Category: War of the Worlds

I’ll Explain Later…

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging:

In a certain sense, it’s because the documentary is so strong that it leaves me just a bit unsatisfied. Because, frankly, I can look up how World War I went.  “A Brief History of World War I Only With Martians Instead of Germans,” is merely clever; I find myself much more fascinated by the question, “How does the rest of the twentieth century go if we get Alien Tech in 1918?”

Unfortunately, that’s not a question that particularly interests The Great Martian War. Fortunately, I’ve got a bunch of adaptations left to go…

It is June 28, 1914. Yesterday, boxer Jack Johnson won by decision after 20 rounds with Frank Moran in Paris, retaining the World Heavyweight title. He’d eventually lose it to Jess Willard by knockout in Havana the following year. Manchester, NH is rebuilding after a fire downtown. The 23-part serial The Million Dollar Mystery starring Florence La Badie has recently opened in theaters, as has Cecil B. DeMille’s The Only Son, and an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first Tarzan novel, Tarzan of the Apes has just been published, as has Baum’s Tik-Tok of Oz. Speaker of the House Champ Clark vows to vote in favor of women’s suffrage when it’s put to vote in Missouri. The referendum will fail in November, amid fears that female voters will push for prohibition, based on the fact that this is pretty much exactly what happens. Missouri’s legislature will grant women the vote late in 1919, which won’t make a lick of difference because the 20th amendment will give it to them anyway before the next election. A time-traveler from the future (I assume, since the idea of both advertorials and anti-vaxxers being native to the 1910s makes me sad) posts an advertorial in the New York Tribune claiming that vaccination is more dangerous than smallpox and tetanus. Teddy Roosevelt refuses to follow his doctor’s advice and give up politics for four months’ bed-rest to treat his malaria, though he’ll relent the next day and agree to take a day off. The Aquitania, Ruritania and Lusitania are all departing New York in the next month on round-the-world trips starting at $474.83.

In Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is assassinated by Yugoslav Nationalist Gavrilo Princip. Through a series of confusing, ill-conceived and boring mutual defense pacts, this leads to Germany invading France.

The United States, of course, remains neutral, since they’re far more concerned with preparing for the immanent return of invaders from Mars.

Some time in the first quarter of 2012, I managed to get the script that automagically makes newly released movie trailers appear in my mythtv working, and it dutifully informed me that there was an animated film coming out that I probably wouldn’t be interested in — some kind of dieselpunk alternate-universe war film that looked like it was pretty much World War I with mecha. I like me some giant robots, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not a huge fan or war films per se. Or dieselpunk. I’d probably have skipped this one, but then it showed the title. War of the Worlds: Goliath.

So I guess I’m in. Goliath is a 2012 animated film produced and directed by Joe Pearson (It’s kinda weird how the name ‘Pearson’ keeps coming up in reference to War of the Worlds…), set during World War I in a world where the events of the HG Wells novel took place in 1899. There’s an obvious parallel to The Great Martian War, but here, World War I itself happens the historical way (at first), with the alien invasion as backstory. War of the Worlds: Goliath, therefore is very much the thing I said I’d have preferred to see. Sorta.

Goliath is also, oddly enough, a bit of a reunion for the cast of Highlander the Series: the voice cast includes Jim Byrnes (Joe Dawson), Elizabeth Gracen (Amanda), Peter Wingfield (Methos) and Adrian Paul (Duncan MacLeod) remember that name. For that matter, screenwriter David Abramowitz was the supervising producer for Highlander the Series and its spin-off Highlander: The Raven. Joe Pearson, whose work has been entirely in animation, isn’t connected to the Highlander TV series directly, but he did work with Abramowitz on the 2007 anime Highlander:The Search for Vengeance.

We’re treated to a sepia-colored montage of life in 1899 intercut with Martian spaceships approaching the Earth as Luka Kuncevic gives us an arrangement of Jeff Wayne’s “Forever Autumn” (Best known for its cover by Justin Hayward for Wayne’s musical adaptation of War of the Worlds, which we’ll talk about eventually) with so much autotuning it sounds like a cyberman is singing it. I mean, it’s clearly intentional; for some reason Kuncevic thought that sounding like a mid-70s robot would make a 1969 Lego jingle sound more apropos to the turn of the century. A longer version plays over the end credits, and at least the electric guitar part is nice.

Post-credits, we open in Leeds, in 1899, where young Eric Wells (Because it’s contractually required for 2 out of 3 War of the Worlds adaptations to name a character after HG Wells) gets his parents killed by panicking in the face of a Martian tripod rather than running for cover. I know that’s putting it bluntly, but this movie is not really big on subtlety. And besides, I have seen exactly this setup about a hundred million times. Future-hero is confronted by a powerful enemy as a child, panics, dads rushes back to save him and is killed. This haunts the kid his entire life and will be the specter of self-doubt he must overcome in order to unlock his full potential and avenge his parents when the villains return. It’s the backstory for Wonder-Red in The Wonderful 101. It’s the backstory for Simba in The Lion King. It’s the backstory for Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride. It’s the backstory for Samus Aran in Metroid. Hell, it’s the backstory for the Goddamned Batman. It is even the backstory for Captain Power. I’m not saying it’s a bad trope per se, but the depths of it are pretty well plumbed out by now, especially if you’re not going to give us any real payoff for it. Also, the deaths are needlessly gruesome, showing their flesh burn away and their skeletons and viscera twist as they are reduced to ash. That’s going to be a recurring motif; most battles have at least one money shot of someone getting vaporized but good.

The 1899 tripod looks to have taken some inspiration from Henrique Alves Corrêa’s illustrations for the 1906 French edition of the novel. The general shape is somewhat similar to a water tower, with a barrel-shaped body and wide-brimmed roof on long, stilt-like legs. There’s two large windows in the front, positioned like eyes. A cylindrical extension projects forward just below the main body, which you’d think was the heat ray, but the heat-ray is a separate unit, slung lower, in a position that kind of makes it look like the tripod’s naughty bits. Actually, the curve of the roof strongly resembles a Brodie Helmet, and when combined with the large window-eyes and the cylindrical extension, the combined effect is to make the tripod’s main body look uncannily like the head of a World War I soldier, kitted out for the trenches in helmet and gas mask. My assumption is that this is intentional given the premise, but there’s some things later on that make that seem weird. The tripod, as would be expected, conveniently drops dead before it can fire its green heat ray a third time and kill our nominal protagonist before the story even gets started.

The animation in Goliath is interesting. Like I said back in Gandahar, I’m no expert on animation. Goliath was animated in Malaysia, which has a pretty robust animation industry, but not one I have any other experience with. The thing it looks the most like is the 1990s DCAU stuff — the animated Batman and Superman in particular. Everyone’s got these ridiculous comic-book proportions with gigantic chests, Lenoesque chins and small waists. But there’s also elements that remind me a lot of Aeon Flux: anything gory, like the deaths of Eric’s parents, but there’s also something about the character of Jennifer Carter that reminds me a lot of Peter Chung’s work. The film is 3D computer animated, and the cel shading here is first rate; I’d at first assumed it was a hybrid animation style, using CGI for the mecha and traditional animation for people.The animation is absolutely fantastic. I won’t call it “beautiful”, though, because an awful lot of it is very deliberately ugly.

There’s also a whole lot of detail in the backgrounds, such as the New York City of 1914, where our story resumes. One obvious downside to setting a story in New York City in 1914 is that it doesn’t actually look that much like New York City: you’re missing all that fantastic Gothic Revival and Art Deco stuff. Pretty much the only things you’ll see in Goliath‘s New York that really shouts “New York” are the Flatiron building and something I’m not going to mention yet for dramatic effect. Instead of the familiar skyscrapers of modern New York, the city is instead decorated with numerous statues memorializing the Martian invasion, which all tend to depict humanity as having a greater hand in the defeat than it did, soldiers with heavy arms standing astride felled tripods or skewering squid-like Martians. New York is an exceedingly smoky place. For that matter, just about everything in this movie belches huge amounts of diesel exhaust, which is presumably historically accurate, but is strangely at odds with the technological motif.

Eric Wells, now grown into a barrel-chested adult, rides a suspension train that runs down Fifth Avenue to the headquarters of ARES, Earth’s unrealistically ethnically diverse “Allied Resistance Earth Squadron”. ARES is run by Secretary of War Teddy Roosevelt, Russian General Sergei Kushnirov (Who is not a real person, but is played by Rob Middleton, who hasn’t been in anything since the ’80s, but does have one credit I recognized: he played the monster that lived in Dorian’s basement in the first episode of the last season of Blake’s 7), and Nikola Tesla. It’s made up of the best and brightest of the world’s various armies, putting aside things like racism, sexism, or the fact that the world is full of countries which all hate each other. The men and women of ARES put all that nationalism aside to work together in the name of their common humanity. Except for the Germans, who are kind of assholes. Well, mostly. Ace pilot Manfred von Richtofen seems like a mensch, even if he did make a point of showing off by buzzing the train earlier.

Roosevelt has some troubling news for ARES: Mars is once again in opposition, and Tesla believes he’s detected evidence that the Martians are launching a renewed attack. To make matters worse, half of ARES’ soldiers have been recalled to Europe in anticipation of a war between the great powers over there.

Yes. World War I is still gearing up to happen over in Europe. Now, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve defended works of science fiction for pulling the whole “Aliens invade in the ’70s and yet the ’90s are superficially identical to the ones the viewer lived through,” thing. There’s a lot of people who take issue with the idea that, post-alien-invasion, humanity would get back to their lives rather than instantly evolving into spangly space-clothes wearing Science Fiction Characters, and I don’t think that it necessarily follows that the absolute knowledge of the existence of hostile extraterrestrials would have a huge impact on the day-to-day lives of most people, for the same reason that the discovery that the Earth goes ’round the sun didn’t. During the invasion, yeah, sure, things are very different. But once the Martians are finished dying, the cows still got to be milked and the lawn’s still got to be mowed, and there’s no per se reason — provided that the invasion is done-in-one and there isn’t continuing contact with the aliens — that it wouldn’t be handled exactly the same way as every other kind of large-scale disaster, like an earthquake or a hurricane, that comes out of nowhere, shakes things up, then leaves.

But this still feels wrong. Not that Europe wouldn’t still be itching to get its war on — Europe had been itching to get its war on pretty much continuously for centuries, and it seems hopelessly optimistic to me to assume that Kaiser Wilhelm and Franz Joseph and George V and Raymond Poincaré would all set aside the fact that their countries all hated each other just because there were Martians now. No, that bit I’m okay with — it even sort of works to have this sense that ARES was assembled immediately after the war out of a sudden feeling of a common brotherhood of man and the need for mutual defense, but after a few years, the old rivalries and hatreds resurfaced. Rather, it seems awfully forced that, after the destruction of much of the world’s military and a tenth of its population (Literal decimation!), everyone would be ready in fifteen years. We’ve already seen this is a different world than the real 1914; Eric here is the commander of an ARES tripod, built by Tesla based on his studies of alien tech. Humanity has heat rays and giant mecha. And you’re telling me that Europe had time to put their shattered cities back together and raise a new generation of soldiers to replace the ones lost in the Martian war and build new battle fleets using an entirely new kind of technology (Because seriously, if heat ray-equipped giant mechs are a thing that exists, are you seriously going to start a war without some of your own?), and this didn’t push everyone’s schedule back a few years?

General Kushnirov believes that the key to being prepared for the Martians’ return lies in their new “Achilles-Class” Tripod. Because when you’re building what is, essentially, a tank complicated by the fact that instead of rolling on treads, it has to accomplish the much more difficult feat of walking on legs without falling, you naturally assume it’s a good idea to name it after a guy who is famous for being killed by injuring his ankle. It’s one of the laws of military naming symbolism, like how you have to call your high-altitude craft “Icarus” or your indestructible spaceship “Titanic 2”, or your physics-defying ship “The SS. Fuck you, Newton”.

