Tag: giant ants

Burn It!  Burn It All!

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Ah, the heady days of our civilizational maelstrom.  As the world we knew is ripped to shreds and flung around us in centripetal chaos I can recognize fragments of familiar things flying by.  Sort of like the images that Dorothy sees in the scene where she is riding in the tornado and sees her friends and relatives float by in a rocking chair or a row boat.

You recognize some normal American ritual or an icon of a former day.  There’s a flash of recognition and it triggers some reflexive emotion or thought.  And then it flies by and is gone and the reality of being spun around in a howling cyclone of fragmented bits of the former reality returns.

But when we’re not fighting for our lives, human beings have to search for the interesting and enjoyable things around them.  Even in hell there must be a coffee break where people gather around the water cooler (or battery acid cooler) and shoot the breeze.  It’s just the nature of the beast.

You know I really enjoyed thinking about the minutia in the giant ant movie yesterday.  Thinking about the characterizations and the movie conventions that they employed back then was the most fun thing that I have thought about in weeks.  And it occurred to me that here is so much substance, so much American-ness in these old silly things from sixty, seventy years ago.  And not because there’s great art on display.  This is a story about giant ants.  Nothing more absurd is imaginable.  Nothing less important exists.  And yet the people who wrote the script and acted the scenes managed to do a good job of creating this ridiculous world that they were employed to create.  The guy who played the booze-soaked hobo in the hospital ward was highly entertaining.  The general working with the cop to operate the bazooka for the phosphorus bombardment of the ant nest was amusing in his portrayal of upper management trying his hand at a front-line task.

Maybe that is what the future looks like.  We’ll be like the medieval monks copying and illuminating fragments of the classical world to preserve something for when the rampaging vandals have run out of places to sack and burn and whoever is left sets about the hard work of rebuilding civilization from what’s left of the wreckage.  So, I’ve found new direction in celebrating whatever fragments and shards of the old order strike my fancy and even any worthwhile new shoots as they present themselves.  Certainly, it’s an uphill battle while the orcs are still busy burning and pillaging all around us.  And from time to time, we’ll have to put down our quills and cap our inkwells and pick up a battle axe and shield to fend off the latest incursion of rampaging savages.

But there is absolutely more sense in celebrating the things that give meaning to life and to enjoy art; high or low, than there is in just bemoaning the destruction and dwelling on how low we have fallen.  After all, no one threw a switch one day and ended the dark ages and began the renaissance.  The knowledge was always there.  It needed people who were willing to apply that knowledge.  It needed human ingenuity and imagination and a little breathing space between them and the nearest barbarians.

So don’t be surprised if I sound a little happier.  Sure, the orcs may win this war.  Our whole civilization may come crashing down in an orgy of death and darkness.  We may be on the cusp of a millennium of ignorance and misery.  But as Hurin said in the Silmarillion, “ Aurë entuluva!”, “Day shall come again.”  It seems inevitable that human intelligence will persevere over entropy and stupidity.  There is in life that which strives against chaos.  I’ll bet on us.

Now, let’s take another look at that giant ant movie.  Have you ever noticed how annoying the girl scientist gets when she’s down in the ant nursery in New Mexico?  She starts yelling at her colleagues, “Burn it!  Burn it all!”

I mean who the hell is she?  Especially since Ben and Bob are going to have to haul her fat butt up several steep inclines by rope to get her out of that cyanide laden death trap.  It’s not like she has the upper body strength to get herself out.  She could at least act a little more polite.  An incipient girl-boss even back then.  Ah well.

Don’t Panic.  Pick Up the Flamethrower

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Facebook crashes and burns, Musk guts the Twitter mafia, the Fetterman debate, Biden continues to spin his tale of a bizzarro world where inflation is low and he’s the most popular man in the world, the State Department muses about nuclear first strike over Ukraine, Chuck Schumer tells Biden the bad news about the Georgia senate race, Oregonians might elect a Republican governor.  And on and on and on.

