For three years in a row (1966-68) Mr. Pohl was honored with the Hugo Award, given annually by the Science Fiction Convention. In 1972 he was designated the guest of honor at their annual convention. Several times he has represented the United States in International Science Fiction Conferences in Europe and South America.
A native of New York City, he has lived for the past twenty-two years in Red Bank, N.J., with his wife and family.
George Zebrowski
Science Fiction and the Visual Media
Science fiction film is mainly a story of failure on many fronts. Numerous critics, those who know science fiction and those who do not, have pointed this out for so long now that it has become a familiar point in many discussions of the subject. I would like, however, to avoid a parade of bad films or films which contain technical virtues of interest only to those willing to ignore the absence of everything else a good science fiction film should have to preserve their enthusiasm. Rather, I would like to explore those very fronts where science fiction film fails, and where it can succeed. So very often the different positions expressed about science fiction film suggest the pieces of a puzzle, a puzzle such that if only the pieces had been cut correctly, the picture would emerge.
The most general cause for hope, one which I would like to offer again, more clearly than I have encountered it to date and in the light of recent developments, is that there exists a real possibility for good science fiction cinema. Such a possibility in any field is always exciting. Yet so few realize that, as in written science fiction, science fiction film is an area where almost everything remains to be done. Then why has it not been done?
There are financial and technical barriers, and I will present newly developed ways of overcoming them. To begin with very few have tried to do enough. Little has been done because it has not been tried. Generally, this problem afflicts all film. As a medium it seems to lack an aesthetic sufficiently flexible so as not to constrict very creative individuals, yet sufficiently authoritative to orient newcomers. Ironically, the dream-made-real medium breaks newcomers of their dreams. Things which they would like to do are labeled "unfilmic" or unfamiliar to audiences. Some of this is justified, but much of it is an expression of budgetary and technical restrictions. Motion-picture executives seek to guarantee the success of a film in advance, and to repeat it as often as possible. As a result the selection process for new projects is weighted against innovation. This is less true today, but one is surprised that given the obstacles, anything good has been done.
Science fiction film from 1950 to 1970 makes the above problems more acute and specialized. The past of science fiction cinema rarely suggests much that can be considered innovative today. Good science fiction films are individual, and cannot be repeated endlessly like the monster cycles. The serious science fiction film maker must depend on his own judgment, the resources of his studio, and his knowledge of written science fiction, in addition to his own cinematic skills and the abilities of his writers.
Here we come to our first big problem. John Baxter, author of Science Fiction in the Cinema, tells us that science fiction film is an intellectual impossibility. "With 2001: A Space Odyssey," he writes, "science fiction came as close as it could to an alliance with sf film. Whether by instinct or design, Kubrick and Clarke had found a plot device that combined the positive attitude of science fiction with the negative attitude of sf film. They had set the particularising mood of film in the visionary sweep of literature, the mythopoetic basis of sf film in the rigidly real world of Clarke's space fiction. But despite this superficial combination, the tension is still there. One doubts that it can ever be otherwise when too dissimilar fields, for better or worse, are nailed together."
Throughout his book, Baxter stresses that what is called science fiction film is a primarily visual, sensuous medium which cannot express the science fictional ideas found in the written form. We should view sf film as a visual play of man's fears and symbols in the twentieth century. Written science fiction tries to be logical, abstract, and scientifically believable; while sf film is associative, immature, scientifically inaccurate and irrational. And it should not even try to be good science fiction because that is impossible.
Baxter directs our attention to the visual things in a large selection of examples from sf film. Much of what he points out about the visual elements of past sf films is revealing, managing to show things, which many of us had not noticed, about even the worst of the monster-mold sagas of the 1950s. But he puts himself in the position of the opera lover who must admit that the story of a particular work may be inane, while the music is a work of genius. In fact Baxter does admit this sort of thing a number of times, but manages to hold that it is not damaging at all to the concerns of a legitimate appreciation of science fiction cinema.
Naturally it would be as wrong to deny film its visual glories as it would be to deny opera its music.
The novel quality of film is the visual experience, just as one of the important aspects of opera is the music. But a film is also theater drama, including sound and music; and opera has been known to be excellent theatrical drama, apart from its music. As a matter of historical record there have been intermediate states. Legitimate plays have been filmed, with the camera expanding audience awareness. Television programs are often an example of well-made plays, if uninspired, which are simply filmed. At least two operas, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (baroque) and Berg's Wozzeck (modern), have been said to use music and action cinematically. It is not a question of reducing any one form to another, which is where much of the jealousy and confusion between, for example, films and novels originates. It is a matter of recognizing that all dramatic art does not spring out of a vacuum. Originalities of expression and content do advance beyond the media of the past—or much more accurately, new qualities appear. But it is not a mystery where film borrows and where it is new. Therefore, it becomes nonsense to deny science fiction film the capacity to embody sophisticated sf ideas on the screen as well as in the written form, just as it would be foolish to argue against the Greek dramatists, or Ibsen, Shaw, and others, that ideas cannot be made to work on the stage.