Having been established as the main character, command of the first Achilles-class Tripod off the line, dubbed “Goliath”, naturally goes to Eric, on account of his performance in simulations and also because his team meets Haim Saban’s requirements for diversity among a five-man special forces team. The British Wells is accompanied by an American Lieutenant, Jennifer Carter, because the US has female combat troops in 1914 but this complete social upheaval didn’t deter World War I from happening (Remember, in the real world, women in the US don’t have the vote yet); Sergeant Abraham Douglas from Canada, because Canada has desegregated their armed forces by 1914 but this complete social upheaval didn’t deter World War I from happening; Lieutenant Raja Iskandar from British Malaya (Present-day Malaysia, where, as noted, the film was made); and Corporal Patrick O’Brien from Ireland. Wells, of course, is an enlightened Englishman who has no problem serving with a woman, an Irishman, a black guy and a southeast Asian (I mean, I guess it helps that the white British guy is the one who’s in charge), and neither does anyone else. Except the Germans, who are kind of jerks.

Everyone heads down to the local pub before the next day’s war games, where O’Brien tells Roosevelt that he isn’t on speaking terms with his IRA brother and is loyal to the British Crown, then promptly sneaks out to meet his IRA brother to explain that the impending invasion will delay their plans to steal a bunch of heat rays to send back to Ireland for use in terrorism against the British. His brother threatens to kill him if he backs out of the plan, and makes a big point of how he is perfectly willing to screw over humanity in the face of unstoppable Martian invasion if he can sate his desire to kill the English. The brother, by the way, is voiced by Mark Sheppard. I guess after The X-Files, Sliders, Star Trek, Firefly, 24, The Middleman, Battlestar Galactica, Chuck, Warehouse 13, Supernatural and Doctor Who, he reckoned he needed one more sci-fi-cult-franchise to get the free sub.

Back at the bar, the Germans try to start shit. Richtofen unsuccessfully tries to calm things down, and we are almost treated to Teddy Roosevelt getting into a fist fight with the Red Baron. But things settle down when Kushnirov shows up to deliver the news of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, and the resulting orders for the European ARES members to pack up and go home. Eric gives just about the most cliched speech in the world, which inexplicably convinces all of ARES to commit treason en masse and stay in New York, Richtofen even asserting, “Deutchland can kiss my ass.”

That night, Eric stays up late tinkering with Goliath, in order that he can have a tender scene with Jennifer, the child of wealth and privilege who ran off and joined the army to get away from her controlling father, so that she can tell him that his parents’ death isn’t his fault and because the movie is shipping these two, even though it can not spare the time away from mech battles to actually sell it. The next morning, a Martian scouting party attacks the war games. The new tripods are larger and sleeker in design, with more powerful heat rays that can cripple the large Achilles-class or destroy the smaller ARES tripods with a single shot. ARES is victorious against the small force, but the victory comes at a substantial cost.

ARES tripods are markedly smaller than their Martian counterparts, and boxier. They look pretty much like tanks with legs, a la Metal Gear. They’re armed with both red-beamed heat rays and more conventional weapons which, as in the novel, can fell a Martian tripod, but only with concentrated fire, a good deal of luck, and a distraction to keep the tripod from incinerating it first. Portable backpack-sized heat rays also exist. General Kushnirov commands a large “leviathan” airship, armed with its own giant wave motion canon dealie which they don’t whip out until the last scene.

After the battle, O’Brien visits his brother, to reiterate that the IRA does not consider an alien invasion a good reason to change their plans. Sean O’Brien declares his brother dead to him, then drops out of the story altogether because this part is boring. The next battle we see is implied to be the next day, but it makes far more sense for it to be some time later. Richtofen defends the leviathan from Martian flying machines while humming Ride of the Valkyries and pulling off maneuvers which, unless Wings 2: Aces High lied to me, aren’t actually possible in a World War I triplane (In their defense, on my second watching, there’s a bit earlier in the movie which suggests that Richtofen’s plane has been retrofitted with something akin to an afterburner).

Goliath is disabled in battle and Eric’s team evacuates. They randomly meet a somewhat deranged militiaman who keeps his wife’s dismembered finger in a pouch around his neck. He leads them to an alien-occupied power plant, then conveniently sacrifices himself as a distraction. They mention in passing that human power plants are based on salvaged alien tech, which is odd since we have not seen a damned thing that doesn’t run on fossil fuels. They rescue some captured humans from the Martian larder, though not before we get to see one of the prisoners get deep-throated to death by an alien bendy-straw. There’s an interesting level of effort here to keep the aliens themselves close to the book: physically, they’re sort of squid-like, enormous, leathery heads with exposed brains, a beak-like mouth, no body to speak of, living off the blood of their victims.

The power plant has been converted to a factory where the Martians are building a kind of dreadnought, a large flying wing that I assume is an homage to the pointless inclusion of Northrup YB-49 stock footage as a bit of spectacle in George Pal’s 1953 film adaptation. Everyone is shocked by it, and it’s clearly meant to be the first time they’ve seen this terrifying weapon. Which is odd, since they were mentioned in passing a few scenes earlier when talking about enemy troop movements. They blow up the plant and the flying wing therein, but it turns out that this is all part of an elaborate Martian feint, to draw the bulk of ARES out west while the Martian armada converges on Manhattan. Which technically makes the whole scene with them risking life and limb to destroy the Martian Wing pointless, but at least Eric gets laid for his trouble, as Jennifer jumps him later that night while he’s repairing Goliath.

And then, weirdly, the main characters kinda drop out of the story. Not entirely — they’ll turn up for a line or two — but once the action switches to the battle in Manhattan, they’re really no longer our main characters. Roosevelt’s defense of ARES HQ becomes the focus of the story now, and the whole rest of the film is just balls-to-the-wall action. Teddy Roosevelt brandishing a machine gun, shooting down Martian fighters; two ARES airships pulling out their giant heat-rays to attack a one of those Martian Wings (which knocks the Statue of Liberty off her pedestal, in accordance with the regulations mandating the destruction of the Statue of Liberty by any aliens and/or kaiju who attack New York City in a movie); a zepplin chase through the streets of Manhattan. The leviathan is damaged, and a lieutenant we’ve never seen before starts to fall toward the conflagration below. Kushnirov catches him and struggles to pull him back up, but as the general is the only person who could get to the controls to right the craft, the younger officer deliberately pulls free and falls to his death, but not before revealing to the audience that he’s Kushnirov’s son and only remaining family after the last war. Kushnirov wins the battle by crashing the leviathan into the Martian ship.

With the battle, but not the war, won, we close on Secretary Roosevelt giving a speech to the survivors in the ruins of ARES HQ, promising vengeance for their fallen comrades and to eventually take the fight to Mars.

War of the Worlds: Goliath is… Weird. 

Goliath is also bizarrely gruesome. They love these scenes of soldiers being shredded by heat rays. Even the Martians get a little of it: Raja dispatches one with his knife and is left covered in glowing green blood (Remember this). And when the leviathan crashes into the Wing at the end, its prowl smashes through the windshield and impales the pilot through the eye. I can not fault this movie visually. But that is just about the only thing I can’t fault. The plot is… Not so much a “plot” as a concept. The characters have some promise, but they don’t spend any time with them. I appreciate the attempt to have the characters be more than just ticking off boxes in an ethnic diversity matrix, but it doesn’t amount to anything: O’Brien’s Fenian sympathies boil down to two scenes of Adrian Paul and Mark Sheppard arguing which aren’t connected to anything else in the movie at all. Jennifer’s issues with her father are mentioned exactly twice. The extent of the characterization for Abraham Douglas (whose name sounds like it was generated by the algorithm they used to name black sitcom characters in the ’70s) is for him to mention that he’s got two daughters he’s worried about. We see the tail end of Raja performing the Salat, and there’s a scene that should go somewhere there when O’Brien and Raja talk about their shared status — they’re both from cultures that are unwillingly under British rule. But it doesn’t go anywhere. There’s no real direction to the plot, it’s just a bunch of seemingly random incidents that all take place under the blanket of this war.

I came into this from the question, “What sort of world would we get a few decades after the Martians invade.”  The answer they give us is… incomplete. It is a different world — they’ve got tripedal tanks and suspension railways and the Statue of Liberty has a sword. But it’s just a motif, really. A little visual flavor. Europe’s still about to explode into a profoundly stupid war for profoundly stupid reasons. All the same people are in all the same places doing all the same things (Except for Roosevelt, who apparently did not seek a second term in this universe). There’s potential for something in the fact that Eric Wells commands an racially integrated coed unit, but no one ever says anything about it or takes more than a cursory glance at the implications of that.

You know what it feels like? An abridgment. This feels like when a long-running anime series gets condensed down to a two-hour OVA. In fact, it feels more than anything I can think of like the Family Home Entertainment VHS abridgments of Robotech, that would grind six episodes of the cartoon down to a 45-minute video. There’s so much promise here, but it’s like we’re only seeing the highlights reel. Characters basically enter, give us one scene to establish themselves, then leave. There should be more. Like hours more to cover the scope of what we’re seeing. We should see that whole relationship between Patrick and Sean O’Brien (And there should be a recurring threat from Sean’s partner who wants to kill Patrick outright for his betrayal). We should see a relationship between Jennifer and Eric, something more than just “It’s hinted he likes her in scene 4 and then she out of nowhere decides to bone him inside Goliath’s cockpit in scene 8”. Those prisoners they rescue from the power plant — they should go somewhere. Probably, they should end up having to stay on the leviathan for some length of time. There should be skirmishes and minor battles with the Martians. We should see Tesla studying bits of salvaged Martian technology. There should be some kind of buildup and backstory with Kushnirov and his son, rather than plot-bombing us with his son’s identity a second before you kill him. And the decision to make the climax of the movie center around the battle between the leviathan and the Martian Wing, rather than, y’know, Goliath is utterly incomprehensible; it’s a fine scene, but it shouldn’t be the climax — it should happen about five minutes before the climax, with their sacrifice buying the actual main characters their chance to deal the finishing blow to the attacking army. This movie feels incomplete: it’s insubstantial, and yet you can almost feel like there’s something substantial this has been carved out of.

Actually, Robotech. Hm. You know? This movie feels an awful lot like Robotech. Joe Pearson was a personal friend of Carl Macek, who converted two largely unrelated and one totally unrelated anime into the original three-season Robotech saga. They’d worked together in the ’80s (Not on Robotech, though Pearson does get a “special thanks” credit in 2013’s Robotech: Love Live Alive, which I briefly mentioned in relation to the Captain Power Training Videos). There are definitely parallels. An international force defending Earth using new technology developed from studying salvaged alien tech? The big ship with the big honkin’ gun being commanded by a Russian? I’m sure you’ll find parallels to lots of Mecha anime and it just happens that Robotech is the one I’m most familiar with. Goliath is very straightforwardly “Let’s do a standard ’80s style Giant Mecha anime only set during World War I as a sequel to War of the Worlds.” I would not mind watching a Goliath TV series. But as a movie, there’s very little here to bring me back. Not unlike The Great Martian War, it’s what they didn’t show me that interests me more than what they did.

• War of the Worlds: Goliath is available on DVD, Blu-Ray and streaming video from amazon.com

I’ll Explain Later…

It is June 26, 1913. Civil War veterans begin arriving in Gettysburg, PA for the Great Reunion marking the fiftieth anniversary of the battle. A few days ago, Tiny Broadwick made history as the first woman to parachute from a plane. Chauncey Olcott’s recording of “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” tops the charts. In theaters are Charles Gyblyn’s The Battle of Gettysburg and Mack Sennett’s Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life, which you’ve probably seen without realizing it because it’s the movie that invented the old-timey movie trope of a villain tying a woman to the railroad tracks. Buffalo, New York is recovering from a grain elevator explosion earlier in the week that killed seventeen men and injured fifty. Avalon, California is incorporated. The Washington Senators host the Philadelphia Athletics in a double-header.

Oh, and Earth is invaded by an advanced and hostile alien race from the planet Mars.

So, I’ll grant it’s entirely possible that I just imagined this, but I think that possibly when I was a younger man, The History Channel did not… suck. I mean, they had their share of crap shows and all, but mostly they were a respected institution. One of my professors in college got interviewed by them a fair number of times on the subject of Joan of Arc. By the time I was in grad school, they were well on their way to transitioning into being mostly about Hitler, lost treasures, historical reports of supernatural entities, and Hitler’s Leveraging of Supernatural Entities to Hide Treasures. And more and more recently, they’ve come under fire for using their once-trustworthy documentary filmmaking chops to put out works of fiction that pretend to be real documentaries about mermaids and suchlike. At least they still show stuff about the pyramids sometimes. I like the Egyptology stuff.

