Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema 9780813552415, 0813552419

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page ix)
CHAPTER ONE The Great Escape (page 3)
CHAPTER TWO Eternal Summer (page 43)
CHAPTER THREE Paradise Now (page 86)
CHAPTER FOUR The Uses of Heaven (page 128)
CHAPTER FIVE The Promise of the Future (page 158)
Works Cited (page 195)
Index (page 201)

Citation preview

VISIONS OF PARADISE

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I. .I.

9. Michel Piccoli as Milou (seated, in white hat) presides over an idyllic spring picnic In the

French countryside in Louis Malle’s May Fools (1990). Phot h t f The J Ohlinger Archives.

. .. >. .. ..P]. .I

Claude Carriére dir ct Lis | B n : | tl ll b t M

..‘

ools Gemonstrates that even when en seems limitless, its true duration can De measured in the span of one persons tie 1 this Case that O 1lous mother. S ong as Ma ame Vileuzac §& increasing| tenuous -

I

O On iife remaine ife at the amil estate was measured deliberate, seeming etermmal. rier aeat as thrown Mi ous entire orld into a State of flux.

alle stages the nlm ina dreamy torpor; thou revolution 1S brewd

a4 In raf4ris, the characters in ay OolSs are Tar More interested in their or a nation teetering on the Drink OF anarcny.

VISIONS OF PARADISE

The film’s original title, Milow in May (Milou en Mai), is perhaps more indicative of the film’s real ambitions than the American release title.

Although the student/worker revolt of 1968 keeps threatening to intrude, in the end Malle’s film is about Milou, not France, and about his personal crises, not those of the government. Indeed, what little information that comes through to the house is wildly speculative, and rumors soon become “facts” as the various members of the household take measure of their lives.

The same sort of redolent golden splendor also suffuses Jaromil Jire3’s decidedly dreamlike Czechoslovakian film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Valerie a tiden divi, 1970). Once again the action takes place

in the countryside, as Valerie visits her relatives at their turn-of-thecentury estate, only to find that they are vampires, engaging in a sort of ecstatic summer orgy into which Valerie will be initiated. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a deeply eccentric text, infusing a coming-of-age

story with Edenic concepts of purity and lust, inclusion and banishment, into a sensuous tapestry in which nothing is as itseems. Written by JireS, Ester Krumbachova, and Vitezslav Nezval, the film's brevity (a mere seventy-seven minutes) and its seductive mise-en-scéne, sumptuously photographed by Jan Curik, make the film seem almost an outlaw project, or as Tanya Krzywinska argues, an act of social criticism designed to “enforce atheism Iby embracing] an anti-Catholic stance, particularly in relation to sexual morality.” Yet the film’s embrace of

sexual excess, and the almost fetishistic depiction of bodily fluids, color, light, flesh tones, and gauzy fabrics, bespeaks an atmosphere of absolute sexual license, rather than creating a fantasy world of repression. In many ways, Valerie is very much like Alice in Miller's Alice in Wonderland, reacting to the bizarre circumstances that unfold before her. The film begins with an image of Adam and Eve, as Krzywinska notes, and Valerie 1s often seen eating apples in close-up, her overripe lips lingering over the succulent fruit with undisguised satisfaction. Thus Valerie provides us with an image of feminine desire before and after the fall of Eden but without the attached blame that Eve shoul-

80

ETERNAL SUMMER

ders in Western Christian mythology. Instead, Valerie is seen by the film as a giver of life, a force of purity too intense to be corrupted, while her grandmother (Helena Anyzova) becomes a vessel of corruption. As Krzywinska notes, this is a film that is deeply tied to nature at its most gloriously ripe season, summer, and Valerie herself partakes of this lushness with direct and unabashed delight. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders presents a world in which all is al-

legory, one’s relatives may be vampires, and all authority figures are suspect; in the opening minutes of the film, a “priest” enters Valerie's dazzlingly white bedroom and almost immediately tries to rape her. Valerie extricates herself from the priest's attack but remains ustly suspicious of authority for the rest of the film. What protects Valerie, above all other things, is her connection to nature, which preserves her position within the film as a force of hope within a crumbling family structure. In many ways Valerie and Her Week of Wonders can be read as a more

sexually explicit vision of the coming-of-age narrative, centering on the freedom of youth, than its numerous American and British counterparts. Valerie emerges triumphant at the end of the film, despite all adult attempts to corrupt her, and the purity and innocence of her metaphoric quest 1s valorized by the film’s ambiguous conclusion, in which all of the film’s events are called into question; it may all have been a dream.

