Abstract:

American popular culture’s recent fascination with vintage sci-fi now extends to a medium that did not even exist when Martians first invaded American drive-in movie screens: the videogame. One game in particular, Destroy All Humans! (THQ, 2005), makes an unabashed foray into cinematic pastiche with its visual, musical, and thematic allusions to 1950s alien invasion movies such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), It Came from Outer Space (1953), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1958). Frequently compared to director Tim Burton’s sci-fi parody Mars Attacks! (1996), Destroy All Humans! indeed employs very similar scenery and iconography. Yet, although certain criteria of genre would place Destroy All Humans! comfortably alongside Mars Attacks! into the category of comedy/science-fiction, the videogame medium makes other generic demands that bear substantially on DAH!’s intertextual relationships with vintage invasion films, film parodies, historical representations, and contemporary culture and politics. Specifically, most videogames, and especially third-person action-adventure games such as DAH! that give players considerable power in manipulating the game world, present varying temporal expectations and experiences. Games and films may both allude to the same “story world,” but, in the words of game theorist Jesper Juul, playing a game “requires at least points or periods of temporal convergence where the time of the game world and the time of the playing merge—and the player can actually do something.” Thus, Destroy All Humans!, while riffing on a fictionalized past, is always partly rooted in the present, and this oddly anachronistic positioning of the player provides an interesting perspective on a twenty-first century culture that is mesmerized by its forward-looking past. Ultimately, the game functions both as a commentary on 1950s culture as mediated by sci-fi invasion films and on contemporary American culture by way of comparison. What are obviously anachronisms (a soldier character’s statement of regret that he passed on a cushy assignment to the Texas Air National Guard, for example) also evoke analogies between a society openly parodied as risible in its paranoia and conformity, and our own cultural milieu. This paper proposes to explore generic conventions and anachronism within Destroy All Humans! with an eye toward how this videogame’s invasion of the past mediates the player’s sense of the present.

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