Movie Review of
“Communion”
hitley Streiber, a writer of science
fiction and horror genre fiction, produced a supposedly
non-fictional account in 1987 of what he claimed was an
encounter with extra-terrestrial aliens. Communion
lasted 25 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
In 1989 it was turned into a movie (directed by
Phillipe Mora from a screenplay by Streiber, starring
Christopher Walken) which tanked at the box office,
grossing less than $2 million. Was anyone else to blame
besides Streiber and Mora (of whose ten movies that are
ranked in IMDB.com,
“Communion”
scored highest, with a rating of 5.3 out of 10)? I
don’t know. The disparity between the popularity
of the book and the film brings to mind, as a contrast,
the book/film pairing of another
supposedly true weird tale, The Amityville Horror, published and filmed, respectively, ten
years before the Communion book and movie. In the earlier
case, the book was a big hit and the movie also,
grossing $86 million domestically. Some critics later
said that Jay Anson’s tale about a haunted house
in New Jersey was pure fiction, just as some doubted
the truth of Streiber’s supposed 1985 encounter
with aliens at his cabin in upstate New York.
I saw
“Communion” on tape around 1994. It pissed
me off so much I cannot let sleeping dogs, or sleeping
aliens, lie. The film amounts to a prolonged and
unintentional caricature of a small but important group
of people: artistic/intellectual New York Jews. Like
Jews everywhere throughout history, they have acted as
a leavening in the bread, causing all cultural life
around them to rise and expand. There’s a lot of
flour and not much yeast and that should make one
solicitous of its preservation. Yes, by all means,
satirize them if that is your purpose. All things are
fair game for the satirist. Nothing is sacred. Indeed,
it is the “sacred” that especially needs to
be periodically deflated. But turning the viewer
against a group of people by accident serves no good
purpose than I can think of. I presume the damage in
this movie was done by accident. To think it was
deliberate would lead me into a darker corner than I
want to explore.
The film shows
Streiber, played by Walken, in his upstate cabin with
friends and family, all members of the New York Jewish
intelligentsia. We are meant to bond with them, so that
we’ll be worried about Streiber when this world
is later invaded by aliens. The problem is that the
movie makes him and all his friends and family look
like hysterical, self-obsessed infants, the men
impotent and servile, the women frigid and domineering.
Every character is
a miniature Woody Allen, without the jokes and without
any other characters around to serve as foils.
It’s a no-laughs Woody Allen impersonator
convention in the woods. One winds up rooting for the
aliens, wishing they’d arrived sooner and carted
off the whole lot of them. Every work of art performs
emotional surgery on the viewer (reader, etc.), trying
to implant in him new, and therefore foreign, patterns
(ideas, characters, images, melodies, forms, etc.) with
the goal of persuading the viewer, the host, to accept
them and incorporate them into his worldview - at least
provisionally. Failure causes a rejection of the new
elements, just as our bodies reject (and destroy)
anything it considers to be an invader.
The hero in this
movie, having failed to win our sympathy, wins our
vigorous scorn. I found myself jeering at his trials.
This is not an attractive emotion and I resented
getting boxed into that corner. The movie made me
temporarily hate not only its hero but his family and
friends, New York, America, women, men, marriage,
children, Jews, psychotherapy, writers, the cast of the
film, Whitley Streiber, and, yes, even aliens.
Everything this movie touches, it dirties. It’s
like a soiled diaper. There’s nothing in the
material that foreordained this outcome. It’s
simply a result of all the artistic decisions made
along the way.
Among these bad
decisions was the one to cop a defensive stance vis a
vis the viewer. The movie seems to say, “I know
you won’t believe this, you philistine, so
I’m not going to even try to convince you. If you
were the right kind of audience, you wouldn’t
need convincing.” Insularity is a common trait of
New Yorkers, and will generally pass unchallenged in
New York, which indeed can be mistaken for the whole
world when you’re there. But, once you step
outside its magic bubble, you need to earn the
audience’s interest, sympathy and suspension of
disbelief. You don’t get them handed to you
because of who you are or where you’re from.
If Streiber wanted
to sidestep the conventions of narrative film in an
appeal for audience belief, then he should have made a
documentary. But then he would have had to play by its
rules, and one gets the impression that he
wouldn’t have liked those either. He winds up in
a no-man’s-land between fiction and documentary
where his most sympathetic audience is likely to be the
aliens.
Jews, New Yorkers
and the intelligentsia all, separately, have a tendency
toward insularity. When you combine all three into one
group, it can be hard for them to overcome the
conviction that the only people worth talking to are
each other. The flour is a flat and tiresome business
without the yeast. But what is the yeast without the
flour?
