Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  Beneath the genre trappings, Westerns and early science fiction stories were remarkably similar. Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry famously sold his series by describing it as ‘Wagon Train to the stars’, a reference to the long-running TV cowboy series. Secretly, he had more ambitious and progressive plans for it. ‘Westerns were big and I wanted to sell [Star Trek to the network],’ Roddenberry said in 1988. ‘I said, “Look fellas, it’s little more than a western. They have spaceships instead of horses and zap-guns instead of six-shooters, but it’ll be familiar.” ‘And unfortunately, they gave me the money and a set of good actors and a director, and I just went ape! They didn’t get what they asked for or what we’d agreed on. They were naturally very upset.’ Roddenberry’s progressive aims were apparent when he threatened to walk away from the show unless Nichelle Nichols was cast in the role of Communications Officer Uhura, at a time when a black actress would not be cast in the role of a significant authority figure on American television. But while Roddenberry had a vision of the future above and beyond that described in his initial pitch, Star Trek was still a show about exploration and the frontier. America’s mythologised past was powerful enough to also work as a mythologised future.

  Many parts of the world had functionally equivalent versions of ‘cowboys’, from the llaneros on the Colombian Plains to the horsemen of Andalusia or the ranchers of the Australian outback. But these didn’t grab the imagination in quite the same way as American cowboys. There was a magic ingredient in the American story that elevated it above stories of those similar lifestyles.

  The myth of the Old West was a celebration of the power of the individual. It was a life free from state authority, where men had no lords or masters. People were considered equal and followed a clear moral code that prioritised reputation over wealth. The existence of a separate Native American population fed into this. Individualism requires a gulf between the self and the ‘other’, which the cultural differences between the existing and the colonising populations helped emphasise.

  The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has highlighted the striking difference between the myths of the American and Canadian frontiers: ‘One is a myth of a Hobbesian state of nature mitigated only by individual and collective self-help: licensed gunmen, posses of vigilantes and occasional cavalry charges. The other is the myth of the imposition of government and public order as symbolised by the uniforms of the Canadian version of the horseman-hero, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.’

  The logical end point of the idealised individualism of the Westerns genre was The Man With No Name, a character portrayed by Clint Eastwood in three films directed by Sergio Leone in the 1960s. This character was admired by the audience because he was so isolated and unattached to the wider community that he didn’t even require a name. Like so many twentieth-century icons, his isolation was the cornerstone of his appeal.

  A nation formed under the dream of a utopian future did not restrict its national myth to stories of its past. Not only did it invent new stories, it also mastered new mediums to tell them with.

  Film had been born in the late nineteenth century. There wasn’t a single inventor who could claim responsibility, but instead an accumulation of breakthroughs from inventors working independently around the world in working-class locations such as Brighton and Leeds in England, Lyon in France or New Jersey in the USA. By the start of the twentieth century filmmakers had learnt that they could cut between different shots without confusing the audience and were starting to experiment with techniques such as focus pulls and close-ups, but it still wasn’t clear what direction the fledgling medium was going to develop in.

  Cinema ultimately became a populist medium, arguably the most popular of the twentieth century, democratically supported and shaped by means of ticket sales. But it could easily have developed into a more elitist, highbrow art form. The great advances made by Russian, French and Italian filmmakers in the early decades of the century seemed to point in that direction. A film such as Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (Italy, 1914) towered over most films of the period, in both ambition and technical expertise. Cabiria depicted the destruction of the Roman fleet at the siege of Syracuse, the eruption of Mount Etna and Hannibal’s trek across the Alps with elephants. It took six months to shoot, at a time when most films were completed in a few days. The monumental sets and huge crowd scenes still impress a hundred years later. In contrast, American cinema found initial commercial success by filming boxing matches, such as 1897’s The Corbett–Fitzsimmons Fight, which remained a mainstream form of entertainment in the eyes of American audiences from that point on.

  A number of events conspired to shift the centre of the film world away from Europe and towards California. The First World War destroyed much of Europe along with its economy and industry. The development of ‘talking pictures’ in the late 1920s gave the English-speaking film industry access to a larger world market than that of the French or the Italians. A third factor was the growth of Hollywood itself. It was a location which offered the reliable sunlight the industry needed and a relaxed, idyllic lifestyle that appealed to movie stars, which the industry increasingly depended on.

  The American movie industry’s move from the East Coast to California was in part promoted by patent disputes. The intention was to get as far away as possible from the lawyers of the MPPC, or Motion Picture Patents Company. The MPPC claimed intellectual ownership of the sprocket holes which mark the edges of each roll of film, and wanted to be handsomely rewarded. Considering the twenty-first-century industry’s love of intellectual property, it is an irony that Hollywood itself was founded in the spirit of intellectual piracy.

