Il est en interview sur le web.
Petit extrait :
"SFS: I'm thinking of all the sf/f works that almost casually kill off the human race, going back to The Last Man by Mary Shelley (1826), The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel (1901), I Am Legend (1954), and any number of others. Given Sontag's article and your own thoughts on the matter, to what extent are these sorts of stories desensitizing to mass destruction and possibly exploitive, versus being a legitimate avenue to examine human nature? It's certainly a very different dynamic than the more personal horror represented by Frankenstein's monster.
JM: I tend to be skeptical of the argument that mass media desensitize us to the real meaning of wanton destruction -- though I realize that's not exactly what you're saying, and I certainly agree with you that monster movies may exploit the dark side of human nature, the fascist voyeur in all of us.
For my money, a deterministic theory of television or Hollywood movies threatens to distract us from a much larger problem: the kind of murder legitimatized, sanctioned, and encouraged by our worst political and religious institutions. Consider the case of ex-President George W. Bush, a man who, in the memorable phrase of psychiatrist Justin A. Frank, loves violence. ("Feels good," Bush remarked as the planes took off to kill people in Iraq.) I sincerely doubt that Bush's sickness can be traced to his having consumed one too many Rambo fantasies. I would instead point to a fatal combination of ideological savagery and apocalyptic theology. However, given the automatic deference that "faith" receives in our culture, we can't have that discussion, and so we must content ourselves with railing against action films and antisocial video games.
That said, it certainly behooves us to consider the discontinuity between our affection for Godzilla and the raw horror of his modus operandi. As you point out, the King of the Monsters is a killing machine, murderous in a way that the Frankenstein monster could never imagine being. I thought the recent SF movie Cloverfield, sensationalistic though it was, did a good job of demonstrating that, were a demonic beast actually to attack New York City, the experience would be closer to the cataclysm of Hiroshima than to the glorious escapist thrills of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms."
