Even years before the premiere of The X-Files when I was a little kid that just learned how to ride a bike without training wheels, I was obsessed with extraterrestrials, UFOs, and especially Grey Aliens. Indeed, when the love of my life told me when we first met that she stopped eating red meat as a child because of alien cattle mutilations, I knew I had found my soulmate. In fact, I unwittingly developed a nearly decade long obsession simply because I randomly happened upon the iconic grey alien graphics used by the skateboard company Alien Workshop (AWS). Even with my later adult obsession with the most arcane and impenetrable of experimental and arthouse cinema, I can still say without hesitation that my favorite TV series of all time is still The X-Files, though I must admit that the last couple of seasons were rather pathetic. In fact, after recently watching the somewhat disappointing 2016 tenth season entitled ‘The Event Series,’ I could not help but subsequently re-watch every single episode of the entire series, which I followed up with every single episode of the somewhat underrated but nonetheless inferior NBC UFO conspiracy theory–based sci-fi television series Dark Skies (1996-1997) starring Eric Close and Megan Ward. Featuring a movie-like pilot that was directed by Tobe Hooper, Dark Skies is unfortunately plagued with unintentionally kitschy special effects that pale in comparison to those of The X-Files, yet they are still largely superior to those of the flagrantly flawed, sometimes nonsensical, and oftentimes unintentionally humorous cult item Communion (1989) directed by French-born Jewish-Australian documentarian turned horror/exploitation trash auteur Philippe Mora (Mad Dog Morgan, Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills). Probably best known nowadays for the uniquely horrendous Howling (anti)sequels Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985) and Howling III: The Marsupials (1987), Mora might be described as a sort of Mel Brooks of Aussie horror trash, hence why Communion—a film based on the 1987 ‘nonfiction’ novel of the same name by Whitley Strieber—is such a rather ridiculous flick as a unbelievably convoluted cinematic work with next to nil plot that attempts to take an ostensibly serious approach to the depiction of an extra neurotic and eccentric Christopher Walken receiving alien anal probes and dancing with so-called ‘Little Blue Doctor’ aliens, among other things.
Feeling like the marvelously misbegotten result of an atheistic nonbeliever of the UFO religion trying in vain to make a relatively realistic alien abduction drama that is supposedly based on a true story but instead siring a pseudo-psychoanalytic psychodrama featuring tons of reference to degenerate art about a wholly fictional eccentric Jewish NYC comedian type that seems nothing like the real-life Strieber who is on the brink of a total mental breakdown and attempts to blame it on rectum-reaming little green men, Communion is an unequivocal cinematic disaster that is somehow compelling due to the film's leading man Christopher Walken’s singularly whacky performance, primitive pre-CGI in-camera special effects, and the overall awkward and emotionally schizophrenic tone. Notably, long before the film or the novel it was based on were ever conceived, director Mora and writer Strieber began what would become a longtime friendship after meeting each other in a sort of London beatnik scene during the late-1960s (notably, Mora also befriended the film's composer Eric Clapton around this same time). While the two apparently lost contact at same point during the next two decades, Strieber reunited with Mora in the 1980s after the latter just completed his fairly weak war drama Death of a Soldier (1986) starring James Coburn and confided in him that he believed that he had been abducted by aliens, so the filmmaker recommended that he both write about his experiences and see a psychiatrist (or as Mora stated himself, “He didn’t know whether he should get a psychiatrist or publisher . . . And I encouraged him to get both.”). After taking various lie detector tests and receiving extensive testing for temporal lobe epilepsy and other brain abnormalities, Strieber—a horror writer who, somewhat suspiciously, already became famous for novels like The Wolfen (1978) and The Hunger (1981), which were both eventually adapted into movies, before he was ever abducted by aliens—became thoroughly convinced that he indeed made contacts with visitors though, as Mora’s movie makes quite clear, he has always been conflicted with the exact nature of his experiences (for instance, Strieber is not even sure if they were actually aliens and has hinted that he might have been a lifelong victim of government intelligence and/or military agencies).
