From: klaatu Subject: [REVIEW] "Last Man On Earth" (was Re: Labels, gender, and queerness. Date: 1999/02/19 Message-ID: <36CDAB02.D3C76C26@clark.net> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <36c8cc66.4078672@news.pacifier.com> <19990217174621.20935.00002573@ng28.aol.com> <7ah779$9js$1@plug.news.pipex.net> <36CC7E6B.733ECCA5@oblix.com> X-Accept-Language: en, Russian, Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: Earth Operations Central, 1486 Harvard Street #5 NW, Washington DC Mime-Version: 1.0 Reply-To: klaatu@clark.net Newsgroups: alt.gothic Marjorie Peck wrote: > > > Phildo wrote in message ... > > > > >What I do have a > > >problem with is why gay people have to be SO open with it, to the point of > > >pushing their sexuality down other people's throats. > > I once had a friend ( a lesbian) completely go off on me and my b-friend of the > time when we kissed in public. It was meant in jest, but it was very revealing > as to how my friend had been treated. She said that we were sick fucks, and what > was this world coming to when respectable citizens had to witness this > depravity. That it was obviously agaisnt nature and she couldn't believe that > people like us were allowed to walk the streets....why, we could corrupt > children....or move into her neighborhood which would send the real estate value > plummeting....and so on. All screamed loudly at us while pacing around ( the > place was night at a Rennaissance Faire) People were walking by and giving her > strange looks, and my b-friend and I were laughing..... > > -Marjorie, apparently an open Heteo *gasp* :-) It's funny that I should see this first thing in the morning. No doubt everyone else was watching Friends and then Part Three of King's "Storm of the Century". I put on the VCR to catch those and instead watched the Paramount production of "Last Man On Earth." "Last Man On Earth", credited to one Kenneth Biller, was, from the advertising going to be yet-another cheesey "Women Take Over The World" scenario, and to some degree it was - however, it was also good science fiction and also good social commentary. "Last Man On Earth" was also essentially a redux of one of the all-time influential pieces of 1970s feminist science fiction. Alice B. Sheldon (aka "James Tiptree Jr.")[0] was, along with Joanna Russ and John Varley, one of the most influential contributors to feminist thought in the 70s, in particular delving deep into the relationships of men and women, and her Hugo Award-winning piece "Houston, Houston, Do You Read" went farther than did almost anything else at the time, with the possible exception of Russ' "The Female Man" and "Where of Late the Sweet Birds Sang". Elements of all three stories appear within "Last Man On Earth", mingled with a fine sense of balance by the writer, and with a sensitivity and even-handedness for which Paramount Television is not particularly well-known. The first few scenes of the film require a certain requirement on the part of the viewer to set maintain their suspension of disbelief. Starting with a political ad for a woman campaigning for the Senate, our law-and-order candidate assures us that she's going to keep the streets safe for women and children, and points to her long experience as the head of the FBI. The camera tracks in as she sits down and introduces her wife and their two children. The scene cuts, with a subtitle of "Washington DC - in the not-too-distant future" to a young woman apparently about to make love to a strapping young man, who is revealed to be nothing more than a hologram. It then cuts to a stock shot of a forested Mall nearly obscuring a well-landscaped white House, and then to a University Quad, sparsely populated entirely by young women. One of them, she who was unsatisfied with the hologram, Hope, turns out to be a grad student headed on the fast track for a great career in genetic engineering. She's got a plan for implimenting extremely rapid mitosis, and is advised against it by her colleague, and older and wiser head. But with exuberant youth combined with scientific abandon, Hope secretly impliments her protocol successfully: she designs and actualizes growth within an artificial womb, and within the week she draws forth the proceeds of her crime: an infant boy. The rapid mitosis brings the boy to maturity within six weeks. Raised in isolation at a rural house, the boy acquires an education at an implausible rate, and being a boy, decides one night to steal the car and head into DC. He arrives in the sparkling downtown at about rush-hour and parks conveniently next to a subway station and then starts wandering around. Eventually his wanderings take him into the entrance of the Metro just as the first wave of commuters arrive. He notices that there are no men in the crowd, only women walking single or in pairs.