The Day the Earth Stood Still
In terms of classic science fiction, William Cameron Menzies’ Things to Come and Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still stand firm as examples of the ways in which humanity used science fiction in film to explore the anxieties that came with things like war, apocalyptic destruction, and the possibility of death through our own command of technology. In Things to Come, a utopian vision of the future is created out of the ashes of war; in Day, aliens from another planet come to warn us of the dangers of war and divisions by national boundaries. Both of these works express fundamental tensions experienced by Americans in the mid-20th century, from the horrors of World War I and the Great Depression to the fears of industrialization and the Cold War. As Susan Sontag wrote in her essay “The Imagination of Disaster,” science fiction films like these are often identifies as allegories of modern life’s depersonalized nature and the specter of nuclear war. Both Things to Come and The Day the Earth Stood Still capture that imagination of disaster by both showing us the ways in which we envisioned our own apocalypse, and the ways we might overcome it.
Sontag and the Imagination of Disaster
Susan Sontag, in “The Imagination of Disaster,” described science fiction as a genre that explores the role of fantasy to “distract us from terrors, real or anticipated,” as well as to “normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it” (Sontag 42). Science fiction allows people to grapple with the unthinkable, offering exaggerated versions of real-life anxieties that are somehow amplified by the presence of spaceships, monsters and aliens or some combination of those. Sontag’s structure of the typical science fiction film divides them into five phases: the arrival of an alien thing, the failed attempt by societal organizations (e.g. the police) to control the alien, meetings between military and scientific leaders to understand the thing, a period of even greater destruction, and the development of a final strategy that capitalizes on a recently-discovered weakness in the alien threat (Sontag 42-43). While the phases are often structured or expressed in different ways, many science fiction films (particularly of the Golden Age of sci-fi to which Sontag refers) follow this mold.
The relationship between science fiction films and disaster, as Sontag asserts, is highly important, and relates closely to the need for societies that create these stories to exorcise their own anxieties about the way their world may end. In many ways, the appeal of science fiction films is in an “intersection between a naively and largely debased commercial art product and the most profound dilemmas of the contemporary situation,” as these films sneak in prescient and solemn messages about the state of the world in the guise of light entertainment for children – which is how science fiction is often marketed (Sontag 48).
Unlike horror films, however, science fiction films express these disasters as a means to give a moral message that might allow audiences to prevent such a catastrophe from happening in the first place. Usually, this comes through a science-based perspective, with scientist characters becoming the ultimate moral arbiters of their respective films and technological innovators who end up solving the crisis at the heart of the story (Sontag 46). In science fiction, “science – technology – is conceived of as the great unifier,” allowing for intellectual solutions to moral and political problems these films might be exploring (Sontag 47). In this respect, Sontag argues that science fiction explores the nature of how we might – and should – react to the possibility of disaster.
Things to Come
William Cameron Menzies’ 1936 science fiction film Things to Come is an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ book of the same name, depicting a speculative history of mankind through the 20th century and beyond. In the film, total war rages through the world in the 1940s, devastating civilization as we know it and pushing humanity into a new Dark Age. Plagues and tribalism take over the world throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with gangs of warlords ruling the land. Eventually, however, a futuristic plane arrives at one of these tribes to announce that a utopian civilization called “Wings Over the World” has been created by the remaining mechanics and engineers who lived after the war. Wings Over the World eventually folds these tribes into their own civilization, defeat the warlike bosses who kept them fighting, and creates a world of technological progress into the 2030s that eventually launches spaceships deep into space.
Viewing Things to Come through the imagination of disaster, it is clear that Menzies and Wells chose to depict an apocalyptic vision of what may happen if technology and progress are ignored in favor of our baser animal natures. At the time of the film’s release, World War I was still very much on people’s minds, a devastating global conflict that had seen the development of fantastic killing technologies such as the combat airplane (which makes substantial appearances in this film through the character of John Cabal). As a result, Things to Come feels like an expression of mankind’s fear as to how soon it would be before it happened again, and the devastating consequences that would result.
War and conflict are associated with impeding progress in Things to Come, as conflict invariably stunts technological growth and turns mankind into roving bands of bandits – a prescient fear in the post-World War I world in which mankind had found new ways of killing more efficiently and quickly, but lacked the wisdom to use them wisely. It is only through the lionization of scientists and their ability to create amazing vehicles and technologies if left to their own devices (as they are with the Wings Over the World society) that mankind is saved. Even in the final act of the film, in which Everytown’s artist community (including the sculptor Theotocopulos) seeks to destroy Everytown’s efforts to put a man on the Moon, the enemy of mankind is seen as those who impede technological advancement. To that end, the ‘disaster’ in Things to Come is the threat, usually through armed conflict, that mankind will not be allowed to fulfill its potential by being free to develop technologies that might expand its reach.
One of the ways in which Things to Come expresses its utopian vision of the future is through its portrait of its cities. The metropolis of “Everytown” offers a fable-like illustration of the way H.G. Wells (and director Menzies) sees cities and urban life expanding and changing with the advent of technology. In the beginning of the film, we see a normal early 20th-century city on Christmas, with bustling streets, brick-and-mortar buildings, and relatively modest storefronts. After the global war, however, people eventually move to underground cities, and by 2036 a new Everytown has risen. This city is a sleek vision of Wells’ future, with “multistoried buildings, moving sidewalks, and a domed, glass shell protecting the climate, marking off city from exterior countryside, and diffusing light into an even glow” (Staiger 31). The expansion and development of Everytown offers the kind of technological advancement Menzies and Wells warn against if our baser instincts toward conflict are allowed to flourish.