While Mora found Strieber’s claims to be somewhat dubious (as the director has noted in various places, while he does not doubt that his friend is telling the truth, he doubts the circumstances surrounding his claims), Mr. Walken—a mensch that seems far too cynical and smug to believe anything that he cannot see, buy, touch, eat, fuck, and/or kill—is a total unbeliever and in the film it totally shows. Undoubtedly, Communion seems like it was made more as platform for Walken to go wild and express his deepest and darkest emotions than to take a serious look at the reality of the alien question. In fact, Strieber, who comes off as a fairly normal and sedate WASP, saw nothing of himself in Walken’s performance and was dissatisfied with the film before it was even released, not least of all because it features scenes of improvisation that sometimes resembles bad avant-garde performance art (rather revealingly, when Strieber confronted Walken with his concern that he was making him seem a little too bit crazy, the actor apparently arrogantly replied, “If the shoe fits”). Undoubtedly, it is not a bad sign when a director creates a film based on a true story about a longtime friend and that friend is completely disappointed with it. Additionally, it is not a good sign when a mainstream movie based on a longtime #1 New York Times bestseller is both a commercial and critical failure.
Ultimately, Communion feels like a sort of preposterously pretentious psychological horror-comedy disguised as a sci-fi-cum-drama that features the novelty of a quite pompous and Jew-y NYC intellectual type with marriage problems that collects shitty overpriced modern art being abducted by aliens, but then again one could argue that the movie is really about a megalomaniacal human dildo that mentally deteriorates on the weight of his own insanely inflated ego. While Strieber apparently collects the sort of tasteless modern art that is featured in the film, he seems nothing like the sometimes insufferable and egocentrically unhinged neo-dandy dickhead that Walken portrays in the film. Of course, as a film that features the famously quirky Hollywood actor being anally probed and in a S&M-like scene where he is strapped naked to a sort of makeshift alien experiment table, Communion is indubitably both the foremost film for Christopher Walken fetishists and a potent piece of evidence that Mr. Mora might be a latent homo (after all, in his debut feature Mad Dog Morgan (1976), the filmmaker would include a scene where Dennis Hopper is brutally raped in prison).
Ultimately, Communion feels like a sort of preposterously pretentious psychological horror-comedy disguised as a sci-fi-cum-drama that features the novelty of a quite pompous and Jew-y NYC intellectual type with marriage problems that collects shitty overpriced modern art being abducted by aliens, but then again one could argue that the movie is really about a megalomaniacal human dildo that mentally deteriorates on the weight of his own insanely inflated ego. While Strieber apparently collects the sort of tasteless modern art that is featured in the film, he seems nothing like the sometimes insufferable and egocentrically unhinged neo-dandy dickhead that Walken portrays in the film. Of course, as a film that features the famously quirky Hollywood actor being anally probed and in a S&M-like scene where he is strapped naked to a sort of makeshift alien experiment table, Communion is indubitably both the foremost film for Christopher Walken fetishists and a potent piece of evidence that Mr. Mora might be a latent homo (after all, in his debut feature Mad Dog Morgan (1976), the filmmaker would include a scene where Dennis Hopper is brutally raped in prison).
Interestingly, in a 1951 letter to an American friend, alpha-psychoanalyst C.G. Jung—a somewhat unexpected innovator in the field aliens and UFOs studies who began collecting data on the subject as early as 1946—wrote, “I’m puzzled to death about these phenomena, because I haven’t been able yet to make out with sufficient certainty whether the whole thing is a rumor with concomitant singular and mass hallucination, or a downright fact. Either case would be highly interesting. If it’s a rumor, then the apparition of discs must be a symbol produced by the unconscious. We know what such a thing would mean seen from the psychological standpoint. If on the other hand it is a hard and concrete fact, we are surely confronted with something thoroughly out of the way. At a time when the world is divided by an iron curtain—a fact unheard-of in human history—we might expect all sorts of funny things, since when such a thing happens in an individual it means a complete dissociation, which is instantly compensated by symbols of wholeness and unity. The phenomenon of the saucers might even be both, rumor as well as fact. In this case it would be what I call a synchronicity. It’s just too bad that we don’t know enough about it.” In Mora’s Communion, there is not the faintest piece of evidence that aliens and spaceships are the product of the protagonist’s unconscious, as it is only when he has made ‘contact’ and been ‘abducted’ that his mind begins to deteriorate. Additionally, the protagonist is more petrified at the thought of being mentally ill than being experimented on by aliens, hence why he comes to almost like the extraterrestrials once he realizes that he has indeed been abducted. After all, the film is set in Reaganite America when hedonism, materialism, escapism, and Hollywood fantasy were at an all-time high and the Cold War began to cool as a result of ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ appeared in the Soviet Union, thus it should be no surprise that it fails to take a Jungian approach and explain the psychological and cultural implications of alien abduction.