In 2013, the History Channel produced one of these faux-documentaries about World War I, sorta. They recast the Great War, getting rid of all that messy and inconvenient history with an adaptation of, you guessed it, The War of the Worlds. We’ve covered three “newscast”-style adaptations so far, so I thought we’d try out a “documentary”-style one. There is one more documentary-style adaptation, 2012’s War of the Worlds: The True Story, but that’s largely a reworking of an earlier traditional movie, and I’m not going to cover it because I’ve already watched the movie it’s reworked from, which was enough of a slog that I never want to do that again. So I guess this, provisionally at least, marks the end of our little trek through adaptations of HG Wells’s novel that are presented with the framing device of a real historical event being reported. Unless I can somehow find an angle to squeeze out an article about Henry Legg’s Twitter adaptation. Which I probably can’t.

So let’s do this thing. It’s a little strange to even call this an adaptation of War of the Worlds, really. I mean, is “Earth gets invaded by aliens, ostensibly from Mars” enough to make it count? There’s loads of movies where Earth gets invaded by aliens, even specifically Martians, but not all of them are considered “War of the Worlds”. The key factors seem to be that the Martians arrive in a meteor, sweep over the world without meaningful opposition, then are all struck dead by what amounts to divine intervention, because they have no natural immunity to the common cold (At least, it’s usually remembered as the common cold; the book says “putrefactive and disease bacteria”, and even this Wells qualifies as unproven hypothesis. Viruses had only just been discovered when Wells published). The war as presented in The Great Martian War 1913-1917 unfolds very differently from other adaptations. Sure, the broad strokes of the story are mostly there, but so much is changed. Most importantly, the war isn’t a complete curbstomp: humanity can and does fight back. It is still only through a bit of a deus ex machina that mankind is able to win in the end, but it’s not so much “Killed after all man’s defenses had failed,” as “This war would have gone on for years and probably ended in a slow defeat had this one big push right at the end not worked so perfectly.”

But it’s got tripods, so there’s that. We’ve talked about one adaptation using the height of 1930s radio technology, and one using 1960s radio technology and a cast of non-actors and a budget of “what we can find around the studio”, and one really cheap production that was kind of profoundly unconvincing. But if there’s one thing The History Channel is good at, it’s at convincingly pretending to document fake history, so at the least, this is going to be a lot more proficient on a technical level than what we’ve seen before.

Since this isn’t a traditional narrative,  I’m going to be a lot more light-handed on the play-by-play. While The Great Martian War doesn’t have a “story” per se, it does have an “angle”. That’s a clever choice, I think, and adds to the authentic feel. This isn’t “Ken Burns’s War of the Worlds”, a twelve-hour epic providing a semester’s worth of lecture on the history of the war. Just like a real History Channel documentary, this is very much “Hey, there’s been a recent discovery that makes this old topic timely again, so here’s seventy minutes of background to get you up to speed and then we’re going to deliver a bit of actually new information at the end,” just as you’d see in a real documentary: “We got permission to X-ray a mummy. Here’s seventy minutes about the Third Dynasty and then we’ll show you what we found.” The angle for them is a recent breakthrough in translating alien text. “2013 is the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great Martian War – a conflict unequaled in devastation and often mired in controversy. But the lost legacy of a forgotten hero, unearthed only last year might just ignite the biggest controversy of all.”Regardless of what you think of the History Channel’s sensationalist style (Hey, maybe they could make their motto “We put the History in Histrionic!”), this is just pitch-perfect. It’s practically Mad Libs: “<current year> marks <length of time> since <historical event>, among the <superlative> <category of events> in human history. But now, new <research | discovery | witnesses | technology> might just have unearthed the most <unexpected | startling | terrifying> secrets of all, and changed the way we look at <event | all of human history | our place in the universe | Hitler> forever.”

Our narrative frame for this little adventure through faux-history is Gus Lafonde, a Canadian Anishinaabe soldier, who’d left detailed notebooks of his observations during the war, recently rediscovered by his great-granddaughter. I think it’s a bit of a pleasant sign of the times we live in that they made the effort to do a little bit to correct the extent to which the indigenous peoples of the Americas are represented in things like 20th century history, especially in a context that implies that his work had been largely overlooked precisely because no one was expecting a major breakthrough to come from a First Nations enlisted soldier. That his discoveries are specifically linked to the translation of the alien language may be an homage to the Navajo Code Talkers, though it that’s true, it’s maybe just a bit uncomfortable that they’ve conflated the country, tribe, and which war it was. But still, props and all.

The “Martian War” will follow the broad outline of the Western Front of the European Theater of World War I, transposed one year backward in time (Presumably to keep everything at the right time of year while preempting the historical war). Lots of elements of the historical war are there — the US’s early isolationism and late entry, the von Schlieffen plan, the Battle of the Marne, chemical warfare, the introduction of tanks. Others are recast: Paul von Hindenburg is crucial in the defense of Paris; Douglas Haig is remembered as an inspirational leader and his troop losses as fully justified; the Lusitania is reimagined as an American liner, and the events precipitating America’s entry into the war draws more from Perl Harbor than the Zimmerman Telegram. Other things still are missing: there’s no references to an Eastern Front. Russia is completely absent. The Ottoman Empire is completely absent. There’s no campaign in Africa, and naval warfare is minimal.

In order for you to slot Martians into the story of World War I, of course, you need to clear out some space first. This is a little tricky; one of the reasons “Why did World War I happen?” is so hard to answer is that World War I was caused less by one specific thing happening, and more by the fact that the general trend of European History was for them all to go to war with each other every few decades, and it was just tough cookies that there’d been a technological revolution since the last one that made warfare possible on an industrial scale. The most accurate summation of why World War I happened I’ve ever heard comes from Edmund Blackadder: it was too much effort not to have a war.

Now, obviously, you can recast the story any way you like, but if you want to be able to draw from real history, both because it lets you show interesting parallels, and also because if you’re not sure what should happen next, you can just look up what happened next in real life, the simplest way to do it is to remove one of the historical players in the war and stick the Martians there instead. So that is what they did. Most adaptations move the invasion so that it occurs on the adaptor’s home turf: Orson Welles had the Martians invade New Jersey and work their way up to New York. Jeff Kaye put them in Buffalo. The 1953 Hollywood film put the aliens in California. Breaking News put them in Mojave. The Great Martian War needs to write the Central Powers out of the war to make room for the Martians, so it breaks with tradition: an American production with a very British focus places the one and only Martian landing site in the Bohemian Forest. Most adaptations have the Martians land all over the world; the only one off the top of my head that doesn’t is the WKBW version, where the invasion is centered on the east coast of North America (Interestingly, though, the novel doesn’t say one way or the other. The narrator speculates that the invaders might move outward from England — which they obviously made their first priority as it was the most important country in the world, the rest being full of foreigners — but he never becomes personally aware of invasions outside of England). Here, there’s just one mass landing, which generates a shockwave felt across Europe.

This being pseudohistory, I think parallels to the Tunguska Event are intentional, and it’s almost a little surprising that no one brings it up. The other obvious parallel is something which does get brought up, but never by name. Like I said, in 1913, World War I was already more-or-less inevitable. When an earth-shattering explosion occurred in the heart of the German Empire, everyone’s first assumption was that Kaiser Wilhelm had just test-fired some kind of new super-weapon. Everyone except the Germans, of course, who assume someone else just test-fired some kind of new super-weapon at them. “His Majesty the Emperor, in the name of God, the Fatherland, and the German people, begs the assistance of his brother nations. Germany is under attack by assailants not of this earth.” Six days after German troops enter the impact zone, however, the Kaiser sends word begging the other world powers to come to their aid against, “assailants not of this earth”. It takes less than a week for Germany to collapse, and the world is at war by the end of July.

The tripods, hallmark of any War of the Worlds adaptation, are called “Herons” in The Great Martian War, and they pay homage not only to the novel, but to the many adaptations done over the years. The “heat ray” is described as a “slow-firing energy cannon”, and, like their 1953 counterparts, the Herons are protected by an “energy shield”. There’s a rare hint at how this world’s 2013 has diverged from our own: the shields are described as “The first introduction we had to the many uses of dark energy particles.” The Herons are a bit similar in design to Warwick Goble’s original illustrations for the serial run of The War of the Worlds (Which Wells himself personally disowned and criticized in a passage he added when the book was published in novel form). The “black smoke” is a function of the Herons too, a “toxic cloud” that surrounds the machines. The effectiveness of it is greatly scaled down here, though, making it much more similar to the chemical weapons that were introduced in the real-world Great War. Gas masks prove effective against it, though interviewee Jock Donnelly describes the sense of dreadful isolation that comes with that sort of fighting.

This is another thing that The Great Martian War does well. The interview footage is really convincing. In fact, if you told me some of it was actual interviews with real World War I veterans — the bits where they’re just speaking about the horrors of war or conditions in the trenches without anything specific about aliens — I’d believe you. I’d be pissed that they’d misrepresented the real testimony of real people’s real suffering for this show, but I’d believe you. (It’s not. I checked. The interview footage is all done with actors). What sells it is the audiovisual texture. Remember, this is purporting to be a documentary made a century after the fact: hardly anyone who was alive in 1913 would be available for interview in 2013, and certainly no one who was old enough to have served in combat (The last known World War I veteran died in 2012), so this is all archive footage dated from the ’60s to the ’90s. The sound is flat. The video is grainy — and it’s grainy in different ways. Interviews dated to the early ’80s have film grain, and those from the ’90s have VHS artifacts. Some of it is in 4:3. Other parts are widescreen but have that slightly-wrong look of having been cropped and enlarged. The colors are either oversaturated or faded depending on the vintage. The only interview footage that looks really inauthentic is of an interview with author Nerys Vaughn in the 1960s, and even there, it looks quite a lot like the “reenacted” interviews they sometimes attach to this sort of documentary.

There are actually four kinds of Martian war machines in Wells’s original novel (Or three, if you don’t count the flying machine mentioned only in the original serial version). Hardly any adaptations ever follow up on this; it’s only the large tripod machines that get covered. The Great Martian War, though, wants a “whole” war story, so it takes the rare step of changing it up a bit. Like the original, there are four distinct types of Martian war machine, though they’re entirely distinct from those in the novel. The second type of machine introduced is the “Iron Spider”, a smaller form of tripod that acts as the Martian infantry. It’s a clever way to divvy things up: between the original and its many famous adaptations, there’s a whole assortment of traits associated with the Martian war machines that are kind of a clusterfrak when put together, so here, they divide up the popular tripod traits between the two different kinds of machine. The Spiders are smaller and far more agile than the Herons, whose size honestly makes them look kind of awkwardly matched against human infantry. The primary purpose of the Herons, it seems, is not to kill humans in large numbers directly, but rather to destroy cover and force soldiers out into the open, where the agile Spiders, roughly the size of a modern tank and twice as tall, could dispatch them with “ribbons of death”, highly articulated tentacles that are extremely accurate to the tentacle appendages Wells described on the fighting machines, prefiguring modern inventions like electroactive polymers and muscle-wire.

By August, the situation on the continent looks desperate — the Martians are expected to take Paris within weeks, when Paul von Hindenburg and the German Army turn up, revealing that they’d been hiding in the woods for a few months. In real history, Count von Hindenburg was a major German war hero on the Eastern Front, who went on to the German presidency, and is remembered as probably the last guy who could have stopped Hitler from rising to power except that he didn’t, and kinda sounds like the German version of Ulysses S. Grant. The fictionalized Hindenburg implemented the von Schlieffen Plan, which, near as I can figure, is basically “Slip into France the back way through Belgium,” bringing along the German army and every other surviving German he could round up. In the real world, it was a devastating strategy for defeating France, whose only flaw was that it didn’t actually work: Belgium took a certain objection to the German Army rolling through, which made everything harder, and on top of that, Russia didn’t take nearly as long to get its act together as they’d anticipated, so they had to divert troops to the other side of Germany to fight the other half of the war.

