Blast from the Past

There was a legend in my hometown, Arcadia, that the former mayor owned a bomb shelter that was big enough to host an underground high school party or two. The "legend" part of this story might be the size of the underground complex, since a school tour parent and daughter of the mayor in question confirmed its existence for me, and even the high probability of her older brother outfitting a shindig or two down there, but I wager it was more like the bomb shelter at my in-laws old place, which was really just big enough to organize a poker game in reinforced concrete, with ominous red stripes on the wall--indicating the compass positions of March and Norton Air Force base.

I re-watched "Blast from the Past" last night with the kids, and although the language of the plot's post-Cold War chapter is pretty vulgar, there's a powerful argument being made about our culture in this story of a Cal Tech eccentric who builds a vast underground fall-out shelter and mistakes a crashed jet for the first salvos of a nuclear war. The nutty professor takes his pregnant wife down into the compound and locks the doors for a generation. The little family's isolation from the San Fernando Valley for thirty five years reveals a values shift that doesn't seem to be celebrated by the film-makers, which--by itself--puts the flick in my top twenty list.

With the exception of the civil rights movement, the Sixties brought with it not much more than pure social poison--cheap relationships, divorce, drug abuse, and the resulting cynicism that made the "underground child" Adam Webber (Brendan Fraser) seem like a gallant, if innocent, Galahad when he emerges looking for a wife among the ladies of the late 1990s. It's comic stuff, to be certain, but even the characters themselves--when confronted with this picture of civility emerged from the amber--seem to recognize that the world has lost something in its rush to embrace nihilism. When the valley shopkeepers of the 1990s repeatedly curse, Adam Webber says, "would you mind not taking the Lord's name in vain?"

"You have a problem with that, buddy?"

"I certainly do have a problem with that," he says.

"Blast from the Past" is the flip side of "Jurassic Park." In the big lizard flick, saintly old Richard Attenborough tells us to "step aside" and let the re-born, remorseless, scaled monsters enjoy their killing ways. Humans, it is implied, should stand aside and allow even the most evil whims of nature to take their toll, out of deference to a value-neutral biological universe. "Blast from the Past" stands in awe of a human being redeemed from the savagery of nature. Adam Webber would slay the dragon. Lord Attenborough would offer up his children to it.

More evidence of our free-fall...