As a film made in the age of friendly extraterrestrial likes the eponymous alien of Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the film could not have been made at a worst time, hence its abject commercial and critical failure. Despite being supposedly based on real events, Communion features completely abstract moments of darkly humorous quasi-Fellini-esque surrealism that come completely out of left field in what seems to be auteur Mora’s semi-cryptic attempt to critique the entire subject of the film. While the aliens in the film have dubious intentions that involve anal play, they are quite cartoonish (for example, the grey aliens seem like they were designed for the clay animation franchise Gumby) and are hardly grotesquely sinister in physical appearance like the disgustingly erotic extraterrestrials of Xtro (1982) and Alien (1979). Featuring a protagonist that has a bizarrely intricate form of writer’s block where he begins to question both his own sanity and entire life, Communion feels like what might happen if a man with the mind of Larry David and the body of Walken was abducted by perverted extraterrestrials that read too much Freud and not enough Jung, hence the film's Judaic auteur.
As a film made in the age of friendly extraterrestrial likes the eponymous alien of Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the film could not have been made at a worst time, hence its abject commercial and critical failure. Despite being supposedly based on real events, Communion features completely abstract moments of darkly humorous quasi-Fellini-esque surrealism that come completely out of left field in what seems to be auteur Mora’s semi-cryptic attempt to critique the entire subject of the film. While the aliens in the film have dubious intentions that involve anal play, they are quite cartoonish (for example, the grey aliens seem like they were designed for the clay animation franchise Gumby) and are hardly grotesquely sinister in physical appearance like the disgustingly erotic extraterrestrials of Xtro (1982) and Alien (1979). Featuring a protagonist that has a bizarrely intricate form of writer’s block where he begins to question both his own sanity and entire life, Communion feels like what might happen if a man with the mind of Larry David and the body of Walken was abducted by perverted extraterrestrials that read too much Freud and not enough Jung, hence the film's Judaic auteur.
The year is 1985 and despite being a successful NYC writer that is rich enough to own original pieces of degenerate modern art, Whitley Strieber (Christopher Walken) is beginning to have dubious psychological problems as revealed at the very beginning of the film after he wakes up in the middle of the night as a result of feeling some sort of presence in his bedroom that he cannot quite wrap his mind around. It all starts on October 4 while Strieber is writing on his computer and it “fucks him” by crashing, thus causing him to lose a day’s worth of work. Indeed, when his wife Anne (played by Lindsay Crouse, who was notably married to Zionist writer David Mamet at that time) and his young son Andrew (Joel Carlson) come home, Strieber complains with an exaggerated Yiddish accent, “oy vey what a day” and then goes on to describe how he believes “the computer turned off for a reason” because “the book I’m writing is no good.” While Strieber does not know it yet, he is indeed correct as he will have an inexplicable experience that night in his cabin that will eventually lead to him writing a very different sort of novel. After firefighters arrive at his apartment as a result of him burning dinner, Strieber drives his wife, son, friend Alex (Andreas Katsulas), and Alex’s lady friend to his remote cabin in the woods of upstate New York. That night while lying in bed and acting like a jackass, Strieber attempts to get his wife to say something “dirty” by asking her, “Can you say erection?,” but the fun and games soon come to an end after everyone falls asleep when a bright light randomly fill the inside of cabin and the protagonist soon sees an almond-eyed ‘grey’ (who is actually dark yellow) peeping at him from behind a cabinet in his room. While everyone is awakened by the aliens and a grey even ‘zaps’ Strieber on the head with some sort of instrument, no one in the house can recollect exactly what happened the next day, though everyone seems to suspect something strange happened. As a result of he and his lady friend being completely spooked by something that they cannot quite describe, Alex, who is a sort goofy foreign Hebrew with a ridiculous fake accent, becomes inordinately belligerent and angrily demands, “Take us home, Whitley.” As Strieber will eventually discover while under experimental hypnosis, he was the victim of aliens with a bunghole fetish.