One of the things that Sontag ignored in “The Imagination of Disaster” is just what would happen after the alien invasion or disaster that devastates the world in most science fiction films (Levine and Taylor, 2013). Things to Come does just that by destroying the world in the opening minutes of the film, then showing how mankind rebuilds. Just as Sontag argues that science fiction imagines not only our disaster, but our means of overcoming it, the 2036 Everytown is our way of preserving civilization even if our short-sighted forebears succumbed to the aforementioned disaster of total war. Civilization is acutely connected to technological progress, as the new Everytown is unequivocally better than the barbarism of the post-war 20th century Wells and Menzies illustrate in the middle act of the film. In this respect, Things to Come presents an optimistic vision of the future in which, even if the world ends up destroying itself, mankind will work things out and come back even faster in terms of its technological development. Through this technology, mankind can then find its destiny among the stars.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
While Things to Come offers a tale in which mankind manages to become mighty and prosperous even after a terrible war, Robert Wise’s 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still presents an apocalyptic scenario in which mankind must be prevented from reaching that point of total destruction. Charting the reaction of the US Army to a flying saucer containing a supernaturally powerful robot named Gort and an interplanetary ambassador named Klaato (Michael Rennie), The Day the Earth Stood Still acts chiefly as a cautionary tale against the perpetuation of armed conflict. The film follows Klaatu as he walks among the people of Earth to understand them and their “unreasoning suspicions and attitudes,” then offers both an invitation and a warning to the leaders of Earth after the military embarks on a manhunt for him. According to Klaatu, their development of rockets and atomic power has made them noticed by other, more advanced life forms, who wish to invite Earth into a peaceful alliance with them. However, if they choose to maintain their violent selves after maintaining this alliance, Klaatu warns that the Earth “will be reduced to a burned out cinder,” and leave the planet to await mankind’s answer.
Though Things to Come allows mankind to explore its imagination of disaster by following through with the war in question, Day follows more of the formula Sontag mentions for the science fiction film, in which scientists are meant to stop the world from ending in the face of an insurmountable alien force. In this context, Gort and his incredible powers represent the immediate threat the human characters feel they must destroy – his eye becomes both a judgmental gaze upon the flaws of humanity and the interested eye of a savior hoping to herald our salvation (Csisery-Ronay 301). In the imagination of disaster, Gort’s eye is what heralds it – he only opens the sheath covering his singular, glowing eye to destroy whatever he looks upon, as he can see even without it (Csisery-Ronay 305). However, the film’s true message is to ask humanity to cease its propensity for violence if they wish to elevate themselves to the level of Klaatu’s advanced alien society. Much like in Things to Come, armed conflict gets in the way of mankind’s progress, and it is Gort that serves as a stark reminder of that. For audiences, Gort becomes synonymous with the kind of destruction they feared they would face in the Cold War, a blind arbiter of justice for mankind’s hubris with armed conflict and tools of war.
The Cold War anxiety of The Day the Earth Stood Still permits the film to express the audience’s imagination of disaster – the fear that a godlike force of destruction will come down and punish us without warning, with no ability to stop it. The threat of mutually assured destruction in the form of the atomic bomb was at the forefront of most Americans’ minds during this period of time. Day, in turn, capitalized on this to show audiences that salvation could come in the form of benevolent leaders who could stop the conflict and prevent mankind’s annihilation. While this comes in the form of a veiled threat from Klaatu, it is this kind of prescriptive moralizing that gives the audience of the film its catharsis in the face of disaster – an overwhelmingly powerful force essentially coercing mankind into laying down arms may well have been cathartic for 1950s audiences seeking a respite from the constant fears of the Cold War. In this way, the imagination of disaster is uniquely represented in The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Conclusion
Both Things to Come and The Day the Earth Stood Still act as perfect examples of Sontag’s notion of the “imagination of disaster,” offering apocalyptic scenarios in which mankind is changed forever by the specter of nuclear war or alien invasion. However, in the midst of these disasters, each film offers a different glimmer of hope for mankind’s salvation. Things to Come shows it in the form of technological progress and a utopian society that rises up to conquer the stars and beyond, while The Day the Earth Stood Still offers the chance for Earth to abandon its cycle of violence and join other advanced civilizations across the galaxy. Each film provides a highly-topical outlook on the state of the world at the time, expressing similar fears of the post-industrial military age and the Cold War, respectively, and their capacity to turn international conflict into a human apocalypse. These treatments of the ways in which mankind might destroy itself, and the ways in which it might rise from the ashes or choose a more peaceful path, solidify science fiction’s role as a way for mankind to express the imagination of disaster, and intellectualize our way out of it.
Works Cited
Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. "The Eye of Gort." Science Fiction Studies 41.2 (2014): 301-313.
Eshaghi, Ehsaneh. "HG Wells's Science Fiction: The Cyborg Visual Dromological
Discourse." International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 4.1 (2015): 159-168.
Levine, Michael, and William Taylor. "The Upside of Down: Disaster and the Imagination 50
Years On." M/C Journal 16.1 (2013).
Menzies, William Cameron (dir.). Things to Come. Perf. Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson,
Cedric Hardwicke. United Artists, 1936. Film.
Sontag, Susan. "The imagination of disaster." Commentary 40.4 (1965): 42.
Staiger, Janet. "Future noir: contemporary representations of visionary cities." East-West Film
Wise, Robert (dir.). The Day the Earth Stood Still. Perf. Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh
Marlowe. 20th Century Fox, 1951. Film.