  From the very start, cinema and science fiction complemented each other wonderfully. Filmmakers knew that they needed to offer something beyond that which could be experienced by a trip to the theatre, so their ability to conjure fabulous visual special effects was clearly something they should exploit. Perhaps the most famous silent film is A Trip to the Moon, which was made by the French conjuror, showman and theatre impresario Georges Méliès in 1902. The film tells the story of six adventurous astronomers who build a rocket and fly to the moon. The team is led by Professor Barbenfouillis, which translates as Professor Messybeard. On the moon the adventurers are wowed by many wonders, including an appearance from the Moon goddess Selene, before being attacked by a race of alien insects and narrowly escaping back to earth.

  The image of Professor Messybeard’s rocket ship embedded in the eye of the Man in the Moon is only one of the many extraordinary visual images in that seventeen-minute film, but thanks to its simplicity, originality and humour it has become an icon of early cinema. A Trip to the Moon is considered so important to cinema history that it was the first film to be classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Film. It was clear from the very start, then, that cinema and science fiction would have a fruitful relationship.

  The German expressionist masterpiece Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang in 1927, is another example of this perfect marriage between medium and message. At its heart Metropolis was a loose version of the Frankenstein story. Much of the visual imagery we associate with Frankenstein, particularly the mad scientist’s laboratory with its crackling electricity and strange machines, originates in this film and not in Mary Shelley’s book. Its most famous scene depicts a lifeless female robot, built by a broken-hearted inventor named Rotwang, being given life as an evil double of the kindhearted heroine Maria.

  Metropolis is a film packed with insights into the psyche of the late 1920s. The visual design of this future city is a wild and uninhibited expression of modernist architecture. The unease about the dehumanising effect of industrialisation is apparent in the scenes of workers toiling away inside giant machines. The gulf between the drudgery of the workers and the luxurious lives of their rulers, at a time when labour-led revolutions still seemed a real possibility, is one of the key threads in the plot. Equally significant is the libidinous character of the female robot, whi
ch seduces the citizens of Metropolis into decadence and hedonism. As Gene Roddenberry would later realise, it was possible to use science fiction to talk about contemporary issues with a frankness that would have been unacceptable in more realistic narratives. All you had to do was distract the censor with the odd flying car.

  The ambition of Metropolis was something of an anomaly in the story of early science fiction film. Early American science fiction cinema was more typical. This was concerned with populist adventure rather than bold artistic statements. It was typified by the films of Buster Crabbe, the Olympic Gold-winning swimmer who went on to play the roles of both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. These films did not portray the future as a utopia, exactly, but it still seemed an exciting destination.

  After the Second World War science fiction films lost their youthful optimism. The fear of communism was apparent in B-movies such as 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a thriller in which the alien ‘other’ looked identical to everyday Americans. This was a film complex enough to be read as a condemnation of both communism and the paranoia of the anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy. Soylent Green (1973) presented a vision of global warming, overpopulation and a resource-short world, which echoed the growing environmental concerns of the age. The Godzilla series of Japanese monster movies reflected the Japanese relationship with nuclear technology. Godzilla was originally a monster who flattened cities but, in the years after Hiroshima and before Fukushima, he gradually evolved into a friend and protector of the Japanese people. The Matrix (1999), meanwhile, portrayed humanity as trapped in a virtual world and subservient to the computer technology it created.

  In the second half of the twentieth century the adventure and excitement that Buster Crabbe represented were replaced by a growing unease. The genre now depicted harsh dystopias that individualism was unable to prevent. This did not affect the growth of individualism in the real world. On the contrary, its rise would continue onwards until the end of the century. The self-focused politics of Margaret Thatcher in Britain, who became prime minister in 1979, and her influence on President Ronald Reagan in the USA, would eventually make individualism the default political and economic perspective in the Anglo-Saxon world. But science fiction responds to subtler signals than politicians do. Like a canary in a coal mine, it is an early-warning signal. And postwar science fiction did seem to be warning us about something.

  The script for George Lucas’s 1977 movie Star Wars was influenced by The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a 1949 book by the American mythologist Joseph Campbell. Campbell believed that at the heart of all the wild and varied myths and stories which mankind has dreamt lies one single archetypal story of profound psychological importance. He called this the monomyth. As Campbell saw it, the myths and legends of the world were all imperfect variations on this one, pure story structure. As Campbell summarised the monomyth, ‘A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.’

  Campbell found echoes of this story wherever he looked; myths as diverse as those of Ulysses, Osiris or Prometheus, the lives of religious figures such as Moses, Christ or Buddha, and in plays and stories ranging from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and Dickens. This story is now known as ‘The Hero’s Journey’. It is a story that begins with an ordinary man (it is almost always a man) in a recognisable world. That man typically receives a call to adventure, encounters an older patriarchal mentor, undergoes many trials in his journey to confront and destroy a great evil, and returns to his previous life rewarded and transformed. George Lucas was always open about the fact that he consciously shaped the original Star Wars film into a modern expression of Campbell’s monomyth, and has done much to raise the profile of Campbell and his work.

