While some opt to live in the past either through the delusion of nostalgia or through the imprisonment of remorse, another prevalent posture is to ignore the past altogether and pretend the present is all there is. Primeval terrors provoke a fear of cosmic insignificance and loss of agency. Demeaning them as unenlightened, we shield ourselves with the sentinels of science and screens, intermediaries that keep the night of yesteryear at bay. In its very nature though, today is ever in tension; it cannot help but be terrorized by the past and threatened by the future. Excising the past and evading the future, we colonize the present as if it were under our control. In the end, the present is never fixed but fluid. Behind our futile attempts to manage it lays a greater malignancy. By both denying transpired terrors and acting as if we are always relevant, we lose ourselves in a liminal state.
Latent in George Mihalka’s My Bloody Valentine (1981) is the idea that current comforts are to be sought in spite of past sins. The unironically named town of Valentine Bluffs is haunted by a mining incident that took place twenty years ago when two supervisors abandoned their posts early for a Valentine dance and neglected to follow safety protocols, leading to an explosion that trapped several miners. The sole survivor of the accident, Harry Warden (Peter Cowper as The Miner), resorted to cannibalism to stay alive until he was rescued and institutionalized. One year later, Harry returns for revenge and brutally murders the two supervisors, vowing to kill anyone who celebrates Valentine’s Day again.
Against the backdrop of such a tragedy, we are introduced to characters who are hedonistic. Despite the foolishness in having a Valentine dance even if twenty years have elapsed, they pursue such a celebration for gratification as its own end. Throughout the movie, what struck me was the following: exactly how old are these characters supposed to be? While the impression that we are given through their antics and lust is that they are teenagers, the backstory of the boys as having worked in the mines places them at least in their mid-twenties. Besides, we are even explicitly told at one point that the falsely adolescent-appearing female who is impaled during the cold open is “thirty years of age.” Through the lens of a culture that deifies youth, the movie exposes our desire to delude ourselves into the idea that we are perpetually young. As I recently eclipsed the milestone of turning forty, I have often found myself guilty of seeing mid-twenty year olds who are just starting families as being contemporaneous with me. What is beneath such a distorted self-image?
For the residents of Valentine Bluffs, it is the allure of revelry and indiscriminate sex without consequence. Enhancing a sense of the eerie in the film is the absence of children. Are there none in this town and, if so, how will the community continue into the future? The future seems to be estranged from the townspeople’s minds. After the sheriff cancels the Valentine’s Day dance, they proceed to party elsewhere by relocating to the mines. Brazenness in the face of death is not what is going on here; repression of its reality is at work. Taking as a given that resurrection is not real, the citizens are living for the moment. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’” (15:32).
Engaged in a love triangle with Sarah, T.J. (the mayor’s son) and Axel tangle and tussle over who deserves her. Language of meriting another human being betrays the disparity between Love and romantic love, the latter primarily an invention of the twelfth-century writer Andreas Capellanus, which is paralleled by the origin of the feast of Saint Valentine and what it has become. According to tradition, Saint Valentine was a third-century Roman priest who was martyred for marrying soldiers against the orders of Emperor Claudius II. Marriage, then, decoupled from the hedonistic and self-gratifying urges of the now, is the principle behind the origin of the holiday. How foreign the institution of self-giving love is from the one designed by the medievals! [1] Real love, whether expressed in marriage or in charity towards one’s neighbor, is suffering and sacrifice, a giving up of self. Perverting love is the kind of passion that causes T.J. and Axel to brawl for possession of Sarah. After all, within the confines of romantic love, she must belong to someone. Distortion of manhood and womanhood is a postlapsarian condition found most keenly in man’s dominating disposition towards women. Seeing the female as something to be owned is conveyed when the men in the movie say, “Women are not allowed in the mines.”
Dispatching various victims in grisly ways, The Miner symbolizes the past and its tragedy invading the present. Near the end of the third act, Axel and T.J. form an unlikely alliance to rescue Sarah and several other partygoers. T.J. has been a red herring — the onset of his backstory involves a situation where he disappeared for months at a time before returning to reclaim Sarah. So when the foes-turned-friends descend into the mines, we suspect someone is not who they would appear to be. For a moment, it seems that Axel drowns, but there is a resurrection, albeit a fake one, when he emerges in the final scene and is revealed to be the killer (rather than Harry Warden). In a flashback that is forced, we learn that he was the son of one of the supervisors that Harry slayed and was traumatized as a result. The past is not past; it ever patrols across the present, surveilling all in its sight.