Ironically, the failure of the von Schlieffen Plan in real life had pretty much the same effect as the success of it in The Great Martian War: it caused what had been a juggernaut advance by the invading army to stall out into years of stalemated trench warfare. And it was in the trenches that the third class of Martian war machine came into play: at night, as fighting slowed down, the ground-based “lice” would scour the battlefield, sweeping it clean of the day’s debris of war. The documentary makes a big deal out of the psychological impact of this: dead soldiers could not be recovered for burial, and rumors spread of the Martians invaders making some hideous use of the dead and wounded — keep in mind, in the original novel, the Martians were vampiric (Based on some comically incorrect Victorian ideas about how digestion worked, Wells assumed that a more advanced race would evolve beyond the need to eat and would just inject the blood of lesser creatures, and this would somehow be more efficient), and herded humans for food.

It’s kind of strange, in fact, how much they make of this, since it turns out to be a red herring: about twenty minutes later, they reveal that the missing dead weren’t taken by the Martians at all, but rather simply crushed into the mud: the lice were actually just sweeping the field for spent shell casings and other bits of metal debris, which they recycled to build their war machines.

A kind of parody of the famous Christmas Truce of 1914 occurs in December 1913: fighting draws to a halt on Christmas night as the Martians launch a series of “Christmas Stars” into the sky. But this “truce” has a twist reminiscent of the Racnoss Christmas Star from Doctor Who: what the Martians have launched are their fourth kind of war machine, kraken-like submarines that attack the shipping lanes.

In the real world, the 1915 sinking of the RMS Lusitania came close to bringing the US into the war. That’s mirrored here in the sinking of the Aquitania. There’s a bit of a slip though: the historical RMS Aquitania was a sister-ship of the Lusitania, launched in May 1914. The historical Aquitania would serve in both World Wars as a troop transport and hospital ship, and operate in peacetime as a cruise ship until 1950 (It was the longest-serving passenger liner of the 20th century, surpassed only in 2004 by the QE2). But the ship is identified by narration as American (Even though the illustration they show is clearly based on the real ship and bears the historically correct Liverpool marking).

As in real history, half the American public gets all riled up and wants to join the war, but the other half still reckons that this is Europe’s war and none of our damned business, and President Wilson kept the US out of the war. And here, Theodore Roosevelt, the historical equivalent of Harrison Ford in Air Force One, reenters history. In real life, Roosevelt did push for the US to enter the war, and in 1917, he tried to raise up a volunteer army to go fight in Europe. Wilson shut him down and sent the real army instead. Roosevelt acts earlier in the Martian war, and Wilson concedes to public opinion, allowing Roosevelt’s volunteers to ship out in 1914.

Meanwhile, Gus Lafonde, our “angle” on this, had been counting coup. I don’t know how I feel about this. On the one hand, it has a hint of TV’s usual “Magic Indian” trope: the humble indigenous American who is able to do what the white folks can’t because of his people’s rich heritage, specifically something the white folks in the audience have probably heard of already. On the other hand, by making his contribution tie specifically to his specific cultural background, it does make his presence a part of the narrative and not just “We wanted extra credit for diversity so we spun the Wheel-of-Minorities and it came up ‘Canadian First Nations’.” Sneaking into Martian encampments under cover of night, he steals alien artifacts and makes notes on their writing which, a century later, would lead to its decipherment.

Things start to turn around for the allies when, having discovered the size of the Martian force, they undertake a daring plan to capture a Heron through undermining. The captured Heron reveals the true intent of the lice, as it’s made from locally-sourced materials. We also get to see the physical nature of the aliens. There’s a clear similarity between the alien bodies and the alien war machines. That’s a common theme in adaptations, and is suggested by the book in a limited sort of way (Wells notes that the aliens don’t use pivot joints, and this seems reflective of the fact that their own bodies, being akin to cephalopods, don’t have them). Odd when you think of it, since humans have never built vehicles designed based on the way we look outside of Japanese cartoons. These aliens look like a kind of anencephalic insect. Correspondingly, the Herons, Spiders and Lice alike all have these sort of pillbug-shaped bodies, differing mostly in size and the design of the legs.

The other thing to come out of the capture is where The Great Martian War makes its real contribution of something genuinely new to the “mythology”. Because once the Heron is down, its attendant Spiders surrender. Investigation turns up that the Spiders are unmanned, controlled instead by a “living organic metal” they term “victicite”. The victicite turns out to be not only the key to Martian technology, but seems like it’s actively trying to be helpful, causing allied war techology to advance. Though, just like the first tanks of the real World War I, the technology is unreliable at first and its impact is limited. Though the energy-weapons are effective, they’re prone to exploding, and the “landships” aren’t fast or maneuverable enough to evade Heron counterattacks — they can dispatch a single Heron, but only if it obligingly stands still and lets them. Their first real successful use comes when three ace pilots (among them, László Almásy, the real-life inspiration for “The English Patient”) using experimental energy weapons defeat a Heron that’s wandered across the Channel to London. The pilot survives, but catches glanders from police horses and promptly dies.

Unlike the other interpretations we’ve seen, then, though it’s still a disease that will ultimately bring down the Martians, it won’t be an act of nature, but flat-out biological warfare. Glanders really was used as a bioweapon in World War I along the Eastern Front to infect horses. However, it would take most of a year for the virus to be weaponized, and the Martians are expected to conquer all of Europe before that can happen.

Fortunately for Europe, the Martians inexplicably attack a group of American destroyers.  Or do they? The interviewed historian points out that there’s no hard evidence of Martian presence in the Gulf of Mexico, and notes that Allied U-Boats had the range to have done it themselves, coyly hinting that it may have been a false flag by the Allies to trick the Americans into the war. Woodrow Wilson resigns in disgrace, and for some reason — they talk around it, but it kinda sounds like a coup — this makes Teddy Roosevelt president and the US enters the war proper.

Victicite-based weapons and American reinforcements slow down the Martians enough for the final push, called “Operation Trojan Horse”. To the troops on the line, it sounds very much like it’s going to follow the general outline of the Hundred Days’ Offensive, and desertion starts to become a problem as they expect to be sent on a suicidal final charge against an unstoppable foe. “Many amongst us are tired. To those, I say hold firm. Ultimate victory is within our grasp. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.” Sir Douglas Haig, who in our world became the poster-child for the kind of disengaged aristocratic general who happily sends huge numbers of his own men to their deaths because he thinks of war as a sort of jolly academic exercise rather than a real thing that affects real people, delivers a stirring speech that restores order. The push turns out to be a feint: when the Martians easily rout the charge, they press their advantage, the Herons charging into vast pens of glanders-infected horses up and down the 50-mile line. Within a day or so, all are dead.

Continue reading Deep Ice: The war scare was over (“The Great Martian War 1913-1917”)

I’ll Explain Later…

It is October 31, 1968. I’ll get back to that in a few minutes. Since we’ve slipped back twenty years, we are, of course, talking once again about War of the Worlds. I’ll get back to Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future soon enough, but it’s a new year and I was traveling over the holidays, so I need something easier, and besides, I’m almost out of Captain Power and need to play for time so that I’ll have something else to write about when it’s done.

WWKB-AM 1520 is an ESPN Sports Radio broadcaster out of Buffalo, New York. But prior to 2013, it had been a progressive talk-radio station, before that an oldies station, before that, business talk radio, after sports, after country music, after “hot talk”. But long before that, before ABC was bought by Capital Cities and got out of the radio business, they were WKBW-AM, companion station to Buffalo’s ABC 7. The radio station, originally a religious station (WKBW, later appropriated as “The King of Buffalo”, originally stood for “Well Known Bible Witness”), predated the TV station, but with the arrival of TV and the waning of the golden age of radio, it transitioned into the more modern “top 40” format in the late ’50s, until FM radio pretty much put an end to AM top 40 stations in the late ’70s. During those years, WKBW was one of the power players in east coast pop radio — their high-power transmitter gave them a tremendous range, reportedly getting better reception in Boston than Boston’s own local top 40, was regularly received in Stockholm, and in 1967, a WKBW-exclusive Monkees performance was recorded off-air in Morocco, because mumble mumble ionosphere mumble mumble.

But the reason we care (well, the reason I care) is because in the ’60s, “KB Radio” was well-known for its Halloween specials. In 1968, program director Jefferson Kaye noticed that they were coming up on the thirtieth anniversary of the infamous Mercury Radio Theater production, and thought it would make a good subject for this year’s special. It had been done before, in 1944 in Santiago and 1949 in Quito. These were adaptations of the Howard Koch radioplay, adjusting the names, locations and current events to fit the locality. And that’s how Jeff Kaye’s version started out. But he had a problem: it was 1968, and KB Radio wasn’t in the business of making original drama. WKBW was a prominent station and its stable of talent at the time was certainly top-notch, but they were disk jockeys and news reporters, and that kind of acting just wasn’t their thing. Not to be deterred, Kaye decided to try something different. Something that sounds really risky to me, but it was a gamble that paid off.

They got rid of the script. Instead, Jeff Kaye and director/engineer Danny Kriegler produced an outline of the various events that would make up their Martian invasion, based on the events recounted in the 1938 version, and simply told their radio personalities to deliver it as though it were news. Which sounds on the surface ridiculous: take a bunch of people who aren’t trained as actors and have them do improv? And yet, somehow, miraculously, it works.

Dan Neaverth opens the show with a lengthy disclaimer, for all the good it will do, giving some background on the 1938 broadcast, and explaining how it was made, “With the techniques that were in use at that time,” and that they had therefore decided to approach it, “Not how we can copy it, but how it would be covered by a modern newsroom in this day and age.” He goes on to speak to the quasi-mythical “panic” that the 1938 broadcast generated, and how in those days, radio announcers held a “strange charisma”, that what, “A radio announcer said was true was. The same could be said for newspaper, the only other mass media at the time.” If you read my article on the 1938 War of the Worlds, you’ll know I have my misgivings about that interpretation of events, the way it casts the people of 1938 as credulous dupes like something out of that movie The Invention of Lying. But what Neaverth says next plays more to what I think is the truth of the 1938 panic: “WKBW radio has been promoting the show over the last three weeks, every hour 24 hours a day, you all know what is about to occur. This was not true when the original was broadcast. So place yourself in that position: sit back and pretend that you do not know what is going to happen. And perhaps at the end of this broadcast, you will begin to understand what took place thirty years ago tonight. This is Dan Neaverth speaking.”“So place yourself in that position: sit back and pretend that you do not know what is going to happen. And perhaps at the end of this broadcast, you will begin to understand what took place thirty years ago tonight.” Some lies aren’t meant to deceive; sometimes, it’s an invitation. Thirty years earlier, Orson Welles had invited the nation to come live in a world where the unstoppable invaders at the doorstep were from Mars. In 1968, WKBW invited listeners to try it again.

Joe Downey takes over for the eleven o’clock news. By which I mean, he actually delivers the real eleven o’clock news. So…

It is October 31, 1968. Yesterday, Soyuz 3 returned to Earth, its mission a partial failure after it proved unable to dock with Soyuz 2. Today, President Johnson has announced an end to bombing in North Vietnam“President Johnson has taken a big step on the road toward peace in Vietnam. Tonight, he ordered a total bombing halt in north Vietnam. Johnson also announced that the Paris talks will be expanded to include the Saigon government and the political arm of the Vietcong. Mister Johnson made it clear that productive talks can continue only if Hanoi respects the DMZ and commits to stop shelling South Vietnamese cities.” (The war scare was over), though the peace which seems forthcoming at the time falls through, possibly due to the intervention of presidential hopeful Dick Nixon, who didn’t want Johnson getting the credit for ending the Vietnam war. Davey Jones marries for the first time, to Dixie Linda Haines. The marriage will last until 1975. On TV tonight are new episodes of The Flying Nun, That Girl, Daniel Boone and Ironside. Tomorrow, dutifully marching toward the cancellation NBC has already predestined for it, Star Trek will air “Day of the Dove”, one of the more spectacular and iconic episodes of the third season, and the one that kinda invented the Klingons, since their appearance here is really the first time they act anything close to the characterization of their culture that would be carried forward into the post-TOS era. Here is what Josh Marsfelder has to say, in the hopes that after you’ve read it, you will come back and read this instead of going on with something more interesting in your life. In local news, Governor Nelson “Rocky” Rockefeller ceremonially broke ground on the construction of a six-hundred million dollar State University Of New York at Buffalo campus. (More men were back at work). A raid at a cab company in Lackawanna led to numerous gambling arrests, and then there’s Mars.

