had the collateral effect of opening up a space for us to imagine a new cinema directly for ourselves).
“Consider this a proof of concept.”
We had previously published four of Kimball’s reviews of non-existent films here at ShipsofHagoth, under the titles of:
–Review For a Non-Existent Film: “Neither Hot nor Cold”
–Review For a Non-Existent Film: “The Wednesday Night Bible Study Club”
–Reviews for Non-Existent Films #3: Not the Robo-Apocalypses We Expected, But the Ones We Deserved
–Review for a Non-Existent Film #4: Richard Dutcher’s 20-Year-Delayed Joseph Smith Biopic “Smith” (the latter of which describes a multiverse wherein these manifold fake-films might actually exist after all!)
As you can see, three of these faux-reviews are explicitly LDS is theme and discussion, and even form a handy little trilogy in the middle of the collection. Yet even the outlier in that quartet–“Not to the Robo-Apocalypses We Expected, But the Ones We Deserved”–is possessed of an LDS sensibility if you are attuned to it, even if the Church or its Doctrine are never mentioned once therein. Whosoever hath ears to hear, let them hear.
As another example, we include here a fifth excerpt from Reviews for Non-Existent Movies, whose portrayal of the spirits of the dead in the aftermath of a foiled alien invasion is wholly in-line with an LDS understanding of the next life–all, again, without ever mentioning the Church once:
Review: Independence Day—Fallout: After the Invasion, It Is Impossible to Make Movies (Grade: B+)
Adorno once said, after Auschwitz, it is impossible to write poetry.
We might now update that to say, since the Invasion, it is impossible to make movies—literally, since Los Angeles was one of the first cities wiped out in the bombardment, but also because the Invasion has retroactively ruined all of our favorite alien invader films.
For when it finally happened, there were no mile-wide space saucers hovering ominously and theatrically over our cities, no landmarks and monuments dramatically blown-up in crowd-pleasing fireballs, no—the saucers quite sensibly bombarded us from high-orbit. There was no big blue skybeam for our plucky band of superheroes to rally around, no last-minute heroics, no big motivational speech or once-more-to-the-breach, just every industrialized nation on earth desperately launching all their ICBMs at once. There was no hidden ace up our sleeve, no computer virus, no stolen scout-ship out of Area 51, no exploitable weak-point or thermal point, no grand and noble sacrifice, no: the only reason we won is because the Invaders launched their generational star-cruisers while we were all still a pre-industrial civilization, and it was their bad luck to arrive long after we’d developed nuclear weapons. And though their plasma-canons took out many of our missiles, they failed to hit them all.
(Either that, or it apparently hadn’t occurred to them that we’d have so many; notably, their bombardment of every major city on Earth utilized strictly non-radioactive weapons—because they apparently wanted our planet to still be habitable when they landed. The thought that we’d ever risk permanently irradiating our own planet apparently never occurred to them.)
And so, in one unfathomably catastrophic day, we lost nearly half the population of Earth (Avengers: Infinity War especially became unwatchable after that), three-quarters of our cities, and nuked an alien invasion fleet that rained fall-out across the globe—which did not then produce a race of super-powered mutants or zombies or what-not, but merely higher cancer rates. Meanwhile, certain democracies became more authoritarian, certain dictatorships collapsed into anarchy, while still others just kept muddling on like they always had (we didn’t even get a decent Mad Max apocalyptic hell-scape out of it). There was no swelling rising action, no dramatic build-up to climax, no stirring denouement, no—just massive, senseless devastation, and an entire world full of PTSD and survivor’s guilt. You simply can’t make a movie out of that; not only because there are no good story beats in there, not only because there are no big-budget studios left, but because no one, and I mean no one, wants to relive a recent trauma of that scale.
They probably couldn’t even do it even if they had the budget; but the Indie Film makers who suddenly saw themselves promoted from the Hollywood minor leagues to the de facto last game in town, have especially struggled against these impossibilities. Their standard bag of Postmodern tricks have all fallen flat, because Postmodernism rings hollow now: when the Mothership came, Godot finally arrived. The deconstruction was literalized.
This is the universally-acknowledged background within which Independence Day-Fallout (the first new American wide-release in nearly a decade) arrives to us in. As though to further concede the impossibility of making a movie about the Invasion, it appropriates the title of an old aliens-attack flick from the before-times. The minor miracle isn’t just that this film was made at all, but that it somehow finds a way to address the single most immense catastrophe of our lifetimes—of any lifetime—without falling into the traps of crass hero worship or cheap sentimentality.
