There is a certain Department of Defense training film quality to the film The Happening (a convention cleverly deployed by the film Cloverfield but not here). It has a matter-of-fact tone which suits such training films. But what is the lesson and for whom was it produced?

I'll guess that few people ever ponder the possibilities of any form of chemical attack, let alone one which is made upon humanity by Mother Nature herself. Chemical attacks involve the twin concepts of point sources and non-point sources. A big ugly pipe pumping purple poison out of a factory and into your river is a point source, easy enough to find and to fix. A simple example of a point source. A non-point source is, well, more diffuse. No one actually knows where it is exactly, it is just 'out there' somewhere.

The non-point source was what made The Happening so effective. Even films about terrorists who use chemical weapons have a point source, get the guy with the trigger and you stop the threat. The Happening is brilliant in that there is no guy with a trigger. To the extent that an 'event' is triggered at all it appears to be a function of human population density and not the decision of some terrorist with his/her finger on the trigger of some weapon in some definite location.

The diffuse combined 'angry plants/human population density' scenario makes it both difficult to imagine and absurd to watch at the same time. We simply do not think in such terms about threats. We look for the hand holding the trigger, not some diffuse base of contamination which can spontaneously reach toxic levels at certain times in certain places with no prior warning. It's like toxic smog which you can't see and which causes psychological pathology culminating in suicide.

As an allegory it works as a way to remind us all that we as industrial society people create many non-point sources of pollution which can have cumulative negative effects, e.g. greenhouse gasses, pesticide runoff, soil erosion, etc., etc. which may not kill us so quickly but which do kill us more slowly over time. Taken together with The Ruins that makes two films about pissed off killer plants this year. Better be nice to your tomato plants or you may be wishing that all you get from them is Salmonella poisoning.