30 Years Ago: John Carpenter's Village of the Damned (1995)

"God said let us make man in our own image after our likeness. But image does not mean outer image, or every statue or photograph would be man. It means the inner image, the spirit, the soul...but what of those in our midst who do not have individual souls or spirits?...They have the look of man, but not the nature of mankind."

- Reverend George (Mark Hamill) discusses "the children" of Midwich in John Carpenter's Village of the Damned.

John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned is a remake of the beloved 1960 black-and-white classic directed by Wolf Rilla (itself an adaptation of John Wyndham’s book: The Midwich Cuckoos). 

All three productions focus on children of extra-terrestrial origin, and the world's response to these changelings.

The J.C. film dramatizes the story of a sleepy town in scenic, quiet Southern California. On the day of the annual town picnic, something unseen and malicious moves quietly over the placid, wide-open skies of Midwich. The presence of this invisible interloper is just barely perceived by some locals, including Dr. Alan Chafee (Christopher Reeve). But -- by and large -- it remains undetected...moving on a secret agenda.

Then, at 10:00 am, the object strikes. Everyone within the town boundaries of Midwich falls inexplicably unconscious. When the citizenry spontaneously awakens at 4:00 pm, all the women of child-rearing age are…pregnant. Even the town virgin. Even the faithfully married woman whose husband (Peter Jason) has been away in Japan for several months.

Before long, a secretive employee of the United States Government, Dr. Verner (Kirstie Alley) arrives in Midwich and encourages the pregnant women to carry their babies to term with the promise of Federal funding.

The women – perhaps affected by alien brainwashing – keep the babies. We experience one of these possibly alien brainwashing dreams too: a strange vision of euphoric emotions and roiling storm clouds. The women are garbed in simple garments and they caress their abdomens with a sense of exaltation.

In nine months, the mystery children of Midwich are born, and though they initially appear human, the platinum-haired children possess a distinctive “hive” or group intelligence. They also lack all human emotions. 

Over the ensuing six or seven years, the children separate themselves from the human citizenry of Midwich (even their parents) and protect themselves from human interference with terrifying psycho-kinetic abilities. In short, these alien children can “persuade” the weak human mind to commit terrible acts of violence; acts including suicide. The townspeople come to hate the children, just as the children come to regard humans as inferior.

Unfortunately, the children grow more powerful over time, led by Chafee’s icy daughter, Mara (Lindsey Haun). Sensing a losing battle, Dr. Verner finally reveals the childrens’ true alien nature to Chafee. Now their school teacher, Chafee attempts to destroy the emotionless alien progeny before their influence can spread beyond Midwich.

Only one of the children, named David (Thomas Dekker), seems to possess a human side. Perhaps this is so because his female “twin” or partner died in childbirth years earlier. That intense sense of loss has granted David a first-hand understanding of loneliness, and the human quality of “empathy.”

Hive Mind: One Size Fits All in This Village

There are many aspects of this particular Carpenter film that just don’t seem to work as well as they should; and these problems all stem from one particular creative decision: the apparent necessity of transplanting the events of the drama from an isolated, homogeneous English village in the 1960s to modern, diverse America in the 1990s. 

In other words, many of the problems exist at a script level; or at the level of intention.

For instance, in a small, isolated English community of decades past, it is possible to believe that all the villagers attend the same church, and are of the same religious persuasion. Somehow, we can accept the uniform nature of the indigenous population in that foreign, slightly timeless setting.

In John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned, however, there is just one church and one priest (played by Mark Hamill) in Midwich, and all the new mothers without exception even attend the same “mass Baptism” service. This may sound like a small matter, but it means -- essentially -- that there are no Jews, no Muslims, and no Atheists in Midwich. Just Christians. And Christians all of the same denomination, apparently.

Again, that just doesn’t quite ring true. I live in small town North Carolina, and all around me there are people of various ethnicities, religions, and political beliefs. On a purely human level, would every mother and father involved agree to a mass baptism instead of an individual one?

I call this the “one-size fits all” dilemma, and it extends even beyond the film's central narrative to the very appearance of the children themselves. In the original film, the children wore ascetic-looking clothing that was contextually accurate to a life in the 1960s (and England). The clothing read to our eyes as “gray” or “black” because, simply, the film was shot in black-and-white. Again, there's a timeless quality to it.

In John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned, the Midwich children – all from different families – universally wear similar gray clothes, but a color world surrounds them. I understand that the filmmakers were groping for an “equivalent” look to that which was utilized in the 1960s original, but it’s a “one size fits all” solution that doesn’t make sense on more than a surface level.

Are viewers to assume these children – at age 7 – have no older (human) half-brothers and sisters in their families, and therefore no hand-me-downs to wear? 

That the children shop at the nearest Gap, but that their parents only purchase slate-gray outfits for them?

Even if the parents were forced to somehow purchase only gray clothes, it seems likely that someone might comment on this oddity. You could argue that there is a distinct leitmotif in the film concerning "eyes." It is the eyes which are the source of the alien power; and Mara and Chafee discuss eyes being "windows of the soul." Perhaps the gray clothes result from the fact that the children are color blind. That's a shot in the dark, however. The film does not establish that idea even indirectly. You get the feeling that this was a visual decision, to garb all the children in grays (in a color world), and it doesn't quite make logical sense.

That kind of unquestioned, “one size fits all” thinking is all over Village of the Damned. Take for instance, the impressive night-time shot of the caravan heading to the hospital. Car headlights stretch over the horizon as the delivery date finally arrives. Again, a beautiful composition and a great visual, but we are made to understand that the pregnant women deliver at exactly the same time on the same night?

I understand the women have been implanted by aliens, but the aliens are gestating inside the bodies of human women; and those human bodies are individual. Each one is unique. I assume that during their pregnancies, the mothers-to-be had different diets and different exercise regimens, for example. 

Seems to me those factors would also determine how fast or how strongly the baby develops in each woman. Just like all the children wearing gray, or all the denizens of Midwich attending the same Church, this mass exodus to the hospital reeks of plot contrivance. On a simpler level, is it believable that every woman would still be living in the same town at delivery time, anyway? (Again, that could be a stipulation for the Federal funding, but that’s not established in the text of the film.)

And, as I belabored in my book, The Films of John Carpenter, the plot of Village of the Damned clearly encompasses several years. By my reckoning at least seven or eight years pass, considering the age of the children by the film’s climax. And yet there is no on-screen indication that time has passed for any characters other than the children. The Washington Post review picked up on this and noted that Carpenter shows "no grasp of character development, plot line or time passage," (Richard Harrington, The Washington Post, April 28, 1995).

Just think for a moment how greatly technology has changed in the last few years ors. Think of how different your street looks today than it did eight years ago. Look in a mirror and judge yourself for a second: even the healthiest amongst us “ages” in eight years in a variety of ways and I’ll testify to this: having a baby ages you faster than any force in the world.

But seriously, fashions change, hair-cuts change, people move from one home to another, and people gain and lose weight over the years. Yet, Village of the Damned skips over seven or eight years in the blink of an eye, and adult characters don’t change at all. Not what they wear; not how they style their hair; nothing!

For once in a Carpenter film, the action scenes aren’t particularly well-handled either. They come across as minor and not particularly scary. One character is injured when she is forced to squeeze painful medical drops into her eyes. Oh no, not painful eyedrops!

That incident may have read as dramatic on the page, but on the screen it just seems, well…silly.

