Normie!

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie Plan 9 From Outer Space. It’s one of those rare exceptions where a bad movie becomes entertainingly bad. Smarter, better versed critics and cinephiles have explored its paradoxical nature more thoroughly than I can. I can only say that I had a moment, the other day, where a line from the movie passed through my head. The hyper intelligent alien, exasperated with the simple heroes aboard his saucer, falls into invective: “You see? Your stupid minds. Stupid. Stupid!” he almost weeps. It is bad writing and stiff acting, but it is also memorable and insightful. And as I remembered the line, I wanted to rewrite it a little: “Your normie mind. Normie!”

Normie. The modern insult might have fit well with the alien’s diatribe. The heroes are normal, or at least as normal as Ed Wood is able to make them. Let us say that they and their counterparts in many an anti-nuclear/alien-invasion movie are normal, or meant to be. Too normal, they don’t know what the enlightened, liberal, superior beings know.

The way I’m told Ed Wood wrote his scripts, that is, in an evening while watching the television, I’d not be surprised to learn that he didn’t mean anything. A mind a little too open, perhaps; the movie reels from one idea to another with only the fig leaf of “it’s part of the plan” not really covering everything. It feels more, perhaps I’m reading this in, like the author simply let in every idea that happened to be floating in the zeitgeist. And yet, he has an insight, an insight I doubt he was insightful enough to see, and he almost satirizes the cold war hysteria that animated better films.

I am a little reminded of the climax to C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, but I don’t want to give spoilers. I’ll only say that, whereas Wood allows his “fiend” to spout his nonsense without intellectual resistance, only violence, Lewis allows his villain to monologue without facing violence but only questions. In the end, both are nonsensical, circular, positions. Wood showcases the nature of the common cant for what it was by his artful inarticulateness.