by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
For days now I’ve been wanting to comment on the quite
remarkable Mars movie screening in Golden Hill Charles and I went to Friday,
June 17, a program of seven episodes from the Ray Bradbury Theatre TV series which ran from 1988 to 1993 set on and/or
dealing with Mars. Of course Ray Bradbury is one of the legendary authors and
one of the first science-fiction writers to break out of the genre ghetto and be accepted as a literary heavyweight,
and his strengths are an almost poetic prose style and an imagination that cut
across the technological triumphalism of much sci-fi of the 1940’s and 1950’s
and questioned whether the scientific and technological advances of his time
were such a good thing. He also was one of those writers who lived so long he
virtually became an institution, and this show, produced in Canada and
originally aired (at least in this country) on the USA Network), drew on a lot
of his old stories for which he did fresh adaptations. It also featured the
usual mix of on-their-way-up and on-their-way-down actors usually cast in
relatively cheap TV shows; I can’t recall anyone from the lower reaches of
these casts who subsequently made it to stardom (though Paul Clemens, cast as
the long-lost son Tom in “The Martian,” certainly deserved to; he was not only
quite sexy in an unassuming way but managed to achieve a genuinely complex
performance in a not-that-well
filled-out role) but among the on-their-way-downs were David Carradine, Hal
Linden, David Birney and Robert Culp.
What came through most strongly in these
seven shows — “The Concrete Mixer” (1992), “Mars Is Heaven” (1990), “The
Earthmen” (1992), “And the Moon Be Still As Bright” (1990), “The Martian”
(1992), “The Silent Towns” (1992) and “The Long Years” (1990) — is how much of
Bradbury’s fiction deals with human loss; at times he seemed to be out to prove
single-handedly that the usual “rap” against science fiction, that it presented
imaginative technologies but cardboard people, was wrong. It’s difficult to
tell who came first since neither the credits of the shows themselves nor
imdb.com gave publication dates for Bradbury’s original stories, but it seems
as if Bradbury anticipated Kurt Vonnegut in his fusion of an idealized
small-town America (which, of course, proves considerably less ideal than
advertised) and Solaris author
Stanislaw Lem in the idea that humans could visit an alien planet whose
intelligences would probe their minds and reconstruct their lives on Earth, not
only the environments in which they had lived but people they had known who had
died but now were resurrected based on the aliens’ reading the people’s
memories of them. At the same time the influence of O. Henry and his famous
surprise endings is clear in a lot
of these stories (including such other “serious” science-fiction tales as Rod
Serling’s and others’ scripts for The Twilight Zone — no one with more than a passing familiarity with The
Twilight Zone would have been especially
surprised by the famous “surprise” ending Serling stuck onto his script for the
original Planet of the Apes),
notably “The Earthmen,” which is about a group of astronauts who land on Mars
as part of the third Earth expedition to the Red Planet and spend a lot of time
making frustrating attempts to contact the Martians — all the ones they meet
have names like “Mr. X” (Gordon Pinsent), “Mrs. Th” (Patricia Phillips), “Mr.
Aaa” (pronounced “Ah”) (Jim Shepard) and “Mr. Iii” (Raul Tome), and when the
mission’s captain, Williams (David Birney), tries to present himself he’s given
what appears to be a simple bureaucratic runaround until … at the very end
they’re ushered into a room which it turns out is an old-fashioned Bedlam- or Snake Pit-style insane asylum, to which he, his crew and the crews of the two
previous expeditions have been committed for having the delusion that they’re
visitors from Earth.
