Bombs Away and Smash Hits at Home
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major studio backing, creative directorship, and the budget necessary to aim for
something well above its formulaic counterparts that emerged contemporaneously
from smaller studios. Thus it is a film which was especially subjected to the
economic demands of the cinematic marketplace but which also enjoyed the
national distribution and critical acclaim that mark it as an important comment on
this era.
The Martian invaders who terrorize the story’s little California town are
the most vivid indicators of where the film is on this continuum at any one point.
At its most metonymic, the Martian is completely alien and only Martian, as
removed from us as the minuscule bacteria which play a significant part late in
the film; and continuing the film in the tradition of its predecessors as science
fiction, as the fantasy and escapism that enliven a restless pre-teen’s Saturday
afternoon. Midway on this spectrum of associations, the Martian metaphorizes
into the Russian enemy; we will see fairly obviously that the most interesting
layer of stylization added to this mid-20th-century remake of a Victorian novel is
the casting of the Martian as the other “red menace.”5 In its most metaphoric
incarnation, the Martian is first and foremost not Russian but human, that is, as
“just like us” as a film during this era dared suggest and therefore deserving of the
same respect for its life as we hoped it would grant our own.6
The Martian depictions on this continuum are complemented or
countered by various American-made efforts to combat the communist and
nuclear threat posed by the Soviet Union in this period—science, in the figure of
Doctor Clayton Forester; the military, figured in a host of generals, colonels and
infantry men who turn the California town into a battle zone; and religion, here
represented not by any particular sect or clerical figure but by “God, in his
wisdom,” presumed to be on our side during all wars. Appropriately, the doctor
and his camp of protagonists contend with the Martians in their ultra-metaphoric
state (the state of illness as opposed to violence) and the military men with them
in their middling, “red menace” state. In their most heinous and unknowable,
ultra-metonymic state, the film surrenders the besieged town to the hand of God
(as Wells did to his London setting in the original text), saving a few Californians
from horrible doom, yet, as I will argue later, losing much more than is gained in
the metaphysical bargain.
As I inquire here into the nature and meaning of the alien presence in
mid-century Martian films, so too has this alien’s enigmatic “vehicle”—not its
spaceship but its cinematic package—been pondered and discussed by critics who
would know and love it better. The Martian movie has been described as a child
of the horror films of the 1930s and 1940s (vampire, mummy, and wolfm