Downey reports, with no discernible change in tone from all the real news of the day, observations at the Mount Palomar Observatory of a series of explosions on Mars. “The observatory’s director, Dr. Benjamin Spencer, says that although they appear to have as much energy as hydrogen bomb blast, they are undoubtedly of natural origin. Dr. Spencer describe the explosions as looking like
(quote) Tremendous jets of blue flames shooting out into space (end quote).” The news report is bookended by incredibly condescending commercials for the Peace Corps, suggesting listeners come, “Build something. Like Latin America, Asia and Africa.” After the weather and another Peace Corps ad, Downey hands off to Sandy Beach.

Nowadays, Sandy Beach is a midday right-leaning talk host on Buffalo’s WBEN-AM 930. Back in the ’60s, he was WKBW’s nighttime DJ. The default mode of top-40 disk jockeying has evolved a lot since War of the Worlds, but I think a late ’60s nighttime DJ is pretty close to the platonic form of disk jockey. DJing was a lot more performative back in the 60s. A year or so ago, one of my local stations fired a long-time morning DJ, replacing him with a syndicated show that was fine, but never took off. But the frontman for the new show, early on, talked about the switch a little, and explained that the previous host was a very talented example of an older, more stylized kind of morning DJing, and that they thought that this market was looking for a more modern approach, That approach involved a lot of trying very hard to be “real”, while relating amusing anecdotes from their own lives and stories from social media, taking a lot of listener calls, and being really really judgmental (Seriously. Drive-time DJs are, as a class, possibly the most judgmental human beings imaginable. Though I’ll grant you, I might get a little judgy too if my job was to listen to callers’ stories. Protip: If you feel compelled to call a local radio station to set up an elaborate prank call to determine if your husband is cheating on you, it’s already time to call the lawyer). But here, back in the 60s, it’s much more about sounding really hip, really groovy, really with-it, and really stoned. It was the era of Doctor Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap and Wonderful WINO and even DJs who were not fictional, such as Wolfman Jack and Skinny Bobby Harper.

Sandy Beach starts off his show on “Kaybee Baybee” by speculating that the “blue flames” from Mars might be an impressive marketing stunt by the natural gas industry before playing “Eleanor” by The Turtles, this week’s #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 (Also in the top ten are “Midnight Confessions”, “Girl Watcher”, and “Harper Valley PTA”, and it kinda seems incomprehensible that all those songs happened at the same time. So too for Jimi Hendrix’s definitive cover of “All Along the Watchtower”, which is spending its last week on the chart at its peak position of #20). Sandy jokes about fortifying his house against trick-or-treaters, then plays a commercial for a local music store, which is selling 8-track players for $49.95, which is a lot of money back now, even if they do throw in the speakers for free.  I bring it up because the One Stop Tape Center of 1130 Main Street is one of the sponsors of War of the Worlds, as they explicitly tell us during the commercial, not that it is going to make a lick of difference. Sandy Beach has an announcement from NASA when he returns from commercial, cautioning space-watch facilities to expect unusual observations and communications difficulty, which he uses as the jumping-off point for a riff about Jeff Kaye’s inter-office memos.

That’s probably the first thing beyond the style that this new adaptation brings to the story over the 1938 broadcast. Keep in mind, that there was no such thing as a space program in 1938. There wasn’t even an Air Force (The Air Force would not become a separate branch from the Army until 1947, coincidentally, right around the time of the Roswell UFO incident…) There was no cold war to speak of. There was no such thing as a nuclear weapon. There wasn’t even such a thing as World War II. Here in 1968, it’s pretty much the height of the space age. I mean, it’s 1968. We’re less than a year from man walking on the moon. The Apollo Command Module has already done its first test flight. By 1938, the closest we’d come to space travel was when Balloonist Jeanette Piccard and her husband, Balloon-designer Jean Piccard (Yeah. His namesake) piloted the airship The Century of Progress to the stratosphere. In 1968, pretty much everyone on Earth who wasn’t too busy with the basic scrabble for mere existence was looking to the heavens, and for the first time in human history, the possibility of travel to one of those big round things in the sky was something scientifically plausible and eminent rather than speculative fiction.

Cream’s “White Room” (Number 15) is interrupted halfway through for a KB News special bulletin “KB Commuter Call: We have a condition red. All available firefighting equipment is rushing to Grand Island where an explosion has set off a series of fires. Traffic on the Grand Island bridges has been halted. All onlookers and motorists are asked to stay clear of the area.”. Sandy doesn’t react immediately to the bulletin, instead taking the piss out of fellow WKBW DJ Stan Roberts. A commercial clearly identifies this as a dramatization of War of the Worlds while advertising a sale on “monster shoes”, a then-popular wide-toed, clunky-heeled style at AM&A’s. After singing along to the KB Radio jingle, Sandy relays a request from the news department for listeners not to call in for information about the Mars explosions. I gather that the performance was prerecorded, so this was the folks at the studio anticipating rather than reacting. Sandy also makes a dig at newsman Henry Brock. I’m starting to get the feeling that most of Sandy Beach’s shtick is based around insulting his coworkers.

Right after the really good two and a half minutes of “Hey Jude“, this week’s Billboard #1, before the interminable 800 minutes of “Na na-na na-na-na na”s, KB Total News breaks in again to attribute the earlier fires on Grand Island to a meteor impact. “KB Total News Bulletin: It’s been reported that a large meteor has smashed into the ground along the East River Road on Grand Island setting off a series of fires. Several lives have been lost. KB Total News director Don Lancer on the way to the scene. Repeating: A large meteor is reported to have smashed into the ground on Grand Island, killing several people and touching off a series of fires. This has been a KB Total News Bulletin. Full details at KB Total News straight down the line on the half-hour” They’re going to spend a lot of time on the fire. I imagine that part was easier for them to perform, since, y’know, WKBW’s news reporters had probably covered those before. Unlike in 1938, this version of the story puts the initial meteor strike in a populated area. I think this is the only adaptation that makes that decision, and, again, qualifying it with the fact that they keep broadcasting disclaimers, I think that’s one of the things that sells this version. They manage to escalate the tension before introducing the fantastical elements. If you were actually seriously trying to hoax people, this is how you’d do it: you’re already tense and already invested. You’re not in the mental mode to go, “Oh, this is just a dramatic presentation” because you’ve already started accepting what you’re hearing as true before you had to make the big commitment to believe in an alien invasion.

Another commercial for “Monster Shoes” is told in the form of a Halloween narrative, about a witch cursing some shoes, only to have her plot foiled when the misshapen shoes proved popular with the teens. Sandy Beach asks listeners to neither drive out to Grand Island nor call the WKBW newsroom. Before he can play another record, newsman Henry Brock repeats pretty much the same news we just heard, and while Sandy gets a chance to let Buffy St. Marie sing a few bars of “I’m gonna be a country girl again,” (which didn’t chart until 1971, and even then, only broke the top 40 in the UK) before Don Lancer, who is stuck in traffic, calls in from the field.

Jeff Kaye opens up the WKBW news room, and Sandy Beach gives one last recap of the story before tossing to the newsroom. Even the formidable KB Total News Theme Song doesn’t buy Jeff enough time to get everyone set up in the newsroom, and he’s left having to tell Joe Downey on-the-air that his microphone is hot. Downey reminds us of the what and where, adding the new information that telephones to Grand Island are down and other communications are poor. Henry Brock is trying to get a report from the Sheriff’s office — Downey actually interrupts himself to ask Henry if he’s gotten through yet. He hasn’t, and Downey is left pretty much just stalling until he does. The deputy they finally get hold of confirms multiple deaths and fires, but can’t confirm a body count. He mentions a military presence on the scene, confirms three power outages, but can’t speak to looting. In a weird technicality, Joe Downey wasn’t able to hear the report from the Sheriff’s office, and has to ask Brock for a recap.

Before he gets very far, though, Jim Fagan calls in from the field. He’d been interviewing a Dr. Moore from Niagra University about the Martian explosions, and conscripted him to come have a look at the meteor. That would make Moore and Fagan this production’s equivalents of Carl Phillips and Professor Pierson, though the roles are considerably different here. Moore is a lot closer to Oglvy from the original book, and the reporter’s role is spread out across the whole KB News team.

Doctor Moore is a bit of an odd character. In his very first line, he seems oddly fixated on Fagan’s choice of words, and wants to make sure to clarify that the explosions on Mars could not possibly be hydrogen bombs (Fagan had called it a “Hydrogen bomb-intensity explosion”). He denies that the impact on Grand Island could be an “extraterrestrial body”, theorizing instead that it is a meteor. Fagan: Doctor Moore, can you tell us if that was an extraterrestrial body that landed on the island?

Moore: I would think not, sir, at the moment. As I say, I have not as yet seen what has happened on the island. We’re going to be getting there in a few minutes, but certainly, it’s possible. But I would doubt it. That would be just my candid opinion before I have seen it. That’s kind of weird and awkward, firstly because if comes off like Moore thinks meteors are terrestrial in origin, and secondly because his denial is kind of limp — no “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one,” rather a kind of cautious reluctance to commit. He’s also a bit cautious about pronouncing it a meteor, though he does consider it likely, as, “There are many meteors that have landed on various parts of the Earth in the past many years.”

Moore is far and away the worst part of this so far, offering really only one useful comment (he proposes that it might actually be multiple meteors given the scope of the damage). But before you judge too harshly, consider the context. In the scope of this presentation, I think you can redeem the Moore character by interpreting him as a professor who is crap at giving interviews.  It would have sold it, in my opinion, if Fagan had expressed some chagrin at Moore’s fumbling, though that probably would have seemed unprofessional.

Hank and Jim exchange traffic information from their respective locations on the East River Road and the Robert Moses Expressway south of Niagra Falls. Unconfirmed reports claim Governor Rockefeller has mobilized the national guard. Irv Weinstein, news director at WKBW’s  TV counterpart and coiner of the phrase “It’s eleven o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”, wants to coordinate the TV news team and commandeers Henry Brock’s newscast for a moment, by which time Don Lancer has finally made it to the crash site.

Lancer interviews a lineman, who reports power outages on streets that suggest that the impact site is right around here, though Jim Fagan, having approached from the other direction, sees leveled houses from two and a half miles away on Whitehaven Road. Fagan is close enough to see the crater, while Don Lancer manages to get a look inside it. Here, about thirty-six minutes into the broadcast, is where things finally take the turn we’ve been waiting for: It’s not a meteor. “It’s not– It’s not a meteor, Henry. I’m standing on the edge of the crater, and I can look right down into it. There’s clouds of white-hot steam rising from the face of what looks like some kind of metallic cylindrical object. It’s a very large object that’s lying in the bottom of this crater. Thus far, there’s been no one around that I’ve been able to talk to to find out what it might be. It’s hot. Intense heat around this crater at the present moment, and I just don’t — I can’t describe it all that well.” There’s a sort of two-tone high-pitched whine coming from the crater too, and boy do I wish there weren’t, because it’s awful to listen to and makes the dialogue hard to make out. Don’s signal crackles and drops out suddenly just as he’s being yelled at by the authorities to move back.

As they struggle to get hold of Don or Jim, you can hear some desperation from the newsroom, and Jeff Kaye, in the background, orders them to play a commercial to cover the lack of information. It’s the eight-track player again, along with another disclaimer no one is listening to. Jim Fagan, at the opposite side of the crater, reports having seen Don Lancer lose his footing and fall into the crater, though he doesn’t seem badly hurt. Since this is 1968 and not 1938, Henry Brock posits the obvious hypothesis that the thing in the crater is space debris — again history rears its head, because, as I mentioned, a Soyuz capsule literally just returned to Earth. The fact that it bears no markings, appears to be intact, and is making that terrible sound weighs against that idea, but no one’s sure.