While everything initially seems normal after the unexplained cabin experience, it becomes quite obvious a couple weeks later that things are not quite right when Strieber freaks out and screams at a 13-year-old girl sporting a fly mask at a Halloween party after he mistakes her for a sinister insectoid alien. Indeed, as a result of making a supreme ass of himself in front of their mutual bourgeois friends, Strieber’s wife Anne berates him and declares in a fashion that reveals that she is not a fan of motherhood, “I’ve got one child. I don’t need another.” No longer acting like the Woody Allen-esque smart ass that she married, Anne also bitchily declares to Strieber, “You know, you used to be funny” after he gets extremely moody and yells at her simply because she attempts to be nice and do her wifely duties by cleaning his extremely cluttered work space. Naturally, Strieber’s son Andrew also begins to realize that something is wrong with his father and eventually asks him why he is always “sad,” but he lies and simply states, “I’m having a hard time, you know, with my writing.”
When the family goes back to their cottage right after Christmas, Strieber has another abduction experience where he begins to become convinced that he is being experimented on by extraterrestrial beings. Indeed, while in bed, Strieber is abducted by cloaked ‘little blue doctor’ aliens with grotesque negro-like faces while his hysterical wife looks like she is having a hellish orgasm while in a seemingly semi-paralyzed state. The next day, Strieber, who is beginning to realize what is happening to him, becomes sick and suffers a horrible migraine. Upon looking at her husband’s head, Anne finds a strange mark on Strieber’s head that looks like a spider bite that ultimately proves to be a scar from an alien implant. As a result of his moody and erratic behavior, Anne berates Strieber that night by mocking him for being “scared of shadows” and then demands to him, “you come back to me,” as if she believes that he has totally lost him mind. Determined not to become a victim of enigmatic beings for a second night during his Christmas vacation, Strieber whips out a shotgun while his wife bitches at him, “I’m sick of this macho bullshit. You’re so self-indulgent.” Ultimately, Strieber almost blows a hole in his wife with his shotgun after seeing a little blue doctor hiding behind a vase in his cabin, thus leading to the family heading back to NYC so that the protagonist can get so much needed help.
When the family goes back to their cottage right after Christmas, Strieber has another abduction experience where he begins to become convinced that he is being experimented on by extraterrestrial beings. Indeed, while in bed, Strieber is abducted by cloaked ‘little blue doctor’ aliens with grotesque negro-like faces while his hysterical wife looks like she is having a hellish orgasm while in a seemingly semi-paralyzed state. The next day, Strieber, who is beginning to realize what is happening to him, becomes sick and suffers a horrible migraine. Upon looking at her husband’s head, Anne finds a strange mark on Strieber’s head that looks like a spider bite that ultimately proves to be a scar from an alien implant. As a result of his moody and erratic behavior, Anne berates Strieber that night by mocking him for being “scared of shadows” and then demands to him, “you come back to me,” as if she believes that he has totally lost him mind. Determined not to become a victim of enigmatic beings for a second night during his Christmas vacation, Strieber whips out a shotgun while his wife bitches at him, “I’m sick of this macho bullshit. You’re so self-indulgent.” Ultimately, Strieber almost blows a hole in his wife with his shotgun after seeing a little blue doctor hiding behind a vase in his cabin, thus leading to the family heading back to NYC so that the protagonist can get so much needed help.