Film is not the drama of theater, but drama is an aspect of it, an aspect uniquely expanded by the camera. Film makes more demands on what has been written. The result is more than theater drama can do. But film remains drama and fiction to a degree. The problems of relationship between these things are not insoluble. What works well written is often not as good spoken. What goes well shown may not be well written. A good example of this last problem is THX1138, a beautifully visual science fiction film released in 1971, which expressed a certain mood of pathos and defiance growing out of some well-known science fiction ideas. It was unremarkable in book form. Like Fantastic Voyage, the book was a novelization from the film, and did not require exceptional writing to be an adequate verbal memento of the film. As a work of written science fiction, it would have required a more ambitious approach in that medium to have been exceptional. For example, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess is a fine novel, but it suffers in the minds of those who have seen the film first and then read the novel trying to untangle Kubrick's images from those of the novelist. This cannot be helped except by understanding that a true novel is not a memento of whatever film has been made from it. THX 1138 is primarily a film, and it took some courage on the part of George Lucas to make, because it presented futuristic ideas not universally familiar, though many sf writers and readers found them so.
Consider the problem of ideas in science fiction film more closely—assuming that they can be conveyed on the screen. The problem is very much like the one of ideas in written sf. Necessary ideas and backgrounds involving a future world, or any world significantly different from the present, tend to stop the progress of a story while the reader is made aware of what he has to know to understand the particular nature of the story, story problem, and final resolution. I am assuming here Theodore Sturgeon's view that a science fiction s
tory is one which could not have taken place without the scientific idea (current science or extrapolated science—actually any relatively fantastic element) affecting the lives of persons (human or other) in the story. If the story is written in a scientific spirit of believability and serious concern about the future, it is a science fiction story; but if the fantastic element is intentionally left unexplained (and need not be explained), the story is a fantasy and need be only internally consistent. The common ground lies in the variety of fantastic element used.
The information load of a science fiction story has always been a problem because the work must also be a work of fiction, subject to the demands of good fiction. When the information is extensive, characters convey it to each other in conversation, which is sometimes legitimate dialogue and sometimes contrived. The author tells things to the reader, quoted information is placed in front of chapters; direct thoughts of characters are presented. When the needed information is scant and the story takes place near or during our times, the author can get in a few things at the beginning and let the reader assume others, as in a contemporary novel or story, where no one explains elevators or taxis. One reason why the monster films of the '50s are so easy is because all the viewer has to know is that there is a monster, and the story moves forward visually.
American science fiction, growing up as it did in the pulps, is defensive about ideas. They are something to be slipped into the story. The story action comes first, before characterization and style, or ideas. This is not difficult to understand if we remember that fiction is a story medium. A well-plotted story tends to survive even when everything else is minimal. Sf films inherited this traditional reluctance. A science fiction writer fears being called an essayist when he aims to be a writer of fiction, a maker of words, a purveyor of altered human experience and character. But he also fears having his ideas ridiculed for implausibility or scientific error. Science fiction is at once vulnerable from the side of the intellectual and the anti-intellectual.
But the root question to ask, one which will help us see the solution, is this: what are ideas—where are they found? And the answer is that people have ideas. Characters think them, say them, write them, live them at all levels of articulation. It is not everything they do, but it is enough to help us out of our problem in film and in written sf. The theater has always known this, as have European novelists. In science fiction, Robert Heinlein has known this from the start of his career, as did H. G. Wells. Heinlein's and Wells's characters always need to know what the reader needs to know as the story progresses. The first person subjectivity of Heinlein's characters enables them to relate to the reader on any level, intellectual as well as emotional. I'm not saying that other writers do not do this at all. I am saying that few authors have the self-assurance to practice ideas in fiction and make a seamless fabric out of the effort. Too many never get over the feeling that it is always a case of slipping in the ideas.
Sf film tries to leave them out. Sf writers who have worked in Hollywood tell the same story too often. They do a script which tries to be good drama, good fiction, and good science fiction—leaving the visual expression to the director and visual effects teams—and the result too often is a rewrite designed to reduce the whole thing to the primary emotions of love, hate, pleasure, pain and fear— above all fear and violence for their own sake. Everything deserves stimulation except the brain. In recent years we have seen human sexuality win its case in the cinema; one wonders, can the brain be far behind?
The infuriating fact is that often many efforts achieve beautiful visual results, things which are a contribution to the visual aspect of film, so much so that critics like John Baxter retreat into the visual as the only relevant point of discussion. The king has a great tan, which only helps emphasize that he has no clothes. Parallel attitudes in written science fiction are those which gravitate toward style, ideas, or action at the expense of other things. One might just as well insist on breathing by itself, hearing or tasting by itself. Even radio, which could imagine anything for its listeners, gave strong attention to other fictional virtues. Advanced gourmets insist on the total experience of a restaurant, from the decor to the excellence of the food. To be fair, all this is the inevitable result of different people being good at different things. But there is little excuse for being unaware of the problem on a critical level. Again, very few have made the effort to think about the problem very much, much less try to put the pieces together in a constructive way.