Lindsay Anderson's equally surreal If... (1968) presents a young Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis, the leader of a surrealistic rebellion at a British public school. As Mick enlists his various classmates in his plot, the world around him becomes increasing fragmented, to the point that it becomes impossible to separate fantasy from reality. If... 1s punctuated by sequences that do nothing to advance the narrative, as 1s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, but that do a great deal to

enhance the mood of the piece as a contemplation on the precariousness of youth and the unreliability of one’s perceptions in an often deceptive world.

8|

VISIONS OF PARADISE

At one point in If..., while cleaning up the school’s basement as an enforced punishment, Mick and his compatriots come across an ancient chest filled with various human biological specimens neatly preserved in jars of formaldehyde. In Mick’s face we can see a sense of wonder as he confronts these embalmed fragments of life that remind him of his own inevitable mortality. In another sequence Mick and his unnamed lover (Christine Noonan) engage Ina playtul, animalesque flirtation in a roadside caté, followed by a victorious romp on Mick's motorbike in the fields outside. In the already highly homoerotic atmosphere of the school, two young men who are sexually attracted to each other are found sleeping peacefully beside each other in the same bed, lost in a reverie of homosocial bonding. At the film’s end, Mick and his coconspirators climb to the top of the school and ritualistically machinegun the school’s alumni during Founder's Day, and the film ends with a close-up of Mick’s anguished face, blasting rounds of gunfire at the

school’s “old boys,” a vision of what Mick himself might one day become.

Director Anderson filmed If... on location at an actual British public school (although, for obvious reasons, he had a great deal of trouble

identifying an institution that would allow the production of such a script on its ground) and used color and black-and-white stock interspersed throughout the film at random intervals to further distance

the viewer from the spectacle that s/he is witness to. Further, this displacement of a consistent visual medium (it’s not in color, nor is it in monochrome; it's a mixture of both media, switching back and forth for no apparent reason) enforces the artificial, dreamlike quality of the piece, as if we are witnessing a fiction film that is also partly a documentary, as in Straub’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach. Then, too,

Anderson uses direct sound throughout the film to further enhance the “realistic” nature of the project's surreal scenario, creating an unusual mix of cinematic reportage and apocalyptic fantasy. Although the film owes an obvious debt to Jean Vigo's anarchist masterpiece Zero for Conduct (Zéro de conduite, 1933), which uses a French boarding school as

the site of a similar rebellion, If... 1s an entirely original work, and ar82

ETERNAL SUMMER

guably Anderson's finest film, in its explication of the mechanics of youthful revolt.

Summer has always been synonymous with freedom and a relaxation of normative social standards. For many it is the time for vacations; for those in academe, the summer months represent an Edenic hiatus during which the normal exigencies of classwork can be momentarily set aside. Much of If... takes place in the summer; the trees that surround the boarding school bloom with ferocious assurance, much as in Joseph Losey’s Accident (1967), which documents the quietly decadent world of Oxford in the 1960s during the height of summer. Summer 1s, in itself, an excessive season, in which all that has been dormant for the winter springs forth in a riot of color and sensation, a cornucopia of sights and smells. Summer is a time to make love in the fields, a time to take long walks at night on the village green, a time to ride your motorbike through the tall grass, a time in which all 1s renewed and

made young again. , | | | In such films as Delmer Daves’s teen romance film A Summer Place

(1959), Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue fight back against the hypoc_ risy of their parents during a stay at a summer house on an island off the coast of Maine. In Sidney]. Furie’s The Young Ones (a k a It’s Wonderful to Be Young, 1961), British pop star Cliff Richard (as Nicky) and his

backing group, the Shadows (as themselves), work together to prevent

the destruction of their clubhouse by ruthless impresario Hamilton Black (Robert Morley), who wants the site for a new office building. Unbeknownst to all except Nicky, Hamilton Black is Nicky’s father, and so the film becomes a clash between generations with a predictably Edenic ending in which Nicky and his father are reconciled. Clive Donner’s Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967) is yet an-

other tale of youthful promiscuity centering on Jamie McGregor's (Barry Evans) sexual exploits as a young rake about town, set to an 83

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10. Pia Degermark in the title role of Bo Widerberg’s Elvira Madigan (1967). Photograph courtesy of The Jerry Ohl nger Archives.