When her son Andrew asks if god exists and Anne replies, “I hope so […] but nobody knows,” it becomes clear that the little boy was also visited by the aliens after he replies, “So were all alone, except for the little blue doctors. They come to the cabin. They have big black eyes. They’re really scary. They said, ‘We won’t hurt you,’ but I prayed for them to go away but they kept just shining their lights on me. God didn’t make them go away.” After talking to his wife, Strieber reluctantly agrees to see a psychiatrist that “specializes in rape cases” named Dr. Janet Duffy (Frances Sternhagen). Like the Strieber family, Dr. Duffy collects degenerate modern art, though she also seems to have a stereotypical white bourgeois liberal fetish for primitive tribal African art. Indeed, the various pieces of art in Dr. Duffy’s home make the place almost seem more extraterrestrial than the interior of the alien's spaceship. When Strieber visits Dr. Duffy and she recommends that he receive hypnotic regression therapy, he initially refuses and arrogantly declares to his wife, “I’d stick pins in my eyeballs before I’d let that whacko woman fool with me […] She should pay me.” After becoming annoyed with his irrational behavior, Anne decides enough is enough and makes the following ultimatum to her “selfish prick” husband: “I’m gonna tell you something. You’re gonna go back in that woman’s office, we’re going to find out what is wrong with you, or we’re not going to have any marriage left.” Needless to say, Strieber reluctantly agrees and soon discovers the true nature of his abduction experiences.
During his first session of hypnotic regression therapy, Strieber experiences both vivid literal flashbacks and sort of surreal nightmares that inspire him to nonsensically proclaim, “The world is blowing up. My boy is dead.” Totally unable to deal with the experience, Strieber quits the session before he really discovers anything truly insightful and proclaims to Dr. Duffy, “I don’t need this. Bad dreams.” Indeed, it is only when Strieber talks to his son about “little blue doctors” and “tall thin ones” and realizes that he is more afraid of the aliens than his little boy that he gets the testicular fortitude to once again go under hypnosis. While Andrew finds the aliens to be somewhat “scary,” he also describes them to his father as being, “soft and perfect.” While under hypnosis, Strieber recalls being anally probed by one of the little blue doctors with a high-tech vibrator that is pulled from a hole in the wall of a spaceship. Upon realizing his anal cavity is about to be assaulted by a scary shiny object of unknown origin, Strieber tries in vain to reason with the aliens by stating, “Can we talk this over? It looks like you’re gonna sing White Christmas,” but naturally the aliens have no interest in arguing with smart ass NYC intellectuals. The aliens also strap Strieber’s nude body to an operating table where they proceed to conduct dubious experiments. As a result of Strieber’s ‘successful’ hypnotic regression therapy, Dr. Duffy becomes convinced that he is indeed a genuine victim of alien abduction and invites him to become part of a support group for fellow abductees, which include a paranoid policeman and a couple whiny Jewesses. During the group session, Strieber meets a woman that claims her unborn fetus was stolen from her by aliens and talks to another that mentions that both her daughter and granddaughter were also been abducted. Eventually, Strieber begins to believe that he was first abducted when he was a little boy and that his son is also being abducted.
While dressed like a sort of culturally confused Gothic Latino pimp and seeming inordinately jubilant like a Bipolar person that is suffering from a manic episode, Strieber declares to his wife that he is going out for “a pack of cigarettes” even though he does not smoke and then heads to the woods of upstate New York so that he can confront his alien tormentors. Rather magically and inexplicably, Strieber somehow manages to effortlessly find the aliens, who are inside what looks more like an extravagant outhouse than a spaceship. Instead of being afraid, Strieber is quite friendly with the aliens and greets them with high-fives and a present in the form of a camcorder, thus inspiring the extraterrestrials to dance like autistic toddlers. Before Strieber knows it, he finds himself confronted by his doppelganger, who is dressed like a magician and who is no less arrogant than the protagonist. When Strieber remarks, “I am the dreamer and you’re the dream,” he gets somewhat of a shock when his doppelganger replies, “The only thing that matters is what I’m about to show you” and then reveals to him a partially unmasked grey alien, which has grotesque flesh that looks like something in between that of an insect and a rotting human corpse. When the doppelganger then reveals that it is not actually the alien’s face, Strieber humorously replies, “You’re not gonna let us see you. That’s a good idea.” Apparently, the alien’s true head is something like a Russian nesting doll (aka matryoshka doll) though, like with everything else regarding his abductions experiences, Strieber is not sure what is actually true. As far as Strieber is concerned, he is just glad that he is not insane.
