Content Warning: Discussion of genocide; full plot details
Some works of art aim only to leave the audience with a feeling. Characters, story, aesthetic, all elements become secondary and instrumental to producing a state of mind. Fantastic Planet is about genocide, and, more strikingly, the mindset needed to commit genocide. The film guides the audience to, for even one small moment, adopt this mindset, and then realise with horror how easily they adopted it.
Some works of art aim only to leave the audience with a feeling. Characters, story, aesthetic, all elements become secondary and instrumental to producing a state of mind. Fantastic Planet is about genocide, and, more strikingly, the mindset needed to commit genocide. The film guides the audience to, for even one small moment, adopt this mindset, and then realise with horror how easily they adopted it.
On the planet Ygam, the gigantic Draags
treat Oms (humans) as animals. The Draags either keep Oms as pets or exterminate
them as vermin. One pet, named Terr, flees into the alien wilds, dragging behind
him a Draag education headset. Finding a ‘wild’ Om tribe, he gives them the
Draag headset, allowing Oms the knowledge to escape Draag oppression.
If you’ve only seen stills of Fantastic Planet, that summary will come
as a disappointment. The film’s aesthetic feels as if a renaissance painter,
trained in depicting Hell, was abducted by aliens and lived to illustrate it.
The plot of the film, however, can be found in any young adult dystopia, although
young adult dystopias tends to have rounder characters. There is an overclass
and an underclass. A very special underclasser rallies the underclass to
resist, or at least escape, the overclass. Happy ending optional. In terms of
scene outline, the film does not introduce thematic complication or complexity
to this trite plot. Yet this is not a trite film. The film does not merely
waste its creativity on the visuals, sparing none for the plot. The visuals make
the audience feel the film’s themes.
Fantastic
Planet is film about genocide, and the genocidal
mindset. Before you can slaughter a people, you must convince yourself they are
not persons. A person has reason as I do, suffers as I do, ambitions as I do. But
these people do not reason as me, and
their suffering means less than mine, and their ambitions can only be to my
detriment. Besides they’re barely individuals, they’re a swarm, whose every
causality is one less pest.
A table, without even a computer |
The film’s visuals and plot elements manipulate
the audience into adopting this view, on a pre-rational, amoral level. For one,
the audience identifies earlier and more closely with the genocidal Draag than
with the victimised Oms. Until half-way through the film, the only Om voice we
hear is Terr’s narration. Oms are little more than voiceless animals. The
Draag, however, seem more human than the Oms. It is no failure of imagination
that these alien beings live like middle-class inhabitants of the industrialised
world. The director could have alienated us from the Draag easily. The director
could have given the Draag a hive-like family structure, instead they live in
nuclear families. The Draag could have conducted their government in a
telepathic convergence of minds, but, no, their leaders gather around a literal
table. Most importantly, they speak intelligibly. If the aim was to alienate
the viewer from the Draag, there would be no quicker means than having the
Draag speak gibberish. Yet the first dialogue we hear is from Draag children,
saying the kinds of things children do. Sparing the architecture of Draag-ish
homes and how Draags breed via astro-projection, the Draag-ish society mirrors
the presumptive industrial-world viewer’s own.
Terr and his love-interest, in an unromantic kiss |
As the film forces us to identify with the
Draag, viewing them as at least a little like us, the film also dehumanises the
Oms by depersonalising them. None of the Oms are three-dimensional characters. Terr
wants to help his fellow Oms, and he possesses Draag knowledge; beyond this he
has no character. The leader of the Om tribe also wants the best for his
people. The wizard of the Om tribe doesn’t like Terr. Terr’s love interest is…
his love interest. This lack of character is not necessarily a failing. We
identify with the Oms because we know they must have internal lives, but we
cannot identify with these characters because we cannot see their internal
lives. We know they are sentient beings, but we cannot empathise. We can neither
empathise with the Draag, as they are at most two-dimensional characters, but
the two-dimensional Draags inhabit a society and social roles closer to the audience’s
than the one the Oms inhabit.
Evoking insecticide |
Starting from this emotional distance the
film accomplishes its most affecting sequences: the Draag genociding the Oms.
These sequences are not affecting because of the visceral impact each death has
on the viewer, but from the viewer reflecting on how little of an impact all
these deaths make on them. Only for moments at a time is the genocide shot from
the Oms’ point of view, i.e. from the victims’ point of view. The camera looms
back, so dozens of unknown Oms occupy the screen, dying on mass. Sometimes the
camera hangs so far back that the Oms become black blots, looking and feeling
like insects falling.
Two pedestrians |
This is the film’s most affecting element: the audience feel the genocide
as the Draags rationalise it, even if, intellectually, the audience knows it is
unconscionable. The Draags do not believe they are committing genocide. They
murder Oms like we would murder insects, throwing gas canisters and spraying
death. Even as the Draags find evidence that the Om are rational beings like
themselves, the Draags never talk of Oms as a military threat, but as an insect
infestation. Oms live in ‘nests’, they are ‘dirty’, they ‘reproduce at an
alarming rate’. The Draags are not ‘killing’ anybody, they are ‘de-Omming’,
just as you would delouse. This is the rhetoric of mass murder. It is a crime
to kill innocent people, but these are
not people.
We do not view the victims as people. Their
deaths do not affect us because they are as emotionally and physically distant
from us as insects. And then we realise we are seeing Oms like the Draags see Oms.
We realise each of those depersonalised deaths is the death of a person. The horror
of these murders is heightened by the fact that we the audience so easily took
on the mindset of the murderers.
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