Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Commerce in Monsters
King Kong was minding his own business, living something of an idyllic existence in the 1933 horror classic, when white men arrived on his island. They intended to exploit him for money, so they captured him and took him back to civilization. Of course he escaped. Men can be such fools.
These days the monsters are found not on remote, uncharted islands, but in laboratories in the United States. Scientists go looking for them to exploit for money. The field of biotechnology was once as uncharted as the vast ocean expanses of King Kong’s time. Today, after decades of experimentation and fortunes in spent grant money, scientists have become quite good at making more and more subtle monsters. Some of the rituals used to invoke them are as strange as the native dances on Kong’s island, as are some of the results: sheep with the heads of goats, frogs with no heads, fish with human genes. All this would have been the stuff of science fiction fifty years ago, that is, solely the product of a writer’s imagination. Today it is the subject of scholarly articles, news reports, corporate annual reports and the occasional sci-fi film. Writers now have a lot more fact upon which to base their fictions.
An entire industry has sprung up, the influence of which reaches into every part of our society and its institutions. Monster making has been legitimatized. It’s traded on the stock exchanges. Very different in many respects from the maverick actions of the kind of lone wolf entertainment promoter depicted in King Kong. But there is one more similarity, if I might point that out: men are no more capable of controlling and containing today’s monsters than they were capable of controlling and containing King Kong. Let’s just hope the outcome of playing with these things is better today than it was in that film.
June 2001
These days the monsters are found not on remote, uncharted islands, but in laboratories in the United States. Scientists go looking for them to exploit for money. The field of biotechnology was once as uncharted as the vast ocean expanses of King Kong’s time. Today, after decades of experimentation and fortunes in spent grant money, scientists have become quite good at making more and more subtle monsters. Some of the rituals used to invoke them are as strange as the native dances on Kong’s island, as are some of the results: sheep with the heads of goats, frogs with no heads, fish with human genes. All this would have been the stuff of science fiction fifty years ago, that is, solely the product of a writer’s imagination. Today it is the subject of scholarly articles, news reports, corporate annual reports and the occasional sci-fi film. Writers now have a lot more fact upon which to base their fictions.
An entire industry has sprung up, the influence of which reaches into every part of our society and its institutions. Monster making has been legitimatized. It’s traded on the stock exchanges. Very different in many respects from the maverick actions of the kind of lone wolf entertainment promoter depicted in King Kong. But there is one more similarity, if I might point that out: men are no more capable of controlling and containing today’s monsters than they were capable of controlling and containing King Kong. Let’s just hope the outcome of playing with these things is better today than it was in that film.
June 2001