The weirdness has metastasized.  Even Democrat voters have stopped claiming that “things are alright.”  We’ve reached the Howard Beale stage of things where almost everyone is confused, scared and angry all at the same time.  And I’m really happy about that.  I’ve been waiting for years for the rest of the idiots to catch up to where I’ve been for a decade.  And I count myself as one of the idiots.  Maybe I’m just a little less stupid than the rest of them.  Or maybe I was just a little more involved in what was playing out on the national stage.

The real reason is because I’m extremely vindictive.  I’ve taken personally all the lies I was fed twenty some odd years ago during the War on Terror and I want pay back.  I’m just as interested in seeing Mitch McConnell lose his job as I am in seeing Joe Biden go to jail.

So, it’s a great relief to see so many catatonic Americans open their eyes for the first time in their lives and realize that they’ve entrusted their country to incompetent ideologues who believe in things that don’t exist.

It’s good to see that America is getting a sense of what abandoning petroleum feels like.  It feels like poverty.  That’s a valuable lesson to learn.

So, this week I’m soaking in all of the rage, fear and panic that the Democrats are radiating around them and the confusion and lies that the media is pumping out.  I’m floating on my back in a warm ocean of schadenfreude and it’s wonderful.  There was a great video of a doofus from MSNBC interviewing Republican voters from Western Pennsylvania.  She’s trying to get them to say that January 6th is a terrible thing and any politicians who were there should be shunned.  And they’ll have none of it.  They scoff at her and compare it to the larger riots during the “George Floyd summer of love.”  The expression on the face of the woman interviewing them was a deer in the headlights look.  She couldn’t believe that they wouldn’t let themselves be shamed into condemning the protestors.  It was glorious.

I’m trying not to get too charged up by the good news that seems to come out of every poll I read.  There’s nothing worse than the let down after being subjected to a fraudulent election.  Especially when it’s brutally obvious that massive fraud is slowly being unrolled before your eyes.

But there’s no reason not to enjoy this run up to the election.  Listening to the excuses and bitterness as everything goes wrong for the Left is deeply soothing.  It puts a bounce in my step and a smile in my heart.  Just hearing Liz Cheney talk about how noble and honorable it is for her to sell her party out and support the Democrats makes me feel all the better about her failure to get re-elected and the bigger failure of her January 6th Hearings.  Very soon she’ll be carrying her box of stolen office supplies home from her cushy former office in the Capitol building.  And once the new Republican majority is in charge of the House no one will ever remember who Liz Cheney was.  And the receptionists will let her know that whichever Congressman or Senator she wants to speak to is not available but they’ll be sure to send her a fund-raiser envelope in the mail, have a nice day.

Tonight, I watched my favorite giant radioactive insect movie, Them!  Unsurprisingly James Whitmire (as Sgt. Ben Peterson) is, once again, killed by the powerful mandibles of a giant carpenter ant.  No matter how many times I yell out, “No Ben don’t try to get in the pipe.  Pick up the flame thrower, dammit man pick up the flame thrower!”  But he was too cocky.  When he heard the stridulations of the giant ant, he first lifted the second little boy into the exit pipe and then tried to exit that way himself.  Obviously, he should not have picked up the child but calmly and efficiently picked up the flame thrower that was nearby, pointed it at the murderous mega-insect and charbroiled the wretched invertebrate.  Then he could have exited with the kid at his leisure.

What is it about giant insects that makes otherwise rational public servants so erratic?  C’est la vie.

Them! – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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You may be asking yourself, is photog becoming demented?  Didn’t he already write a review of Them!?  The answers to those questions are yes and no.  I have referenced Them in several posts about cheesy 1950s science fiction movies.  But it has never gotten its own exclusive treatment.  Well, I mean to remedy that situation, pronto.

