Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
intelligence he has just silenced. It performs the perfect unity of body and
spirit that was denied to Gwyllm Griffiths. Bowman's final descent into the
monolith unites him with pure science, just as Griffiths' descent into the
evolution machine had done, and when he ascends from this subterranean
journey he has been transfigured as a “star child.” Nature is science-like,
and thus in the culmination of this evolutionary odyssey Bowman departs
the realm of the body for the realm of pure thought. Science is discovered
to be nature in its spiritual aspect, and thus when Bowman again encoun-
ters the scientific perfection of these same extraterrestrial stewards at the
end of the story, humanity's ultimate fate shows forth.
This thematic spiritualizing of science and its identification with natu-
ral evolution runs through numerous popular films of the last half cen-
tury that imagine earthly encounters with benevolent extraterrestrials. The
sainted aliens that we find in such films as
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
(1982),
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977),
Starman
(1984),
Cocoon
(1985),
2010
(1984),
Contact
(1997), and in that slightly older forerunner to these,
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(1951), foreshadow some anticipated destiny in
which science and its offspring—technology—will transform the human con-
dition. As with the previous examples, the unspoken premise that sustains
this theme is the notion that scientific hegemony is not merely a logical
outcome of cultural development but a tendency of natural evolution itself.
The alien visitors who populate these stories consistently manifest superior
powers of knowledge that the viewer will attribute to the far longer time
frames in which these civilizations have possessed science. However, these
advanced powers also seem to have analogous biological footings that can
be accounted for by these alien beings' correspondingly longer exposure to
the effects of natural evolution. In several of these stories—
2001
,
Cocoon
, and
Contact
, for instance—the aliens seem to have achieved the same transfig-
ured state that Gwyllm Griffiths had aspired to realize, in which embodied
biological life has been gradually changed, presumably by natural evolution,
into a disembodied, mind-like life—but a mind-like life still closely identified
with nature. Evolution has brought matter and scientific thought together
in these characters. The alien in Steven Spielberg's
E .T.
, for instance, has
enough scientific knowledge (in the conventional sense) to build a radio
telescope from household odds and ends, but similar powers are shown to
lie within his bodily organism when he revives a wilted chrysanthemum
and later even his own body. He is science incarnate. Similarly, the alien
whose natural body is destroyed at the beginning of the film
Starman
spon-
taneously clones another one to wear during his earthly sojourn. It is as if
