Enemy Mine, directed by Wolfgang Peterson; aliens created by Chris Walas, starring Louis Gossetts Jr. and Dennis Quaid.

I have a vivid memory from childhood—the beginning of an episode of The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone, or maybe Tales of Tomorrow. The story took place at an outpost of the DEW Line, and the code name of this particular installation was TABU. The staff had, according to the narration, concluded that this was an acronym for Total Abandonment of Better Understanding.

I do not remember the story at all. But I remember being rendered so nearly hysterical by TABU that my mother was disturbed. My adolescent sense of humor was devastated; this was the funniest thing I had ever heard. More devastating still, TABU seemed then, and still does today, a definitive statement on the issue of peaceful coexistence among nations. For Better Understanding has always been an ideal that human beings served more in word than in deed.

But Better understanding is the whole message of Enemy Mine. A human soldier (Dennis Quaid) and a soldier of an alien species with whom Earth is at war (a green lizard, no less, but interestingly portrayed by Louls Gossett, Jr.) are marooned on a harsh planet. They must cooperate to survive, so they do. They even become friends. In fact, they become such good friends that when Gossett dies after bearing a child, Quaid faces substantial risks to return the alien child to its home planet. (The alien gets pregnant, you see, because its species is asexual and pregnancy just happens "when the time is right.") The universal brotherhood of all rational creatures is affirmed, and Better Understanding shines like a beacon lighting the way to a more peaceful universe.

I haven't read the piece by Barry Longyear on which this movie is based: so I can't say whether or not it has more to say on this topic. It certainly couldn't have any less. Enemy Mine is a failure, but not because of its tawdry special effects, its silly dialog, or its improbable alien. (Gossett's alien is interesting but it is not, as the script requires, asexual. It displayed until it becomes pregnant, all the characteristics one would expect the "male" of a bisexual predator species to have; after it becomes pregnant, it seems vaguely homosexual.) It is a failure because it lacks any coherent conception of just what the relationship is between better understanding and peaceful coexistence. It is surely true that the more nations or cultures or, we may speculate, species understand each other, the less likely they are to war on each other. But this is a truth that is extremely misleading, and not only because it has exceptions.

When I was in elementary school in the 50s, we had regular tornado and air-raid drills. Teachers devoted a great deal of time and energy instructing us about the signals for each and the appropriate action on our part. When the tornado warning sounded we were to proceed calmly to the nearest interior hallways sit down against the wall, and put our heads between our knees. When the air-raid warning sounded we were to do exactly the same thing. I once asked a teacher why we responded in exactly the same way to tornados and atomic bombs. I don't recall that her answer was very satisfying, and eventually we quit having air-raid drills anyway.

We quit in part because the bomb forced most of us to change our view of war. It is no longer a "natural" disaster that is bound to come along every so often and that we must prepare for. It is, in the minds of most Americans, a catastrophe that cannot be prepared for; nuclear war is the end of everything. And this makes the plea for Better Understanding particularly compelling.

Surely, the argument goes, if we could achieve a better understanding of our enemy, and our enemy of us we would both see that we have no cause for war, and certainly none for the final conflagration of nuclear war.

Hence, the plea for negotiated arms reduction, the continual reminders that the Russian people don't want war any more than we do, and the portrayal of US-Soviet conflicts as mere political gamesmanship between players of equal rationality and equal moral understandfng. Too often, war is portrayed as a problem of communication, just a big misunderstanding.

But I am convinced that all this emphasis on Better Understanding just confounds matters. I do not think that ignorance is usually, or even often the cause of war. (Or, at least, ignorance of the enemy or of the costs of war; ignorance of the amorality of politicians may well be a cause of war.) Rather, it is more likely that war is the cause of ignorance. The exigencies of war both hot and cold—the very unsettling measures we must adopt to protect ourselves from annhilation—create an environment that is thoroughly unconducive to any understanding at all. After a couple of air-raid drills at the tender age of seven or eight, we understood the Russians quite well enough, thank you.

In the climate of fear, anxiety, and the compelling urge to do something that is produced by the threat of nuclear war, pleas for better understanding are certain to appear as the most impractical kind of idealism. And they are certain to be derided as such by "realists," who usually argue that the only way to avoid war is to prepare for (and, perhaps, initiate) more war. When the debate over how best to achieve peace is polarized along this axis, pleas for better understanding just distract genuinely peace-loving people from more productive approaches to the creation of peace.

Approaches like international (or interstellar) capitalist "exploitation." We could even make a movie about it. Creditor Mine: Harry Mudd and his stable of interstellar whores are marooned on a planet with 4000 horny green lizards from the army of Earth's enemy. The lizards are short of cash and Harry, being an enterprising pimp, lets them charge everything to their credit cards. This bit of free trade causes such complications in the international banking structure that banks on both worlds are forced to call in respective governments' war loans lest the continuation of the war cause a drop in profits due to uncollected accounts. Peace on the installment plan, as it were.

SF, as well as other genres, contains numerous stories of individuals from warring cultures who nontheless come to understand and even love one another. Such stories can teach us much about our own motivations or about how to live decently in an indecent world. But they cannot, I think, tell us much about how to create peace; for what individuals can sometimes do, albeit with great difficulty, whole nations or cultures or species can seldom do at all.

Enemy Mine misses this point entirely, and turns out to be nothing by a hackneyed plea for Better Understanding.

John Ahrens is the Assistant Director of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University.