I was about half-way through my annual Christmas Gremlins rewatch when I realized it all felt extra familiar this year. Something about the central theme of society’s tendency to disastrously play around with things it doesn’t understand reminded me of the current cultural hellscape in which we all suddenly live.
It was watching Billy Peltzer irresponsibly raise his pets to the detriment of everyone around him that did it. While these days I wouldn’t be surprised to find a corner of the internet where people defend Mrs. Deagle, I’m not one of those people.
Having said that, Billy is not a good pet owner.
We know this right away because his dog – apparently allowed to freely wander the neighborhood – has destroyed Mrs. Deagle’s imported snowman. Then Billy brings that same dog to work, where it is also out of control. He seems like a nice enough kid, but I would not trust Billy to feed my gerbil.
It’s not entirely Billy’s fault, some of this is upbringing. His dad, Rand Peltzer, an unemployed and aggressively mediocre inventor, essentially steals a creature heretofore never seen in modern society and gives it to his kid for Christmas. Elated with the preciousness of the alien/oni/whatever they now possess, the Peltzer family gathers for Polaroids with it before Rand remembers there was a whole list of rules he was supposed to tell them first.
Gremlins would have been a very short movie if that camera flash had fried Gizmo to the bone then and there, though it might have worth it for the following scene where Rand is forced to explain what the hell just happened to his sobbing family.
Even after being given the rest of the rules, Billy breaks them almost immediately.
He doesn’t Mogwai-proof his room like a good pet owner would. He leaves a half-empty glass just sitting around right next to Gizmo, who for-all-he-knows will literally explode upon contact with water. When Gizmo gives give birth to a full litter after getting wet, Billy is so fascinated he takes his beloved new companion to school and willfully repeats the process which it’s worth noting looks super painful and traumatic.
In fairness, Stripe and the rest of Gizmo’s offspring do trick Billy into feeding them after midnight. On the other hand, Billy is easily duped by creatures roughly two days old.
All of this is to say Billy has no idea what he’s doing, and the entire town of Kingston Falls ultimately pays the price for his and Rand’s irresponsibility. (Lynn Peltzer gets a pass because she does all she can to clean up after her family’s mistakes, and by ‘clean up’ I mean explode said mistakes in a microwave.)
The internet was like a Mogwai once.
It was also cute at first glance, with just enough weirdness to make it interesting. You could invite your friends over and show it to them. But unlike the Peltzers, we weren’t given any rules. We brought it into our homes and played with it like the new toy we thought it was. We put in the bath and were alarmed as we found ourselves in a ‘Trouble With Tribbles’ situation. It all escalated so quickly and suddenly it was everywhere. It was still kind of fun – a never-ending torrent of cat photos and funny gifs – but like with Gizmo’s offspring, there was a mischievous aspect right there in front of us we didn’t fully understand or respect.
At first, the mischief seemed harmless. I’ll never forget the first time someone tricked me into watching a jump-scare video, and you might have been a little sick of Rick Astley, but it was a small price to pay to see that Freddy Vs. Jason trailer when it did eventually go up for real. In retrospect, Aunt Beatrice’s forwarded e-mails about beleaguered Nigerian princes might have been a red flag we missed. That’s probably when the Mogwai first started trying to hang the dog on the front porch.
Years from now, in the Future Wastes, we’ll still be huddled around a campfire composed of useless smartphones trying to figure out how the internet went from Mogwai to Gremlin. Because at some point it ate after midnight and now it’s not so cute. Now it’s teeth and claws and hate and it’s playing with the wiring in the traffic lights just for the lulz. People are violently colliding in the streets because they’re all getting different information from a source they previously assumed was reliable and everyone believes they have the right of way.
It’s affecting all of us in incalculable ways, every single day. Targeted harassment. Massive breaches of personal data. Malware. Extremist groups. Clickbait headlines. Russian bot networks. Kingston Falls has fallen into chaos and nobody knows what to do about any of it because most of us are just trying to survive the long, dark night. It’s unlikely the negative aspects of the internet will simply gather in one place for us to blow up because they would first endlessly debate whether Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is ‘real horror’ as though that were a thing.
And of course, this is what’s happened. Of course it is.
This is what Mr. Wing was trying to tell the Peltzers over thirty years ago.
“You do with Mogwai what your society has done with all of nature’s gifts. You do not understand. You are not ready.” From the first time we drove an animal to extinction to the splitting of the atom, we’ve shown the same level of care and caution to new discoveries Billy showed his poor pets. The internet may not be one of nature’s gifts in the same way a rainforest or the climate is, but the principle is the same. We usually have no idea what we’re doing with these things until it’s too late. Mr. Wing saw this clearer than anyone and that’s why Spielberg gave him only one good eye. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is Wing.
So, if someone destroys your credit score with your stolen identity, or an army of trolls ruins your Twitter mentions, or your kitchen appliances are hijacked in a large-scale DDOS attack, don’t bother checking the closets or under the bed. There’s not only a gremlin in your house, it’s already careening through your living room in a snow plow.
