Religious and Political Allegory in Robert Wise's: The Day the Earth Stood Still
1982; Salisbury University; Volume: 10; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoUnlike almost all science fiction films of the 1950's, The Day the Earth Stood Still takes a stand against the anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. This is courageous enough, but the film is all the more remarkable for its use of the Christ myth to make its point. I will be discussing the specifically Christian imagery of The Day the Earth Stood Still shortly. First, however, I wish to confront the third word in my title: Many Marxist critics insist that all literature, science fiction included, is by nature political. On the other hand, we have the statement by Susan Sontag that science fiction movies are never political. 1 Somewhere in between these two extremes lie the many critics and reviewers who have recently pointed out the extent to which Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers of 1956 is a McCarthyist allegory. The observation was commonly made in reviews of Phil Kaufman's 1978 remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. However, the first critic to make the connection was an Italian named Ernesto Laura writing in a 1957 issue of Bianco e Nero.2 According to Laura, we are to understand that the residents of Don Siegel's cozy small town are being changed into Communists when we properly understand the allegory. When they least expect it, normal, healthy Americans are attacked by foreign conspirators and transformed into zombie-like images of their former selves. These pod-people will stop at nothing to carry out their plan of world domination. In short, they are not terribly unlike Communists as they were perceived in 1956. Although I think Laura may be right about Don Siegel's film, this kind of interpretation can be taken too far. Recently, for example, a French film critic suggested that Jaws was a counterstatement to the idea that America in the post- Vietnam era could not defeat a crafty and violent enemy. Thus Bruce the shark functions metaphorically as any threat to America's shores which can be effectively destroyed by a significantly diverse aggregation of American virtues represented by the three characters who set out on Robert Shaw's boat.3 Such a reading does little, I think, to clarify the basic issues of Jaws. Rather than seeing the work as an allegory, we might do better to consider, say, screenwriter Peter Benchley's debt to Ibsen's An Enemy of the People or the film's handling of the concept of natural evil. But let us return to the more perilous waters of McCarthyism. Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers does indeed surrender some of its mystery when seen in terms of how it taps the same springs of anxiety as our natural preoccupation with international Communist conspiracies. I can think of another film, from six years earlier, which can be read on a similar level: Panic in the Streets (1950). Here it is the pneumonic plague which arrives from across the ocean and begins secretly to infect the American people. Richard Widmark plays a military health official who must fight ignorant government officials and dangerously meddlesome newspapermen in order to stop the spread of the deadly menace. The principal carriers of the contagion happen to be sleazy underworld characters who run from the police and refuse to listen to reason. I read the film as another allegory of Communist infiltration. It may be significant that Panic in the Streets was directed by Elia Kazan who later cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee in the search for Hollywood Communists.4 1950 was not only the year of Panic in the Streets; it was also the year of the conviction of Alger Hiss, the arrest of the Rosenbergs and the disclosure of Dr. Klaus Fuch's betrayal of atomic secrets to the Russians. 1950 was also the year in which Joseph McCarthy emerged from obscurity by charging that the United States State Department was full of Communists. In 1951, as far as I can tell, Hollywood produced no films that endorsed the McCarthyist vision, with or without the veil of allegory. …
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