To protect your kids, you must know when to stop protecting your kids, and of course, this does not mean going back to toughening up, an easy route to toxic masculinity, like in a Cobra Kai dojo, like in Vincent Haddad’s excellent article Masculinity on the Mat (2019).
All metrics describe how there is less and less partying among teenagers, while on the positive side, there is less and less drinking. The side-effect is that there is an increase in OCD, PTSD, mental health issues, etc. The less you go out, the more you grow anxious about meeting people, even your friends. There is a combination of factors that, at least in the West, produced teenagers who will be less likely to go out and hang out with their peers than, say, in the 1980s (the time I had been socialized growing up in Socialist Romania).
Rave culture and jungle party culture of the 1990s foregrounded a rather collectivist and direct mode of production, on-the-spot organization, and even an important political stance, like in Jeremy Deller’s Everybody in the Place (just think of the enmity of Margaret Thatcher’s government against raves). I guess it is quite impossible to avoid k-punk Mark Fisher’s conclusions about the opening and utopia constituted by rave and jungle in those years, as it is impossible not to see today’s sweeping loneliness and solitude crisis as not just the effect of the lockdown years. Not only are clubs closing down but there is a certain ‘monkish mindset towards health and wellness’ (check the excellent article about SV Grindcore hustle culture). The social fitness is as important if not more important of physical fitness (you depend on). This can easily sound alarmistic but social life is one metric where everyone agrees could be much better. Maybe you a misanthrope, maybe you lost or hope for humanity’s
People stop leaving their bedrooms, stop leaving their houses, not going to parties, not meeting or making friends. The shift from latchkey parenting to intensive parenting had a high cost. Alienation was one of the most important aspects of capitalism since Marx and Engels, now it strikes at the very core of society and socialization. We are not eusocial but truly asocial.
One of the greatest pleasures of today is all the rotten, splendid carcases of B-movies and matinee SF glory days slouching around on the net waiting for vultures like me. You can find all these online gems restored at 4k quality on YT. There are literally tons of forgotten or well-hidden movies online, or even lesser-known classics like this one (mentioned by a favorite science fiction auteur like Adrian Czajkowski as “One of my all time favourite films, lord help me.”). That says something.
To call it a knock-off or a spin-off of Seven Samurai (1954) or the Magnificent Seven (1960) would be stating the obvious. It makes much more sense to consider such a sui generis movie. This is what I learned in my Eastern European teenage years – your Metallica or Mad Professor DUB t-shirt, drawn with a smeared ballpoint pen or marker, was the better, the correct degenerate copy. Wear it proudly, bc it definitely felt more real and touchable, and anyway, we could not afford (back then) the production costs or the textile sweatshop labor behind it. In a way, it was totally opposed to the fast fashions of today. What we have to figure out is how we got from that to the fast fashions of today. Battle Beyond the Stars is also probably one of the most unabashedly – shamelessly, one might say, examples of genre hybridizing beyond the borders of commercial success or market-driven hype. Let us consider it an example of horizontal or transversal gene transfer, but also a sign that ‘mature’ SF rarely hides its roots. The result is a tainted ‘space opera’ play that never quite grew out of imperial-colonial dime novels and penny Wild West pulp cradle. And still the copy goes beyond the original.
But let’s put all these petty considerations aside and enjoy this ludicrous piece of 80s cinema. What I miss in the recent spate of Marvel remakes and SW prequels that has gripped the Hollywood industry is the way they score rather poorly on the baloney aspect of a remake and sci-fi spoof. One should push the envelope, but completely try to bend it out of shape. Turn the quantitative into the qualitative. If you do a more or veiled remake, just see what lies beyond. Bring on hive minds, heat-communicating aliens, Valkyrie from outer space in tiny ships, decadent sapphire-studded mercs, and alien reptilians with lucious bodyguards.
One could be really wicked and say that The Battle Beyond the Stars was very mundane, it was the prospect for the entire actor-president 1980s Reagan era of finding a mate in the other, the Eastern (Perestroika) liberalized other. What does it take to spice up your competition, woo it, and transform it into your trading partner? Is it just about big space guns? In domestic terms (or Melinda Cooper talking about the New Family Values), maybe it was about how to make an arranged marriage for the two protagonists, fairly bland white cisgender heroes, more palatable (erotic, anyone?)? Battle Beyond the Stars is then the Panda show – how to avert the “Great Replacement” by mutants in terms of today’s damaged “volk capital“. Damned it, will they ever kiss, will they ever mate, will they follow the “Varda” scripture against the Social Darwinist imperatives of the empire and its mutant minions? Altough, important point, a lot of early SF was analysed by Jordan S. Carroll (who recently won the Hugo for the Best Related Work category) in his award-winning Speculative Whiteness point to superior mutant leaders (Sador!) as some sort of ubermensch aloof from the masses (“The enemies in many of the early mutant stories turn out to be the masses, who represent primitive throwbacks to the past when compared to the forward-looking mutant visionaries.” – read the interview here)
Hmm, what could be waiting after the 1980s arms race, when the Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative (which Lucas sued for copyright), refuses to gett decommissioned? Nothing else but an AI gendered Voice of Nell spaceship (spaceship with tits) and completely incompetent baddies that, nevertheless (like the eponymous US empire at its zenith), are ready to incinerate planets and suns in order to get new organs or audience ratings from ‘lesser’ species. Batten Beyond the Stars is how solidarity and foreign policy were imagined during the 80s, where every friendly dictator or enemy of my enemy (Mujahideen) is my friend. All my allies have to commit suicide and die a “beautiful death” like a Valkyrie.
timespace coordinates: 2000’s Journey to the Earth’s center + Alaska, Boston, California, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, San Francisco, the Middle East, the Pacific Ocean, San Francisco Bay Area, Utah, Washington, D.C.
In response to criticism of his screenplay’s lack of scientific realism, screenwriter John Rogers responded that he tried to make the science accurate, but expended three years fighting “to get rid of the … dinosaurs, magma-walks in ‘space-suits’, bullshit-sci-crap sources for the Earth’s crisis, and a windshield for the ship Virgil.” (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 