On Piranha 3D
Sinners in the Fins of an Angry Fish:
A Review of Piranha 3D:
by John David Ebert
I was ten years old when the original 1978 Piranha came out. It was Joe Dante’s first film (he would later go on to do The Howling, Gremlins and Innerspace) which he made for Roger Corman in something like two weeks. Steven Spielberg has always said that it was his personal favorite of all the Jaws rip-offs. The sequel, Piranha II: The Spawning (1991) was James Cameron’s first film, and also his worst. The original Joe Dante movie, though, was quite good, and it still holds up.
The new remake–the second one, actually, it was first remade in 1995–is also very entertaining, although it has a completely different set of semiotics than the original. In the first film, the piranhas were an artificial creation of the military, a genetically engineered creation of a bioweapon that escaped into the local river. The monster, thus, was the creation of hubristic Science, and the victims were simply average people who had the misfortune of finding themselves in the wrong lake at the wrong time. During the 1970s, in other words–the era of Three Mile Island, the Vietnam War and Agent Orange–the public was felt to be at the mercy of a military-industrial complex with imperialistic intentions.
But nowadays, nobody cares about politics anymore: our 20 year olds couldn’t be more indifferent to the world around them, submerged as they are in the artificial bubbles of their iPods, laptops and cell phones, while the United States quietly, and with little notice except by people like Naomi Wolf who are branded as reactionaries, transforms itself into an Empire, makes a mockery out of the Constitution, and sinks, once again, into a political quagmire (this time in the Middle East) that it cannot seem to extricate itself from. Like the dwarf upon which the Dancing Shiva is thrusting his foot, who is unaware of Shiva’s Dance of death and destruction because he is blissfully fascinated by the serpent that entrances him, so too, our young today are dazzled by the technological gadgetry that has been fed to them by late capitalism, while the United States government busies itself with carving up their civil liberties.
In the new film, the culprit isn’t the military, it’s Nature: these piranhas are the result of an earthquake that opens a rift in the floor of Lake Victoria in the Arizona desert, which unleashes a species of giant piranha that has been extinct for two million years. Notice the change in semiotics: the monster is here the creation of Nature, since we have seen, with Hurricane Katrina, the earthquakes in Haiti and China, and the tsunami in Indonesia, just what kind of monstrosities she is nowadays capable of cooking up.
But the remake differs from the earlier film in another, more interesting way: it shows us a Spring Break-style party of 20 year olds, flashing lots of T&A and not a care in the world beyond the desires of the flesh, dancing and parading blithely across the surface of Lake Victoria, while ignoring the warnings shouted at them by the local police. These are precisely the victims of the newly released monster fish. The two or three characters in the film, however, who exhibit any kind of moral conscience, such as the teenager who allows himself to be momentarily tempted by a porn filmmaker on a boat but, at the last minute, resists the temptations offered to him by pink skinned beauties, are precisely the ones who are not attacked by the fish. This is a common horror film formula: the kids who have sex without giving it a second thought are killed by the mad slasher, while those who exhibit any kind of reluctance towards the act whatsoever become the heroes who defeat and overthrow the killer.
It is, of course, an archaistic survival of a vestigial structure of the American psyche, a Puritan structure, in which those who are tempted merely by the flesh very quickly find themselves in the role of sinners in the hands of an angry God. Thus, the giant prehistoric piranhas in this film become the punishing instruments of an absent (though still present) American God. Indeed, the scenes in which the kids are torn apart by the fish remind me of images out of Medieval works of art, in which the damned are depicted in Hell being torn apart and eaten by demons. Thus, we find that certain basic structures of the American psyche, unchanged since the days of Plymouth rock, are reincarnated in the CGI-enhanced special effects of modern digital celluloid in which ancient demons return in the guise of prehistoric, devouring fish. No matter how advanced the technology, the psyche of a people persists and remains unchanged for centuries, while the surface structures of the pop culture narratives twist and writhe like mutating creatures.
America was founded on a fear and hatred of the body and of Nature: the particular aggressiveness of American medicine, for example, toward the body, in which 40 percent of surgeries are unnecessary, antibiotics are overprescribed, and iatrogenic cancers are induced by too many X-rays and other diagnostic procedures is all indicative of the particular virulence and hatred of the Americans toward nature and the body. Our hospitals are dangerous places, and for good reason: the war on the flesh is still going on, and the American fear and hatred of the body, with all its confusing desires and lusts, and of an intransigent natural environment that persistently resists taming, continues to work itself out through the apparently innocuous narratives of our Saturday matinee cinemas.
So you can spend 12.00 bucks and two hours of your time going to see the latest Piranha remake in 3D; or you can stay home and read a copy of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The media might be different, but the message remains the same: Nature is fallen, our natural impulses irremediably stained with Original Sin, and it is the God-given destiny of the American soul to go to war against them both.
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