Forbidden Planet 1956
TheLiteraryBrain
Caliban as 'id' became a palpable thread in twentieth-century psychoanalytic interpretations of The Tempest, a notion more dramatically presented in the 1956 science-fiction film, Forbidden Planet. Now a cult classic, this postwar film transports its Prospero figure to Altair-IV, a distant planet, where Professor Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) continues his scientific investigations, builds robots (Robby, the film's Ariel) and raises his daughter Altaira (the Miranda figure played by Anne Francis). When a spaceship from Earth invades the planet, Altaira falls in love with its handsome captain (Leslie Nielsen), but their romance is threatened by an invisible force that nearly destroys the spaceship and kills several of its crew. The dramatic finale reveals that the mayhem is caused by the Professor's own inner psyche, projected on to an electromagnetic force (Caliban), which implements Morbius's repressed anger at the man who would take away his daughter and jealousy at her love for another man. Only with the destruction of Professor Morbius can the calibanic force be quelled".
Forbidden Planet is now regarded as one of the most influential films in the history of sci-fi cinema, and not simply within the United States. One must ask a couple of basic questions: first of all, what does Shakespeare have to do with science fiction? And secondly, why The Tempest of all plays? Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy dictated how we were supposed to interpret the world around us. Science as we know it today did not exist, and its first great representatives were persecuted for trying to take away from us our earth-centered cosmos (Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei). All this is a far away from the universe revealed by Newton and Einstein that today provides science fiction with most of its setting and subject matter. Science has become our most powerful and trusted instrument for interpreting reality, while religious and mythological thinking are constantly being attacked by rationalists denying the very existence of God. To say that science fiction is in essence a religious literature is an overstatement, but one that contains truth. Science fiction is a uniquely modern incarnation of an ancient tradition: the tale of wonder. Tales of the gods who inhabit other worlds and sometimes descend to visit us, tales of humans traveling to the abode of the gods, tales of the uncanny: all exist now as science fiction". We are not saying that the mythological tale, the traveler's tale, medieval hagiography and other ancient forms of storytelling are science fiction. We are simply suggesting that in their time they satisfied the same aesthetic and emotional needs sci-fi satisfies today. One of the best ways of generating the sense of wonder is to set a story in an exotic place. Between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, the New World and the African continent represented the site of England's sense of wonder. They were the frontier of civilization, peopled by savages with strange, amazing, often horrifying customs, by impossible creatures made of materials other than flesh and blood, and by powers men could only guess at. Shakespeare found in Africa and the New World the perfect fantastic landscape, it was to seventeenth-century Italy that he turned to in order to give us the perfect fantastic and adventurous plot. Renaissance Italy was, for the average English citizen, a place of danger and secret, a sophisticated, violent geo-political scene of constantly shifting alliances and endlessly renewing intrigue. The island is, in short, the perfect place to experience and exercise our sense of wonder, precisely because it has no name and has never really been explored. It is the territory of fantasy, and as such it is at the same time nowhere (except inside us) and everywhere (that is, anywhere our imagination sets up shop at any given time). Everyone leaves the island in some way enriched by his/her experiences, or at least, in the case of Caliban, Antonio, and Sebastian, not harmed by the logical consequences of their actions. In Shakespeare's play, and in a relevant cross-section of scifi texts as well, the contemplation of the wonderful and the miraculous seems to possess a special quality of kindness, of mercifulness towards our human failings.
Scriptwriter Hume and director Fred McLeod Wilcox wanted to make a film based on The Tempest that could preserve the play's sense of wonder, together with a few other themes the two happen to be keen on. What better way of doing so than placing Prospero's island in outer space and enlarging it a little bit? Instead of a lonely patch of earth in the middle of the Mediterranean we now have Altair IV, so called because it is the fourth nearest planet to its parent star, Altair (one), and instead of a wooden brig being tossed by the elements we have a saucer-shaped starship calmly traveling toward the planet at an appreciable multiple of the speed of light.
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Prospero is now Doctor Morbius (two), a philologist stranded on Altair IV with his daughter Altaira when the survey ship of which he was a member, the Bellerophon, is destroyed with all its crew by an invisible force of unknown nature. The Ferdinand character is now Commander Adams, captain of the "United Planets cruiser C-57-D, now more than a year out from Earth base on a special mission to the planetary system of the great main sequence star, Altair." The mission is, of course, to rescue the crew of the Bellerophon, from whom Earth has not received a single transmission in nineteen years. We have the island and the characters. We have also retrieved our previously lost sense of wonder, and naturally there will be lots of incredible things happening on the planet.
The sense of wonder is not enough to define the field of science fiction with sufficient accuracy. What else do we need? The key factor in his separation of science fiction from other different but similar genres, like fantasy and horror, lies in his use of the twin elements of estrangement and cognition; estrangement is an imaginative agent that excites the reader's sense of wonder by presenting him with a reality set that is radically different from the one he or she is used to. Depending on the work of fiction one reads or sees, the level of estrangement of this alternative reality set varies, ranging between two extremes: a single new element in an otherwise normal setting on the one hand, and a thoroughly altered environment -- complete with a different timeline -- on the other. As we have seen, however, this element alone is not sufficient to fully distinguish SF from fantasy or the mythological tale, and it needs the second term of the pair, cognition which is the process of acquiring knowledge and of reason. 'Cognition' is, in fact, frequently the main subject of sf: the investigation, for instance, of possible social systems or new forms of science. The act of cognition, of rationally making sense of -and coming to terms with -- the estranging elements, increases the sense of wonder inherent in the former (SF), whereas it destroys the pleasure of reading the latter (Fantasy). Describing The Tempest as a form of proto-sci-fi would be too far-fetched. In Shakespeare's time, the term "tempest" represented "the alchemical term for the boiling of the alembic to remove impurities and transform the base metal into purest gold; if we see Prospero's goal as the transformation of fallen human nature -- Caliban, Antonio, Sebastian and Alonso- from a condition of sinfulness to a higher level of morality, the play's episodes mirror the alchemical process". We could therefore see The Tempest as a prototypical representation of a pseudo-scientific experiment, a process of cognition employing estranging factors with rationally conceived means for rationally conceived ends. If The Tempest represents a proto-experiment, it necessarily follows that Prospero is a protoscientist. "Prospero is often described as a theurgist, a practiser of 'white magic', a rigorous system of philosophy that allows the magician 'to energize in the gods or control other beneficent spiritual intelligences in the working of miraculous effects.' The antithesis of theurgy is 'goety' or 'black magic', its evil practitioner produces magic results by disordering the sympathetic relationships of nature or by employing to wicked ends the powers of irrational spirits". While the evil magician uses the powers of the irrational, the good theurgist studies a rationally constructed "rigorous system of philosophy" that enables him to work with nature, not against it.
