"They've got our oil! Exterminate!" (Donald Sutherland doing the pod-people howl in the 1978 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers")
It's always fascinating to try to discern the patterns of how Hollywood reflects what's moving in the zeitgeist.
Angst about nuclear power and weapons was transformed into mutant blobs and monsters set on infecting or ingesting the population. Fear of Communism was made flesh in pod-people, who would suddenly act and think differently and subversively, while still looking like their old selves.
So what fear is rising up to the surface of the dark waters of our collective unconscious today, like some Leviathan of the deep? What clammy nightmare jolts people awake in the middle of the night drenched in the sour sweat of panic? Judging from "Black Monday", a new movie that's being rushed into production, it might be sticker-shock at the petrol pump.
For many years the term "Peak Oil" was unknown to most ordinary people and dismissed by the ones in political and industrial positions of power. Sure, everyone knew that petroleum was a non-renewable resource. But there just seemed to be so much of it as to not make much difference.
Yes, the oil fields of Texas had reached what is called "Hubbert's Peak", the point at which production, or to be more exact, extraction, reaches its top level and then starts heading down hill, back in the early 70s. But this shortfall was more than made up for by new finds elsewhere in the world, surely? And for a while that seemed to be the case. The price of crude, along with most other commodities, headed steadily down after the shocks of the 70s, and cars fuelled by the cheap petrol ballooned to ever greater sizes, 'til roads were filled by SUVs rivalling a main battle tank for weight and fuel consumption.
Then two things became apparent. One was that the world had been sucking ever harder at the straws stuck into the same giant fields in the desert and ocean floor which had been found in the middle of the twentieth century. No fields of comparable size had been found for decades. And those old fields were starting to show signs of peaking. The second thing that happened was that the Asian countries, and China in particular, began to boom economically, and their newly affluent and growing middle classes wanted a piece of the good life too, electrical appliances, larger and more power hungry homes, and not least, cars.
The price of oil started climbing, and climbing. People living in the suburbs, with little or nothing in the way of public transport, and commuting to work in the city in cars, found that the cost of filling up their petrol tank was eating into the salary they took home doing it. And faced with competition from the Asian countries for jobs, as well as oil, that salary just hadn't kept up with the rising costs. Suddenly the very economic foundation on which large parts of modern work and leisure had been built seemed under serious threat.
Crude Monsters from the Id
It was only a matter of time before Hollywood would start cranking out metaphors on how our precious fluids are being sapped. And they're obviously in a rush to get the product to the market to capitalise on the crude fear factor.
"X-Men" screenwriter David Hayter has signed on to Paramount's "Black Monday", an adaptation of Bob Reiss' novel about a worldwide virus (or microbe) that threatens to wipe out the planet’s oil supply. The book, which hasn't even been published yet, was purchased last autumn by the studio based on just 100 pages and an outline.
The story of "Black Monday", according to Variety (subscription required), revolves around a federal investigator and his attempt to keep the virus from spreading, before the world is brought to a screeching halt. The film will take on a disaster picture feel, according to Hayter, who compares it to the unfortunate hit "The Day After Tomorrow".
"[It’s] similar conceptually to Roland Emmerich’s Day After Tomorrow," says the writer, "in that it is highly visual and exciting, but it is socially conscious with something to say."
It's hard to imagine something you can only see beneath a microscope having the right sort of punch as a movie monster though. I'm sure Hollywood will come up with something more visceral and frightening very soon.
So what shape will the next threat to our vital fluids have? Who knows. Just don't be too surprised if its codename is "Yellow Peril".