Some of the pacing seems off too. Carpenter does well with the film’s climax: with Chafee blocking his thoughts (with images of a brick wall) from the children; even as a bomb ticks down to destruction. But the scene leading up to that finale -- a sustained assault on the children by local police and a helicopter -- seems entirely unnecessary. For one thing, we know the government is going to bomb the dickens out of Midwich anyway (because that’s what they did with the other “colonies"), so why bother to send police forces in on the ground where they’ll just be cannon fodder? 

For another thing, how do the children make a helicopter pilot (at night, no less) crash his chopper? Another moment, involving Midwich-ers of the 1990s spontaneously taking up torches (!) on Main Street also seems very off. 

Torches? Really? In 1995 America?

Village of the Damned fails because of the relentless accumulation of little things like these aforementioned points. By itself, not one of these issues is enough to scuttle the film.But taken in combination, the film seems slap-dash; careless. 

Writing in Magill's Cinema Annual of 1996, Kirby Tepper noted that while Village of the Damned was well-intentioned, something was missing. He called the film "a bit shallow," and noted that the "lack of depth in the film can be seen in its campy dialogue and its discrepancies." Although I disagree, to an extent on the comment about dialogue, I agree with the rest of that criticism. Something just feels...off.

Why Can’t We Just Live Together? Race Relations in America and in Midwich

On my first viewing, the most troublesome aspect of John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned was its apparent (and bland) passing-over of an important hot-button issue during the Age of Clinton: reproductive rights.

After all, Village of the Damned concerns women forcibly impregnated during an alien rape, who all decide to carry their pregnancies to term.

I just felt that the film left the whole issue of reproductive rights entirely unexcavated. When does society consider it right to “terminate” a pregnancy? Is life sacred, no matter what the origin? As I wrote in The Films of John Carpenter, I felt that the movie missed so many possibilities and opportunities by avoiding the issue of abortion all together.

Today, upon reading this complaint, I realize that I was reviewing the film I had expected and hoped for, rather than the film that was made. And that's not fair. John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned does indeed concern a hot-button issue of the 1990s, but it isn’t reproductive rights. Rather, it is race relations. This is entirely appropriate given some of the startling events of the decade.

On March 3, 1991, for instance, a twenty-five year old black man, Rodney King, was stopped by officers of the LAPD for speeding while attempting to dodge a traffic ticket. The policemen beat Mr. King so savagely that one eye socket was shattered, one leg was broken, a cheekbone was fractured, and some of his fillings were knocked loose from his teeth.

Soon after the event, CNN re-played the amateur videotaping of that beating around the clock. When a poll was conducted about the incident, some 92% of Los Angeles residents believed that the very men sworn to protect and serve the community had utilized excessive force on this occasion. Frankly, it was hard to see it otherwise: King was outnumbered by the police, and didn’t seem to be putting up much by way of resistance. And certainly not after the beating began. Yet on April 29, 1992, the four police officers most deeply-involved in the beating of Rodney King were acquitted of all wrongdoing by a jury of peers. As a result, Los Angeles…exploded.

A riot ensued on April 29, 1992 – the worst in American history -- in which 3800 buildings were vandalized, thousands of buildings were burned, and property damage spiraled to a cost of one billion dollars. Fifty-three people were killed. On TV, we saw looters and worse. We saw a trucker, Reginald Denny, pulled from his cab and attacked on live television. Sixty percent of the buildings destroyed in the Los Angeles riots belonged to Korean-Americans.

So it wasn’t just the King verdict that had sparked this conflagration. Something else had been unleashed. Hatred begat hatred, begat hatred, again and again, across the diverse population of Los Angeles. A shaken Rodney King timidly went before a camera crew in an attempt to curb the violence.

He famously asked: "Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids?...It’s just not right. It’s not right."

That question -- "can we get along?" -- is the very question that appears to underline Village of the Damned, produced just two years after the L.A. riots.  Late in the film, a character involved in the racially-charged battle between the alien children and defensive mankind asks - in a clear echo of King's appeal - “Why can’t we just live together?”

Examine the scenario closely, and you can detect how this remake involves two races in one society jockeying for superiority .and survival. Even young David feels intense race-based pressure to conform to his kind, to side with, essentially, his “skin color.” Meanwhile, the majority race (the humans) fear that which is new, different and “alien” among them. They fear a loss of humanity’s role as the master of the planet. The humans want to protect what which is theirs, and which has always been theirs: the “human” way of life. They want things to be as they have been traditionally (and hence, theirs is the conservative, safeguard argument). By contrast, the minority (the alien children) views the same battle not in terms of “hate” but rather as a “biological imperative,” a stand for their own culture; which is in danger of being  assimilated or destroyed by the larger, more powerful culture

In the end, standing between these two entrenched racial viewpoints is -- literally -- a brick wall that seemingly cannot be breached. Chafee talks about competition vs. cooperation, and the superiority of human emotions, but even he is not impartial in his judgment. His prejudices are already set in stone. Mara – the leader of the children – calls him “a prisoner of his values.” She is thus arguing for a progressive cause: an acceptance of a new viewpoint outside that which is traditional and known. 

The children (violently) stand up for their way of life (“there are going to be changes...”) while the adults of Midwich attempt to kill or bully them. Religion turns them into a convenient scapegoat, and the Reverend of Midwich compares them to devils, or demons. George Buck Flower, appearing in a cameo, attempts to frighten and intimidate the children, telling them directly, “you ain’t right!” The children fight back with lethal, ugly, force.

Viewed in terms of race relations, one can start to see how some of Village of the Damned's apparent weaknesses are mitigated, at least a little. It even seems necessary that the adults are treated in as monolithic a fashion as the children (as merely humans, rather than as Catholics, atheists, Jews, liberals or conservatives) because every little difference begins to take away from the central metaphor. It is much more important to see the battle as being between humans on one side and the children on the other.

Even the distinguishing features of the aliens – those trademark gray clothes and bad platinum wigs – visually characterize the race “differences” we are meant to note. 

And the lethargic, overlong police attack on the children? In some way that too reflects the specifics of a race war: the law enforcement arm of the Majority has come to wipe out the minority. It’s Rodney King all over again, only here Rodney King is telekinetic, mad and quite capable of defending himself. And when the children riot, it is bloody...

And consider this too…perhaps the townspeople of Midwich are picking up those objectionable torches, willy-nilly, because they’re going to a “high-tech” genre lynching (President Bush Sr.'s description of another racially-tinged event of the 1990s: the 1991 confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas). The image of the torch is resonant in American history, and consistent with the racial motif. The torch explicitly reminds one of a KKK rally, or some such thing: of a mad mob out to destroy the reviled “other,” the “outsider” living in “our town.”

Although many townspeople and the Children die in the film, Village of the Damned is not without hope on the subject of race relations. David shows the capacity for love and other “human emotions” and is thus a bridge between man and alien...the hope for the future. Interestingly, he character of David was not featured in the original film, and therefore one must conclude that he was added here -- in a turbulent time -- so as to show that a peace was possible between the races; that race different need not necessarily end in riot, death or assimilation.

Maybe all the awkward, weird elements of Village of the Damned actually further the film’s leitmotif of a looming race war; of race intolerance and hatred in America. 