In The Tempest, irrationality (epitomized by Caliban, Sebastian and Antonio) is evil, rationality (Prospero, Ariel, Gonzalo, Ferdinand) is good. The same kind of conflict between morally upright rational attitudes and the evils of an irrational behavior features prominently in Forbidden Planet where the director and scriptwriter link the twin elements of estrangement and cognition to Freud's theories, they used this strange hybrid as the carrier wave for a psychoanalytical treatment of the clash between the two conflicting sides in the Janus face of human nature: the Apollonian, rational worldview of the conscious mind and the Dionysian, rabidly-instinctual-and-proud-of-it irrationality of the unconscious.
Forbidden Planet is already set in the future, which of course is extraordinary for the audience but not for the characters. This situation, together with the matter-of-fact attitude the crew of the starship displays towards such exotic elements as faster-than-light drive, teleportation and beam weapons, further excites our sense of wonder. The perception of a plausible, rational environment is strengthened by the characters' use of well-structured 20th -century terminology to indicate hierarchies within the command structure of the ship, engineering problems, physical principles and biological factors. The behavior of the starship's crew is exactly what one would expect from the crew of a vessel on a rescue mission (three), and their reactions to what happens on Altair IV is a more than educated extrapolation of what a normal group of people would do in a similar situation.
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When Commander Adams tells Morbius that the cruiser is there to rescue him, he is warned by the doctor to avoid landing on the planet. Morbius appreciates their concern for his safety but he is all right, thank you very much. This time, Prospero wants to remain in exile. Who will not be all right if they land on Altair IV, they are informed, are the Captain and his crew. As Adams and his two highest-ranking officers finally meet Morbius, they discover that the only living beings on the planet are himself and his daughter. Everybody else is dead. The force that destroyed them is -- in an interesting inversion of Ariel's power- invisible, incomprehensible, unstoppable, and soon begins to attack the starship, killing many of its crew (four).
This force is something nobody is able to understand - - not the audience, of course, but not the characters either. The hunt for the truth is on then, and in the way Adams and his men set about finding it, Forbidden Planet reveals its fundamental nature. Footprints and energy signatures are examined, even the readings of the instruments connected with the cruiser's protective energy barrier at the time of the creature's attacks, while Adams engages in some old-fashioned pumping of witnesses for information. In the process, he manages to fall in love with Altaira (four), who naturally reciprocates. It is Adams's tactics that yield the best results.
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When he and his officers enter Morbius's inner sanctum, the doctor is finally forced to show them his discovery (five): a great number of planet-ized generators built by an unimaginably evolved alien race, the Krell. After a million years of continuous evolution, the Krell were annihilated in one single night, just as they were on the verge of an evolutionary breakthrough that would have allowed them to leave their baser instincts and physical bodies behind. By connecting their minds to the generators and tapping the well-nigh infinite energies these machines were able to muster, they would have become pure psychic energy, sheer quanta of unadulterated rationality free of the physical constraints of a messy, inefficient body as well as of the irrationality of the unconscious, the ultimate rationalist's dream. Predictably enough, their murderer is the same force that destroyed the Bellerophon and is now busy trying to slaughter Adams's crew. The final revelation comes as a result of yet another act of cognition: the ship's medical officer and Adams pool their mental efforts and discover that the Krell were annihilated by their own subconscious. As the monstrous generators were connected to the minds of every Krell individual, their "id" recognized the threat of annihilation they posed and protected itself, using the unimaginable energies produced by the machines to destroy everyone on the planet. Of course, when all the Krell died their subconscious died with them, but now there is Morbius (six). During their first meeting, the doctor had told Adams that he was the only one of the Bellerophon's crew who did not want to leave the planet, owing to his enthusiasm for the alien artifacts, an enthusiasm that the others did not share. The truth was a little different: the doctor had been the first to stumble on the discovery, and had been quick to connect his mind to the generators (which, of course, were still in perfect working order); what he had found was nothing less than the combined power of a dozen stars, all at his disposal. The Krell were an entire population, conceivably numbering several billions, and their minds, Adams and his men are told, were immeasurably more advanced and capable than ours. Yet they were destroyed in one single night. What would happen if one mere human being were to receive all that power in one single gulp, without intermediaries or sharers? As far as Morbius' conscious mind is concerned, nothing beyond a great enthusiasm for an unprecedented scientific discovery, and possibly a strong conviction of the need to advocate its careful study in the strongest possible terms. For the doctor's "id," however, it is a different story altogether. One does not share power, plain and simple. In the course of our all too-often-barbaric history, we have come to learn this lesson quite well, almost always at a terrible price.
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Translations: Italian - Spanish
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