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THE USES OF HEAVEN

section of humanity, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s famous wartime parable Lifeboat (1944). Between Two Worlds offers Sydney Greenstreet as the Rev-

erend Tim Thompson, the mysterious Examiner, and Edmund Gwenn as Scrubby, the ship's steward, who tries to keep the passengers ignorant of the true purpose of their journey. None of the passengers on the fog-bound ship can remember how they got there; they only know that they are drifting toward some unknown destination. One by one, the truth sinks in; this is really a voy-

age across the river Styx, and Stubby is Charon, the boatman who will guide them to the afterlife. When the true nature of their journey becomes apparent, some of the passengers panic and try to bargain their way out, most notably the millionaire industrialist Lingley (George Coulouris). The Examiner, however, is unmoved by his threats, bribes, and blandishments. For the lovers, ‘Tom and Ann, how-

ever, there 1s a happier fate. Convinced of the stupidity of their attempted suicide, they are returned to their gas-filled London flat as a conveniently timed shell fragment explodes through a window, allowing the gas to escape. The lovers have received a second chance; the film implies that we are each responsible for our own destiny and must soldier on in the face of adversity, as the responsibility of the living. Reginald LeBorg’s The Flight That Disappeared (1961) offers a simi-

lar moral fable for the Cold War era. On a transcontinental flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., a nuclear scientist, an expert on rocketry, and a mathematical genius are suddenly transported

from their normal flight path into a stratospheric climb ten miles above the earth. When the plane finally comes to rest in a nest of clouds, the three scientists leave the plane and its other passengers (who have seemingly lapsed into a coma), to be judged by an otherworldly tribunal for their involvement in creating a new and terrible atomic weapon, the Beta Bomb. The two chief designers of the device, Dr. Carl Morris (Dayton Lummis) and Tom Endicott (Craig Hill), are put on trial in a zone that is “beyond space or time” and shown the po-

tential results of their work, in a world ravaged by famine, destruction, and war. 155

VISIONS OF PARADISE

As the tribunal’s chief examiner (Gregory Morton) concludes his indictment, the three men agree that the Beta Bomb potentially promises to destroy mankind. Their ethereal advocate (Addison Richards). speaking for all the “future beings of the world,” argues that the scientists should be released on condition that the results of the work never reach fruition. Returning to the plane, the men are transported back to Earth as the other passengers regain consciousness. Saying nothing to the others of their experience with the tribunal, the scientists destroy the plans for the Beta Bomb after landing in Washington and agree to lie to the president and his advisors about the outcome of their research. As far as the world will ever know, the project has ended in failure, which paradoxically is a victory for the future of civilization. A deeply personal work by LeBorg, who had earlier made the proto-feminist Destiny (1944) from footage excised from co23. Nuclear scientists face a heavenly tribunal in Reginald LeBorg’s The Flight That Disappeared (1961). Photograph courtesy of The Jerry Ohlinger Archives.

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THE PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

era increasingly dominated by television; perhaps God knows that television will emerge as one of the greatest threats to Hollywood's global hegemony.