We Have Become Accustomed to the Power of Science

Nearly all of John Carpenter’s films feature some strong anti-authoritarian message. Prince of Darkness and Vampires take aim at the Catholic Church. Escape from L.A. and They Live go after the Republican Party, and even Halloween exposes “holes” in our apparently safe infrastructure (law enforcement, medicine, parents, psychology…). 

Village of the Damned is no different, but here the target of Carpenter’s maverick streak seems to be irresponsible, grasping science.

It is irresponsible science that allows the alien children to grow inside human women, out of “curiosity.” It is irresponsible science (represented by Alley's Verner) that keeps the secret of the aliens for so long, from the affected populace. It is alien science, of course, responsible for the strangest experimentation of all: the implantation of alien embryos into human wombs.

This anti-science message was part and parcel of the 1990s too. The X-Files (1993-2002) concerned, rather explicitly, alien experiments involving human gestation (in episodes such as "The Beginning" and in the first feature film, Fight The Future). Episodes such as "Soft Light" revealed the danger of forward-pushing science carried too far too fast. 

This whole philosophy of "tampering in God's domain" again came into vogue because of rapid technological advances in the 1990s. This was the era that saw Big Blue beat a chess master, cloning become a reality, and the development of the human genome project.

 But what was the moral authority behind such science? If you reject the race war analysis of Village of the Damned, you might consider in its stead, the film as an anti-science screed, one concerning the danger of genetic experiments carried to – literally – Aryan ends (blond haired, physically-perfect white children are the result). These Aryans wear uniforms (the gray outfits) that visually recall the uniformity of Hitler Youth. The children are also frighteningly dispassionate in the pursuit of their goals.

Sometimes Mysteries Don’t Get Solved

Village of the Damned is not a great film. However, like all works of art, it reflects the issues of its day (the mid 1990s), whether that issue is the blazing pace of scientific advancement or turbulent race relations. For me, the film has never quite worked as more than the sum of its parts; but studying it in terms of the race aspect has proven illuminating. 

There is another facet of Village of the Damned I more thoroughly appreciate now than I did on original viewing: the visual component. 

In particular, the first half of Village of the Damned is very strong. The movie opens as an alien shadow goes by overhead, in a series of menacing aerial shots. On the soundtrack, we hear an inhuman whispering…like a storm is slowly building; like something is watching. Carpenter handles this section of the film deftly, generating a strong sense of paranoia and also voyeurism. The aliens are among us – chattering – but we don’t see them. 

In her review of the film, critic Janet Maslin praised Carpenter's staging of this opening, noting that Village of the Damned "has one of the eeriest opening sequences in horror history." (The New York Times, April 28, 1995).

Carpenter’s macabre sense of humor is also entirely intact here. One of my favorite moments involves the Midwich fellow cooking hot dogs at the Town Picnic. Last year he burned the hot dogs, goes the gossip. This year ,however, he falls asleep on the grill during the time of the alien “black out” – and burns himself to a crisp. When the picnic-goers awake, Carpenter cuts to a shot of the grill and we see a smoking, flame-broiled human form splayed out there. This is wicked fun, pure and simple, and the kind of nightmarish vision we expect in a carefully-crafted Carpenter film.

Many Carpenter films look better across the passage of years, as the director’s neo-classic virtues stand out more and more from today's interchangeable, TV-style movies. Ultimately, I submit that is also the case for Village of the Damned. Carpenter’s skill behind the camera makes a difference, and elevates the film. 

In the final analysis, Village of the Damned may not be a good film. But thanks to Carpenter’s visual aplomb, it at least looks like a good film.

On some days that’s enough...

50 Years Ago: Death Race 2000 (1975)

Fifty years after it was produced, Paul Bartel and Roger Corman's Death Race 2000 (1975) remains an example of exhilarating, go-for-broke, low-budget science fiction film making. 

Of course, the "futuristic" film is undeniably brutal and bloody too, so much so that Roger Ebert awarded the film "zero stars" and contemplated leaving a screening early upon the film's initial release.

Yet the decades have been kind to Death Race 2000.  

What seemed viscerally excessive in the Gerald Ford Era now seems merely par-for-the-course in the post-War-on-Terror, post-Torture Porn Age, MAGA Age.

And with the on-screen violence neutered to some degree by contemporary expectations and standards, something truly wondrous and unexpected has occurred in this case: the film's satirical angle has more fully-flowered than ever before.

Like the best examples of the genre, this is a sci-fi movie that comments on the "American way of life" --" no holds barred," to quote the film -- in an intelligent manner.  

But it's not some heavy-handed political diatribe either.  

On the contrary, Death Race 2000 is fuel-injected with laughs. The film boasts an unmatched sense of wicked black humor.  Today, you're far more likely to laugh than turn away in disgust from the film's action. In particular, Sylvester Stallone is a hoot as the movie's touchy villain, a guy who answers every perceived slight with a volley of machine gun fire or a good impaling.

Perhaps the great fun of returning to 1970s productions like Logan's Run (1976) and Death Race 2000 today is sizing up their predictions about the unknown, unwritten future. Logan's Run predicted a dominant youth culture obsessed with beauty and fitness, for example. Death Race 2000 imagines a dystopic future, one where a parochial American electorate is mesmerized and distracted by violent bread-and-circuses entertainment while a rich political class rules the land and pulls the strings.  

When this Orwellian Order is being overturned in the 1975 Bartel film, one of the rebels meaningfully shouts "The Age of Obedience is over!"   

That exclamation may not seem entirely appropriate to the year 2000; but it sure as hell seems appropriate in the year 2025, no?  

It's a bit unsettling, actually, how accurately (and viciously...)  Death Race 2000 predicts many of the defining trends of the 21st century. For instance,  Death Race 2000 looks meaningfully at the ways that manipulative politicians encourage xenophobia and jingoism to distract from important domestic matters.  

Simultaneously, the movie also shows the ascent of reality television in the American pop-culture firmament and imagines what impact the equivalent of modern "gladiatorial" games could have in a technological age 

On that front, just consider this fact: both Survivor and Big Brother first aired in the U.S. in the year 2000, the very year of this film's action.   

On a whole, would you judge that two full decades of reality TV has made us a more attentive, literate people? Or is the opposite true?  Has this kind of entertainment coarsened the culture?

Most trenchantly, however, Death Race 2000 fully understands how dangerous it can be when the walls between politics, religion,  journalism, and pop entertainment crumble and these formerly-trusted pillars combine to form a giant multi-headed "media" Hydra.  

 "Is winning all you care about?"

Death Race 2000 commences as the "20th annual trans-continental road race" is about to begin in New York. In this government-promoted race, a "new American champion will be crowned," and there are several contestants in competition.

They are: Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), Machine Gun Joe Veturbo (Sylvester Stallone), Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins) and "Mr. President's" favored contestant: the U.S.-govt sponsored hero and two-time winner named "Frankenstein" (David Carradine).  He wears an all-black leather body suit, and a mask that ostensibly hides his racing "scars."

The racers' destination is New Los Angeles and on the way to the finish line, each driver is expected to rack up points by striking and killing innocent pedestrians.  In fact, their fearsome cars have been fiendishly designed for just such a purpose; decorated with blades and other impaling tools such as knives, horns and dragon's teeth. These are mean, lean, killing machines.

In the race's violent rules, women pedestrians are worth ten points and teenagers are worth forty points.  Hit a child under twelve and seventy points are earned  

The greatest reward? One hundred points per each senior citizen struck and murdered.  