Continue reading Deep Ice: One outside Buffalo, one in Chicago (Jeff Kaye’s War of the Worlds)

I’ll Explain Later…

I don’t even know how to begin. I don’t even know where to begin. I’m not even sure this exists. Seriously. Google tells me nothing (You get hits, but they lead mostly to stubs, someone’s video production class project, or archives of a forum post from someone preemptively clarifying that they weren’t talking about that one. The one they were thinking of is Without Warning). IMDB tells me nothing. There’s no copyright date. There’s not even a title card. If it weren’t for the Netflix listing on it, I’d probably have concluded that I’d imagined the whole thing[permalink anchor=”coda” text=”*”].

It doesn’t really feel like a movie. I guess if I had to nail down what it feels like, I’d say at the most a DVD Bonus Feature. No, not even that. You know what this feels like? You know how sometimes in movies, there will be a TV on in the background showing something related to the main narrative to help sell the idea that these events are really happening and having an effect on the world? Like when Steve Bacic briefly played The Beast in X2: X-Men United, or when Larry King plays Larry King in pretty much any movie. It feels like that. Like they filmed this to be on in the background of some other movie, but for no clear reason — maybe they needed lots of spare footage for the editors or something — decided to film a whole movie’s worth of footage. Director Rod Pyle is also credited with an episode of UFO Files about The War of the Worlds dating from around the same time, and a History Channel documentary the following year, so I suppose it’s possible that this was, like, some kind of outgrowth of that? I mean, this movie does not feel quite intentional. Can you make a movie by accident?

The thing we’re talking about today is the 2005 film adaptation of The War of the Worlds. No, not that one. No, not that one either. No, not even that one. Starting to get the feeling that something was Up in 2005? This one is actually, when you get down to it, more an adaptation of the 1938 radio play: it’s presented as a newscast from a presumably small California station, but unlike Invasion from Mars, they maintain the artifice for the entire running length.

Frankly, we’re already in trouble here. I more often hang out back in 1987 where this isn’t so much of a big deal, but we’re in 2005. The film is entirely in 4×3, which is period-accurate; few news programs shifted to 16×9 before 2006, and it was still the most common format for local news until at least 2009, but as early as the late ’90s, local news had started shooting for a kind of ersatz “big-budget” look. When my local UPN affiliate started up in the mid-90s, one of their gimmicks was that the newscasters did the 10 o’clock news in formalwear. Your typical 2005 local newscast may not have been filmed in High Definition, but you’d typically expect professional-grade lighting and camerawork, and an actual set, usually consisting of a big wood desk and a matte painting skyline. You’d also expect intertitles and transitions, and since we’re after September, 2001, you’d expect the ubiquitous news crawl. Instead we get this. A pair of yoyos in front a greenscreen whose only purpose is to show a generic blue pattern with an occasional globe. I mean, for all the good it does, they could have filmed it in front of a sheet. I mean, the did film it in front of a sheet. But they could have used a blue one instead of filming in front of a green sheet and turning it blue in post. It isn’t shot like news, but it also isn’t shot like a film. I don’t know. What it doesn’t at all feel is modern. Not even modern-cheap. Not even retro-cheap. This feels like it was made by a local, unaffiliated station in the 1980s. And not even as news, really. I don’t know. I don’t have words. The closest thing I can think of is the little five-minute news and financial digests the local PBS station would put on between British imports to make the next program start on the half-hour twenty-five years ago, but even that had a distinctly different texture to it. And, y’know, those highly identifiable Video Toaster effects. Without Warning managed to get the texture right ten years earlier (The only thing I really recall finding distinctly wrong in Without Warning was the “We lost the feed from the field correspondent and cut to static” bits, because as it turns out, faking realistic static-snow was bizarrely difficult using 1990s video technology).

But I won’t trash it too much. I mean, I’ve watched enough terrible movies to identify the most basic levels of filmmaking competence. It’s not like it was shot on a VHS Handicam or anything. The audio quality is good (except when there’s an in-story reason for it not to be), and while the visual texture and style fails to look like the thing it’s supposed to be, it does look like something. Things are in focus. The actors don’t mumble. No one gets attacked by an animated GIF of a bird. I’m saying that Rod Pyle is better at making movies than James Nguyen or Scott Shaw, at least insofar as he seems to have a basic grasp of how the general concept of what you should end up with when you are done making a movie and which end of the camera is which. I mean, he’s no Tommy Wiseau, but still.

It’s not good, is what I’m getting at. It’s watchable, but only just. I mean, it’s not physically painful to watch. We’ll be getting most of our story from these two Channel 3 news anchors, Dave Douglas and Cheryl Storm (Credit where it’s due. That is a fantastic local news anchor name). Insofar as this narrative has a protagonist, Gideon Emery’s Dave is it. And that’s a real shame for multiple reasons, the first of which is that he’s terrible. That’s odd, since I looked him up on IMDb, and out of all the cast, he’s the one with an actual resume, having appeared in the modern Teen Wolf series, and having a long history as a video game voice actor, playing such iconic characters as John Connor and Trevor Belmont. But calling him wooden would be an insult to marionettes. I get what he’s going for, the old-fashioned hardcore-staid network newscaster who has to maintain utter unflappability. But he just can’t carry it off: rather than stoic, he seems unengaged. If you look back at Orson Welles’s radio play, the reporters there are all stoic and go out of their way not to convey emotion, but they still manage to convey intensity. The way they speed up or slow down, little catches in their voices, all work together to convey that this is SRS BSNS. Dave doesn’t have the gravitas for what he’s attempting. Instead of stoic, he comes off like he doesn’t appreciate the seriousness of what he’s reporting. And not even a “This is too big for me to process,” lack-of-seriousness; it’s more like he just doesn’t care. It’s the kind of disingenuous, “Thanks, Bob. And now, over to Mike for the weather,” kind of tone you’d expect if he were reporting on some fluff local-interest story that wasn’t even especially cute or heartbreaking. It’s almost parody, like a bored newsman trying and failing to show enthusiasm for the one hundred and thirtieth “Beloved family pet rescued from dangerous situation” story — parody, because in my experience, even very seasoned newscasters can usually manage to whip up some realistic “Aww, cute kitty,” or at least a sense of novelty at getting to report on something pleasant for once.

Caroline Do’s Cheryl is much the same. While I call Dave the lead character, she gets almost as much screen time and dialogue. I think. I’m not going to watch this whole movie again with a stopwatch to compare their relative number of lines. But as the story goes on, I think the direction shows a mild preference for him over her, and she gets her One Big Emotional Line and exits the story a few minutes before him. I actually think she’s a little better on the acting front too, as she’s clearly playing a slightly different archetype, a female newscaster who’s still staid and stoic and serious, but is allowed to show a bit more emotion. In a sense, I think one of the roles of the specifically female newscaster in this setting is to help make the audience care about the news in a way the traditional male newscaster doesn’t (I mean, Walter Cronkite could make you care about paint drying, but he was, to be blunt, really fucking good at his job). It’s a kind of ugly and sexist trope, but it’s had the net effect of putting a lot more female professionals in television news roles so I’ll let people who are better qualified than I am complain about it.

After approximately five seconds of them setting up the idea of a “meteor” strike in Mojave the previous weekend, they toss to our third character, Tiffany Heinsbocker in the field. Bree Pavey is far and away the best actor in this thing, and it’s weird that she’s apparently never done anything else (There’s an actress of the same name in IMDb, but she doesn’t look to be the same person) except for a web-based Feng Shui series for a content portal site that looks like its database crashed some time ago. She gets top billing in the credits, so maybe she is meant to be the lead, but her scenes, while the best thing in here, make up a comparatively small part of the narrative, such as it is. She reports on the gathering excitement surrounding the meteor crash, which is demonstrated by… The camera passing over a mountain, and a clip of some boy scouts running a lemonade stand. And at this point, you pretty much know what the deal is going to be with this movie. They’re going to combine “Tell, don’t show” with “Also none of these people are ever going to get a clear understanding of what’s going on”. We’re in for fifty-one minutes of being shown mostly nothing while mediocre actors deliberately avoid telling us what the hell is going on. This is practically an anti-movie. Tiffany interviews a bored child who would rather be watching TV. You and me both, kid.

But you know what? She sells it. I’m willing to believe, at least this far, that I’m watching a field reporter for a small TV station, who knows this story is big, but doesn’t have the access to actually report anything meaningful, and the chagrin in her voice when, for want of anything better to do, she ends up pestering a boy scout, seems legit.  She does assure us that the crash site is an impressive sight to behold “even from here”, though her cameraman dutifully shows us nothing that could even remotely be described as “interesting”.

We get a few homages to other adaptations of the story here too: the bored boy scout’s name is “Grover”, an allusion to Grover’s Field, the landing site in Orson Welles’s 1938 version. Scientists studying the meteor are identified as being from the fictional “Pacific Tech”, and are led by “Clayton Fielding”, references to Doctor Clayton Forrester, the hero of the 1953 George Pal film. She interviews Fielding, who is no help at all: he tells us the same thing that Tiffany has already told us twice (and, for that matter, that Clayton Forrester told us in 1953 and Richard Pearson told us in 1938): the meteor is hollow. He goes on to tell us, again twice that meteors normally are solid metal or stone. Tiffany does throw out the ET question, which I think is a good move: I imagine there was a strong temptation to have everyone play coy about that, the same way that no one in a zombie movie has ever heard of zombies, and frankly, I’d find it interminable if someone didn’t come right out with, “Hey, is this aliens?” They’re not going to do anything with it, but at least it’s there. Fielding misses the obvious response, of course, since this movie never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. He merely laughs the idea off rather than saying that the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one (they say).

Tiffany tosses back to Dave, and then I guess we cut to commercial.

After the commercial, Dave tosses back to Tiffany, who’s now standing beside a police truck and wearing Chekov’s radiation badge, though I ought to ask someone with working color-vision what it looks like, because I am utterly underwhelmed by how the green/red distinction comes out on-screen. She manages to score an interview with a General Guerro, who, in accordance with how this thing is going, pretty much just repeats what Tiffany has already told us: the National Guard has sent some folks up into the pit, they may need to push the reporters and onlookers back soon, and there’s been “some signs of activity” near the meteor. He says this is “just routine,” a phrase which, for some reason, really enchants my son. He seems a little flustered and a little incredulous, at first like he doesn’t believe the words that are coming out of his mouth. When Tiffany presses him to elaborate on the alleged “activity”, he suddenly gets evasive, but it’s the kind of evasiveness I’d associate less with “He knows something and isn’t telling,” and more with “He’s lost the next page in the script.” All the same, if they actually did something with this, it could really salvage the movie, playing up the idea of the people in power having something to hide. But that’s a very hard angle to sell without dropping the kayfaybe and stepping outside the “Breaking News” artifice, and to this movie’s credit, they are 110% committed to this narrative frame. That’s sixty percent more than Orson Welles was, keep in mind.

The general is called away with some news that visibly troubles him, and the police relocate Tiffany, forcing her to toss back to Dave and Cheryl, who share a good-natured forced chuckle over the idea of it being aliens. In a not-very-convincing attempt to make it seem more like a regular newscast and not The Plot Development Channel, Dave drops a news item about the President dismissing the latest Kyoto accord as “hogwash” and commissioning oil drilling in Yosemite. Cheryl tries to impersonate a human being by suggesting that will, “Teach those bears a lesson,” and Dave is clearly kind of scandalized by the statement. His lips say, “Yes, I guess it will, Cheryl,” but his head nod says, “What the fuck are you thinking? It’s a national treasure!”