Critters 2: The Main Course (1988) also involves a character eluding a past and wanting to live in a perpetual present, in the person of Brad Brown. Visiting his grandma at Grover’s Bend, he operates on the belief that the weird and eerie alien invasion (the ingeniously named Krites so that they can then be referred to by the locals as “Critters”) he witnessed two years ago was fictitious. Arriving the day before Easter, the film evinces that the resurrection is the renewal of creation that constitutes the now and an already apprehended but not fulfilled promise. It is Easter that sacralizes all of our time in the present as being re-creational. Also, Easter is inherently ecclesiological: in the event of Easter the church is created. During his sermon on Easter morn, the pastor even somewhat jokes, “Some of you have chosen to resurrect your church attendance.”
Critters 2 is a campy, hokey movie that is prima facie without substance, but that does not mean there are not archetypal characters and symbols that resonate with our experience of time. The movie opens with the shape-shifting bounty hunters Ug and Lee and their human companion, Charlie, being informed by some really important-seeming alien that the Krites were not eradicated on earth. The movie rollicks along when a sheriff dressed as the Easter Bunny is devoured and falls through the window pane of the church — as the pastor is preaching, no less! Alien eggs are scattered on the lawn outside where a hunt is to take place. Of course, they hatch, and the Critters scuttle and scurry across town, ravaging its residents. Sheltering against the savage creatures, the people of Grover’s Bend are holed up in the church. The motif of the church as a place of refuge for the community recurs throughout the movie. When it becomes clear that someone must do something about the menace, the response of the congregants is to entrench themselves in the building. It reminded me of the current-day tendency for the church to insulate itself within its safe circles rather than venturing beyond the walls. We would rather occupy places than offer ourselves to others.
Perhaps the biggest horror within Critters 2 is that our institutions — places and principles that express our wish to conceive of the present as purged of inconceivable terrors like monsters (be they terrestrial or extraterrestrial) because those are so primitive — are penetrable. As alluded to earlier, the church is punctured when the Easter Bunny-costumed sheriff is gnawed to death and spat out through the sanctuary window. Brad appeals to the old law by pleading his case to the sheriff who hightails it down the highway. But even when he returns, the law is no rescuer for Grover’s Bend. After Lee is consumed by the Critters, Ug is depressed and unable to transform. When the aliens are on the verge of ransacking the entire town, Charlie emerges as an unexpected hero when he sacrifices himself by piloting Ug’s spaceship into the expanding mass of Critters that tumble towards the church. This is the Charlie who before recoiled at the idea of returning to earth where he had no friends (until Brad) and was the town drunk. The one who is ridiculed from beginning to end becomes the savior.
Unlike the false suffering and sacrifice of the duplicitous Axel in My Bloody Valentine, Charlie is a true savior, born by giving himself up for the life of his neighbors. Although Charlie previously mentions struggling to find purpose to his life, he ironically finds purpose in the laying down of his life. Undermining his character arc a bit but perhaps conforming to our theme, Charlie reappears at the end as an aha moment, which could be seen as a resurrection of sorts. Before Charlie’s believed death, Ug had transformed his face into Charlie’s out of respect. Now, Ug ascends into the heavens wearing Charlie’s face, while Charlie receives a new title as sheriff of Grover’s Bend. Analogous to Charlie’s improvement of station, we too will be exalted if we are united to Christ in his death and resurrection. And though we are not appointed sheriffs to enforce our law and our justice, we are commissioned to carry God’s law and justice into the spaces we inhabit.
Every second counts: grappling for time as if it is a territory we can tame, the present flows to the future. Vicious vanity cleaves us more than any miner’s pickaxe and bites us more than any Critter’s maw. Presentism does not mitigate the past, for it confines us in a claustrophobia of being locked in the lunacy of focusing only on the now, which is a hell all of our own making.
[1] Marriage is “of the moment” in that it is the condition of all the baptized who in faith are conjoined with Christ. Marriage is temporal too, as it will be replaced by its realization in the age to come, signifying the union between Christ and the church. Disordering and disorienting ourselves, romantic love involves an idealization and veneration that is unrequited — that is, lopsided — whereas marital love is mutual. While romantic love might revolve around a kind of suffering, it is suffering only in the idiomatic sense of someone who is going through pain, not the self-giving suffering of one who endures affliction for the good of another. Additionally, marital love is an abstention from all other loves for the sake of one, while romantic love includes the concept of qualified adultery, which was an ennobling of extramarital affairs on the grounds that such affairs were rooted in an emotional intimacy. Paradoxically, such a view of love can generate both a Gnosticism (by privileging the affections of love over an embodied expression through sex) and a hedonism, chasing desire at the expense of vows and oaths. And although marital love is not restricted to the purpose of propagation, it is emblematic of how the design behind the act of marriage is intrinsically one that is selfless, external, and directed outside of ourselves.