As the race starts, Frankenstein is joined by a new navigator, beautiful Annie Smith (Simone Griffeth), secretly a rebel plotting with Thomasina Paine (Harriet Medin) to kill the racers, abduct Frankenstein and force Mr. President -- who has been ensconced in high office since "The World Crash of 1979" -- to abolish the bloody race once and for all. This mission is called Operation "Anti-Race."

But on the open road, Frankenstein and Annie grow close, even as the rebellion and Frankenstein's fellow drivers attempt to kill them ...


"[Winning] in the name of hate" 

Death Race 2000 announces its intention to satirize almost every important aspect of American culture in its opening frames.

As the movie begins and the trans-continental race commences, we hear the familiar notes of the National Anthem as played by a high-school marching band.  So the Star-Spangled Banner is still the official theme song of the United Provinces in America in the year 2000, but there has been an important upgrade to Old Glory herself.  

In short order, we see that the blue background and white stars of our beautiful flag have been replaced by a gloved fist pointing heavenwards.  So now its fists and stripes, not stars and stripes.  

Arriving in theaters as it did in the last year of the Vietnam War, during an ongoing Energy Crisis, with inflation on the rise, and a President having resigned in disgrace, Death Race 2000 also suggests a future America in which the old, dependable, and traditional pillars of the country have failed. They have abdicated their obligations and are running on empty, on fumes.

If anything, we are simply much further down this road in 2025 then we were in the disco decade, and the speculations today seem more accurate.

To start with, the journalists featured in the film are not independent arbiters of fact, rather they are access-hungry promoters towing the official party line.  

One shallow journalist, the wonderfully-named "Grace Pander," lives up to her moniker. To pander means "to cater to the lower tastes and desires of others or exploit their weaknesses," and that's exactly what she does. She symbolizes the total, seamless blending of news and entertainment -- which some  observers call "info-tainment" -- and again, the trend has gotten a lot worse since 1975.  She caters to the blood lust of an angry, resentful populace.

Pander treats the film's racers as celebrities and speaks in worshipful tones of "Mr. President," the dear leader.  For her own personal fame, Pander has forsaken her responsibility as a journalist to ferret out facts and truth. Instead, she merely encourages the populace to adore the racers, and support the race. She also plugs and parrots the anti-intellectual line of the government officials.  

When Frankenstein goes after physicians and nurses with his dragon car, for example, Pander reports it as a populist victory and writes off the murder as being, well...deserved. 

"Well, those doctors - dear friends of mine - have been pretty smug all these years setting up the old folks. Frankenstein must have decided it was their turn."

Yep, those darn elitist, college-educated physicians!  Who the hell do they think they are?  They got what was coming to them...the bastards.

Politicians don't get off any easier than journalists in Death Race 2000.  "Mr. President" governs the nation from his "summer palace" in Mar a Lago, I mean, Peking, China (another particularly timely joke about the United States become more and more owned by Chinese interests), and our Great Leader beats a familiar jingoistic drum in order explain to the people why the economy is so bad.  

In particular, he uses a long-lived and cherished American scape goat: the French. Specifically, Mr. President claims that France and her "stinking European allies" collapsed America's economy on purpose.

This is funny for a couple of reasons.  

First, some Americans always want to blame the French for our woes...conveniently forgetting that the French were our most dedicated and steadfast ally at the time of the Revolutionary War.    

But, again, look to the events of the last few years.  Remember when France wouldn't support the Iraq War in 2003-2004 and the mainstream media and the administration in power joined forces to trash everything French?  French fries became freedom fries. Bill O'Reilly actually launched a boycott of French wine on his Fox show, if I remember correctly. Death Race 2000 hints at this still simmering American animosity or resentment for Europeans, particularly the French, and even ends with the President launching a war against that country after falsely claiming the French air force (humorously just one, measly plane...) ambushed Frankenstein.  

"Well America, there you have it," announces a reporter, "Frankenstein has just been attacked by the French Air Force and he's whipped their derrieres!"  

Secondly, in terms of 2025, consider the global economy and how interconnected it has become. The idea of another country subverting America's prosperity  doesn't seem as ridiculous today in an age of 145% tariffs. A stupid economic choice in another country, or even here at home, can damage us. So Death Race 2000 gets that contemporary idea right too.

There's also no separation of Church and State in this America of the Year 2000. The Bi-Partisan Ruling Party of America boasts an official Deacon to bestow the blessing of the Lord (and the President) upon the racers, though he comes to a bad end.  

Again, this is an abdication of moral responsibility (probably harking back to Watergate in terms of historical context). So far as I understand them, religious men and women in power must obey one "higher authority," and shouldn't be shilling for the guy who happens to be in the Oval Office at any given moment.   

Interestingly, Death Race 2000 even sees fit to include two Nazi characters: Matilda and her navigator, "Herman the German."  They drive around in a vehicle decorated with swastikas.  But nobody in the movie's culture -- not the reporters nor the audience -- seems to mind this "affectation."   

Again, look at the state of America today. In the 2020s, being a Nazi has been mainstreamed to an alarming degree. In the world of Death Race 2000, Matilda the Hun -- actually, truly a Nazi -- is just another "theme" driver, and no one is bothered by that. In fact, she's got lots of fans. She's just "an entertainer" and we're not supposed to judge her, right?  

But the most searing criticism embedded in Death Race 2000 is certainly lodged against those people who would be manipulated by their fears of foreigners, limited by their narrow outlook on the world, and easily distracted by televised bread-and-circuses.  

In other words: reality-TV American culture.  

It's much easier to root for a hero in a televised sporting event then -- you know -- solve a problem.  It's much easier to get caught up in minutiae of a hobby, such as -- for instance, the new rules of the race -- than in the details of national economic policy. Sports fans are "enthusiasts," people who try to understand policy are called "wonks." 

The result, of course, is that the very men who "hold the power of life and death" operate in secrecy and with complete autonomy, according to their agendas, while the masses watch the race and are clueless about the government.  The rebellion against the Powers that Be can easily be dismissed as "the lunatic fringe" because the majority enjoys the bread and circuses.  

The movie also says something about the way our nation manufactures heroes for public consumption. Here, Frankenstein was raised in a government center and trained to be a racer. He is only one in a succession of many Frankensteins, though that fact has been kept secret from the people.  In Death Race 2000, fans so admire and revere the "public" Frankenstein -- essentially a hit-and-run driver -- that they willingly throw themselves in front of his car so he can score points.  

"You want to make love to me because I drive the Monster and wear this costume?" he asks an adoring fan. 

Yes. She loves the trappings of his fame. She worships it.

So Death Race 2000 really gets in its satirical licks -- licks that resonate even more fully today than they did in 1975 -- all while providing some glimmer of hope. In the film, the rebellion is victorious and Mr. President's Orwellian Order is taken down...violently.  The death race is abolished.

The message to that defeated and murdered President is, perhaps, if you live by the sword (or the rules of the Death Race), you'll also die by the sword.  

Once you numb the people so thoroughly to the death of others on a routine, televised basis, what emotion would you expect your death to engender?  If you take empathy as weak, you can't expect to benefit from empathy when you're the one suffering, bruh...

How many points is striking down a global leader worth?  Or, in the language of the film, "Bye-bye Baby! Hello 70 points!" 


"The drivers are ready, the world is watching. Once more, I give you what you want."

Readers sometimes ask me how I can support extremely violent films like The Last House on the Left(1972) Straw Dogs (1971) or Death Race 2000, and my answer is always the same: I support violent films if they use their on-screen violence to make a point. To comment on our culture, or to present some kind of worthwhile moral statement.

