Enchanted microcosm or apocalyptic war zone? Human projections into the bug world (original) (raw)

2013, Monstrous Geographies: Places and Spaces of the Monstrous

Many children, until the moment they become conditioned to fear bugs, harbour a natural curiosity for these creatures. Chinese and South African children raise silkworms for fun, Japanese kids hold jumping spider tournaments, and in Western schools bugs are investigated in science projects, kept in glass enclosures, and watched with mixed feelings of disgust and satisfaction. In childhood the tiny ani-mal ‘landscapes’ are observed with fascination, after all, a lot of childhood play takes place on ‘bug-level,’ but for adults there are spaces in the house where they are scared to look, the corners and crannies that invade nightmares and give rise to phobias. Revolving largely around two influential and contrasting (pseudo)documentaries, The Hellstrom Chronicle (USA, 1971) and Microcosmos: Le peuple de l'herbe (France, 1996), this article is an excursion into our fascination with habitats and bodies of insects and other arthropods in daily life and fiction. We often use technological or combat terminology to describe bug world. Conse-quently, visions of war and the apocalypse are riddled with insect bodies and land-scapes. For the civilized world, bugs or bug-like features contribute to definitions of archetypal ‘otherness’ and to envision enemies of mankind on a regular basis. The two documentaries discussed here present their different world views as strong and opposing metaphors for the man-sized universe. They are remarkably similar in their portrayal of alien beings in bizarre landscapes, but one is magical, the other threatening. Conspicuously, both films feature the birth of a mosquito; except while the insect is displayed as a grotesque invader in the American Hellstrom Chronicle, it turns into an angelic creature in the French documentary. The film-makers did not have to go very far to find a both terrifying and enchanting foreign landscape close by.