HELP THIS IS DUE ON MONDAY AND I CAN'T FAIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?

**SPOILERS**

“The story, it’s about the living dead.”

These words are spoken by the young filmmaker Charles in the opening minutes of the J.J. Abrams movie SUPER 8. He is referring to his short film THE CASE, the production of which is the catalyst for the adventure about to unfold, but I would argue that he could have been referring to SUPER 8 itself. One year after this movie was released in theaters, I believe there is still a mystery lurking beneath the surface, one which I believe adds an extra layer of depth and makes the ending far more satisfying.

I was very excited to see this film, having grown up in the era of Spielberg summer blockbusters, very close to the spot on the map where this story takes place, making Super 8 movies of my own. If I wasn’t the target audience for this movie, no one was. And I did thoroughly enjoy it on first viewing. But there was something nagging at me that night as I lay in bed, digesting the movie. Something about the ending just wasn’t right. It was that damned locket. The young hero of the film, Joe Lamb, has been clinging to a locket since the beginning of the film. We learn that it was his mother’s, that his father gave it to her on the day Joe was born, and that he passed it along to Joe after her tragic death. It is repeatedly made clear throughout the film how much he values this locket as a memory of her. Then, at the end of the film, the locket levitates out of Joe’s pocket as metal objects are being drawn towards the water tower where the alien is assembling his spaceship. Joe manages to grab it before it can fly away. But then the locket flips open, and he sees the picture of his mother inside, and he lets go. The locket zips across the sky to attach to the alien spacecraft, and, as if it were waiting for that last piece, it blasts off into the cosmos. The swelling music seems to imply that something wonderful has just happened, but I couldn’t help being sad. I initially interpreted the scene as being symbolic of Joe finally letting go of his mother, but that just seemed weak to me. There’s nothing unhealthy about a child holding onto a meaningful memento of a lost loved one. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t hold onto that locket for the rest of his life, maybe even pass it down to his own children someday. Moreover, there is nothing in the movie that has suggested to me that Joe needs to let her go. He seems to be coping with that tragic loss far better than most people would at his age. So in what light could letting go of that locket possibly be a happy ending? Then I remembered something that had happened earlier in the movie, another moment I was still trying to make sense of, and the whole story popped into place. Joe wasn’t letting go of his mother’s locket. He was returning it to her.

The key moment I’m referring to was just a few minutes earlier in the film. Down in the tunnels, the alien has cornered the kids, and Joe turns to face him. The creature lifts Joe up and holds him in front of its menacing, alien face. Then Joe says to it, “I know bad things happen. Bad things happen, but you can still live. You can still live.” It leans in for a closer look, and its milky, alien eyes split apart and reveal more human eyes behind them. It regards Joe closely for a moment, seeming to think about what the boy said. Then the engine of the spaceship the creature is building sputters to life behind it, so it sets Joe down and returns to its lair. Cary, the little pyromaniac kid, punctuates the scene by saying, “Okay, wait a minute… What?”

Apparently it’s necessary to keep working backwards through this movie to make sense of it, because this encounter with the alien obviously evokes an earlier scene, when Joe and Alice were in Joe’s bedroom, watching old home movies of his mother. Joe tells Alice, “She used to look at me this way, like really look, and I just knew I was there, that I existed.” It was clear to me that the alien was meant to be looking at Joe the same way his mother had looked at him. One theory to make sense of this was that the creature had read Joe’s mind, found this memory of his mother, and was using it to communicate with Joe. And that could be a valid interpretation. But now I believe there was more going on.

Moving backwards again, recall the scene where the kids’ biology teacher, Dr. Woodward, explains his psychic bond with the alien to his interrogator, Colonel Nemec. Just before they kill him with a lethal injection, his last words are, “He’s in me, you know. As I am in him. So when you see him next, as I’m sure you will, I’ll be watching you too.” Woodward knows that it is a two-way connection, that he shares his consciousness with the alien in both of their bodies. And he knows that even after his human body dies, his mind will live on inside the alien. This idea is brought full circle later in the film when the creature has Nelec cornered in the overturned bus and moves in for the kill. No doubt Woodward was indeed watching through the alien’s eyes as his murder was avenged.

The final piece of the puzzle takes place immediately before Woodward’s death scene. Joe, after having an argument with his father, rides his bike out to the cemetery and visits his mother’s grave. He sits with his back against the tombstone, looking at her locket, when he hears a loud noise coming from a building at the bottom of the hill. Through the windows, he sees dirt being tossed in the air. This is how Joe later knows where to find the entrance to the tunnel. And it’s important to note that this entrance is in the graveyard.

