All the universe—or nothing

[sovay]

This was supposed to be a short note over e-mail, but apparently I have lost the ability to write short notes about movies. I have a strobing headache.

Tonight derspatchel and I watched H.G. Wells and William Cameron Menzies' Things to Come (1936) because I knew it was a landmark of science fiction and supposed to be very strange. It is indeed both of these things; its visual and temporal scope is stunning, its politics declamatory and confused, and its characters mostly ideological positions, although the middle section actually contains some pretty great post-apocalypse. It is fascinating to see a depiction of both societal collapse and scientific triumph from a pre-atomic perspective. Watching from a present day nearer the film's end than its beginning, you find yourself tracking its timeline like an alternate history. By starting World War II on Christmas 1940, the film misses the actual date by a year; it is also incorrect that chemical warfare would play a huge part in the conflict, although I give it a pass because everyone who had lived through World War I took the future use of poison gas for granted. It was right about the importance of air combat and the bombing of cities, even if it assumes civilians will be gassed from the air rather than firebombed or nuked. Trench warfare did not recur, but because the film believes it will, we are shown the passage of decades in a grimly evocative dissolve from a dead soldier tangled in the wires to pieces of rotted cloth fluttering on the same barbed snarl. The subterranean future city looks like the missing link between Metropolis (1927) and the Krell machine. The model work on this film is insanely good.

Among its surprises, Things to Come contains the earliest onscreen instance I've seen of a zombie pandemic—the "wandering sickness," a biological weapon produced in the last throes of WWII, which here went on for nearly thirty years; its victims stumble blankly through the streets, hands feeling the way in front of them, unresponsive and yet dangerously attracted by the movements of healthy humans—and a local warlord who rises to power by ruthlessly shooting the infected, but has limited leadership capabilities otherwise. (He's played by Ralph Richardson.) Possibly it would not have so stood out for me if I had not spent the last couple of years reading handful_ofdust's Tumblr, but there you go.

This is the section that works most like a conventional drama rather than a succession of montages bound together by rolling intertitles or stirring speeches: like the rest of Britain and presumably the world, "Everytown" (read: London) has been reduced to a nearly medieval poverty by decades of war and then the disease that outlasted it; a scrounging, rural existence in the bombed-out, grassy ruins of an urban center. In 1966, Richardson's unnamed character was the only man ruthless enough to shoot his infected neighbors as well as strangers who threatened to bring the sickness in; by 1970, he's "The Boss" of his little "combatant state" and it's gone to his head.¹ He strides around the walls like he conquered them; he's trying to revive a hangar of antique biplanes in order to make war on the "hillmen" who mine shale and coal, but as his master mechanic points out, they can restore the planes to his heart's content, but they still won't fly without petrol. His consort is a restless, regal young woman named Roxana (Margaretta Scott), her arms covered with reclaimed jewelry and her mass of black hair dressed with feathers and coins; she can see more of the future than he can, in that she knows there's a world outside of the wasteland borders of Everytown and she wants to see it, but she knows she never will in her lifetime, so she might as well take this violent, short-sighted, not unattractive man with all his bluster and his conceit and make the best of it. Then a plane comes down on the outskirts of the settlement—not a relic from the wars, but a new machine, a futuristic design we haven't seen before. The bubble-helmeted figure that emerges like Klaatu come to Washington, D.C. is John Cabal (Raymond Massey), first seen thirty years ago as a gloomy, future-concerned engineer, now an emissary of the benevolent, albeit vaguely totalitarian "Wings Over the World," an organization of scientists based in Basra who have set out to eliminate war and the independence of nation-states that provoke it. The Boss takes him prisoner, is persuaded by his master mechanic to use the stranger as a resource for the rebuilding of aircraft, is doomed to be outcompeted by the new order, like "the Tyrannosaurus and the saber-toothed tiger." There is a great scene with Roxana and the imprisoned Cabal where she doesn't behave at all like the warlord's beautiful mistress toward the hero: she doesn't want to switch her sexual loyalties, she wants to see "the Mediterranean—and Egypt, and Greece, and India" and wants to know if she'll have the chance if she frees Cabal. The cost is her old life, either way. Wings Over the World comes to Everytown. The Boss goes out like a Shakespearean, ranting against Progress as if against Fate as the sleeping gas of the invading airmen blots out his city. The question of the wandering sickness is never again addressed; presumably either it burns itself out (it was successfully eradicated in Everytown) or is cured by the miraculous new medicine of Wings Over the World, which is everywhere making life sleeker, shinier, cleaner, easier, at once more leisurely and more driven toward the ultimate goal of man's conquest of the universe.