Death Race 2000 is an exploitation film and it is incredibly violent.  Heads get crushed under tires.  Innocent pedestrians get struck and sliced with alarming regularity.  Yet, the film is a cautionary tale.  It declared  in 1975 that this is where America was headed; into a world of bread and circuses, into a world where celebrities are God, into a world where citizens have "tuned out" from politics and don't know what is being done in their names.

So the violence in the film certainly has a moral underpinning.  

What surprised me watching Death Race 2000 for the first time in years was not only how accurate many of the film's speculations turned out to be fifty years later; but also how genuinely erotic the film is. There are quite a few scenes of explicit sexuality, and they add a lot to the film and particularly the relationship of Frankenstein and Annie. 

That's something that has changed a lot since 1975 too.  

Today, our movies are all about the violence, but rarely about the sex.  Sex has been deemed unacceptable as a serious subject in the culture, and swept out of movies by and large.  

So that's another reason I love this film. It's about pleasures we don't get to enjoy in the movies that much anymore.

Like watching real cars -- instead of the CGI equivalent -- race and jockey for superior position.  

So for me, Death Race 2000 -- with all its satiric and queasily accurate speculations -- will "forever howl down that freeway in the sky, knocking over... the angels." 

Happy Alien Day (4/26) - 5 Reasons Why Alien (1979) Endures

Here are my five reasons why the original Alien endures nearly five decades after its release.

1. Revolutionary production and art design, translated into revolutionary sets, costumes and miniatures.

Alien truly pushed the science-fiction “space” film forward into a new realm of imagination.  Director Ridley Scott’s movie eschewed the stream-lined modernism and “neat,” minimalist future-look of such films as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969) as well as TV programs like UFO (1970) or Space: 1999 (1975 – 1977). 

The film offered instead a world that was grungy, messy and recognizable…both lived-in and dirty.  It’s true that Star Wars (1977) represents a crucial step in this direction, having created a universe that – in terms of visuals – suggests a rich and storied past.  But Alien went whole hog into a world where coffee mugs rested on computer consoles, where pornographic pin-ups were hung up beside work stations, and where characters wore sneakers and ball caps when not asleep in cryo-tubes (or “freezers” in the vernacular of the film). 

This visual aesthetic has famously been termed “space truckers,” and it’s indeed a crucial element of Alien’s mystique and appeal.  In director Ridley Scott’s capable hands, outer space was not some glorious final frontier.  Rather, it was just your monotonous, unglamorous day-job.  In this future, the average blue collar space traveler still worked for the Man (Weyland-Yutani), and was still trying to get his fair share of corporate wealth and make a living wage. And he still made it through the day on coffee, cussing and swearing when things break down.

Alien, which features a great and very believable monster, would not have succeeded if the elements of the film that involved “futuristic” mankind – his ships, his clothes, his environs – did not reflect a reality the audience could understand and readily identify with.  The recognizable world of the main characters, in fact, makes the alien world all the more disturbing and frightening.

2. The alien itself.

Perhaps this aspect of the film is the one that is actually most difficult to reckon with today because we’ve seen the Alien xenomorph in so many settings and films since the first film came along.  We’ve had three direct sequels, plus two AVP movies, plus toys and comics involving the alien.

The notion of a monster attacking a spaceship crew was not new, of course when Alien, written by the great Dan O’Bannon, was produced.  By that point -- as history-minded film reviewers are certain to remind us -- we’d seen It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), Bava’s Planet of the Vampires (1965) plus episodes of The Outer Limits (“The Invisible Enemy”) and Space: 1999 (“Dragon’s Domain”) that explored the trope, in many cases quite brilliantly.

But Alien represented a new horizon for “monsters” because of the bio-organic designs of Swiss sculptor and painter H.R. Giger.  This artist’s style had never been captured in mainstream film before, and his work expressed a total (and perverse) blend of human flesh and hard-edged machinery.  In short, the monster in Alien looked like nothing audiences had ever before reckoned with, a fusion of distinctly unlike elements.

There’s more to it than that too.  

Today we take this for granted, but Alien proved so horrifying a film because the monster’s shape and appearance were different every time we encountered it.  We now know the alien life cycle by rote: egg, face-hugger, chest-burster, and adult.  But when audiences first reckoned with Scott’s movie in the last year of the 1970s, none of this information was known. We had no idea what was coming, or how the alien was taking shape.  It seemed to be in a constant state of flux…of becoming.  

Again, all the stages of the lifecycle are familiar today, but in 1979, the alien seemed like the cinema’s first legitimate extra-terrestrial: a thing that changed and evolved into something ever-more hideous each time we saw it.  The title “Alien” expresses this idea beautifully.  Watching the film for the first time, we really felt we had encountered something not human, and not of this Earth.  Today, we’ve seen so many aliens and so many shape-shifters that we’re inured to the concept.  But Alien got it right, in revolutionary fashion.

3. Implications unexplored but suggested.  Alien dramatized a complete and satisfying story of survival, but more than that, brilliantly implied a larger universe outside the context of the Nostromo’s last days.

Let’s gaze at the derelict ship that the Nostromo finds on LV-426, which has become an important part of Prometheus’s story-line.  When we encounter it in Alien, it is emitting a distress call (or actually, a warning: stay away).  The characters Dallas, Lambert and Kane investigate the ship and they see the dead pilot, the "space jockey" with a torn-open chest. They also find a giant lower chamber, which must be a cargo hold, given its dimensions and relative lack of instrumentation, furniture, etc.  

This hold is filled with alien eggs. The eggs are ensconced underneath a level of fog which "reacts" when broken.  What is this level of fog?  Is it some kind of technology keeping the eggs in stasis?  Was it a safeguard to keep the alien eggs dormant and the (odd) equivalent of the freezers we see on the Nostromo? Who was meant to control it?

One big questioned unanswered: if a chest-burster broke out of the space jockey’s (Engineer's) chest, where was the adult alien when Dallas and the others arrived to investigate?  A possible answer is that it had died out already, since in Scott’s original conception the alien was to be like something akin to a butterfly, a “perfect” creature that only could live for a few days

See how this film from 1979 is loaded with implications and questions above-and-beyond the "ten little Indians" template of an alien that kills astronauts on a spaceship? The deeper you delve, the more interesting Alien becomes. 

And again, this reflects our reality as human beings, an important aspect of horror films.  We are not privy to all the answers in life.  We don’t always know why things happen, or what fate has in store for us.   Some aspects of nature seem a mystery to us, even with advanced science.  The crew of Nostromo likewise encounters a terrible mystery on LV-426, but that mystery is largely left unexplored as the battle of survival begins.   

4.  It’s all about sex.

Alien is cherished and remembered by horror fans for the gory chest-burster sequence featuring John Hurt.  But the film also features one of the creepiest off-screen deaths of all time, and a discarded idea (or hidden implication) in the franchise. When last we see Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), the xenomorph's tail is seen winding its nefarious way…up between her legs. Then, the film cuts suddenly to Ripley running down a dark corridor, but we still hear Lambert panting and suffering and some...inhuman moaning. 

So what the hell is going on here? What is the alien doing to Lambert? Does it -- by its very "perfect" nature -- boast some other form of reproductive ability that it is practicing on her? Is it fulfilling some kind of sexual desire?  