After his eventful experience with the alien doppelganger, Strieber goes home happy as if he has a experienced a massive life-changing revelation and proudly declares to his wife that he was “chosen” by the aliens. At this point, Anne seems to have finally accepted that her husband is not actually nuts and their deteriorating marriage begins to repair. Notably, the married couple go to an art museum where Strieber stands in front of a Jackson Pollock painting while his wife fittingly stands in front of a Lee Krasner painting. At this point, Strieber reveals his true feelings regarding his extraterrestrial experiences by softly stating, “It would be narcissistic of use to feel alone in the universe. People used to think the world was flat – it’s the center of things. It excludes the possibility of visitors. It’s really another kind of the same kind of thinking. The world is getting so small that it would be nice to meet someone new,” to which his wife supportively replies, “I don’t know what you saw. It doesn’t matter. It’s just god. You saw something extraordinary. There are many faces of god. Masks of god.” Anne then tells her husband he is “different” and that, in regard to the aliens, “I think they gave you a gift. You better use it.” Naturally, Strieber soon begins writing a new book, which would ultimately be what the film was adapted from. In the end, Strieber thinks that the aliens have come to visit him one night, so he more or less forces his wife and son to follow him to the top of their apartment building to greet the extraterrestrial begins, but he is ultimately disappointed when he does not find any aliens on his roof. Of course, everyone knows that aliens do not abduct people in overpopulated cities where they would be easily spotted.
For better or worse, Communion is probably the most thoughtful and abstract film that has ever been made on the subject on supposedly real-life aliens, even if it is an incoherent and singularly unintentionally humorous mess of a movie that was directed by a man that seems to have about as much as interest in real-life alien abductions as Tarantino does in cinematically portraying authentic human pathos and eros. Notably, auteur Philippe Mora has described the surreal scene near the end of the film where the protagonist actively confronts the aliens as an ‘ode’ to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Although seemingly impossible to tell while watching the scene, it should also be noted that Mora opted to have the protagonist’s doppelganger dressed as a magician because he believes that any act of contact between aliens and humans would have to be a “magical” experience. Personally, I believe that this strangely zany magic act is just one of the many indications in the film that Mora does not believe that his friend Strieber was actually abducted by aliens, as if the director wanted to distance himself from the ostensible reality of his friend's experiences as much as possible lest he be labelled a UFO nutjob. Surely, it is hard for me to imagine someone watching Communion and then coming to the conclusion that Strieber is a reliable victim of alien abduction and all it entails. If I were to guess, I would assume that Strieber was more than victim of too many youthful acid trips than alien anal probes. As if to make a feeble attempt to capitalize off of the marginal cult status that his feature would eventually acquire, Mora would later go on to direct a quasi-documentary with the rather revealing title According to Occam's Razor (1999) where he spends a good portion of the time debunking UFO nuts in what is ultimately a glorified home movie that reveals more about the director’s psyche than anything about the fact and fiction of extraterrestrials.
