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As Cold War-era fissionaries perfected the art of mass-market annihilation throughout the '50s, a swarm of killer Bs simultaneously agitated and assuaged our resulting technological unease and fear of Commies.
In Them! nuclear-fortified super-antagonists terrorized the Southwest until a pair of New Mexico state troopers and an FBI agent realized that the leftist insects' cardboard wings made them highly flammable. Beginning of the End unleashed giant Lenin-spouting grasshoppers on the unsuspecting citizens of Chicago; while in Mesa of Lost Women and Tarantula, Mother Nature's displeasure over humanity's atomic tampering took the form of super-sized dime-store spiders who foisted copies of The Daily Worker on innocent, God-fearing citizens.
The fact that post-nuclear America could so boldly enact its deepest fears suggests a safer, simpler time: The monsters we've managed to create since then are apparently too frightening to dramatize. Today's nervous millennialists would have trouble believing in the requisite happy ending. And thus, instead of acknowledging our own Frankensteinian complicity in an increasingly crowded lineup of technological horror shows, we cast external forces as our monsters, things for which we claim no culpability. Have the dark deeds of bio-weaponeers and lazy, Year-2000-ignorant Cobol programmers got you buggin'? Then escape to the multiplex, where blame-free tales of aliens and asteroids offer hours of distraction.
That's not to say that insect movies aren't enjoying a vogue, too; they're just fulfilling a different function now. In Antz and A Bug's Life, the tiny picnic-wreckers serve not to show the blunders of progress but, rather, the wonders: Each computer-generated creature is a miniscule manifestation of a greater technological promise. In interviews, Antz's co-directors Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson karaoked all the usual pieties about the importance of story and character, but the actual movie, whose script reads as if it were written by a couple of guys who can maybe draw really well, belies such sentiments. Indeed, it plays like the world's longest, most expensive demo: Check out what we can do with crowd scenes; notice how we can make the water look just like the glistening can-sweat in a Coke commercial; here's an ant who under-overacts with the same neurotic assurance of Woody Allen.
That's not to say that Antz is without merit. The dazzling brandscapes of soda bottles and other picnic fare have a glassy superficiality that's as compellingly soulless as Robert Cottingham's best work. The master shots of the ants' colony have the depth and nuance that the story line lacks. And who can't but marvel at technology so powerful that it actually makes the diminutive Sylvester Stallone substantially taller than his co-stars? Best of all is the many-layered artifice of Antz. Actors known primarily for playing themselves give voice to digitized facsimiles of their screen personas. What Antz ultimately suggests in both explicit and implicit fashion is that hard-and-fast categorizations of all kinds -- soldier/worker, real/virtual -- are increasingly incidental. In the infinitely reconfigurable future, we'll all be whomever we want to be: ant, movie star, ant movie star, whomever....
Of course, this message is not without its ironic subtext. While Pacific Data Image's sappy directives to be one's own ant whet our appetites for our own elaborately rendered me-topias into which we, or at least our avatars, can escape, the workaholic technoculture that is necessary to create such worlds is exactly what we hope to flee.
Fifty years ago, despite the best efforts of Henry Ford and Frederick W. Taylor, we still identified with the people on the screen rather than the mutant insects. Their regimented, mechanical nature made them Them!: our polar opposites, everything that was not us. Now, however, even though the dreaded Red Menace has added up to little more than consumer kitsch, we find it remarkably easy to empathize with the serial-numbered drones of Antz. And why not? In an era where the ultimate freedom is defined as the ability to send your boss email (which he'll ignore) while you're trip-mining cocktail-party anecdotes in Goa, the workaholic ant, a form of life so lowly that its ascension in Them! was the horrific measure of humanity's fall from grace, now seems like a colleague.
Or maybe even a mentor. After all, it's just a little more than 400 days until the Great Technopocalypse, engineered by the specter of a millennial bug destined to get more press than any Woody Allen vehicle. Indeed, perhaps we should be looking toward Formicidae hymenoptera for inspiration and instruction. Biologists estimate that there are more than 70,000 ant species in the world, and as far as we can tell, none of them are worried about bank runs, unruly Canadians, or how to assemble a mattress burrito. The extinction scenarios of Antz and A Bug's Life are little more than human projection; real-life ants are resoundingly hardy.
For example, in Florida, an Asian import has proven so impervious to the usual extermination tricks that pest-control professionals are refusing to treat them. In Texas, more than US$300 million is spent each year in an attempt to control the state's burgeoning population of calf-blinding, farm-wrecking fire ants. While scientists experiment with transgenics, parasitic ant-eating flies, and other exotic eradication methods, ants continue to thrive, practicing advanced farming techniques, colonizing new territories with the inexorable brutality of Starbucks, and growing increasingly resistant to our efforts to control them. So while human-to-insect metamorphosis used to be an iffy proposition, the stuff of deadpan nightmares and drive-in melodrama, in the face of collapsing Third World stock exchanges and nuclear meltdowns, it doesn't seem nearly as bad as it once did. A bug's life? Sure, we'll bite.