Alien possesses this queasy, uneasy sub-text involving our human sexuality. On the immediately-apparent surface level, the film concerns a creature that can pervert our reproductive cycle for its own ends. But underneath - if we peel back the layers - there are moments in Scott's original that appear to involve homosexuality, sexual repression, sexual stereotypes and more.

Consider that John Hurt's character Kane becomes the first recipient of the alien's reproductive advances. Whisper-thin, British, and sexually ambiguous, Kane is depicted - at one point in the film - wearing an undergarment that appears to be a girdle; something that is distinctly "feminizing" to his appearance.

Also, Kane lives the most dangerous (or is it promiscuous?) life-style of anyone amongst the crew. He is the first to awake from cryo-sleep, the first to suggest a walk to the derelict, and the only man who goes down into the derelict’s egg chamber.  Soon in the film, it is Kane who is made unwillingly receptive to an oral penetration: the insertion of the face-hugger's "tube" down his throat...where it lays the chest-buster. What emerges from this encounter is "Kane's son" (in Ash’s terminology).

Consider Ash and this character's sexual underpinnings. He is actually a robot - a creature presumably incapable of having sex -- and the film's subtext suggests that this inability, this repression of the sexual urge, has made him a monster too. When Ash attacks Ripley late in the film, he rolls up a pornographic magazine (surrounded by other examples of pornography) and attempts to jam it down the woman’s throat...it's his penis surrogate.  The implication of this particular act is that he can't do the same thing with his penis, so Ash must use the magazine in its stead. 

Later, Ash admits to the fact that he "envies" the alien (penis envy?) and one has to wonder if it is because the alien can sexually dominate others in a way that the disliked, often dismissed Ash cannot manage. 

Also note that when Ash is unable to satisfy his repressed sexual desire for Ripley, the pressure literally causes him to explode.  The android blood is a milky white, semen-like fluid. And it spurts everywhere, a catastrophic ejaculation of monumental proportions. Ash, when confronted with his own sexuality and inability to express it...can't hold his wad.

The most hyper-masculinized (again, stereotypically-so) character in Alien is Parker (Yaphet Kotto), a black man who brazenly discusses “eating pussy” during the scene leading up to the chest-burster moment. He boasts an antagonistic, adversarial relationship with Ripley, and is the character most often-seen carrying a weapon (a flame thrower), a possible phallic symbol. 

In another type of film, Parker might be our hero.  But here he dies because of the stereotypical quality of male chivalry or machismo. Specifically, he won't turn the flame thrower on the alien while a woman (Lambert) is in the line of fire. The alien dispatches Parker quickly (mano e mano), perhaps realizing he will never co-opt an alpha male like Parker to be his "bitch;" at least not the way Kane was used.

Which brings me to Ripley. Ripley is a character written for a man but played by a woman (Sigourney Weaver). She is the only survivor (along with Jones the Cat), of the alien's rampage on the Nostromo, and there's a case that can be made that the alien cannot so easily "tag" Ripley as either male or female, and that's why she survives. She is perfect, like the alien is, a blend of all “human” qualities.

Given this uncommon mix of stereotypically male and female qualities, the alien is not quite sure how to either "read" or "use" Ripley. In the final moments of the film, it does make a decision. It recognizes Ripley - the best of humanity whether male or female - as kindred; a survivor. So it rides in secret with her aboard the shuttle Narcissus as they escape the exploding Nostromo.

Note that the alien could likely kill Ripley any time during that escape flight...but does not choose to do so. It knows it is in safe hands with her, at least for the time being. It uses her "competence," her skill (qualities of itself it recognizes in her?) to escape destruction...again establishing its perfection. 

Here, perfection might be measured by how well it understands the enemy, the prey.

So, underneath the scares and underneath the great design, what we get in Ridley Scott's Alien is the story of a monster that exploits our 1970s views of biology and psychology; causing us (as viewers) to re-examine -- perhaps even subconsciously -- the sexual stereotypes of the day. The homosexual man is endangered first, the alpha males (Dallas and Parker) are ineffective, the traditional "screaming" female gets exploited (not rescued...), and the most "evolved" human, Ripley (along with another perfect creature - a cat) survives to fight another day.

The strange, spiky and sexual nature of Alien lurks just beneath the surface of the film, and is noticeable even in the set design. Just take a long look at the "opening" of the alien derelict. Without being too graphic about this, it is pretty clearly a vagina. 

And the chest-burster is pretty clearly phallus-shaped. Ask yourself why. Sex, and -- sometimes discomfort with sex --  lurks at the heart of this horror film. This factor makes the film endlessly interesting and worthy of a re-watch or debate.

5. Sigourney Weaver as Ripley.  Ripley is indisputably one of the cinema’s greatest hero-warriors, but she’s more than that.  She represents a critical change in how women were conceived and written in horror and science fiction films.  

Ripley is simultaneously part of the “Final Girl” tradition and a crucial evolution of the archetype.   Ripley survives in the film because she is smart and because she possesses insights the others do not.  She understands why regulations are important, doesn’t succumb to emotion (regarding Dallas’s order to let Kane back aboard the Nostromo), and she is extremely competent on the job.  She takes command with authority, and is able to understand the ramifications of her actions.  She is tough, but never so much that we lose a sense of her humanity.  Male or female, we all wish we could possess Ripley’s qualities.

Ripley was Sigourney Weaver’s break-out role because the actress brought incredible commitment and intensity to the role.  Ripley herself showed that the Final Girl did not need others (particularly men) to rescue her, and that she could combat and even destroy the villain, not merely survive to another day.

20Years/Top 10 JKM Posts: Number 10. "Millennium: A Retrospective"

[This article was originally posted on October 24, 2016, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Millennium (1996-1999). It is the 10th most read post in my blog's first twenty years.]

Twenty years beyond its first broadcast, Chris Carter's brilliant and underrated crime/horror program, Millennium (1996-1999) remains the gold standard in terms of the genre “procedural.” 

Series such as Bones, Criminal Minds, CSI, Medium and even Hannibal owe the series a tremendous artistic debt.

Like those series, Millennium focuses on forensic pathology, oddball criminals, and crafty, perverted serial killers, but the series achieved something else beyond that description too.  

More importantly, Millennium also charts the impact of such dark, difficult investigations upon the investigator, and even more so, his family.

Catching society’s “monsters” has an impact on the psyche of the investigator, as Millennium episodes such as “Dead Letters” and “The Beginning and the End” aptly note.

In terms of its origin or inspiration, Millennium takes as a leaping-off point two relatively early episodes of The X-Files (1993-2002). One is the second season story, “Irresistible” which involves a horrible serial killer who operates in plain sight, seemingly normal, but really harboring sinister and monstrous urges.

The second is the third season narrative “Grotesque,” which involves the real danger to the investigator in entering the thoughts/worlds of the serial killer. Here, Mulder nearly loses himself, following in the footsteps of the episode’s copycat killer: an FBI investigator who has lost himself in the quest to find the original killer’s motives.

Millennium ran for three glorious and all too brief seasons on FOX TV in the late nineties, in total broadcasting sixty-six episodes.

Millennium starred the incredibly versatile and charismatic Lance Henriksen in the role of his career: ex-F.B.I. profiler Frank Black, a quiet, haunted man who has suffered two mental breakdowns in his life because of his capacity to "see inside" the minds of killers. 