[1] He turns around, and almost walks into an elevator, but it is occupied, by a woman and a little girl, who promptly screams in abject terror: "It's a Man". Panic ensues. An incredulous police officer gives chase and calls it in, and Adam flees in complete confusion and terror. (In the meantime, Hope and her advisor have discoverd his absence and are combing the streets. They turn on their radio and all of a sudden the story breaks, Adam is the top news of the day.) Adam's car is cornered and he is shot at once but then escapes on foot, and luckily manages to be found by Hope, who gets him into the car and they make good their escape to the advisor's house. Adam is hopelessly confused. It seems explanations are in order. World War III had been started by Taliban, which had used biological and chemical weapons aimed at civilian targets, which mostly killed women and children. The US had attempted to destroy the Afghans, with a bioweapon that attacked the "Y" chromosome. Uncontainable, the disease spread worldwide, killing 97 percent of all men within weeks - it was also 100 percent effective on newborn males and the very elderly. The history lesson proceeds, with a clip of one very-butch woman givng a very soul-stirring speech about how everyone's still in mourning for their fathers, husbands and sons, however, the time of tears is over now and the world must go on, and by the way now there's work for everybody and besides, men it was who fought other men and killed each other off and now women would never again have to suffer violence at the hands of their fathers, sons and husbands. Of course at this point in time a man shoots her, proving her point to all women everywhere. The surviving men are rounded up and forever banned from all urban areas[2], sexual congress with males is felonized, the discovery of effective cloning and gender selection is announced, and creation of males is outlawed. The society has, over the intervening 20 years, become exclusively female, with men mostly remembered as vicious wild beasts that destroy everything that they touch. Hope, however, is not afraid of Adam - when she created him, she edited out all of the sites known to be associated with aggression and violence. He's simply not interested in hurting anything or anyone. In the meantime, the FBI has gotten involved in tracking down this dangerous man. The FBI's director, a major bitch-on-wheels, is desperate to win this election and puts one of her crack agents on it (well played by a young asian-american actress). Hot on the trail, she discovers that the recovered tissue samples from Hope's captured car are unusual in that the individual isn't just an impossible 20 years young, he's only 40 days old. Impossible! Not so, she's assured by the lab tech (who tries to pick her up, she asserts that she doesn't date out of the office), there's evidence of a rapidly-normalizing accellerated process of mitosis in the tissues. Hmm, now who coul be doing that sort of work? Hmmm... The FBI team comes to Hope's advisor's house to ask her if Hope's been up to any tricky bits, and Hope's advisor just isn't a good liar - the agents search the house, and when they find Hope and Adam hope throws herself in front of the agent's gun while Adam leaps through a window to escape. Hope is taken to the hospital, where she survives surgery and begins to recover under police guard. In this future, there are those who haven't totally adapted to living in a female-only world, and one of these closet heteros is seen lusting over an photo in an old Tiger Beat magazine. She's maybe 15, and when her parents come up to tell her that there's a highly-dangerous man on the loose in the neighborhood, she quickly hides the magazine, lets her folks tell her to stay low and have a good night, and then sneaks out the window. She is of course quickly confronted by Adam, and she tells him she's got someplace to take him: her sister, who is where she gets all of her man-porn from. Her sister, it turns out, is a pimp. She sees dollarsigns when she sees her sister has a man in the back of the van. She takes custody and leads Adam to what is, inevitably, a bawdy house. His entrance is a sensation - there _are_ many men there, but none is much under 50. The madam quickly takes Adam under her figurative wing, dismissing the pimp without payment. Meantime, the teen has returned home where her parents have called the cops who have called the FBI. The FBI has been to interview Hope, who has basically stonewalled them but also has begged them to not hurt Adam when they find him. The FBI interviews the teen who tells them an obviously fabricated story about the evil and violent "Y" and the FBI decides to not sweat her, but to follow her. A week goes by, in which Hope manages to escape, drugging her nurse and sneaking past a cop playing games on her beltcom. She confronts the teen - who is getting lots of attention (especially on the "Jessie Springer Show" - this was hysterical - and how Hope found out who the teen was) - elaborating upon her encounter with a "Y" (some of her friends are horrified, some fascinated; heterosexuality/"perversion" hasn't yet been