Filmed in what was once called a “Found Footage” style (nowadays just known as “footage”), IDF leans into its technical restrictions by embracing the tropes of that old horror genre with a twist. The Independence Day of the title is simply a reference to a U.S. holiday weekend, and follows a young man named John Preciado (first-timer Roberto Neville in his film debut, who also wrote and directed), who had been rock-climbing in Yosemite during the Invasion, as he at long last revisits the silent ruins of L.A. years later in order to make peace with his losses. Using a jerry-rigged iPhone cobbled together from spare-parts (as the film-makers themselves likely had to do), he wanders through the fallen City of Angels, self-narrating his goodbyes to his old high school, his old house, a diner, a bowling alley, a movie theater (in the film’s most meta touch). He is reminiscing, but also confessing, as his disjointed ramblings begin to form a sort of narrative recounting his regrets, his mistakes, his missed opportunities—to not only say goodbye to his loved ones before he left, but to have treated them just a little better, just a little more graciously, when they were still alive. Judiciously, the film never actually mentions the Invasion directly—partly because it doesn’t have to, but also because it can’t. Implicitly, stubbornly, the film refuses to represent the unrepresentable.
IDF is a sort of stealth film adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, wherein a certain Juan Preciado returns to his hometown (now a ghost town) in rural Mexico, and even features a similar twist—he finds that it is now a literal ghost town, as in, the town is inhabited by ghosts. Similarly here, as Preciado swings his untrained camera around, he almost catches flickers of movement among the charred and lifeless ruins. Once upon a time, this would’ve clearly been the beginning of a horror flick. Ghosts, zombies, mutants, vampires, you once knew the drill—this could’ve quickly become but another jump-scare fest: and let me be clear, sometimes jump-scares are fine! Sometimes jump-scares can distract you from the real ones. But IDF is too circumspect to indulge in such tasteless and disrespectful fare (even in the before-times, no one was vulgar enough to make a film about vampire-zombies emerging from, say, the ruins of the death-camps, or the twin towers). It correctly intuits that we no longer have the luxury of treating ghosts as horrifying and cruel, of being scared of them. No, no—after the Invasion (when so many other horrors lost their terrors forever), we have finally been forced to the truth: that ghost stories have always been innately comforting. They comforted us that there is still something after death, that no one is ever really lost. That’s why we told them.
Once upon a time we excluded the ghosts, because they were economically unproductive, because they were useless to us, because we damned from our lives anything that wasn’t obviously involved in the task of maximizing production and increasing our wealth. But now at long last, in our mass trauma, we ask meekly if the ghosts wouldn’t mind returning.
Don’t get me wrong: this film isn’t some sentimental sob fest wherein Preciado reconciles with his parents or ex-girlfriend or whatever to gain absolution or forgiveness or whatever. This film is too unsparing to offer such cheap fantasy fulfillment. Indeed, the entire middle third of the film is taken up by Preciado awkwardly asking some of the ghosts he encounters—an old woman knitting on a destroyed door-step, a boy shooting hoops in a charred-out cul-du-sac, etc.—if they knew any of the same people he once knew, or directions on where to find them. Their responses are as truthful as they are useless: Los Angeles was a big city, after all, and who really knows their neighbors anymore.
The film does finally live up to its title towards the end of the film, when he does in fact find his older sister; when he asks if Mom and Dad are home, she says they’ve made a last-minute grocery run for the 4th of July BBQ. She asks if he is staying for dinner. He mumbles a yes. She notes how glum he looks, and offers to set off some early fireworks, to cheer him up (“Dad bought a whole mess of illegal ones in Nevada, don’t worry, we got plenty!” she says), and the film ends with them setting off some fire-crackers in the late-summer sky, as the film fades to credits. Are these fireworks supposed to allude to the alien bombardment, or erase them? This ending remains as inscrutable as the Invasion was.
(Author Bio: Eric Goulden Kimball is a lapsed Punk-rocker from Mesa, AZ. He served as a missionary in the Baltic states, where he was first exposed to post-Soviet cinema. He holds a BA and MA in Cinema Studies from BYU and East Sussex College, respectively. He is currently a professor of Media studies at the American University of Tahiti with his wife.)