As the series begins, he's just moved to a beautiful yellow house in Seattle with his wife, a therapist named Catherine (Megan Gallagher) and his young, gifted daughter, Jordan (Britanny Tiplady). 

Frank helps the Seattle PD solve difficult crimes from time-to-time, and consults for the mysterious Millennium Group, an organization of ex-F.B.I. professionals (based on the real like Academy Group) dedicated to understanding and apprehending criminals...and also, perhaps, cultivating The End Times.

Frank's friend, and later -- nemesis -- is his sponsor in the Millennium Group, Peter Watts (Terry O'Quinn). 

After a series of catastrophic events in the second season, Frank loses confidence in the secretive Group and returns to the F.B.I. Academy at Quantico, teaming up with a young, intelligent agent, Emma Hollis (Klea Scott) to bring it down. 

Most of his cases there involve the mysterious and odd misdeeds of The Millennium Group. As fans of The X-Files remember, a closing episode of that show, titled -- appropriately -- "Millennium," brought some sense of closure (though not enough for fans…) to the series.

According to Variety at the time of Millennium’s premiere near Halloween in '96, Millennium "makes Twin Peaks look like a morning in Romper Room," and the magazine called the series "literate, well-acted and blessed with an irresistible hook...the best new show of the season."(Jeremy Gerard, Variety, October 21-27, 1996, page 212.) 

John J. O'Connor, writing for The New York Times suggests that creator "Carter pushes all the right apocalyptic buttons...The production values darkly mirror the text."(The New York Times: "The Evil That Lurks All Around," October 25, 1996, page B16). 

In 1999, after the program finally and sadly left the air, X-Pose Magazine insightfully commented that "Millennium surpassed itself in cultivating relationships between its principal cast" and called the show "a clear artistic success, making sense out of an often chaotic, disturbing world with consummate intelligence and powerful emotions."(X-Pose # 35, "Inner Demons," June 1999, pages 49-51.)

As these notices suggest, Millennium was constructed artfully, with symbols and ideas that continue to resonate deeply in today’s world.  Back in 1999, I wrote a book called Terror Television, and opined of Millennium that it was "far better, far smarter, than just about any program on any of the American networks." 

I could easily (and happily) make the same statement today.

As part of Millennium's twentieth anniversary, I'll celebrate this week with some posts about the series, some of which you've seen before, and others which you have not.  But here, now, to start off, I want to break down some of the particulars of the series' artistry as I judge them.

Context and Literary Allusion

Many episodes of Millennium -- especially during the first season -- open with a white-lettered quotation from a literary or religious source.  In short order, the episodes then depict a tale that echoes, contrasts, or mirrors that opening selection. 

Yeats ("Pilot"), Dostoevsky ("Dead Letters"), Melville ("The Judge"), Jean-Paul Sartre ("522666"), Robert Louis Stevenson ("The Well Worn Lock"), Cicero ("Walkabout"), Nietzsche ("Broken World"), William Rose Benet ("The Paper Dove") and even Shakespeare ("Monster") represent just some of the literary giants and thinkers Millennium routinely referenced.  The Bible is often mined for pertinent quotations as well.

These opening quotes have not been included to be pretentious, but to provoke thought and to connect the viewer to the fact that the series concerns our history, our very nature.  

It's an invigorating purpose, frankly, and one that reminds authors that there is a direct link between past and present: a universality of the human condition.  The situations that criminal profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) encounters are situations that Shakespeare or Cicero contemplated or thought about, and so these opening quotes -- too easily dismissed as affectation by by some -- remind us of our literary and historical past.  

And since Millennium is, in some ways, about the passage of a thousand years, it's entirely appropriate, and even inspired, to focus on the link to our shared past.

In other words, these opening quotations help us contextualize the stories; but also contextualize Frank's journey in terms of human (or at least literary) history.  He's not just "a guy" trying to catch a serial killer, he's part of the ebb and flow of human history, doing battle at a vital juncture in such history.

The Yellow House

I find it endlessly rewarding to consider how Millennium was devised on artistic terms, from its opening quotations to its very unique application of symbols and imagery.  The oft-mentioned yellow house on Ezekiel Drive, for instance, is perhaps the program's most important and familiar symbol. Viewers associate yellow with brightness, and with bright, happy light, like that of the sun. 

Of course, the yellow house also represents Frank Black's only bright place away from the darkness and away from the horror that he witnesses on the job, and even within the recesses of his own mind.  Millennium utilizes the recurring symbol of the yellow house in a plethora of stimulating ways.  It doesn't always mean the same thing.

In the series' first season, for instance, the house is seen as a place of safety for the Blacks, a sanctuary away from the darkness of the world.  That safety is violated (alarmingly) in one of the best episodes of the series: “Lamentation.”

In the second season, the yellow house becomes a representation of paradise lost and the object of the heroic quest, when Frank is, literally, banished from it. His purpose in life becomes reclaiming the yellow house and what it once represented (the wholeness of his family.) He spends this season separated from Catherine, and from his daughter.  He also loses the gift of insight in this season, so the yellow house, in season two, is something to be found again, metaphorically, or to be reclaimed.

In the third and final season, Frank's yellow house is but a sad memory, yet one which remains intact inside the recesses of his mind.  He visits his former home in the episode "The Sound of Snow," and it has been painted white.  

Still, the ever perceptive Frank envisions his Camelot, his yellow home in Seattle.  Frank's house is now an ideal, not a real place, one representative of a specific time and feeling.  The ideal can continue to exist, beyond the latest coat of paint, beyond the brick and mortar construct of the house itself.  As Frank grapples with the loss of Catherine this season, and the requirement to raise Jordan alone, he must come to understand that the yellow house is a state of mind.

One might suggest that the yellow house of Millennium represents an escape from evil, "the painting away of the darkness" as Chris Carter has beautifully described it, and yet it is also the very reason why Frank faces the heart of human darkness every day.  

By facing the dark inside and out, Frank preserves the yellow, inside and out. The two are interconnected in some significant way.  The house is Frank's yin and yang.

The yellow house could also symbolize, on a more basic level, small town America circa 1996.  Frank must rescue it from the encroaching evil.  Thus the yellow home is not merely beautiful in an architectural sense, it is a brilliant symbol because it shares with viewers an insight into Frank's personality and cause.  

It represents his interior architecture, if you will.

It is the reason Frank fights; and what he fights for, since the yellow represents the sanctuary for his family, for his wife and daughter.

And yes, I painted my first home yellow (a Dutch Colonial built in 1912), in honor of Millennium's yellow house.  

We all have a "yellow house" in our minds; whether in our adulthood or as a remembrance of childhood.  It is a place of safety, nostalgia, hope and dreams.   

In Millennium, the yellow house is the center of gravity, the center of Frank's universe.

The Time is Near

 The specter informing so many episodes of Millennium is the end of the world itself: doomsday. 

This is a powerful and universal fear because many people suspect that the end will come one day...and perhaps soon.  Dinosaurs preceded us here and now they are extinct.  The Roman Empire came and went, a brief candle.  The expansive Native American culture which once existed on this land we now inhabit is but a memory too. 

Time passes, cultures die, and life is transitory and on some subconscious level, all humankind is aware of this fact, of the inevitable changing of the guard.  On a personal, individual note, we all must reckon with our personal appointed doomsday, or appointed apocalypse.  We will each die, and for us, that cessation represents, certainly, the end of the world.

Throughout Millennium's canon, the series writers obsessed on the universal human inquietude about our impending ends.  

