How to Save the World
by Douglas Messerli
Edmund H. North (screenplay), based on a story by Harry Bates, Robert Wise
(director) The Day the Earth Stood Still / 1951
Barré Lyndon (screenplay), based on the novel by H. G. Wells, Byron Haskin (director) War of the Worlds / 1953
Daniel Mainwaring and Richard Collins (screenplay), based on a story by Jack Finney, Don Siegel (director) Invasion of the Body Snatchers / 1956
Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, and Ronald Kinnoch (as George Barclay) (screenplay), based on a novel by John Wyndham, Wolf Rilla (director), Village of the Damned / 1960
Irwin Allen and Charles Bennett (screenplay), based on a story by Irwin Allen, Irwin Allen (director) Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea / 1961
Walter Bernstein (screenplay), based on a novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Sidney Lument (director) Fail-Safe / 1964
Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George (screenplay), Stanley Kubrick (director), Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb / 1964
Nelson Gidding (screenplay), based on a novel by Michael Crichton, Robert Wise (director) The
Andromeda Strain / 1971
Steve De Jarnatt (screenplay and director) Miracle Mile / 1988
Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich (screenplay), Roland Emmerich (director) Independence Day / 1996
Anyone who is at all
knowledgeable about film history knows that there are numerous movies devoted to
the subject of the world's destruction. And recent examples such as
Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact, The Core and the remake
of War of the Worlds have been enormously successful with younger
audiences.
I have chosen to focus, however, on a few films, primarily from the 1950s
through the early 1980s in an attempt to discern the varying views of how our
earth might be destroyed and what are possible solutions in those scenarios. I
am sure some of this has been discussed before—perhaps in greater depth—but my
current focus on these films is to explore if there are any coherent answers for
our own times.
Given my smaller selection of choices, moreover, there is a kind of strange
chronology concerning the possibilities of salvation available to mankind. In
the 1951 classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still, for example, there is
actually no immediate fear that the planet we live on will be destroyed. Klaatu
(in the form of British actor Michael Rennie), along with fearsome doomsday
machine Gort, descend to earth simply to warn us that if we continue on our ways
we are doomed to destruction. The masses are always dangerous in these films of
possible annihilation, and the Americans of The Day the Earth Stood
Still are no exception, individuals, along with soldiers and police
gathering in violent groups around the space craft, while authorities try to
capture and kill the peaceful messenger. Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) and her
son are among the few examples of human kindness in this picture, but even her
boyfriend, Tom Stevens, is determined to turn in the alien and perhaps get rich
in the process.
Klaatu quickly realizes that he cannot trust the "people," and turns
instead to the help of world scientists—who today, in the frictional world of
various oppositions to scientific experimentation (activists against the use of
animals in experiments and Christian fundamentalists who outright oppose and
disbelieve in the science itself) might more likely be represented as the least
worthy of trust—who find it difficult even to come together in Washington to
hear out Klaatu's warnings. But Prof. Jacob Barnhardt (played by Sam Jaffe as a
kind of Einsteinian mathematical genius) at least reassures us that, if only the
authorities will listen before shooting, they may be a hope for our
survival.
By 1953, however, the filming of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds
offers no such easy out. Here the aliens attack and win, implanting their
colonies filled with their oddly tentacled bodies across the globe. While
science again tries to win the war, frenzied mobs erupt in the streets,
destroying everything in their path, including the vital findings of the
scientists at work on the alien's destruction. While the masses huddle against
the Hollywood Hills, the world's destruction appears imminent, without a hope in
sight.
My companion Howard, witnessing this movie as a child, recounts his utter
horror at such a breakdown in global authority, and as he walked home from the
showing, his imagination conjured up a spacecraft in the skies. He was unable to
sleep for nights. In the film, however, we are saved as suddenly the alien ships
begin, one by one, to fall from the skies. If scientists cannot save us, science
itself as represented by our natural world does; oxygen is fatal to these
celestial intruders.
Once again in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, we witness an
outside force, this time in the form of an alien bacteria that grows into giant
pods ready to take over and imitate the very form of man himself, successfully
overcoming a population, if only the people of a small region of California.
I have already written on some of this film's implications in My Year
2004, so I will not repeat the underlying hysterias of the time that
energize Siegel's fascinating work. What is important for my purposes is that
only a triumvirate of medical doctors, the military, and police working together
can save the day, one presumes, by destroying the seemingly normal but inwardly
empty people of Santa Mira and the surrounding villages.
Once again the masses have to be staid before order can be restored, but in
this 1956 fantasy, the destructive military is turned against its own citizens,
and there is the uneasy feeling that somehow the salvation of the world may be
botched. Certainly that was conveyed in Phillip Kaufman's 1978 remake. If in the
original Dr. Matthew Bennell stays awake long enough to make a run for it,
convincing the outside world of the dangers ahead, in Donald Sutherland's
portrayal, years later, he himself screams out as an alien against a surviving
human friend. In Kaufman's version it is apparent that the world may be taken
over after all.
Similar, in some respects, to Invasion of the Body Snatchers are
the strange births of blond-haired, blue-eyed children in the village of
Midwich, England in the 1960 film, Village of the Damned. It is not
apparent whether these gifted monsters intend to take over the world or not, but
it is clear that in their supernatural powers they have made it nearly
impossible to be a normal citizen of Midwich, and in their stolid attempts at
education these children clearly have grander plans. Like the scientists and
doctors of the previous movies, Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders) at first
attempts to investigate these incidents within a rational context, but it
quickly becomes apparent, given the young terrorists' ability to read minds,
that the only way to destroy them is to give up rationality and blow them (and
himself) up.