  Star Wars was so successful that the American film industry has never really recovered. Together with the films of Lucas’s friend Steven Spielberg, it changed Hollywood into an industry of blockbusters, tent-pole releases and high-concept pitches. American film was always a democratic affair which gave the audience what it wanted, and the audience demonstrated what they wanted by the purchase of tickets. The shock with which Hollywood reacted to Star Wars was as much about recognising how out of step with the audience’s interests it had become as it was about how much money was up for grabs. Had it realised this a few years earlier, it might have green-lit Jodorowsky’s Dune.

  The fact that Lucas had used Campbell’s monomyth as his tool for bottling magic did not go unnoticed. As far as Hollywood was concerned, The Hero’s Journey was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Studio script-readers used it to analyse submitted scripts and determine whether or not they should be rejected. Screenwriting theorists and professionals internalised it, until they were unable to produce stories that differed from its basic structure. Readers and writers alike all knew at exactly which point in the script the hero needed their inciting incident, their reversal into their darkest hour and their third-act resolution. In an industry dominated by the bottom line and massive job insecurity, Campbell’s monomyth gained a stranglehold over the structure of cinema.

  Campbell’s monomyth has been criticised for being Eurocentric and patriarchal. But it has a more significant problem, in that Campbell was wrong. There is not one pure archetypal story at the heart of human storytelling. The monomyth was not a treasure he discovered at the heart of myth, but an invention of his own that he projected onto the stories of the ages. It’s unarguably a good story, but it is most definitely not the only one we have. As the American media critic Philip Sandifer notes, Campbell ‘identified one story he liked about death and resurrection and proceeded to find every instance of it he could in world mythology. Having discovered a vast expanse of nails for his newfound hammer he declared that it was a fundamental aspect of human existence, ignoring the fact that there were a thousand other “fundamental stories” that you could also find in world mythology.’

  Campbell’s story revolves around one single individual, a lowly born person with whom the audience identifies. This hero is the single most important person in the world of the story, a fact understood not just by the hero, but by everyone else in that world. A triumph is only a triumph if the hero is responsible, and a tragedy is only a tragedy if it affects the hero personally. Supporting characters cheer or weep for the hero in ways they do not for other people. The death of a character the hero did not know is presented in a manner emotionally far removed from the death of someone the hero loved. Clearly, this was a story structure ideally suited to the prevailing culture. Out of all the potential monomyths that he could have run with, Campbell, a twentieth-century American, chose perhaps the most individualistic one possible.

  The success of this monomyth in the later decades of the twentieth century is an indication of how firmly entrenched individualism became. Yet in the early twenty-first century, there are signs that this magic formula may be waning. The truly absorbing and successful narratives of our age are moving beyond the limited, individual perspective of The Hero’s Journey. Critically applauded series like The Wire and mainstream commercial hit series such as Game of Thrones are loved for the complexity of their politics and group relationships. These are stories told not from the point of view of one person, but from many interrelated perspectives, and the relationships between a complex network of different characters can engage us more than the story of a single man being brave.

  In the twenty-first century audiences are drawn to complicated, lengthy engagements with characters, from their own long-term avatar in World of Warcraft and other online gameworlds to characters like Doctor Who who have a fifty-years-plus history. The superhero films in the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ are all connected, because Marvel understand that the sum is greater than the parts. A simple Hero’s Journey story such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit becomes, when adapted for a twenty-first-centu
ry cinema audience, a lengthy trilogy of films far more complex than the original book. We now seem to look for stories of greater complexity than can be offered by a single perspective.

  If science fiction is our cultural early-warning system, its move away from individualism tells us something about the direction we are headed. This should grab our attention, especially when, in the years after the Second World War, it became apparent just how dark the cult of the self could get.

  A still from Casablanca featuring (second from left to right) Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, 1942 (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty)

  EIGHT: NIHILISM

  I stick my neck out for nobody

  In the early 1940s a sign made from fifty-foot-high white letters stood in the Hollywood Hills. The letters read, ‘OLLYWOOD-LAND’. They had originally been built in 1923 to advertise the Hollywoodland housing development. When it was new, light bulbs had lit up ‘HOLLY’, ‘WOOD’ and ‘LAND’ in sequence, and there was also a searchlight underneath it in case fifty-foot-high flashing letters were too subtle. But twenty years later the lights no longer worked and the sign was in need of repair, not least because a drunk-driver had left the road above and flattened the ‘H’ with his car.

  The fate of the sign in the 1940s echoed the story of Hollywood, which also had a troubled start to the decade. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and America’s entry into the war closed off a number of foreign markets. Many skilled filmmakers quit the industry and enlisted, including the actors James Stewart and Clark Gable and the director Frank Capra. But Hollywood recovered from these setbacks and continued crafting the dreamtime of the Western world. By the end of the 1940s the sign had been rebuilt. In order to refer to the district, rather than the housing development, it had become the now globally recognised ‘HOLLYWOOD’.