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Eloi and Morlock
Jan. 24th, 2011 05:21 amAs a kid, George Pal's The Time Machine scared the shit out of me. I found the Morlocks terrifying, and it really seemed like Rod Taylor's character was in mortal danger. It's hard to imagine a movie these days that would convey the same kind of visceral squee... it's all been done before, it seems.
It took multiple viewings, and me growing older, for me to understand the horror of the Eloi. The scene where Weena is drowning, and the others look on with placid curiosity... Here is a race with no need for policemen, but also no firemen or paramedics.
I guess I'd never really thought of it much, just how finely tuned the relationship was between the wolves and the sheep of that world. Entrepreneurs and consumers are hard to pit against each other in a way that illustrates such a 'natural order of things'.
In my 'evil genius' heart of hearts, I guess I had assumed that the Eloi stopped caring for each other *before* they were cannibalized by the morlocks. The 2002 movie seems to go with that interpretation, I think. It was the Eloi's decadence that made them vulnerable to the Morlock's predation.
But then I saw Never Let Me Go , with a different kind of Eloi class. The cannibalism is medical rather than nutritional. This is what happens today, for real, when desperately poor people are able to sell an organ for money. Instead of a cook-pot, it's an organlegger's scalpel.
It's such a small detail, almost trivial... But now it's clear to me that the Eloi don't have a fire department because compared to such huge risks posed by the Morlocks, little things like accidental drowning are hardly worth bothering with.
So, in my dream, I am an Eloi who has somehow managed to escape the Morlock lair, and I've rejoined the others of my kind. My friends and family have never actually seen a Morlock, they don't really understand where I've been or what's happened to me, and my story doesn't make any sense to them at all.
And now that I know more about both branches of humanity, it's hard not to hate these people a little bit, for what they've become. And they are fascinated by my missing body parts- they keep asking me how it was that I was able to do this to myself, alone in the woods. I want to scream that THE MATRIX HAS YOU!- but that only seems to make them uncomfortable, and they quickly change the topic to more pleasant things.
It took multiple viewings, and me growing older, for me to understand the horror of the Eloi. The scene where Weena is drowning, and the others look on with placid curiosity... Here is a race with no need for policemen, but also no firemen or paramedics.
I guess I'd never really thought of it much, just how finely tuned the relationship was between the wolves and the sheep of that world. Entrepreneurs and consumers are hard to pit against each other in a way that illustrates such a 'natural order of things'.
In my 'evil genius' heart of hearts, I guess I had assumed that the Eloi stopped caring for each other *before* they were cannibalized by the morlocks. The 2002 movie seems to go with that interpretation, I think. It was the Eloi's decadence that made them vulnerable to the Morlock's predation.
But then I saw Never Let Me Go , with a different kind of Eloi class. The cannibalism is medical rather than nutritional. This is what happens today, for real, when desperately poor people are able to sell an organ for money. Instead of a cook-pot, it's an organlegger's scalpel.
It's such a small detail, almost trivial... But now it's clear to me that the Eloi don't have a fire department because compared to such huge risks posed by the Morlocks, little things like accidental drowning are hardly worth bothering with.
So, in my dream, I am an Eloi who has somehow managed to escape the Morlock lair, and I've rejoined the others of my kind. My friends and family have never actually seen a Morlock, they don't really understand where I've been or what's happened to me, and my story doesn't make any sense to them at all.
And now that I know more about both branches of humanity, it's hard not to hate these people a little bit, for what they've become. And they are fascinated by my missing body parts- they keep asking me how it was that I was able to do this to myself, alone in the woods. I want to scream that THE MATRIX HAS YOU!- but that only seems to make them uncomfortable, and they quickly change the topic to more pleasant things.