Once all the pieces of the puzzle are laid out on the table, I believe there is one solution that makes sense of them all. As dark as this may sound, I believe that the creature, while burrowing its tunnels under the graveyard, unearthed (and likely ate) the mortal remains of Joe’s mother, and in doing so, absorbed some lingering vestige of her consciousness. Like Dr. Woodward, she lives on in the alien’s mind. Joe understands this the moment the creature grabs him and they are linked. When he says, “Bad things happen, but you can still live,” he is not talking to the alien. He is talking to his mother. When the locket is lifted out of Joe’s pocket at the end, it seems as though it is being specifically targeted by this supposedly magnetic force. Most of the other debris has stopped flying by this point. It really feels as though the alien wants this locket. But it isn’t really the alien who is reaching out for it. When Joe releases it, he is returning it to its rightful owner. And he is giving her something to remember him by as she leaves this world for whatever awaits her beyond. That, to me, is a far more satisfying ending than simply “letting go” of his mother.

Or course this is pretty twisted and macabre stuff to be in such a mainstream Hollywood family adventure movie. I’m sure it was always meant to be merely subtext, that hopefully some people would decipher and appreciate. It certainly wasn’t meant to be clear to the audience as the credits rolled. But I think the film is improved immensely with this interpretation. In addition to adding emotional catharsis, it also creates a clearer connection between the kids’ adventure and the creature’s escape from Earth. There is also symbolism to be found in the concept of the alien’s mind as an afterlife. There is no sign of religion in Joe’s family. No one seems to be comforting him with platitudes about his mother being in a better place. This is probably his first experience with death, and he is trying to process it. From a storytelling point-of-view, this mind-melding power that the creature has could represent the boy’s desire to believe that his mother isn’t really gone, that some part of her lives on.

The creature is like the Grim Reaper, sneaking around town and killing innocent people, but even as it leaves their mortal shells behind, it carries their minds with it. So can it really be considered a cold-blooded killer? Most of the townspeople it abducts may still be alive anyway, cocooned in its lair like Alice and the Sheriff and the lady with the curlers. It seems to kill the Sheriff and the woman during their attempted escape, but all we really see it do is lift them up and toss them out of frame. I’m willing to believe that the creature was not killing innocent people (though I can’t really explain what it was planning to do with those it abducted. Maybe collecting information?). The boys do spot the creature eating a human leg when they first enter the lair, but that may have come from an easier, if more morbid, food source. The graveyard.

The slam dunk for this whole theory, in my opinion, comes in the Special Features portion of the Blu-ray (I’ll grant that a movie should not need supplements to tell its complete story, but I managed to come up with this theory before seeing this scene, so the clues are all there in the movie). There is a Deleted Scene entitled “Joe and Cary Discover Coffins.” It features the two boys working their way through the tunnels leading to the creature’s lair. They stop when they spot something on the ground. It is a coffin. Several coffins, actually. And they are open. And they are empty. As if that isn’t creepy enough, they look up to see more coffins hanging down from the dirt over their heads. “This is scary too,” quips Cary. Then they hear noises from the creature’s lair and move off in that direction. It had already been clearly established that the tunnels began under the graveyard where Joe’s mother was buried, but now there is direct evidence that, at least in an earlier cut of the film, the creature was collecting bodies. This is just moments before the boys spot it munching on the leg (“It’s eating a person,” Cary deftly notes). In the context of the deleted scene, it seems entirely possible that it could have been eating a body from the graveyard. I’m not sure why this scene was cut, but I suspect maybe J.J. Abrams feared it would make the ghastly secret of the movie too obvious.

It’s also worth noting that elsewhere on the Blu-ray there is a featurette on the design of the alien creature, and one of the designers states that the creature’s secondary eyes were modeled directly on the eyes of the actress who played Joe’s mother.

I can certainly understand skeptical reactions to this theory. I could be accused of reading too much into a summer popcorn flick. It is perhaps farfetched to believe that any part of a person’s consciousness could still exist in a brain that has been rotting in a grave for three months. And it may be that this is all just too darn gruesome to be in a Steven Spielberg production. But much like Roy Neary staring into his mashed potatoes in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, one of the Spielberg films that so obviously inspired SUPER 8, I can’t help believing that there is a message here hidden in plain sight. It is alluded to from the very beginning.

“I bet Joe isn’t going to want to do my movie anymore.”

“Why not?’

“Why do you think? The story, it’s about the living dead.”

“His mother’s not a zombie.”

No, she’s definitely not a zombie. But she might be “the living dead” after all.

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