As someone that is fairly familiar with most of Mora’s cinematic oeuvre, I can only assume that the only thing that the filmmaker truly believes is that Uncle Adolf was the most evil man that ever lived as indicated by his documentaries and especially his arguable magnum opus Snide and Prejudice (1998), which more or less depicts an abridged history of the Third Reich as acted out by mental patients portraying Nazi leaders and fittingly presided over by a flagrantly Jewish psychoanalyst named Dr. Cohen that indubitably acts as a stand-in for the director. Surely no novice to the subject of National Socialism, the film makes references to the more esoteric elements of Nazi history, including the somewhat enigmatic völkisch occult group the Thule Society, which acted as the genesis of what would eventually become the National Socialist German Workers' Party (aka Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei aka NSDAP). The son of a French Jewish Resistance fighter turned restaurateur and gallery owner whose first important film was the Nazi doc Swastika (1973), Mora may have spent most of his filmmaking career directing low-camp kitsch and hokey horror trash, but Snide and Prejudice reveals that he has a striking pathological obsession with Hitler and National Socialism that seems to rival that of the average UFO conspiracy theorist. Needless to say, Mora’s doc According to Occam's Razor, which has an entire segment dedicated to the Third Reich, attempts to make the dubious claim that the Nazis met aliens and that an Arno Breker statue might have been the very first depiction of a nude human body that aliens had ever seen. In short, Mora's doc unequivocally demonstrates that he believes that UFO conspiracy theories are a sad and laugable joke and that he probably only went to the effort of directing Communion to capitalize off of the great success of his friend Strieber's hit novel.
Interestingly, in his published letter On Flying Saucers, C.G. Jung wrote, “What astonishes me most of all is that the American Air Force, despite all the information it must possess, and despite its alleged fear of creating a panic similar to the once which broke out in New Jersey on the occasion of [Orson] Welles’s radio play [The War of the Worlds], is systematically working towards that very thing by refusing to release an authentic and reliable account of the facts. All we have to go on is the occasional information squeezed out by journalists. It is therefore impossible for the uninitiated to form an adequate picture of what is happening. Although for eight years I have been collecting everything that came within my reach, I must admit I am no further forward today than I was at the beginning. I still do not know what we are up against with these ‘flying saucers.’ The reports are so weird that, granted the reality of these phenomena, one feels tempted to compare them with parapsychological happenings. Because we lack any sure foundation, all speculation is worthless. We must wait and see what the future brings. So-called ‘scientific’ explanations, such as Menzel’s reflection theory, are possible only if all the reports that fail to fit the theory are conveniently overlooked.” To quote Fox Mulder’s famous poster in response to Jung's remarks, “I Want to Believe,” but rather unfortunately the evidence is strangely lacking. While ostensibly depicting the real-life abduction of a mainstream horror novelist, Communion also features a semi-cryptic believer-skeptic dialectic and that is arguably the greatest and most revealing attribute of the entire film, but then again one also cannot go wrong with Christopher Walken bitching to aliens about being anally probed. In its glaring inclusion of awkward and seemingly nonsensical scenes, including Walken putting on a grey alien mask and telling his doppelganger, “I am the dreamer and you’re the dream” in a segment that can hardly be described as a literal depiction of an alien abduction, Mora's film also anticipates the sort of postmodern meta elements of the more satirical episodes of The X-Files, which is surely fitting considering that both Strieber's book and Mora's movie are parodied in the classic third season episode “Jose Chung's From Outer Space,” which is notable for featuring Mulder screaming with a faggoty falsetto voice upon discovering what he assumes is a dead grey alien corpse.