Which is a bit where the film falls off a cliff, emotionally speaking, although visually it is a triumph of futurism and practical effects. I have a lot of sympathy for Cabal's great-granddaughter who wants to go to the moon; I think Manifest Destiny in Space! is just as stupid and harmful as manifest destiny anywhere else. From a modern standpoint, it especially doesn't help that Everytown 2036 appears to be populated solely by white people in the same angular, shiny, samurai-shouldered costume, recalling simultaneously William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" and Riff Raff and Magenta at the end of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). A discontented artist who wants to give Progress a break whips the populace into a Luddite frenzy; they run to break up the space gun² with metal bars, which seemed not very plausible to either of us, and if the entire city feels that ambivalently about space travel, maybe the technocracy should take it into account? Instead we close with a magnificent, panoramic speech as the camera profiles Massey (double-cast as his own descendant, as are several other significant roles) against the stars of deep space, urging humanity on to ever greater victories: "And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning . . . All the universe—or nothing. Which shall it be? Which shall it be?" As much gravity and prophecy as Massey rolls out for these lines, they're a little difficult to take except as a glorious piece of past camp. But they're also a classic pronouncement of science fiction, for better or worse; it's powerful in spite of itself if you think of it in terms of discovery instead of conquest. Most importantly, it feels like the only way for a story this aggressively forward-looking to end. We're a far cry from ominous near-future Christmas.

I wish one of the art houses around here would show it; a good print would be immersive on a big screen. I can't imagine what it must have been like to see it for the first time, when its setpieces were not yet staples of the genre and its streamlined aesthetic was forming ideas of the future, not reflecting a past conception. I suspect the propaganda was just as loud and problematic. Things to Come was still a totally worthwhile outlay of ninety-seven minutes of my life. Plus now I know what Ralph Richardson looked like when he was my age, which was pretty good. This appreciation sponsored by my tolerant backers at Patreon.



1. His uniform is a fantastic collage of scavenged finery: I am especially fond of the enormous fur vest over the high-collared army jacket, which on special occasions he exchanges for a floor-sweeping cloak of furs. Under his decorated tin hat, he's got Napoleon hair going on.

2. There's a space gun. It's H.G. Wells.

Comments

[spatch]

In 1966, Richardson's unnamed character

I checked and it's not explicitly in the credits, but I could've sworn his village hailed him as Rudolph The Victorious after the attack on the hill people's mines. Maybe Rudolpho and if that's the case I can understand why he'd prefer to be called Chief.

And another thought: considering what happens to The Victorious later on, perhaps the future daughter-in-space is a descendant of not only Cabal but Roxana as well. Not to get all O MY HEADCANON or anything.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

My jaw is dropped.

Checking to see if Richardson was really ever that young, I found "Richardson made his television debut in January 1939." Time is strange. Time Bandits is stranger.

I like this, from the ODNB: "Of the three great actor knights of the mid-twentieth century (Richardson, Olivier, and Gielgud), Richardson was the eldest and the least predictable, the one who looked most like a respectable bank manager possessed of magical powers, and the one who had the most trouble with Shakespeare: the critic James Agate said that his 1932 Iago ‘could not hurt a fly.’"

Nine

gas

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

Mustard gas from the air was used by the Italians against Ethiopians in 1935. It was arguably a decisive factor in the Italian victory of the Italian-Ethiopian war, and it happened just before the movie was made.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

the same angular, shiny, samurai-shouldered costume, recalling simultaneously William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" and Riff Raff and Magenta at the end of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).

Apparently those costumes inspired Forrest J. Ackerman and Myrtle R. Jones to cosplay at the 1939 Worldcon. (http://www.stuffmomnevertoldyou.com/blog/the-first-lady-of-cosplay/)

A discontented artist who wants to give Progress a break whips the populace into a Luddite frenzy; they run to break up the space gun2 with metal bars, which seemed not very plausible to either of us, and if the entire city feels that ambivalently about space travel, maybe the technocracy should take it into account?

Radio Pundit Ralph Richardson claims to be opposed to the safe, boring life in Future Everytown, but convinces his listeners that if they allow volunteers to risk space travel, next thing you know it'll be compulsory for everyone, OMG think of the children. I can't figure out if he's hypocritically trolling all concerned, or if it all makes sense to him.

There's a space gun. It's H.G. Wells.
The documentary that came with our copy insists that by 1936 everyone else working on the film thought the space gun was a ridiculous concept, but Wells insisted it was thematically necessary.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Wow. You're not kidding about young Ralph Richardson. Or Roxana.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Wow, what incredible scope, to start more or less in the filmmakers' contemporary era and to reach into the twenty-first century. And you say "Wings over the World" is based in Basra? As in Basra, Iraq? Why Basra? (Is any reason given?)

Thirty years of trench warfare is a hideous nightmare that I'm glad we avoided. Not that we didn't get some lovely horrors in exchange...

at once more leisurely and more driven toward the ultimate goal of man's conquest of the universe --I get the sense from your review that the movie embraces this as a goal? ... That seems very 1930s, somehow.