Stories by Eve Tushnet

Hi Eve, I just saw your post on Attack the Block and I wanted to clarify what I was saying about its attitude toward heroism. (I'm beginning to see the downside of not having my own blog to write out this stuff anymore...)

I agree with you that the movie doesn't really *overturn* the action-hero fantasy, since in fact it affirms the guys' desire to be heroic, including the children and the white hanger-on. I think it would be better to say it overturned a certain antihero type of fantasy.

I wasn't thinking about it at the time, but I suppose my unconscious was comparing it to Pitch Black, which has a basically similar plotline: a criminal finds himself having to defend a group of people from swarming aliens and ultimately learns self-sacrifice. Only in that case the redemption was undermined by the fact that the camera clearly adored the unredeemed badass Vin Diesel, and his change of heart basically came from deciding his companions were worthy of him. Whereas the use of similar camera shots in Attack the Block seemed to say that these kids THINK they're Vin Diesel, but the screenwriters aren't granting them the sort of hypercompetence and semi-magical powers that Hollywood heroes get. (I especially liked the way the aliens are following Moses around because they think he's a female in heat, which is the sort of indignity screenwriters would probably never put on Vin Diesel.) I don't know about you, but I felt like when the gang finally figures out what's motivating the aliens, there was a bit of a shift even in the genre of movie we were in.

True, it was technically still an alien-invasion movie, but the "invasion" was essentially like a pack of wild dogs moving into the neighborhood; the kids, like the audience, imagined they were in a different kind of movie, and that turned out to be a disastrous mistake. So the block still needed a heroic rescue, but first Moses had to admit that he wasn't the type of hero he imagined he was.