The masses at are it again in Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the
Sea (1961), where in the person of Admiral Harriman Nelson we have both a
military man and a scientist at the helm in his attempt to save the world from
the Van Allen radiation belt, which has caught fire and is quickly scorching and
torching the planet. Nelson (Walter Pidgeon) and his able assistant (the oddly
cast Peter Lorre) are convinced that the only way to save the planet is to blow
up the belt near Mauritius island on an specific day and time. Despite the
continued destruction of earth, numerous other scientists, joined by the masses,
disagree and plan to scuttle the attempts of Nelson's nuclear submarine.
Eventually, he is almost brought down by the machinations of his own medical
doctor, Susan Hiller (Joan Fontaine) with her psychological aspersions, directed
to Captain Lee Crane (Robert Sterling), against the Admiral. The imperiled world
is saved, once again, by a kind of violence, an explosion that jettisons the
radiation belt into outer space. How that might effect our continued survival is
never revealed.
By 1964 the military increasingly becomes the enemy itself. That year's
Fail Safe and the darkly comic Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb both feature a military world out of control and
ready to release nuclear weaponry upon the enemy, resulting obviously in the
total world destruction of which The Day the Earth Stood Still's Klaatu
had warned. The plot to bomb Russia by military higher-ups in Fail Safe
is foiled by a saner head, in the form of the President (Henry Fonda), who,
however, must allow millions of New Yorkers (including his own wife) to be
killed in retaliation for the destruction of Moscow. The earth is saved in
Fail Safe, but at what expense?
Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove took that world destruction to its
obvious conclusion. In this mad world of both military and political leadership,
there is no "fail-safe," and the planet, quite obviously, is up for a totally
dark comic annihilation. I have never been a fan of Kubrick's work, perhaps
because it allows for no possible solution.
The 1971 motion picture The Andromeda Strain continues to explore
the madness of the military, but also points its fingers at the scientific
world. Discovering a small desert town completely destroyed (except for two
seeming unconnected individuals, a crying baby and an alcoholic addicted to
antifreeze), even the plane flying over the site is downed, its pilots' blood
turned to dust. Obviously, a massive bio-chemical accident has occurred. The
always malicious military suggests bombing the site to smithereens, but
scientists warn that will only spread it across the area. Meanwhile, the
dangerous chemicals may be caught up in the winds, killing millions, if an
antidote cannot quickly be discovered. Noted scientists, already slated for this
job, are gathered in a forbidding, chemically impenetrable bunker to seek an
answer. For 96 critical hours in man's history (so claims the film's tagline)
these specialists struggle to analyze the dangerous bio-chemical. They nearly
fail, but as in War of the Worlds they ultimately discover that the natural
world may provide the salvation, that heavy doses of oxygen will ultimately
destroy the new virus. In their explorations, however, they also reveal the
cozy—and dangerous—interplay of politics and science of which most of these
films have previously hinted.
Finally, in Steve De Jarnatt's 1988 offbeat Miracle Mile, filmed
almost entirely in my own neighborhood and including images of my office and
home, mass hysteria is all we have left. Neither the military nor scientists
appear on the horizon. We never, in fact, discover the reason for the impending
nuclear bombing of Los Angeles; indeed, it is only by a fluke—a wrong number to
public phone picked up by an unsuspecting visitor—that forecasts what will
surely result in the end of the world. Escape to an isolated spot (as in the
1959 film On the Beach) is only a temporary salvation. And the "hero"
falls, just before the bombs, into the La Brea Tarpits to be embalmed in water
and tar like the mammoths of ancient days.
Most of the contemporary "end of the world" films are not as bleak. The
1996 film Independence Day, for example, returns to a triumvirate of
the President, military, and scientists to save the day. But there is a strong
feeling, particularly in more dystopian works such as the Mad Max
movies (1979 and 1981), the Japanese animated film Akira (1988) and
Ridley Scott's brilliant 1982 film Blade Runner that government, the
military, and science will only make matters worse.
If in 1951, we might be have been able to hope our scientists, if only left
alone, could have saved us, over the next few decades it became clearer that we
the people, the military, the political forces we elect, as well as the
scientific world would be in collusion to fail in the fight against any real
global threat to our existence—a skepticism, I suggest, that is a horrific
specter of what might happen in any natural or terrorist threat we may soon
face.
Yet someone must take leadership and, although—along with most of the films
I have discussed and, I might add, our founding fathers—I am somewhat doubtful
that answers to any global threat will come from the "common folk." The events
of 9/11 demonstrated, however, that it was the everyday fast-responding
firefighters and fellow workers who saved the most lives. Scientists would only
show up at the World Trade Towers in retrospect. The President remained
protected in a Florida classroom and Air Force One. Even New York mayor Rudy
Giuliani could do little but declare his good intentions after the fact. And
that event, we must remember, threatened only a few New York City blocks, not an
entire planet.
And it was "common folk," after all, who prevented United Airlines Flight
93 from crashing into the USA Capitol or White House.
Accordingly, I might now argue that the struggle to save the world
depends upon everyone of us—not in the way the New Jersey Transit suggests,
urging us to "Report any suspicious acts"—but by
becoming involved in the world around us and acknowledging our lives as being
linked to global events.
Los Angeles, December 12, 2001
Los Angeles, December 12, 2001
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