In 1939, when attairs in Europe were arguably at their bleakest in the twentieth century, with Hitler on the march in Poland and Czechoslovakia and London bracing for the Blitz, H. G. Wells wrote an essay for a short book entitled Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot

Water. Never reprinted, the volume contains a key essay for any understanding of Wells as a scenarist and social visionary, “The Honour and Dignity of the Free Mind,” which was to have been delivered at the PE.N. Congress in Stockholm, Sweden, on September 4-7, 1939. The “war crisis,” however, forced the cancellation of the congress, so Wells, already in Stockholm, presented the completed essay to “one or two writers who had already gathered there” (Wells 122), hardly the ideal audience for the widest possible dissemination of his work. In the aftermath of the disrupted gathering, Wells coupled his essay with a series of other topical writings and brought it out as a slim paperback volume, offering us the only record of the work that might have been undertaken at the canceled Stockholm conference: the creation of a united defense of artists against the Axis powers. As Wells wrote, with considerable passion,

Are the creative and intellectual workers, the universities, the teachers, the hunters of knowledge and wisdom to be at the beck and call of obscure government officials obeying the behests and even anticipating the wishes of some gangster adventurer, some financial trickster or some vote-wangling politician; or are they the masters whom it behooves all governments and social organisations to heed and serve? . . . Can there be any doubt among us here of the answer? Is there any question that the imaginative 167

VISIONS OF PARADISE

and creative brain is the supreme value in human life, and that its

freedom and dignity are the primary concern of every civilised man? Is there any question that these belligerent sovereign states which rule us everywhere, their bosses and their officials and their cants, are now an intolerable menace to everything worth while in human life? (132, 150) These questions had preoccupied Wells for quite some time, certainly since the film adaptation of his prescient novel The Shape of Things to Come (shot in 1935, released in 1936), which accurately predicted the outbreak of World War II (although in Wells’s vision, the war lasted

into the mid-1960s) and ended in a Utopian vision of “the world of the airmen,” a global democratic technocracy in which culture, art, and scientific enlightenment were the sole aims of humankind. Stunningly directed by William Cameron Menzies, who three years later would design the entire production of Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939) and in 1953 create the ultimate childhood dystopian nightmare of Cold War alienation, Invaders from Mars (1953), Things to Come covers nearly a century in human affairs, from 1940 through 2036. John Cabal (Raymond Massey) 1s a pacifist who opposes war, but as Christmas Eve draws near, in a brutally effective montage jux-

taposing traditional holiday merriment with newspaper headlines blaring “war IMMINENT!” it 1s clear that Cabal’s hopes for a peaceful world are doomed.

London (named “Everytown” in the film) is bombed into oblivion by unnamed foreign forces, giving rise to a zombie-like plague called “the Wandering Sickness,” which robs people of their will and sends them out into the world to murder and pillage. The only cure for the affliction is summary execution, something that the now-ruling “Boss” (Ralph Richardson) is more than willing to mete out to his subjects, even as he presides over the ruin of civilization, without adequate sanitation, food, or medical supplies. The war rages on until 1966, when a certain kind of feudal order uneasily descends upon the earth and its inhabitants. But social government as we know it has collapsed; in 168

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its place, a group of warring “nation states hghts over the surviving scraps of crvilization.

The Boss, indeed, is just another feudal dictator presiding over a corner of the earth, carrying on the centuries-old traditions of conquest, plunder, and dictatorship, despite the feeble efforts of a surviving group of scientists who oppose his reign. All this changes when John Cabal, now much older, arrives with a fleet of massive airplanes as the representative of a new government that 1s taking over the world. The Boss is soon vanquished by Cabal’s superior technol-

ogy, and “the world of the airmen” takes over, bringing peace and plenty to the citizens of the world. The film then shifts to its final third, in which the “Everytown’ in 2036 has been transformed into a 169

VISIONS OF PARADISE

paradise of robotic automation, plentiful food and water, enlightened cultural education using television and a forerunner of DVDs as classroom tools, and the hope of sending a man to the moon in the first manned spacecraft. But with the intellectual freedom offered by the new world, there are those who disagree with the new regime’s arms, chief among them the Cassandra-like Theotocopulos (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). Delivering a dramatic warning of doom to the citizens of Everytown via a huge telescreen, Theotocopulos foments a rebellion against the proposed moon flight and leads an assault by a group of malcontents on the landing site, where the rocket is launched moments before Theotocopulos and the members of his mob close in. At the end of the film, Oswald Cabal, John Cabal’s great grandson (Raymond Massey in a dual role), heralds the new scientific achievement as the first step in conquering the stars, which he sees as the ultimate destiny of the human race.

