out of our inability to accept our own limits and care for others. We don't make monsters byplaying God or fooling with mother nature. We make the monsters by failing to be human andrecognize and respect the humanity of others. Maybe that's why it bothers me that monster stories seem to be being replaced by a kind of talethat has no sense of our own responsibility for evil and no compassion for the disfigured creatures whoserve as the stories' foils or foes. In the '50s and '60s the monsters in most creature features wereoften the result of some nuclear explosion or radiation experiment gone awry and so reflected someconsciousness of our guilt or anxiety about the cold war and arms race. Today, however, we seem tobe facing a new breed of monstrous creatures, for whom we are invited to feel neither responsibilitynor sympathy. Instead, we're just to blast those little suckers out of the sky. In a number of films the monster in question has been a beast from outer space, an alien creatureto whom we are not related and who we can hunt and destroy with all the heat-seeking missiles andnuclear arsenals at our command. Meanwhile, in Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park" (1993) we'reconfronted with a brood of dinosaurs from 65 million years in the past and given permission to blastand fry these reptilian sociopaths with nothing short of glee. Nowhere, however, is this trend so evident as in this summer's biggest blockbuster"Independence Day"--one of Bob Dole's recommended family films and a feel-good movie that lets usblow the living daylights out of the meanest pack of really illegal aliens that ever came to town. What athrill to be able to mount a nuclear Armageddon without the slightest concern about political orradioactive fallout of any sort, to finally find an enemy who it's not politically incorrect to hate, and tolive in a world of such stark moral clarity and simplicity, where good and evil are so sharply polarizedand w...