In his essay UFOs In Modern Painting, Jung noted in regard to what he perceived as the nihilistic apocalyptic degeneracy of modern art, “Whilst I was collecting the material for this essay, I happened to come across the work of a painter who, profoundly disturbed by the way things are going in the world today, has given expression to the fundamental fear of our age—the catastrophic outbreak of destructive forces which everyone dreads. It is, indeed, a law of painting to give visible shape to the dominant trends of the age, and for some time now painters have taken as their subject the disintegration of forms and the ‘breaking of tables,’ creating pictures which, abstractly detached from meaning and feeling alike, are distinguished by their ‘meaninglessness’ as much as by their deliberate aloofness from the spectator. These painters have immersed themselves in the destructive element and have created a new conception of beauty, one that delights in the alienation of meaning and of feeling. Everything consists of debris, unorganized fragments, holes, distortions, overlappings, infantilisms, and crudities which outdo the clumsiest attempts of primitive art and belie the traditional idea of skill. Just as women’s fashions find every innovation, however absurd and repellent, ‘beautiful,’ so too does modern art of this kind. It is the ‘beauty’ of chaos. That is what this art heralds and eulogizes: the gorgeous rubbish heap of our civilization. It must be admitted that such an undertaking is productive of fear, especially when allied to the political possibilities of our catastrophic age. One can well imagine that in an epoch of the ‘great destroyers’ it is a particular satisfaction to be at least the broom that sweeps the rubbish into the corner.” Of course, Jung's analysis, especially in regard to, “debris, unorganized fragments, holes, distortions, overlappings, infantilisms, and crudities which outdo the clumsiest attempts of primitive art and belie the traditional idea of skill,” is a great way to describe the oftentimes captivating cinematic disaster that is Communion, which was not directed by the son of a degenerate artist mother and galley owner father for no reason. Additionally, it is no coincidence that the film references artistic works ranging from Giorgio de Chirico to Pollock to primitive African tribal art. Indeed, only a sick and self-destructive society with an apocalyptic death wish could glorify the infantile tribal expressions of negro savages or the glorified finger-painting of a Jewess-loving shabbos goy pricks like Pollock, just as only a troubled and disturbed world could produce mass delusions about little grey men that anally assault dumb hicks from the sticks. While I would love to believe, my cynicism tells me that Jung was probably right when he soundly speculated that the UFO phenomenon is largely the expression of post-religious Occidental man's disturbed collective unconscious. Either way, Communion is infinitely more entertaining than Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) where Monsieur Truffaut makes contact with the most banally benign aliens of cinema history.
In his essay UFOs In Modern Painting, Jung noted in regard to what he perceived as the nihilistic apocalyptic degeneracy of modern art, “Whilst I was collecting the material for this essay, I happened to come across the work of a painter who, profoundly disturbed by the way things are going in the world today, has given expression to the fundamental fear of our age—the catastrophic outbreak of destructive forces which everyone dreads. It is, indeed, a law of painting to give visible shape to the dominant trends of the age, and for some time now painters have taken as their subject the disintegration of forms and the ‘breaking of tables,’ creating pictures which, abstractly detached from meaning and feeling alike, are distinguished by their ‘meaninglessness’ as much as by their deliberate aloofness from the spectator. These painters have immersed themselves in the destructive element and have created a new conception of beauty, one that delights in the alienation of meaning and of feeling. Everything consists of debris, unorganized fragments, holes, distortions, overlappings, infantilisms, and crudities which outdo the clumsiest attempts of primitive art and belie the traditional idea of skill. Just as women’s fashions find every innovation, however absurd and repellent, ‘beautiful,’ so too does modern art of this kind. It is the ‘beauty’ of chaos. That is what this art heralds and eulogizes: the gorgeous rubbish heap of our civilization. It must be admitted that such an undertaking is productive of fear, especially when allied to the political possibilities of our catastrophic age. One can well imagine that in an epoch of the ‘great destroyers’ it is a particular satisfaction to be at least the broom that sweeps the rubbish into the corner.” Of course, Jung's analysis, especially in regard to, “debris, unorganized fragments, holes, distortions, overlappings, infantilisms, and crudities which outdo the clumsiest attempts of primitive art and belie the traditional idea of skill,” is a great way to describe the oftentimes captivating cinematic disaster that is Communion, which was not directed by the son of a degenerate artist mother and galley owner father for no reason. Additionally, it is no coincidence that the film references artistic works ranging from Giorgio de Chirico to Pollock to primitive African tribal art. Indeed, only a sick and self-destructive society with an apocalyptic death wish could glorify the infantile tribal expressions of negro savages or the glorified finger-painting of a Jewess-loving shabbos goy pricks like Pollock, just as only a troubled and disturbed world could produce mass delusions about little grey men that anally assault dumb hicks from the sticks. While I would love to believe, my cynicism tells me that Jung was probably right when he soundly speculated that the UFO phenomenon is largely the expression of post-religious Occidental man's disturbed collective unconscious. Either way, Communion is infinitely more entertaining than Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) where Monsieur Truffaut makes contact with the most banally benign aliens of cinema history.
-Ty E
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