WHAT A CUTE UNIVERSE YOU HAVE!

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Isn't this just the cutest little universe you've ever seen? After centuries of technological striving, we finally got to Earth's strange sere sibling Mars--and found rocks named Yogi, Scooby Doo and Barnacle Bill. Someone high up in NASA must have issued a firm directive: "Keep it cuddly, guys. We don't want Mars to seem like, you know, outer space." So when Sojourner bumped into one of the rocks, we were told Yogi gave her a "boo-boo," and when she (yes, the robot is a girl) made a close approach to another one, we were informed that "Sojourner and Barnacle Bill are holding hands." Kind of made you look at the vast red deserts of the two-mooned planet and want to go "Coochy-coochy-coo!" Or, depending on your sensibilities, retire to the bathroom and retch.

But what can you expect from the culture that brought us Hercules? In the myth Hercules was a tragic figure: born with the strength to strangle serpents in his cradle, but with far less than the normal quotient of self-control, he kills his wife Megara and their three children in an inexplicable fit of rage and is condemned to perform his superhuman feats as a way of atonement. There's a lesson here, maybe, about the disproportion between human ability--mental or muscular--and our capacity for moral reflection. But in the movie the tormented demigod becomes "Herc," an ultra-buff teenage superstar who adores "Meg" and addresses the Great Goddess Hera as "Mom." Maybe Disney didn't realize that Socrates was forced to drink hemlock for impieties far milder than that. What next? Medea, who kills her own sons after Jason jilts her, as a perky homecoming queen who struggles with low self-esteem?

We do it all the time, of course. Watch one of our shlockier televangelists, and you'll be introduced to an affable deity eager to be enlisted as your personal genie. Yes, the Great Spinner of Galaxies, Digger of Black Holes is available, for a suitable "love offering," to relieve the itch of hemorrhoids and help you prevail in office intrigues! At least the ancient Hebrews had the good sense to make Yahweh unnameable and unseeable except in the flames of a burning bush--a permanent Mystery.

When the sense of mystery is abolished, when the truly awesome gets replaced by the merely cute, we don't stop wanting to feel the goose bumps of cosmic wonder. We just pack up our curiosity about the universe and trundle it off to a place like Roswell, N.M., where a few unanswered questions are still allowed to live a furtive life. Though even there the wondrous quickly collapses into kitsch--T shirts and coffee mugs featuring darling little almond-eyed fetuses from space.

I'm not saying we have to abandon our species' well-known sense of humor and go around shouting Hallelujah! at every rock Sojourner stumbled on. In the end, in the spirit of science, we want those rocks to become as familiar and even banal to us as the ones we run into with our lawn mowers. If all goes well, our grandchildren will encounter the floodplains of Mars in a third-grade geography lesson, and maybe even find them a little dull. But cuteness short-circuits the whole process of learning and discovery. When we turn the Martian terrain into a comic strip, when we reduce a tragic hero to an action figure, we are making things seem tame and familiar before we even know what they are. We are insisting, in our pathetic provincialism, that there is nothing out there--either in the mythic past or the distant reaches of space--that can't be labeled, depicted and potentially marketed by the late 20th century American entertainment culture.

Sometimes Hollywood does get it right, or almost right. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and this summer's Contact reawakened the human craving to reach out and touch those things we do not know. While the jolly Jet Propulsion Lab fellows liked to drown out the Martian silence with Twist and Shout, these movies are about the wisdom of being quiet enough to hear the otherworldly message--the simple sequence of chords that announces the aliens' arrival in Close Encounters, the pounding radio signal from Vega that Jodie Foster's character picks up in Contact.

But even these exemplary cases suffer from the cloying taint of kitsch. Close Encounters reaches an anticlimax with its hackneyed vision of dainty space guys trooping out of the mother ship. Contact cannot explain its scientist-heroine's obsession without mawkish flashbacks to her childhood as an orphan; and when she finally meets the Vegans, they take the shape of long-lost Dad--to make it "easier" for her. Apparently our kind can handle only so much strangeness at a time: we travel for light-years, down through the raging chaos of cosmic wormholes, only to arrive on the set of The Waltons.

But the extraterrestrial isn't Daddy. That rock isn't Scooby Doo. And after all these millenniums of composing searing tragedies and monster-ridden myths, we ought to be old enough, as a species, to face the naked, un-Disneyfied cosmos.