While the implied social equality of Wells's vision of the future is highly debatable—the “democracy” of the airmen seems conspicuously sterile, and the vast sets recall the gargantuan buildings of Metropolis (1927), which dwarfed their numerous inhabitants— Wells was trying to show that rule by conventional politicians was doomed

to failure and suggested that a Utopia created by scientists and artists would have a better chance at realizing human potential. It would be an interesting experiment, if attempted; for the present, the world seems to have learned little from Wells's prophetic vision and seems more divided and war-torn than ever. Indeed, the plethora of otherworldly visitors with benevolent intentions in the history of cinema indicates that we know that, as humans, we are fatally flawed and doomed to repeat the past, ending in our inevitable self-destruction,

unless some outside agency (angelic or extraterrestrial) comes to our aid. Things to Come asks whether or not progress for its own sake is valuable or if it needs to be governed by something other than mere scien-

170

THE PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

tific curiosity; that is, by the human conscience. If the march forward

into new technological landscapes is inevitable, no matter whether the outcome be salutary or dystopian, [Things to Come seeks to assure us

that we are the masters of our own spiritual, artistic, and technological destinies and that we alone bear the ultimate responsibility for all our actions. While Things to Come pays lip service to the concept of a higher power, it ultimately argues that humankind is the highest power, for both good and ill. The question is, what will we do with this freedom, and what kind of world will we create with the aid of technology? Lothar Mendes’s The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936) posits

a different question: What would we do if we were able to create, at will, a new civilization; if all our fantasies could become fact merely by wishing them into existence? Based on H. G. Wells’s short story, running a mere seven thousand words in its initial incarnation (Wykes 71), The Man Who Could Work Miracles tells the story of the very plebe-

ian George McWhirter Fotheringay (Roland Young), who is granted godlike powers by a trio of bored deities (Ivan Brandt, Torin Thatcher, and, in one of his first screen roles, the inetfably bored George Sanders) who argue that men should never be allowed to control their own destinies; they simply don’t have the intelligence to manage their own affairs.

In short order, Fotheringay, touched by the hand of the gods, sets out to create a new, Utopian civilization, only to discover that his own vanity and greed have foredoomed the effort. Progressing from a series

of insignificant parlor tricks, Fotheringay is soon reordering the entire planet as an absolute monarchy, with himself as the Earth's ruler. Even as the evidence of his miraculous power spreads, Fotheringay 1s met with a chorus of naysayers, who challenge him to prove his illu minate power once and for all. To do this, Fotheringay orders the earth to stop spinning on its axis, which negates the planet's gravitational pull and nearly brings about the destruction of the Earth. As a last wish, Fotheringay asks that the world be returned to its initial state,

171

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before he was given the gift to “work miracles,” and that he should return to his life as an average, pub-going British citizen. His wish is granted, and the world is restored. As Alan Wykes observed,

Wells's great strength as a writer is his ability to interest the reader immediately in what he has to say. His style is straight forward, serviceable, untrimmed with decoration or rhetoric. . . . He was a Common Man himself, he understood poverty, he knew

about the dependence of the lower orders on those in the ranks above them; he had views on the emancipation of women at the precise moment when women themselves were probing the same ideas; he made himself a spokesman for the very folk whose interest he was engaging. (16) The Man Who Could Work Miracles was a resounding success at the

box office and touched a chord with the average British citizen with its tale of an everyman given limitless power; a common fantasy to the present day. But in depicting the Utopic world that Fotheringay creates as disintegrating into a feudal dictatorship, Wells was merely repeating one of his favorite arguments: that society must be governed by a political, literary, and scientific elite and not by the artificial dictates of a too-easily-manipulated democracy of average citizens or by a common man raised up by the union of circumstance to the level of dictator. And yet, at the same time, a number of films from the 1950s seemed

to argue that without a guiding, benevolent despot, the world would ultimately fail to reach accord on important social issues and vanish in a cloud of nuclear debris. In these films, aliens arrive on Earth with a warning against self-destruction, but they often have to threaten the world with extinction in order to get sufficient attention. In Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Stull (1951), Klaatu (Mi-

chael Rennie) comes from outer space to bring a message of peace and harmony to the earth. Posing as a human, “Mr. Carpenter,” Klaatu falls in love with Helen Benson (Patricia Neal); when her jealous ex172