Actually the first episode shown, “The Concrete Mixer,”
was in some ways the best — certainly after it everything else seemed just a
bit anticlimactic — in which a small group of Martians attempt to stage an
invasion of Earth. Their leader, Ettil Vyre (Ben Cross, who looks like he won
the part in a Michael Rennie lookalike contest), is initially unwilling to go,
alluding to some dire fate he thinks will befall the Martian army and making it
clear he’d rather stay with his wife and kids on Mars, but he’s talked into
going. The Martians’ small numbers, preposterous uniforms and weird-looking
armaments are reminiscent of the invading force from the Duchy of Grand Fenwick
in Leonard Wibberley’s The Mouse That Roared — only the whole point of Grand Fenwick’s invasion
of the U.S. was to lose the war
and then be showered with the huge amount of foreign aid Germany, Italy and
Japan got from us after we beat them in World War II. (After the woeful
non-reconstruction of Iraq following the 2003 war, that joke is a good deal
less funny now than it was when Wibberley thought it up.) What actually happens
is that the Martians are greeted by an unctuous Rotarian type who gives them
the key to whatever Earth city they’ve landed in, they’re impressed into
marching in a parade in their honor with a properly awful marching band
supplying the music, and they end up in the raunchier part of town drinking and
carousing with no-good women — Ettil tries to instill some discipline into his
fellow Martian soldiers and get them away from the 24/7 party and back to the
serious business of conquering Earth, but to no avail.
It’s a spoof not only of
science-fiction conventions of outer-space invaders but of the whole
hail-fellow-well-met spirit of small-town America in the 1950’s and the
presentation of that decade as some sort of ideal in much of America’s
political propaganda (though one of the odd things about the modern-day
American right is that mythical past they want to take us back to — you know,
the one when America was “great” and Donald Trump wants to make us “great
again” — seems to be receding; for a while it was the 1950’s because back then
women were still in the kitchen, Blacks at the back of the bus and Queers in
the closet, until they realized that the 1950’s were also the decade of the
highest income-tax rates in U.S. history and the highest percentage of the
American workforce in unions; then it was the 1880’s, the age of the “robber
barons” when corporations freely and openly bought elections and did whatever
they wanted, U.S. Senators were still elected by state legislatures instead of
directly by the people, and there was no income tax at all; and some of the
corporate leaders and Tea Partiers seem to want to go back even further, to the
1820’s, when only white male landowners could vote) when so many writers in so
many genres, including Evan
Hunter and John D. MacDonald, presented the 1950’s as a living hell when they
were still going on. (It’s also worth noting that “The Concrete Mixer” was
directed by Eleanore Lindo; quite a few of the Ray Bradbury Theatre episodes were directed by women, including Anne
Wheeler on “The Martian.”) “The Concrete Mixer” is also arguably an
illustration of the so-called “Double-Cross System” by which the British secret
service was able to “turn” virtually every German agent sent to the U.K. to spy
on them during World War II — and the first step in doing this was to treat the
German prisoners humanely, respectfully and with dignity. Like the Martians in
this movie, this sent the Germans into cognitive dissonance big-time; they were
in the hands of enemies they’d been trained to regard as inhuman monsters, and
instead the “enemies” were being nice to them, treating them as fellow human
beings and winning their trust and confidence preparatory to getting them to
switch sides.
Quite a few stories in this cycle explore the issue of grief and
the lengths to which people (or Martians) will go to keep their dead loved
ones’ memories alive in some form. In “The Martian” Earth couple LaFarge (John
Vernon) and his wife Anna (Sheila Moore) are confronted with the return of
their long-dead son Tom (Paul Clemens), or at least a Martian using their
memories of Tom to pose as him —
but for what purpose? Anna uncritically accepts the reappeared Tom as the real
deal but her husband is more skeptical. He worries that “Tom” is actually a
Martian seeking to get into their house so he can kill them all, and the last
shot of the show is of a long, lanky, scrawny arm — apparently Tom’s equipment
in his original form — reaching from behind LaFarge over his shoulder, possibly
to murder him. Another emotional wrencher is “The Long Years,” in which Robert
Culp plays the head of a family that has been living on Mars for two decades,
ever since the rest of the human colony on Mars evacuated (at least one other
story on this program dealt with human colonists on Mars missing a planet-wide
order to evacuate) — only when another ship arrives from Earth to take them
home, John Hathaway (Robert Culp) has aged visibly the way you would expect him
to … but his wife, son and daughter are all the same apparent age they were
when they got to Mars. Eventually it turns out that his family were all killed
by a Martian infectious disease, he buried them but then made perfect (or as
perfect as possible) android replicas — who are fully conscious of everything
he could recall and program into them about their real-life originals but who
don’t know that they’re androids.