After another ident break, we’re treated to breaking news of a disaster near Malibu. Well, sorta. We slip into “Don’t show, don’t tell” mode for a bit as instead of actually telling us about the disaster, Cheryl gives us a stilted, poorly-phrased recap of “recent events”, which consists of some new information: several large meteors fell to Earth “last week” in an annual meteor shower (She presents the fact that it’s a regular annual meteor shower as though this too is new information to the audience), one off the coast near Malibu, one in Mojave, “two in Europe and Africa”, with two unconfirmed in Russia and a third unconfirmed in the Sierra Nevadas. Which seems like the Martians have a disproportionate interest in the greater Los Angeles area. Fair enough, I guess, since Angel Grove got invaded by aliens pretty much once a week from 1992 to 1998. Cheryl follows this new information up with stuff we’ve been told multiple times: the meteors are hollow, radioactive, and magnetic. “Beyond that, we know nothing.” Nothing at all, beyond the three minute recap we were just subjected to.

The invisible earpiece Dave is wearing informs him about a plane crash, though there’s, “No reason to suspect terrorism.” We finally get to the “disaster in Malibu” when Dave hands off to the fourth member of their news-almost-reporting team, Harvey Levelle (Wayne Brian). Harvey going for a deliberately hateable sort of guy, over-dressed, over-made-up, oozing a strong “Used Car Salesman” vibe, with his hair so shellacked that he’s halfway to looking like Max Headroom. He shows us the seen of carnage and devastation in Malibu. Or rather, doesn’t, since he just shows us a perfectly ordinary stretch of Pacific coast. Harvey explains, smugly (Why smug? I have no fucking clue), that “something” rose up out of the water and walked off down Pacific Coast Highway.

What? We’re not going to see it. We’re not going to get a description (Not much of one, anyway). Of course not. Don’t show, don’t tell. Harvey uses an OpenGL cube transition to show us a clip of an interview with a local, who explains that, mere minutes ago, a wall of water rose up over this bone-dry stretch of coastline as something “Like a crane. A big mechanical crane. Like a monster,” rose out of the water. Harvey challenges him on the matter of it being a mechanical crane with the most urgency and passion anyone has, in the history of the world, ever asked someone if something was a mechanical crane. Maybe he’s supposed to be challenging someone he thinks is unhinged, but it doesn’t quite come off. The interviewee storms off in a panic, and present-Harvey explains that paramedics took him off for “observation”.

Now, of course, a lot can change in nine years. But even in 2005, it kinda beggars the imagination to suppose that a giant crane-monster capable of generating a tsunami could come ashore in Malibu without anyone snapping a grainy cellphone picture of it. The lack of one does kind of justify Harvey being kind of smug and incredulous. Assuming that’s what he’s going for and not just “I’m a giant dickbag”. He tosses over to their traffic reporter, Lisa Elfman, who reports from her traffic helicopter as she watches some stock footage of an aircraft carrier pulling up to the coast. I will note that your typical news helicopter has a range of about 300 nautical miles and a top speed around 100 knots. I know very little about aircraft carriers, but I am fairly sure that one of the advantages of having a giant honking boat that can launch airplanes is that you do not have to get all that close to the thing you want to blow up, so it kinda strikes me as unlikely that a traffic copter would just happen upon them.

When Harvey finally kicks it back to Dave and Cheryl, needing time to recharge the batteries in his smarm, Dave tries to crack wise about the possibility of someone catching “California’s Nessie” on film. Cheryl just sort of sits there with a look of dull surprise, presumably because hearing Dave make light of the situation made her realize how flat her grizzly bear joke fell.

She receives a telepathic message that the airplane crash from the last scene was actually two plane crashes, which seems like kind of a big mistake to make. Dave responds by declaring it to be Friday night, and kicking it over to some stock footage of parked airplanes and a faceless voice explaining how all the flights out of LAX are grounded, and travelers should call to reschedule. Dave makes one last noble stab at passing for human by trying to lighten the mood by declaring it a zoo at the airport, then seamlessly transitions to telling us that Homeland Security has raised the threat level to “Tell Your Wife You Love Her NOW“ red.

Tiffany calls Dave on his invisible earphone, and he kicks over to her, still wearing same red outfit and radiation badge from her last appearance, which rules out the possibility of there being large time gaps when they go to commercial. She’s relocated to firemen training on a condemned motel that’s been partially demolished, which will be playing the role of the extreme devastation at an apartment complex. She has to shout at her cameraman not to film the dead bodies that aren’t there, because it’s tasteless and against this film’s stylistic conceit of never ever showing us anything interesting.

Back at the studio, Dave confirms that the two crashed planes belonged to Universal Airlines and Western Pacific. I can’t say I’m surprised that the planes that crashed when they were being flown by, respectively,  an airline that hasn’t existed since 1972 and a railroad. He’s interrupted by a press release from an FAA director, who tells us all the things we’ve just heard about a dozen times, but throws in the fact that an EMP was detected near both crash sites. Dave asks Cheryl if there’s any more news, and she reminds us for about the fifth time that there are still no survivors.

We toss back to Tiffany, who’s in Mojave again. She looks momentarily alarmed when we cut to her, presumably because she’s trying to work out how she managed to teleport the thirty miles from Palmdale to Mojave in the past two minutes. She reconciles the paradox by assuming she’d never left, and just continues as though she’s simply reporting in after having been moved back from the meteor impact crater again. She dutifully blames the airplane sounds which keep rendering her audio inaudible on B-1 and B-2 bombers flying to the impact site. In a rare attempt to actually show us something, Tiffany has her cameraman do the world’s least convincing transition, sweeping the camera upward as they do a quick dissolve to some stock footage of three F-14s, that Tiffany thinks are all one plane. While teleporting back to Mojave, she also had time to interview an official, who, off the record, gave her the news tidbit that there was “some kind of activity” in the pit. This is about the fourth time they’ve acted as if declaring that “something happened” without further elaboration is actually news.

While Tiffany is relocated again, Harvey treats us to some stock footage of Marines on training exercises, pretending that it’s relevant. We rejoin Tiffany about five feet to the left, having put her hair up. She’s finally willing to commit to Shit Going Down now, as she’s gotten confirmation that “something” (Now that we’re taking things seriously, no one’s going to come right out and call them aliens until near the end) in the pit attacked the military, prompting the bombing, and now more soldiers are being trooped in, some, Tiffany confesses (as some soldiers just kind of run across the desert behind her), just kind of running across the desert.

We get a press conference from a White House Press Secretary who’s really poorly composited in front of a literal blank blue curtain with the White House seal floating above him. They seriously couldn’t just film him in front of an actual blue curtain and had to greenscreen him there? And I mean, this is seriously bad compositing, we’re talking early 1970s Doctor Who-bad. The only thing he tells us that we didn’t already know is that a meteor landed on the east coast near Grover’s Mills. Cheryl comments that the evacuations are “surely a surprise,” a weird little turn of phrase.

Harvey breaks his smug the next time they throw to him, when the camera shakes very gently from an imaginary explosion, but recovers quickly and still manages to sound incredulous about reports of “giant robots” leaving “death and destruction” even as we continue to hear the sounds of fighter craft and shelling. Dave kind of smirks at this report and cautions the viewers that Harvey was indulging in “speculation”. Dave, Cheryl and Harvey all seem to vacillate from scene to scene and even line to line on just how seriously they’re taking this. I mean, at this stage, it’s not like there’s any actual doubt that the military is engaged in multiple attacks on something in California. Sure, maybe you don’t believe it’s giant alien robots, but I think a reaction of “Ha ha ha, how fanciful!” is more than a little out-of-line. I mean, at this point, what would be a reasonable explanation? If anything, “It’s terrorists. Who can call down meteor strikes,” seems even more pants-crapping than “It’s aliens.”

The lone exception to this is Tiffany, the only one who seems to consistently take things progressively more and more seriously as events unfold. She tries to get some information out of General Guerro, but he brushes her off, and her frustration looks genuine. That said, as before, she seems to be obsessing a bit with the military-porn details. She begs one question out of the general, and it’s to ask what kind of munitions the bombers were carrying. I mean, yeah, it would indeed be big news if came down to nukes, but you know what question has neither been asked nor answered yet? What the fuck is the thing in the pit?

Suddenly, the army is pulling back and Tiffany reports that she’s been ordered to evacuate just before an explosion throws her to the ground and they lose the feed. Though to spare the audience from experiencing any actual suspense, they get it right back before Tiffany can even finish buttoning up her shirt. Which she’d unbuttoned for some reason. She must have fallen on some ketchup packets or something because her temple and eyebrow are dotted with it.

This is like the one unqualified good scene in the whole thing. Tiffany is shaken. She’s confused. She’s scared. She doesn’t know what the explosion was. And as she buttons her jacket, she looks at her badge.

And she says nothing. Because there aren’t any words. They’re never going to say it, never acknowledge it. But she just said she didn’t know what that explosion was, and then she looked down and saw that she’d been exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation. Her voice catches as she relates that the fleeing soldiers are shouting that “It’s coming”. And then she freaking legs it.

Unfortunately, this development takes Tiffany out of the narrative for a few minutes, so we’re stuck with the yo-yos back in the studio. The last of our yo-yos to be introduced is Will Knight, channel 3’s military consultant. He’s not great, but I think he works a good bit better than the others. He comes off as someone who doesn’t really have any practical newscasting experience, but is rather just a retired soldier who happened into this job because he knew someone. He has a fairly commanding presence, but not one that’s honed to the screen. He reports on military movements in Russia in a scene that goes on far too long before new satellite photos come in revealing really fake-looking fifty-mile-wide clouds over the meteor impact sites which Will identifies as nuclear explosions. Again, there’s a bit of obsession with the minutiae of military operations, with Dave’s first thought being to ask Will for an estimate of the size of the nuclear warheads (ten to twenty megatons, “as big as they come”), rather than, y’know, “Holy shit, Russia just nuked itself!” They blame the EMP of the detonations for knocking out satellites in the area, to excuse them not having to report any more news from Russia.

They get a videophone call from their UK field correspondant (Because channel 3 has one of those), who reports on an attack she doesn’t have any real information about in Woking, the site of the first Martian attack in the original novel. Just like every other piece of this thing, they’re interested in talking about the military response, about the fires, about the evacutions, but the reports all seem singularly uninterested in actually getting any information about what’s going on. Yes, I understand the idea that no one’s getting close enough to report back on the nature of the attackers, but the newscasters don’t even bother to ask most of the time, and even seem dismissive of any attempt to bring the subject around to the, y’know, big mechanical death machines stalking the countryside.

When we finally get back to Tiffany, she’s managed to regain most of her composure and wiped most of the ketchup off her forehead. She doesn’t really know anything new, but it feels really legit: in the heat of the moment, she does panic and lose her composure, but she recovers quickly. Harvey, on the other hand, is back to smarmy. He talks over some forest fire stock footage, again, more concerned with stuff like the damage the fire is causing than the whole “Aliens are invading” angle, before he’s forced to relocate because of encroaching smoke.

I think I get the gist of what they’re going for here; they’re harkening back to the endless newsgasm after the 9/11 attacks, where newscasters didn’t know anything but felt compelled to keep newsing at us as hard as they could anyway. But at least then, they were trying to get us some news about what had happened and why. Also, it didn’t actually take that long for us to get the basic gist of what had happened. This is… It’s like if the news channels on 9/11 were unable to determine that airplanes had been involved. Of course, it’s entirely possible that I’m talking out my ass here, and the news coverage really was this random, minutiae-obsessed and big-picture-blind, and it just seems different now because of the decade of time in the middle. But one thing I’m dead sure of is that the initial coverage actually had something to show us. Over and over again. A continuous loop of disaster-porn that lasted for days, and talking heads threatening disproportionate retaliation and calling for undesirables to be rounded up.

The press secretary cuts in again to tell us… Nothing new. They cut over to Tiffany, who contradicts the press secretary on one point: she reports that the military is pulling back, not standing their ground as he’d claimed. Like Harvey, she’s been cautioned about smoke as well, and is preparing to head for the hills. Dave takes over when Tiffany starts having trouble with her link-up, and then there’s an odd visual glitch.

We’ll be seeing it again later. They get Tiffany back, and she explains that their truck has died, leaving them stranded until the military can give them a lift. Though she’s regained most of her compsure, she’s started having trouble with her words, flubbing lines with increasing frequency. It’s a surprisingly realistic depiction of a reporter struggling to keep it together under stress. She comes closer to cracking when she sees soldiers in the distance donning biowarfare suits as thick black smoke rolls across the battlefield, and her expression is good enough that I almost forget to be annoyed that her cameraman doesn’t just turn the camera to the left and show us this.