Them! is the grand-daddy of all atomic energy fear films.  Instead of fearing cancer and radiation sickness we are provided with a much more rational fear, giant ants.  It is 1954 and nine years after the first atomic bomb was tested at White Sands, New Mexico.  During those nine years ants have been traipsing around the New Mexico desert ignorant of their future as future contenders for mankind’s crown as King of the Earth.  But the wait is over.  A small prop plane is inexplicably cruising over the desert and spots a little girl holding a doll aimlessly walking in the hot sun.  The pilot alerts a nearby police cruiser which intercepts the little girl and finds that she’s catatonic.  With the help of the pilot they trace her point of origin to a recreational vehicle parked in the desert.  On closer inspection the officers discover that one side of the RV has been ripped to shreds.  But being crack forensic experts and logical linguists, they proclaim that the RV wall, “wasn’t caved in, it was caved out.”  Whoever wrote the deathless prose of this dialog is partly responsible for the sad position we currently find ourselves in, vis-à-vis cultural and actual illiteracy.  Later on, the policeman redeems himself when at a general store that has been similarly destroyed, he declares, “this wasn’t pushed in, it was pulled out.”  Okay, stupid rant over.

Based on blood found in the RV the officers determine that the girl is the only survivor of an attack.  On the way back from finding the girl and the trailer they stop off at a local general store and find it similarly damaged and the store owner brutally killed.  One of the police officers, Ed Blackburn is left at the store to guard the remains.  His partner, Sgt. Ben Peterson played by James Whitmore, drives off and shortly afterward, Blackburn is heard off camera firing his revolver at some thing and then screaming as he suffers horrible death.

Evidence found at the site of the RV, a foot print, is sent to the FBI for identification and so the story moves on to its next logical step, Santa Claus is called in.  Or more precisely Edmund Gwenn who played Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street.  Gwenn plays Dr. Harold Medford a world-renowned myrmecologist who with his myrmecologist daughter have come to lead the effort to save the world from the giant ants.  Representing the government is FBI agent Robert Graham played by James Arness.  Arness who later found fame as Marshall Dillon on TV’s Gunsmoke is the brave, competent hero of the movie and the love interest for the myrmecologist daughter.  And to provide local color Ben Peterson is always on hand to provide the comic relief.

With the help of the scientists, the army locates the giant ant nest and destroy it with cyanide gas.  But after inspecting the inside of the nest the scientists break the bad news.  New queen ants have escaped the nest and will be forming new nests elsewhere.  Now a war room is set up and armed forces from all the services mobilize to battle the giant ants on land, on sea and in the air.  Dunt, dunt, daaaah!!!

The final showdown takes place where it must, in the storm drains of Los Angeles.  And in fitting fashion, the ants capture two little boys who wander into their nest and are rescued by the US Army.  Unfortunately, Ben Peterson dies saving the boys but dies the good death of a hero.  And when the ants are finally finished off Dr. Medford gives a speech and tells us that the atomic age is fraught with danger and giant insects.

Despite how thoroughly I’ve mocked this movie, I actually enjoy it immensely.  Other than the laughably fake animatronic ants the production values for the movie are quite good and the actors are actually very effective for the most part, including the character actors performing the bit parts as police, military and civilian participants.  My favorite scenes are where the scientific expertise of the Medfords is showcased for the benefit of the poor ignorant soldiers and police.  While under attack from their first giant ant Dr. Medford makes sure he uses the Latin singular and plural versions of the word antenna when instructing the police to shoot at the ant. “Shoot the antennae, shoot the antennae,” he yells and once one of these has been shot off he continues “now shoot the other antenna.”  In another scene Dr. Medford is attempting to convince the Pentagon that the giant ants are an existential threat to humanity and he uses an ant film clip that looks like it could have been made by my high school biology teacher.

Them! is a wonderful time capsule of the 1950s.  Americans are the good guys and giant ants are definitely bad.  What could be simpler?