eliminated from humanity) - and the teen tells her she told the horrorstories to deflect the cops from Adam, who she thinks is safe with her sister. Hope finds the pimp, who directs her to the bawdy house. Adam, it turns out, isn't exactly the perfect gigolo. His first encounter is with a woman who likes her sex rough. She wants Adam to hit her, and he doesn't want to - the client tries roughing up Adam to get some fire out of him, but he's not having any of it - he simply restrains her and she leaves as an irate customer. Adam has in the meantime made friends with an older man, a survivor of the war, who has accepted his position - after all it's warm, dry, well-fed and he gets "lots more tail than ever in the old days". In the meantime, Adam has another client call for him. The Madam advises him to do better this time or else, but when the new client comes in, it's clear that love is in the air; it's Hope. The FBI has been little slower in their travel than has been Hope, but not much. They promptly raid the bawdy house. The madam is outraged; she's paid her squeeze. When the agent kicks open one of the doors, her boss is outraged as well and informs her she can't raid the place without her orders. This slows the agent up enough so that Adam, his friend, and Hope almost escape, but Hope is captured. Adam wants to stay with her (assaulting the cop doesn't enter his mind) and Hope has to order him to escape. And escape he does, with the aid of his new friend who leads him out of the trash chute, and then has no compunctions whatsoever in tapping a lead pipe on the back of a woman's head in order to steal her van. Adam takes off his jacket and leaves it under her head before the flee. On the outskirts of Washington is the remains of a football stadium. In these ruins live a band of ragged old men, and their charismatic conspiracy-theorist leader John. He informs Adam that one day they're going to take it all back, that women were the inventors of cloning and the "Y-Bomb" and it was all a lesbian conspiracy and that someday this damned Mother Earth witchy business will be replaced by the dominance of men and god the Father and Son[3]. Adam's not exactly convinced by the rhetoric. In the meantime, Hope and the agent have a bit of hashing-it-out. The agent is hostile, demanding that Hope assist her in finding Adam, whose hairs have been found in the jacket stained by the blood of a woman in a coma from a cracked skull. Hope finally convinces her that it's impossible for Adam to have done this _because she's edited violence out of his genes_ - thus it's his partner who is the killer and that's who the agent should find - and quickly; Adam as a nonviolent is at risk from someone who's willing to back a woman's head in from behind. But how to find them? John makes it easy - he arranges a trade of some hard prison women for his men, for him to give up Adam. The trade is arranged, and Adam is given over, though of course the hard prison women turn out to be FBI agents in prison garb. They take Adam and lift off and head out, but not before the pilot acts on orders from on high, and blasts the crap out of the old guys. When the agent manages to get back to the base, her boss informs her that she knew the agent wouldn't give the orders, so she gave them, and her poll ratings have never been higher. She leads the agent to the lab where Adam is held captive, and gloats over Adam, and her poll ratings, and how she gave the orders to kill all of the old men, and Adam says, "so violence isn't genetic to men". The old bitch asks him how he feels, headaches, joint pains, and then departs entourage in town. The tells the agent Adam hasn't long to live since she's infected him with the "Y Necrosis Virus". When asked why, she says, well, if the word got out that you could engineer a healthy male, everyone would want one and society would become a chaos. Adam is to be made an example. Later, the outraged agent breaks Adam and Hope out of detention, and they find Hope's advisor who had been working on a cure for the "Y-bomb" in the final months of WW III, and all take off to the rural cottage where Adam had been "raised". She works feverishly and injects Adam with a cure that may not work, and while Adam suffers in possible recovery, the agent and Hope bond, exchange histories. Hope was cloned right after the war, but the agent remembers men, her father had once beaten her mother blind and the agent had had to lead her around and be her eyes. The agent remembers allright. They wind up heading into town for some supplies, and while they're gone, somehow John finds the cottage and breaks in and subdues Hope's advisor. When Hope and the agent return, John threatens to break the old gal's neck unless the agent gives up the gun. She does, but jumps him and gets shot for her troubles. John leaves the advisor tied up but takes Hope as a hostage. He's got her into the car and is about to take off when Adam, barely able to stand but recovering quickly, confronts him