Body Panics and Aliens in Modern Day Entertainment

While aliens in movies are very easy to point out, the actual people they could be portraying are not. Sure, if you take the stereotypical version of an alien in a science fiction movie you can obviously tell they are not of this world and it raises the big question of are we alone in the universe? But that is not the master theory that could be right in front of our eyes. 

If it is taken strictly from a scientific standpoint, people have made their own estimations on what form a human like equivalent would take from another world. The reality of the situation being they have no way of knowing if aliens would look exactly like us or if they would share some our features while others being noticeably unique. They could be among us and some people but a lot of belief in that. 

In movies and television series, it seems that aliens are portrayed more in a negative light than a positive one. They are the ones that do not care to reason with humanity and come to overthrow the world and take humans as their prisoners or wipe them out. It shares a similarity to the early views of colonization and in a more modern sense, immigration. The biggest barrier being a mutual understanding between people with differences. The reason people fear aliens so much is that they will have a shoot first, ask questions later mentality and we will not be able to defend ourselves because we will not be able to even have a conversation with them. Many movies portray this apocalyptic consequence to the introduction of aliens in our society. The same themes are seen in a global war mentality.

However, there is still positive representation of aliens in some productions. In the Star Wars movies, they all live in harmony (for the most part) and many human-like species can be seen mingling without question. Even heroes such as Superman, Green Lantern, the Transformers and the Guardians of the Galaxy come from outer space and are accepted for the most part. What it boils down to is the fact that people who will not open their doors to new cultures of earth will not open their doors to new people of different planets. Mass paranoia is the root of the hesitation and the belief of bodily manipulation or an apocalypse is the expectation from a new group of civilization. So while many view these movies as a question of beings out of this world, they could really be symbolizing the beings already on it. 

-Paige Siewert