We'd Like to Enter an Affirmative Defense

Our class Tuesday bounced back and forth between culpability and rationalizing, but instead of comparing one instance of each to its counterpart, I though that we skipped from one side to another without marrying the two. Here's what I mean, because I'm not sure that made any sense.

We had two examples from the book of who could be guilty, but didn't have proper knowledge: the buggers for the first invasion and Ender. Though we briefly touched on this similarity, I thought that the issue had some legal depth. The way I see it, if the buggers were guilty, Ender was guilty. This certainly has the effect of tying their fates together for all time, which makes the whole cocoon thing work even better as the mysterious prologue-y ending. If we're going to use our own legal tradition, we would have to conclude that no, neither the buggers nor Ender are guilty because they did not have intent to commit a crime. The buggers simply didn't know that they were destroying sentient life and Ender thought he was playing a war simulation. No intent, no crime. However much we'd like retribution for our dead, punishing the buggers is like punishing an innocent man. No intent.

On the communication issue, it seems very deliberate that the "other" is in bug form. Can our bugs on earth show us some kind of intelligence? They create massive, intricate anthills and ordered honeycombs. But we don't think of those as grand works of architecture, even though they could be the Eiffel Tower of anthills, or maybe the I.M. Pei Honeycomb. In much the same way, our buildings could seem so different to an outside race that they just seem like anthills - the sign of life, but not necessarily intelligent life. So, you start clearing out and what's that? Oh, crap, they're fighting back. Well, bees fight back when you hit their honeycomb. Oh, crap, they've got some pretty sophisticated stuff. Maybe this wasn't a good idea. Maybe we should try talking to them.

So let's try! Meanwhile, from Earth's perspective, this entire thing has been an unprovoked attack. An attack, not an accident, not a misunderstanding. So you prepare to wipe the sons of bitches off the face of the... plane of the universe with all necessary speed. In that sense, as a race, humans had every right to send their fighters off into space via that other neat affirmative defense, self-defense. Your entire history with these things is that they come and attack you. Even though your best option is to collude, to put this into the classic Prisoner's Dilemma, you have no reason to believe that your enemy will collude, so you minimize your losses and wipe your enemy right out of existence. So in that sense, they're justified.

But then there's the problem of communication. Should they have tried communicating, both ways? Absolutely, but it's more complicated than just sending a Red Telephone over with a note that says "Call me!" Maybe they could have started by rattling off a bunch of prime numbers - that's generally a good sign of intelligence. Maybe rip the plaque and the record off of Voyager 1 and give that a shot. You could even send them a turntable to play it on. So yes, there were probably better ways of trying to communicate that the I.F. didn't try. Oops! You just killed off a whole race! Thanks for playing, try again.

And finally, a few words on Aliens. It's a good movie to watch, especially with a proper sound system (though until the model classroom gets a center channel, I'm not comfortable with calling it a proper system). You get all these fun little glimpses into the Company from Paul Reiser's character and you wonder how the hell government exactly works in the future. And it's a shitload better of a movie than Alien^3 or Resurrection.

But cinematically, it doesn't hold a candle to Alien. As Prof. PTJ mentioned, Alien is much more of a horror movie than Aliens, which leaves Aliens something like "Space action." Aliens is filled with the horrible dialogue between the Marines and the annoying kid with the worst scream this side of Six String Samurai. What this film loses that Alien had was a true fear of the Alien. There was only one. And he was a lurking badass that no one knew how to kill. But you can shoot the thing? And it just dies? That's it? What a ripoff. Unfortunately, few people know how to keep an infinite badass alien villian going.

Enter the Borg. They were the infinite evil badass - it was simply impossible to communicate with them. Impossible to reason with them. "Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own." That's it. That's Borg communication. You get assimilated. That's it. But then, instead of keeping them as infinite cosmic badasses, they get a queen. So it turns out, all of the drones do play second fiddle, instead of all sharing first fiddle. And I don't buy the "I, Borg" thing that individuality ended up in the collective bullshit because Picard says that the Queen was there on the cube that was sent to Earth. And also, Voyager doesn't count. There, I said it.

So back to my point. Alien had the infinite badass and Aliens removed the "infinite." Which doesn't make it a horrible movie, though the Marine dialogue brings it close. It just makes it a considerable letdown from the original. Seriously, the first time I watched it, when the Marines are about to shoot one, I thought to myself, "Oh, shit - you've got another thing coming if you think you can shoot these things." And then they did. Lame.

But again, it's not a bad movie. Alien^3 was a bad movie. Resurrection was godawful. It's just the 2010 to Kubrick's 2001. It kills the mystery, though it leaves something generally satisfying in its place. But it kills the infinite badass.

Now, I'm just imagining what would happen if James Cameron and Michael Bay worked on the same movie. Three hours of gratuitous explosions? I'd watch that.