Could our demise arrive in a second great flood ("Force Majeure?")  

Could it involve religion prophecy ("Forcing the End,") and, specifically the Anti-Christ ("Marantha?" “Antipas?”)  

Would our end come from deliberate, blind tinkering with our science, or our genetic make-up ("Walkabout," "Sense and Antisense," “Bardo Thodol”)?  

The series also gazed at ethnic doomsdays ("A Single Blade of Grass), Y2K fears ("Teotwawki), and one of the best, "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense,” boasted the audacity to suggest what we've actually seen since Millennium was canceled, with the advent of so many damned movie remakes: a creative apocalypse.  

Written by Darin Morgan, this installment of the series implied that all humans can look forward to for the next thousand years is "the same old crap."

Who Cares?

It probably seems strange to praise Millennium as an inherently optimistic series, considering how obsessively it wonders about the end of the world, or the fall of man.

Yet, Millennium boasts another recurring and potent symbol worth mentioning. That symbol is, of course, the child.  Segment after segment on Millennium explicitly involves children, and youth in general, because our offspring represent the future. In our children, in our next generation, we see hope and fear, and Millennium shares this viewpoint.  

For instance, in one of the best hours written for any genre show in history, Millennium explores a very real "evil" of modern American society: the way in which our culture encourages children to be the same, to conform to expectations, and be "ordinary." 

The episode I refer to is titled "A Room with No View," and it concerns a demonic force, Lucy Butler (Sarah Jane Redmond) who captures promising kids.  These abducted teenagers have all been voted "most likely to succeed," and are well loved by classmates and parents.  There is something almost intangibly special, something attractive, charismatic and magnetic about each of them. They all have spirit, for lack of a better term. 

But in "A Room with No View," our future leaders are captured and tortured until they succumb to the urge to become ordinary, invisible, and corrupt.  In this case, Millennium views an apocalypse not in some outside force, such as a flood, but in our inability to inspire and support our children; to let them be who they choose to be. Instead, we wish to fit them into pre-designed boxes, whether they fit or not.

Other episodes also very much involve children.  Chris Carter's "The Well Worn Lock" gazes at the terrifying problem of child abuse and how it intersects with politics, while "Monster" gazes at a child who -- for inexplicable reasons -- is purely and simply evil. 

The inspiring story "Luminary" involves a young man who forsakes the material "culture of desire" we've made here in the United States, and gives up all his belongings and money.  He goes to Alaska alone to seek wisdom.  When the boy disappears, Frank must find him.  But the very idea of renouncing things, of renouncing wealth, is a potent idea in Millennium (inspired by the story Into the Wild), and significantly, it finds purchase in the symbol for our future; in the next generation.

Throughout the series, the writers also followed the development and growth of Frank's daughter, Jordan (Brittany Tiplady).  

But importantly, we also witnessed, dynamically, Frank's viewpoint as a parent regarding his daughter, and regarding children in general.  In the aforementioned "Monster," he delivers an impassioned, heart-wrenching speech about what the arrival of Jordan meant to his life; and how it changed him. 

Specifically, Jordan's birth reminded Frank that he did not "manufacture" himself as a grown-up; that he too had been a child once.  And now he strives to see the child -- the potential -- in all of us, even the men he hunts.  If the serial killers are dark potential realized, then Millennium views children as exactly the opposite, as a source for hope.

The importance of the child (of our tomorrows, essentially) is signified in Millennium even in its opening credits, impressively.  As you can see in the photo above, there's an image of a young girl walking across a bridge, awkwardly, in danger of a fall.  That's the bridge to the future (the 21st century) and she will either make the journey intact...or plummet to her doom.

The Fall of Rome?

 Millennium is an abundantly introspective series.  Back before Y2K, before 9/11, before Katrina, the series set up a very specific analogy that America was like something akin to Rome...an empire on the verge of collapse. 

And the cause of the collapse came from within; from a perversion or "weeds" growing up inside our borders, and personified by the serial killers of the 1990s. The series brilliantly and quite originally suggested "pathology is part of the grotesque master plan" (Alyssa Katz, The Nation: Millennium," November 24, 1996, page 35), and constantly raised the specter that, as a nation, America was rotting from within; from a kind of inbred decadence. 

I have written about this before, but I believe that writers such as Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz carefully used the concept of the "serial killer of the week," much like Star Trek used the concept of "the civilization of the week."

In each new encounter and each new episode, Frank would learn something valuable about himself, and something about the values of his country from the case of a twisted serial killer.  

We saw this paradigm in "Weeds," "Blood Relatives," "Loin like a Hunting Flame" and "Wide Open," among others.  

The idea was that madness had sprouted up in the land, a very specific madness born from "who we are."   The series suggested this madness would ultimately be America's downfall.  Unless men like Frank could stop it.

The Ouroboros

The Ouroboros is the symbol of a cycle. And Millennium is about such cycles.  In the Ouroboros symbol, a serpent swallows its tail. It eats itself.  It devours itself, and yet it still exists. This is a metaphor for human life.

And it is important regarding Millennium’s historical context, both in-world, and outside it. The Millennium Group speaks often of the last millennium (the year one thousand) and the one approaching. The implication is clear. We survived the test of the last Millennium, but we may not survive the test of this one.  

But we have gone through it all before.

Also, consider that in America we have seen these cycles again and again. We have war, then peace, then war, then peace again.  In the 1980s, we were locked in a Cold War, and in the 1990s, America was suddenly the last superpower standing.  Then came the 2000s and the asymmetric contests of the War on Terror.  Millennium -- falling in the age between wars -- evidenced anticipatory anxiety; fear that the cycle of “peace” and “prosperity” would soon come to an end.

Of course, the series was quite correct.

Lance Henriksen

  

It would be impossible to write of Millennium without considering the depth that Lance Henriksen brought to the role of Frank Black.  Even in a narrative that doesn't necessarily work on all thrusters, Henriksen completely invested himself in the role of Black. 

The scene I described above, in "Monster," is a perfect example.  The episode, as a whole, is pretty good, but boasts some pretty obvious deficiencies in the writing.  For instance, Lara Means (Kristen Cloke) is introduced in this episode as a semi-regular, and in the first twenty-three minutes, she quips "here's my thing" four times.  The viewer is practically bludgeoned with the catchphrase, and it's...well, lacking in nuance. 

But then, in the third act, amidst the dross, Henriksen delivers that speech; the one about childhood, about the importance of children; about the impact of his child's birth upon his life, and his performance is absolutely riveting.  

Suddenly, you're not watching a conventional tale of an evil child; you're watching the story of a human being, of a committed father facing the loss of all that he cares for.  The scene is emotional and beautifully performed (and written), and Henriksen accomplished miracles like this on a regular basis.

We're all shepherds

For me, Millennium was always at its best when it addressed our human fears (about apocalypse, about our culture, about violence) and made us look in the mirror.  In the opening credits the first year, the question "who cares?" would pop up in almost accusing fashion.

That was an important matter. 

Who cared enough about the world to make it a safer place?  By the third season, the series had formulated carefully it's answer to the question "who cares." 

The answer came, not surprisingly, from Jordan, from a child.  She said "we're all shepherds," meaning it is incumbent on each of us to care how the world turns out, apocalypse or no apocalypse.

For three years, despite format shifts, Millennium reminded us, "this is who we are," and in the process gave television one of its legitimate artistic masterpieces.