The amount of mystification present in much of the writing about film tends to discourage lucid thought with a flourish of technicalities and specialized knowledge. I have high admiration for those skilled in the aspects of preparing a film, and the highest regard for those who make the visual image itself real and individual before my eyes. I understand the tendency to be involved with what one does best. My point lies not with the improvement of the image maker's art—that is up to him—but with a specific answer to the problem of making a good science fiction film. We know that it can be done and should be done; we know that the specter of ideas as a problem can be put to rest, in the sense that Baxter raises it—as an inherently insoluble one. We know that the image makers are more than up to it, even in the realm of ideas. The art of montage, for example, can produce a sequence of images which can forcefully elicit thoughts and ideas, as well as feelings, from the viewer.
A good science fiction film must be made, therefore, with craftsmanlike attention to its dramatic and filmic possibilities— its fictional qualities (drama, character, conflict, resolution, etc.), its science fiction possibilities (ideas which must be embodied in characters and visual images).
Ironically, sf film should have some advantage over written sf, because it can show backgrounds and people living in them in a self-explanatory way. Strange, also, that films based on the lives of the great inventors and scientists, like Edison, Curie, and Pasteur, are not afraid to communicate ideas concerning what these people did. Why is it that sf film makers lack the confidence to do the same thing consistently in sf film? Does reality lend authority where imagination and extrapolation seem contrived?
All that can truthfully be concluded is that making a good sf film, much less a great one, is extremely difficult, no matter how easily the problem and solution are resolved on paper. The work demands conviction and familiarity with the things peculiar to science fiction on a level of working confidence, as well as filmic skill. It is a difficult but not impossible task, contrary to the thesis of John Baxter's book. Over-impressed with the difficulties and past successes, he shifts the debate away from the hard, demanding things, to the comfortable areas of existing achievement not peculiar to sf cinema, but characteristic of all cinema: visual skill. He diverts our attention away from what is possible and still remains to be done in sf film.
Part of the problem that conceptually mature science fiction has had in America exists in the problem of communicating ideas. Ultimately this kind of problem lies deeply embedded in the educational character of a people, which expresses itself in the popular attitudes toward intellectuals, scientists, and others who deal in ideas. These attitudes have been communicated to those who back films, and many sf films express these prejudices. The circle closes and new audiences learn these prejudices again.
But there are ways of entertaining the mind, even the popular one. Film makers ignore a number of things in the popular audience. People are curious (a self-educational quality), especially if they know they can find out. People are game players. They like to solve things. Television programs like Mission Impossible and Hawaii Five-O, crude as they are in many ways, are filled with complex ideas unpretentiously explained. For example, in one episode of Hawaii Five-O the viewer learned a few things about how agencies use computers in stock transactions; and the information was vital to the human problem and to the enjoyment of the program, as well as satisfying in itself. The computer was shown as a tool, a working aid to be used or misused by human beings, while in sci
ence fiction film it is often the monster come back in new garb to plague us. No one is against a menace, provided that it is not there only to have one, but is essential to the possibility being explored.
For example, Colossus: The Forbin Project, is really about the emergence of an artificial intelligence, a person in form different from us, in what should have been a tool with no subjectivity of its own. Its conflict with us is incidental to its education and growth. The beauty of the film is that it shows us the computer's daily life and gradual reaching out into the world as the human characters try to explain what is happening. It is vital that they find out (and the audience too) because Colossus does not see the difference between a peace that is imposed on the world, and one that is chosen, the difference between enforcing the right thing and having the world freely accept it. Given this misconception of the moral life (where did Colossus learn it?), it logically proceeds to use the means at its disposal to enforce it. This is not such a strange notion. Our concept of law says that we must have a government of laws, not men. Colossus resembles the idea of judgment and law enforcement made practically incorruptible and inexorable, much like the giant police robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), from the short story "Farewell to the Master" by Harry Bates. Gorth, like Colossus, will not wait for men to behave. He will make it impossible for them to misbehave—a guardian angel who would enforce certain limits much in the same way the natural world imposes limits on our lives, while we go on within it. This idea occurs in Asimov's robot stories, where the built-in Three Laws of Robotics resemble Kant's Categorical Imperative, or perhaps even Moses' Ten Commandments. But the interesting problem with Colossus and Gorth is that we cannot know, or guarantee, that they are like this or like many error-prone specimens of humanity. More likely, Colossus is our true child, logical from bad assumptions and inconsistent at the same time, while Gorth is the conservative's ideal solution to the governing of an imperfect man. What is delightful about both films is that their makers were not afraid to show a conflict of ideas and make them accessible through sf films, which are also genuine science fiction.
Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow Page 6