with the agent's gun. John tells him he's on the wrong side, he's going in any case, and he doesn't want a weakling with him. Adam demands that he release Hope, but shows a moment of weakness and he and John tussle. Eventually Adam recovers the gun and shoots John. Hope escapes, but Adam, pressed beyond the limits of his strength, dies. The house is burned, with the bodies inside - it will appear that Hope and Adam died together, victims of the destructive nature of Man. The survivors part ways. In rural West Virginia, Hope waitresses, and her advisor brings her news... Hope is pregnant with a male child, one parent of which is guaranteed to possess no genes for violence. And thus does our story close. ------- All in all, once the cheesiness of the initial bad-science (rapid mitosis maturing a human within 30 days and then stopping, while the infant absorbs an education sufficient to pass for adult, within that time? oh yeah) was over, the show was handled with remarkable sensitivity if not the occasional appeal to prurience. (This was the first time I have _ever_ seen two women french-kiss deeply on broadcast television, inspired to lust by watching broadcast lesbian porn!) Relationships between women were well-handled IMHO and one didn't see the common fallback to stereotype of wymyn as being either baldly butch or funnily fluffy. There was, IMHO, no sacred cow of feminism left untouched and in fact this was a lovely roll-together of some of the best work done in the field of feminist SF. Both Russ and "Tiptree" dealt with a male-less future where women alone survived a global plague, with "Tiptree" taking a position rather more depressive regarding the roles of men - "the main funtion of men, it seems, is protecting women from other men" - but "Tiptree" certainly didn't attempt (as Russ often did as did a great many others) to tout the single worst idiocy of the women's movements; "Tiptree"'s _Houston, Houston, Do You Read_ concludes with the poisonings of all of the astronauts from the past, by lethal injection of drugged men, with the exception of the narrator who is a feminist apologist for the actions of his comrades, who are essentially unrepentant MCPs. The narrator is, instead, allowed to drink his poison. While portraying the accepted paradise of radical feminism in a positive light (no men == no violence == perfect world) in a general sense, "Last Man On Earth" is quick to point out (as was Russ in one uncharacteristically sweet shortstory the name of which I sadly forget, involving a pair of highschool sweethearts left unscathed and in love when a town polarises along sexual lines and literally divides into enemy camps) that while there may be some compelling reasons for sexist stereotypes, there are certainly also exceptions. Violence is _not_ a purely-male domain, although testosterone does make males physically more prepared to dish it out or take it. Removing all men would certainly eliminate the violence of men against women, but what of violence between women? The Feminist Paradise protrayed in "Last Man On Earth" is ironically centered in part around a character who is a cop, and armed with a gun, and in fact, cops are in evidence everywhere throughout this film, all female of course, but you don't need armed cops where there's no violent crime. The genes that carry a predisposition to violence and domination are human genes, not male genes. This was also an excellent little drama because it points out one of the essential conundrums of male combativeness, that a pacifist male is in many ways essentially useless when confronted with a violence-prone male. However, the drama has the saving grace of Adam being capable of violence when given no alternative, in a situation where his loved one's life is in peril, and the drama continues in its perfect resolution by having "one who was too good for this world" conveniently expire, leaving behind in this world pregnant Hope. [0] Alice B. Sheldon, RIP, aka "James Tiptree Jr." was, incidentally or not, the only SF writer known to work for the CIA. After a lifetime of a bitter fight against depression, with most of the latter part of her life divided between work, writing, and caring for her comatose husband, she took her life in the early 80s. [1] This scene is all too familiar. Please note that Washington DC does have the greatest ratio of females to males (5:1 in 1990) and if you don't know this, the first time a visiting guy sees the morning rush hour they tend to freak. [2] Extremely reminiscent of Pamela Sargent's "The Women's Shore" as well as a few Star Treks. [3] Yikes! Shades of "In Darkness' District", chapter 7, by yours-truly. -- Be kind to your neighbors, even though they be transgenic chimerae. Re-transmission of this e-mail expressly prohibited. Non-UseNet re-transmission of this article is a willful violation of US Copyright Law and the Berne Convention. Statutory damages are $250,000.00 Whom thou'st vex'd waxeth wroth: Meow. http://www.clark.net/pub/klaatu/