THE PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

boyfriend Tom Stevens (Hugh Marlowe) discovers Klaatu’s origin, he

attempts to turn Klaatu over to the police for investigation and imprisonment. But Klaatu’s faithful robot servant Gort (Lock Martin) rescues Klaatu from death when he is shot by the authorities while trying to escape, and he successfully returns to his ship. There, he delivers a warning: Disarm, or perish. As he tells the assembled scientists and government officials, “We shall be waiting for your answer.” With this stern admonition Klaatu departs, ending the film on a note of Cold War uncertainty. Will mankind embrace Klaatu’s message of nonviolence? Or are we doomed to ceaselessly repeat the past, assuring our inevitable destruction? Klaatu’s world of pervasive nonviolence is more perfect than ours can ever be, a world of sanity and reason at odds with the combative, fear-based values of 1950s America. Interestingly, the message of The Day the Earth Stood Still was so powerfully

resonant in the Korean War era that it spurred an uncredited remake just three years later, Burt Balaban’s The Stranger from Venus (1954), in

which an alien (Helmut Dantine) comes to Earth to warn civilization of the imminent perils posed by nuclear weapons and falls in love with the sympathetic Susan North (Patricia Neal, essentially reprising her earlier role). Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956) offers an equally compact and convincing vision of the struggle between paradise and damnation in its tale of Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), the reclusive mas-

ter of Altair 4, an obscure planet on the edge of Earth’s solar system. Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and his key staff members Lieutenant “Doc” Ostrow (Warren Stevens), Lieutenant Jerry Farman (Jack Kelly), and Chief Engineer Quinn (Richard Anderson) arrive on Altair 4 in an elegantly designed flying saucer (“United Planets Cruiser C-57-D”) to investigate the disappearance of the earth spaceship Bellerophon, which vanished without a trace some twenty years ear-

lier, leaving Dr. Morbius and his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis) as the only survivors on the planet, along with their companion Robby the robot (voiced by Marvin Miller), a device Morbius has cobbled together “in his spare time.” When questioned by Commander Adams, 173

VISIONS OF PARADISE

Morbius relates a seemingly fantastic story, claiming that nearly all the members of the Bellerophon party were killed in a single night by a mys

terious force and that the surviving members of the expedition were

vaporized along with their ship when they tried to escape. Only Morbius and Altaira have escaped this terrible fate, and in the ensuing twenty years, Morbius has built a paradise for himself and his _ daughter on Altair 4 and has no intentions of returning to Earth. Adams is understandably skeptical of this story and becomes even more so when key elements of his spaceship’s radio are smashed by an unknown intruder. Adams and “Doc” Ostrow return to Morbius’s house to investigate, and eventually Morbius relates what he knows of the real circumstances on Altair 4: that it was once ruled by an omniscient and benevolent race called the Krel, who developed a series of “super computers” to control all the life-supporting functions on the planet. But, as with the members of the Bellerophon expedition, just

as the Krel were on the verge of their greatest technological breakthrough, the use of computers to do away with all manual labor, the entire Krel race, too, perished in a single night without any rational explanation. Morbius conducts Adams and his key staff members on a tour of the Krel’s staggeringly immense underground city and then tells them that, in view of what has transpired, the planet 1s “cursed” and Adams and his crew must leave immediately. Adams refuses and tells Morbius that “a find such as this must be placed under United Planetary control,” a notion that Morbius immediately rejects; he is master of Altair 4 now.

In the film’s harrowing conclusion, Adams, who has fallen in love with Altaira, is menaced along with his fellow crew members by a monstrous “creature from the Id,” a synthetic creation “whistled up” from Morbius’s unconscious mind as a concrete representation of his dislike for Adams’s intrusion on Morbius’s domain and Adams’s love for

his daughter, which threatens their extraterrestrial paradise. “Doc” Ostrow has divined Morbius’s dark secret and confronts him with his responsibility for the deaths of the crew members of the Bellerophon and his resuscitation of the monster to do away with Adams and his crew. 174

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