7/31/2023 0 Comments Leeloo fifth element![]() ![]() The Fifth Element, like most classic science fiction films, portrays for us certain archetypes, tropes, and narrative progressions that are common to the sci-fi genre as a whole. The alien, it seems, is always the repository of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans in the modern age-especially when tied to the sands of the Orient. The Orient, more than the Gothic cathedrals of Europe or the open-air environments of American revivalism, seem to tap into our psyche of the holy and sacred and give us a sense of the old divine we have drifted extremely far from. Moreover, the imagery of Egypt and an archeologist professor trying to unlock the mysteries of cosmic struggle evoke the quests of finding the historical Jesus. Egypt was the land where the infant Christ and the Holy Family had gone into hiding to escape Herod’s tyranny and bloodlust. It is, perhaps unconsciously, symbolic that the film opens in Egypt on the eve of the First World War. A heavenly sent savior, the “Fifth Element,” the “perfect being,” is that which will bring forth salvation from the Great Evil which threatens to consume the cosmos. Rather than celebrate an end of history, Besson’s film returned us to even more primal fears of the final apocalypse where a “Great Evil” threatens to destroy all life as we know it.Īs the apocalypse approaches, we realize that all the powers of technology and government prove incapable of saving us. Looking back on that decade of euphoria, the Fifth Element brought us back to our senses with its gritty portrayal of a future that was hardly worth celebrating. Francis Fukuyama posed the question asking whether we had reached “the end of history.” The apocalypse was seemingly averted new horizons beckoned. The specter of nuclear holocaust had been lifted off the shoulders of the world. China was internally liberalizing its economy and becoming integrated into the world market with the anticipatory hope by many of making the great leap into the liberal democratic world. The 1990s was a decade of euphoria and liberal triumphalism. ![]() What made the Fifth Element unique, beyond its psychedelic punk rock and dystopian consumeristic future, was the fact that it challenged the technological fetish of the 1990s and offered that deeply Christian, though eroticized, theme of love saving the world in place of space adventure and scientistic salvation. In my essay “ HAL Unplugged,” I mentioned how the 1990s was a decade in which science fiction worshipped at the altar of technology. Luc Besson’s now cult classic The Fifth Element gave us a retro-futuristic take on the apocalypse and messianism which was suffused with Christian motifs and symbolism. ![]()
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