I have noticed a consistent plot in
the fantasy/science fiction genre over the last several years. Surely, you have
noticed it too. In film after film, the human race is depicted as villainous for
supposedly destroying the earth.
The just-released Noah is the latest example. In the
Genesis account, God determines to destroy “all flesh” because humans are
willfully unrighteous. But the holy destruction also heralds a new beginning: God
preserves humanity through righteous Noah, directing him after leaving the ark
to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.”
That’s not the plot of the movie. In the film version, after being kicked out of Eden, man
became industrial. In his greed, he strip-mined minerals, exhausted the
soil, clear-cut the forests, and generally despoiled the environment—no trees,
ubiquitous toxic waste—a dying planet.
“The
Creator” wants us extinct. He assigns Noah the onerous task of saving “the
innocents” (animals)—as distinguished from “the foul” (man)—after which he and
his family are to be unfruitful and not multiply. Noah believes that man’s demise will be earth’s salvation: “Creation
will be left alone, safe and beautiful.”
I was immediately struck
by the similarity between Noah and
the remake of The
Day the Earth Stood Still. In the 1951 original, a space alien named
Klaatu sets out to save humans from self-destruction. In contrast, the
2008 remake seethes with misanthropic antipathy. Klaatu is not here to save us,
but to commit total genocide to in order to, yes, save the earth. As Klaatu
tells the woman who befriends
him: “If the Earth dies, you die. If you die,
the Earth survives.”
Such explicit anti-humanism
is now standard in big-time Hollywood productions. Take M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008),
where the earth’s flora mount a rebellion against the environmental
deprivations of man by releasing “suicide pheromones” that compel all in the
vicinity to kill themselves by any means handy.
Shyamalan tells his
apocalyptic story from the perspective of star Mark Wahlberg’s family and
friends. Realizing that plants attack whenever a critical mass of human beings
is present, Wahlberg and company flee at the approach of a larger group of
refugees. As they begin to kill themselves en masse, Wahlberg’s band
runs past a huge advertising sign for a suburban housing development that
carries the film’s unsubtle message: “Because you deserve it.”
Even children’s movies
often teach that humans are villains. For example, in the Pixar-animated, Academy
Award-winning mega-hit Wall-E (2008),we have so despoiled the earth that the
entire population was evacuated to space ships while robots, known as Wall-Es, attempt
to clean up our mess.
But the earth proved uninhabitable,
and the robots are abandoned. One surviving Wall-E becomes sentient and falls
in love with a female robot. Eventually, through a series of
adventures, they induce the humans—who all have become morbidly obese and so
lazy they don’t even walk—to return to devastated earth and plant a tree. The
planet is saved! Humankind has learned its lesson: From then on, we will live
simple and green.
These days, it seems, we are only allowed to root for the
human race when space aliens invade. Even then, alien invaders may not necessarily
be bad guys. Rather, they are often evil because they plan to engage in the “ecocide” environmentalists
ubiquitously accuse humans of committing.
Thus in the rollicking Independence Day
(1996) the aliens are a “galactic swarm of locusts devouring each world’s
natural resources before moving on to the next one.” Similarly, in The Battle of Los Angeles (2011)—one of the
few recent films in which soldiers are depicted as unequivocally heroic—the invading
aliens plan to suck all the water off the planet.
Movies these days rarely depict us as responsibly consuming
earth’s bounty. Indeed, in Genesis, God instructs Noah to “subdue the earth.” In
Noah, that credo is espoused by the film’s
chief villain, the king of the humans, a murderous meat-eating descendent of Cain.
Anti-human movies get made because
many of Hollywood’s movers and shakers—like Noah’s director, Darren Aronofsky—fervently
embrace a radical environmentalism. But the industry values one thing even
above ideology: making money. We will see an end to anti-humanism at the movies
when the audience stops paying to see films depicting them and their children
as cancer on the earth.
Author Wesley J. Smith is a senior
fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. His latest
ebook is The War on Humans.
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