In a scene of ineffable grief, sadness and loss, John has to take leave of his
(simulated) family in a way that will keep them hopeful of his return someday
but not break their hearts too much if he doesn’t. The gimmick of the disease
that wiped out an entire population from another planet because their immune
systems had never seen anything like it before and thus they had no biological
defense (something that happened quite frequently during the so-called “Age of
Exploration,” in which whites brought their diseases to Third World populations that had
experienced nothing like them) had of course been most famously exploited in
Mars fiction in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, in which the Earth militaries have no defense
against the Martians’ technologically ultra-sophisticated attack machines but
the Martians’ bodies had no defense against Earth’s commonest infectious
microbes. (Wells was a Fabian socialist and an animal-rights activist — if you
actually read The Island of Dr. Moreau sometime instead of just judging it from whichever of the three film
versions you’ve seen, you’ll be struck at how blatant its animal-rights
propaganda is.)
Another show in this cycle used it in reverse — in “And the
Moon Be Still as Bright” (a title Bradbury lifted from Lord Byron’s poem “So
We’ll Go No More a Roving,” which is quoted in the dialogue) the entire Martian
race has been wiped out by the chickenpox virus, which a member of an Earth
expedition to Mars unwittingly carried to the Red Planet. All that’s left of
the Martians are the black leaf-like objects their bodies degenerated into when
they died. The key character in this one is Spender (David Carradine, over a
decade after his hit TV series Kung Fu but playing an oddly similar role as a person who becomes attached to
a culture not his own but which he considers superior, and acting well enough
his tragic death becomes all the sadder), who ends up so totally identifying
with the lost Martian civilization that, when a fellow Earth astronaut breaks a
glass cylinder containing a large chunk of Martian knowledge, Spender goes
berserk and starts killing his crew to protect the Martian legacy against
Earthlings who are just going to destroy everything on Mars the way they did
with the indigenous cultures white people “discovered” on Earth. I’m not sure
how Lord Byron’s poem (“So, we’ll go no more a roving/So late into the
night,/Though the heart be still as loving,/And the moon be still as bright”)
fits the tale, but Spender is fond of quoting it (that first stanza, anyway;
there are two others) and the story itself is a typically Bradburyan bit of
romantic cynicism (in his writing the two are decidedly not oxymoronic!) that, like so much of his work,
achieves a sense of genuine tragedy that marked him as a “special” writer when
he started to emerge from the world of sci-fi pulps and get “noticed” by
literary critics and non-genre
readers.
About the only episode that rubbed me the wrong way was “The Silent
Towns,” yet another one about Earthlings stranded on Mars when the entire
planet was evacuated; Walter Grip (John Glover) is driving around Mars in a
truck (how does he fuel it?) when he hears repeated examples of telephones
ringing in abandoned houses. He keeps trying to answer them and the calls keep
cutting off before they can do so, but finally he reaches one person, Genevieve
(Monica Parker), who’s eager to make a date with him. Only when they finally
meet she turns out to be middle-aged and heavy-set — too heavy for Walter to find her attractive, though
given that she’s the last human female on Mars one could imagine a remix of
this story in which he has sex with her anyway because he’s horny and it’s not
like there are a lot of other choices! An imdb.com reviewer called “Hitchcoc”
(presumably no relation), who posted about a lot of the Ray Bradbury Theatre episodes and oddly disliked some of the ones I liked
best (like “The Concrete Mixer,” which I saw as brilliant satire and he saw as
“terrible”), was right this time when he called it “an interesting and somewhat
sexist presentation.” But would it have seemed more or less sexist if he’d
overcome his initial revulsion towards her looks and fucked her anyway? About
the only way to have remixed this story to make it non-sexist is if he’d got to like her as a person
regardless of her appearance and genuinely fallen in love with her …
