I finally got to watch the much-hyped Blair Witch wannabe The Fourth Kind on pay-per-view today. When it first came out, I was looking forward to it in a major way, even though I was 99.8% sure it would be even cheesier and more annoying than the hype suggested.

I don’t care! I’ll watch anything with aliens in it. Especially if the aliens are abducting our wimmin.

It doesn’t get any better than alien abductions if you are Pam. For me, there’s no such thing as a BAD alien or monster movie: There are only alien and monster movies that aren’t quite bad enough.

The Fourth Kind is bad, of course. I missed the theater debut due to an extended illness in the family, but I was not let down by the cable version. The movie is every bit as bad on the teeny screen as I imagine it was on the big one. Plus, all the tiresome debunking has thankfully already occurred, so I’ll just summarize all that (yawn) ever so briefly right up front and get it out of the way:

• The movie was shot in Romania, not Nome, Alaska.
• No Abigail Tyler can be found on record in Nome. No practicing psychologist or hypnotherapist who even remotely resembles Abigail Tyler seems to exist anywhere.
• The ‘real archived footage’ is clearly fake, and no archive seems to exist.
• The supporting website info is all viral marketing stuff slapped up just before the release.
• Yes, the FBI has been investigating mysterious disappearances in Nome beginning in the early 60s, but these disappearances seem to be the result of drunk Alaskans wandering into the frozen wilderness and then dying of exposure, not the result of multiple alien abductions.
• Nobody in Nome takes this flick seriously. Some of the citizens are very annoyed by it.
• Bad things happen in Alaska. It’s a wild, wooly place. Look at Wasila if you don’t believe me.

So now that I’ve dispensed with the obvious, let’s get to the juicy stuff, namely:

Are alien abductees nuts or do they know something we don’t?

Watching The Fourth Kind, it doesn’t take long at all to suspect that Dr. Abigail Tyler isn’t quite right. The ‘real’ fake Abigail (not Mila Jovovich, the other fake Abigail—the one who is supposed to be real) is possibly the most annoying screen victim since Shelly Duval’s insipid wife character in The Shining.

The ‘real’ Dr. Tyler looks like a 19th century consumptive with anorexia, and her voice is so whiny and tearful and relentlessly helpless that after a very short time you find yourself wishing that the aliens would come and take her away for Pete’s sake so the rest of us can get some peace.

To explain that unpleasant screen portrayal, we are told that Dr. Tyler and all the other characters who are plagued by nightly alien visits are also victims of recent trauma. Dr. Tyler has lately lost her husband to a violent crime, the nature of which remains ambiguous until the final scenes of the film. The other characters are obsessed with other acts of local violence and unease, and all have killer insomnia because of it, (literally).

All of these citizens of Nome are coming to Dr. Tyler for hypnotherapy because they can’t sleep and are always afraid. The similarities in the details of their hypnotic recall (for instance, all have seen a ‘white owl’ and all fly into paroxysms of raw terror under hypnosis) make Dr. Tyler suspect that something weird is afoot in Nome, and that this weirdness is connected to the mystery of her own husband’s violent death.

From that point onward, the movie asks us to wonder whether people tend to believe they are being abducted by aliens because they’ve been recently traumatized, or whether people who have been recently traumatized are more likely to be abducted by aliens.

I think that’s a really interesting question.

Not that the movie itself is really interesting. It isn’t. In fact, the movie isn’t even all that scary. And the few scenes during which we might possibly feel scared are ruined by the annoying personality of the actress who plays ‘real’ Dr. Tyler. Yes take her. Anybody! Abduct this woman… please.

Anything to shut her up for awhile.

But herein lies the problem. Social hysteria breaks out when strong feelings are made taboo. In a society that values individualism, initiative, and autonomy above all else, nothing is less appealing than victimhood. The word ‘victim’ once simply referred to a person who has suffered some terrible tragedy through no fault of his or her own, usually a violent trauma.

But thanks to Oprah and books like The Secret, being a victim or acting like one is now uber-declasse. So unevolved and unattractive. Be an ass, be a bastard. Be a conniving lying user. But whatever you do, if you want to get laid or get rich, don’t be a victim. 

Yet we know victims exist. We know that real people are traumatized by real violence they didn’t solicit or invite every single day. People witness murders, survive violent beatings and rapes, live through prolonged sexual abuse and trauma, overcome painful debilitating illnesses of all kinds (or don’t).

We know this stuff really happens. But we sure as hell don’t want to hear about it.

That fact sticks real victims with strong emotions and memories they can’t talk about openly without losing jobs, friends, and family; and it gives even bad psychotherapists lots of regular business. The therapist’s office is the container into which we pour our least favorite cultural poisons; It is the one place it is OK to be victim, to admit to it, to talk about it, to try to get past it.

In pre-Colonial times, the taboo feelings were sexual more than violent, but the social hysteria that broke out as a result of their suppression led to charges of witchcraft and erotic encounters with Satan, and ended with multiple hangings of innocent women. Today the social taboo seems to be victimhood itself and the fear it elicits in all of us. The more helpless the victim, the less we want to know and the more we need to discredit that person to save ourselves.

In other words, don’t be a victim. Even if you are one.

I’ve often wondered myself if alien abduction experences are not some psychological artifact of PTSD; a situation in which the fractured mind finds a way to project the extreme emotions that accompany violent trauma onto a story people actually want to hear. On the other hand, if I was a member of an alien race shopping for likely subjects for some cosmic experimentation, I think I could do way worse than to pick up damaged people that no one is going to quite believe anyway—no matter how entertaining they are nor how much we like to hear their exotic stories. 

Unlike Whitley Strieber’s books in the 1970s, The Fourth Kind did not seem to lead to a new wave of alien abduction reports, but recent mass sightings of UFOs over Cleveland made MSNBC prime time news and were taken seriously by no less than David Shuster. He did spend some time explaining himself, however, which was itself interesting. Like, “I know this looks weird. But what if it’s real? I missed the Monica Lewinsky story because I thought it was weird, and I’m not making that mistake again.”

He actually said that. Kind of uncomfortable and awkward, kind of telling.

Having had experiences with some of this alien/trauma stuff myself, and having thought all of it to death more times than I can count over the course of decades, I found myself chilled by one bit of movie dialogue:

Dr. Tyler under hypnosis: “They’re smiling.” [the aliens]

Other Shrink: “What does that mean?”

Dr. Tyler: “I don’t know what it means…I can’t explain…God… I hate it when they smile.”

OMG Me too!

And yeah, they do smile. Even though they have no mouths.

I hate that.