When they lose Tiffany’s signal, Will gets a chance to report on some troop movements, but Tiffany’s intrepid cameraman has somehow found a payphone out in the desert in 2005, allowing her to return via low-resolution videophone, her face now partially hidden by a really flat-looking post-production smoke effect. As the gunfire dies down, Tiffany starts to panic again while she struggles to put on a gas mask, then finally falls, choking, out of frame. Her intrepid cameraman manages to hold the camera stock-still as he too presumably succumbs to the black smoke and dies, moving, like a weeping angel, only during a brief moment when the camera feed is replaced by static, to rest at an angle on the ground for a brief shot of Tiffany’s limp body. It’s really all downhill from here, folks, because we’ve got another twelve minutes or so, but they’ve killed off the most interesting and dynamic character in this thing[permalink text=”*” anchor=”ordidthey”].

After a moment of confusion, Dave asks Will if he’s still there. This will be hilarious in a few minutes, and Will seems pissed off by the question. Cheryl interrupts their speculation on the nature of the black smoke with an awkward “Hold it guys!” followed by about a second of silence while the camera gets its act together and cuts to her, still frozen in a hands-out “wait a second” gesture. She’s telepathically intuited that they have audio of a 911 call, wherein a boy named Connor utterly fails to realistically portray a child panicking over his dead parents in a smoke-filled house. He announces that something is at the door, then screams, “It burns! It burns! Mommy!” The scene would be chilling if it had felt anything like genuine. I know from the credits that it actually is a child actor (the same one who played the bored boy scout), but if I didn’t know that, I’d swear it was an adult adopting a fake child voice. I’ve heard panicked 911 calls from children whose parents are in danger. The fact that I just thought about one is probably going to ruin my night’s sleep. This is not convincing.

A shellshocked Cheryl explains that hundreds of similar calls have been recorded. One last time, we throw to Harvey via videophone, who smarms insincere concern for Tiffany. Harvey’s relocated to somewhere “far from the battle zone” but still “inside the battle perimeter,” and is the first person to identify the source of the attacks with something as specific as “Strange invaders”, and a minute later, finally, as “aliens”. He too is overcome by the smoke, using his last few minutes to wax eloquent about the “brave, brave troops,” and, “The finest America has to offer.” We get another one of those strange visual glitches.

The cat being out of the bag, everyone can start calling them aliens. Dave tries to calm the audience, while Will has somehow gotten in touch with “sources inside the military” to learn that the alien war machines can generate EMPs, the source of the various transmission glitches and lost connections. A soldier who’s fled the front lines calls the station and finally Dave asks someone about the nature of the invaders. According to Private Washington, they’re, “Huge. Horrible. They must be at least 200 feet tall.” He insists that the military can’t hold the line or repel the invaders, outraging Will, who is confident otherwise. A presumed alien advance kills Private Washington, still on the line, and Cheryl finally loses it and simply runs off-stage.

Dave, now pretty shellshocked himself, looks to Will for hope. Will angrily insists that the command must still have things in hand. A piss-poor George Bush impersonator (the same actor who’d previously played the press secretary) delivers a message of hope and no information from his undisclosed location, but his message is cut off with another video glitch. Dave’s chyron (The title graphic displayed in the lower third of the screen, named for the maker of a popular 1970s digital character generator) now reads, “Breaking news: Earth invaded by aliens”, and there’s some trouble even with the studio signal now, as Dave’s color balance is all wrong.

He tries to regain his composure, but loses it again when the building shakes and his greenscreen gives out. Will, who we finally now see is literally sitting next to Dave and has been the whole time, identifies the explosion as a nuclear detonation. He gets his PA to summon a traffic map, showing… Traffic. Another building-shake prompts Will to announce, “They’re here, Dave.”

Dave once again uselessly asks, “Are you still here?” to Will, and then, “Is there anything we should do?”

Will is now loading a handgun, and explains, “No. Just try to go with dignity. It’s them. Just breathe, Dave. Nothing anyone can do now.” As smoke starts to fill the studio, Will puts the gun to his temple and we cut back to Dave as a very muted gunshot sound effect plays. Dave shouts, “Oh God! It burns! It burns!” as the studio gives way to the movie’s money-shot:

Our one and only look at the aliens, before the screen changes to what we should probably now realize is a Martian channel ident card (Which it now occurs to me looks kinda like a pie. Specifically, this pie.), then to a test pattern, and finally an old fashioned CRT-winking-off effect.

This movie is weird. It’s wrong in so many ways. It’s probably on-paper the worst adaptation of The War of the Worlds I’ve ever seen (though I reserve the right to revise that judgment very shortly).  And yet it has a certain charm and earnestness to it. Bree Pavey’s Tiffany Heinsbocker is an absolute delight. Will Knight’s final breakdown is painfully cliche, but he carries it off well. And even Dave, who is generally terrible, right at the end, gets a fairly good scene where he has to keep ordering himself to keep it together.

Most of the cast are just terribly misjudged in their performance. They never seen serious at the right time, or try to lighten the mood at the right time, or react with the proper amount of either gravitas or horror in response to things. And the whole character of Harvey is utterly misguided. I think maybe they were going for a kind of self-aggrandizing hotshot who’s trying to get himself noticed for bigger things, but after maybe one scene of him, he’s utterly inappropriate. The absolute worst is his reaction to Tiffany’s death, which just seems so plastic and rehearsed that I’d be rooting for him to die, except that his death ends up kinda upstaging Tiffany’s.

This might be the first time that I’ve found myself complaining about an independent film for being too unambitious. We get one CGI FX shot at the very end, and a few seconds of military stock footage a few more seconds of forest fire stock footage, and one photoshop smoke effect, and the rest of the time, it’s just people telling us, in not very much detail, about destruction that we either can’t see, or which contradicts what we can see.

The real problem here is with the narrative itself. Like, you notice what’s missing from this? The bit at the end where the Martians all keel over from common Earth-bacteria. Which is close to being the whole thematic punch line of the story, but here it’s just absent. The bulk of the narrative is spent with our news reporters reporting over and over again that they don’t actually know anything. Even leaving aside the idea that they’d be reluctant to declare the invaders to be extraterrestrial (which is defensible, but even so, in the real world, the news would have been dominated by speculation, with talking heads shouting why is obviously was or was not aliens. And Fox News “Just asking questions” whether or not Obama might secretly be an alien himself), they story here is that the US Military is engaged in maneuvers against multiple enemy targets on American soil, and yet the reporters are coy even about that. It’s all about them not having much information, and there being “unconfirmed reports” of “activity”. They put off actually saying “We are under attack by a hostile force” for just as long as they put off saying “It’s invaders from Mars,” and they try to keep playing as “The reporters don’t realize that these events are related and add up to something important,” well past the point where any reasonable person could be that dense. Further, all we ever see of the “destruction”, until that final money-shot, is one not-very-burnt-down apartment complex. We’re only a few minutes into the story when, allegedly, a two hundred foot tall crane-like machine rises up out of the pacific ocean and walks down a major highway. That is a dumb thing to write into your story at the 15 minute mark, and then proceed to not have anyone see it, snap a picture, or even confirm the report. There’s a news helicopter in the area, but it goes off to watch stock-footage of a carrier group instead.

And the carrier group reminds me of another of this movie’s strange foibles: the way that the reporters keep acting as though the exact details of military operations are the real story. The copter covering the carriers instead of going to look for the war machine. Tiffany asking about the munitions being sent into the pit rather than the thing inside it. Tiffany’s speculation with her cameraman over the types of bombers. Will Knight’s detailed analysis of Russian troop movements, and speculation on the exact yield of the bombs used in Siberia. The fact that channel 3 has a chief military reporter at all. You see this sort of thing a lot with folks like Tom Clancy or Michael Bay (Though Bay’s military fetishism isn’t as detail-oriented), but, y’know, Rod Pyle is no Tom Clancy. Or Michael Bay even.

But you know what? Why should he have to be? This isn’t a big studio release. I don’t even know what this is. I did a little research on Rod Pyle. Amazon informs me that he’s written an assortment of nonfiction books about NASA, primarily focused on the Apollo missions and on the exploration of Mars. He’s written for The Huffington Post and Conscious Life News about NASA and Mars, He wrote and directed some episodes of The History Channel’s Modern Marvels, including one about Apollo 11. He’s also a ghostwriter, specializing in helping subject-matter experts render their expertise into nonfiction books.

I think what we’re looking at here is nothing stranger than a space-enthusiast who’s skilled as a non-fiction writer and documentary filmmaker turning his hand to one particular story that he has a particular fondness for, and trying to make something fun that’s a little outside his comfort zone. Maybe he made it just for his portfolio, something to show clients. Maybe it was a class project. I don’t know. The only really weird thing is that it somehow ended up on a DVD that Netflix was willing to send me.

Do I recommend this? I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to. It’s not “bad movie good”, in that there isn’t really any incompetence to laugh at, except maybe Harvey. I can’t really say, “If you’re into that sort of thing,” because then I’d have to try to come up with an explanation of what “that sort of thing” is. It’s not really experimental enough for someone who’s into experimental filmmaking. Okay, you know whose cup of tea this might be? If you’re the kind of person who likes educational short films. That’s sort of what this feels like, now that I think about it. Like maybe something you’d show a High School Journalism class: show a clip, and have them identify stuff like the chyron and the intertitles and discuss technique and voice and greenscreening and whatever.

Maybe that’s why I ultimately ended up enjoying this; I actually kind of dig that sort of thing. I like narratives in things that don’t primarily exist to be narratives. The corporate ethics training video with its storyline about intrigues among the employees slowly escalating until someone accidentally commits a federal crime. The anti-drug PSA about a teenager transported to fantasy world to fight video game-style monsters representing drug dealers. The teen high school soap opera to introduce the Spanish words for objects found around the classroom. And of all the things I’ve experienced, that’s what Breaking News feels the most like. Like the actual narrative of this short film is actually beside the point of it.

I just wish I knew what the point actually was. Which is what I thought was going to be the coda to this post, but then something finally turned up in my research. See, from a narrative perspective, Breaking News drives me up a wall, because, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, they killed off Tiffany before the final act…

Continue reading Deep Ice: 2X2L Calling CQ. New York? Isn’t there anyone on the air? (Rod Pyle’s War of the Worlds: Breaking News)

I’ll Explain Later…

Happy Halloween (eve). It is October 30, 1938. In the past month, Germany has annexed the Sudetenland. The ballet Billy the Kid opened in Chicago. The Yankees win their third consecutive World Series. The Munich Agreement was signed, assuring, as British Prime Minister Neville Chaimberlain announced, “Peace for our time.” Pygmalion opens in movie theaters, based on the George Bernard Shaw stageplay. The film’s screenplay will later be the basis of the musical My Fair Lady.  Christopher Lloyd has just been born. Buddy Ebsen has to give up his role in The Wizard of Oz a week into filming when he narrowly survives a severe allergic reaction to the aluminum powder in his Tin Man makeup. It is otherwise a quiet month for movies; most of the year’s big releases were back in August, though Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes opens in two days. In the past week, Chester Carlson has demonstrated the first xerographic copier — the Xerox machine to you and me. DuPont has officially dubbed their new synthetic polymer “nylon”. Jews with Polish citizenship have been evicted from Germany. The US has outlawed child factory labor and created the first official nationwide minimum wage.

Billboard Magazine exists, but it won’t start producing actual charts until 1940, so the most specific I can tell you is that the most popular songs at the moment are probably “Begin the Beguine” by Artie Shaw and “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” by the Andrews Sisters. Or maybe the Sammy Kaye version of “Rosalie”, which I think debuted this week. Presumably, swing is really popular since everybody who’s anybody is denouncing it, including, and I swear I am not making this up, an article dated November 2, titled “Swing Viewed as ‘Musical Hitlerism’; Professor Sees Fans Ripe for Dictator.” Yes. In 1938, literally a week before Kristallnacht, stodgy old people were already comparing things they didn’t like to Hitler. The Nazis go ahead and ban swing by the end of the month anyway, just in case.

In the coming week or so, Seabiscuit will outrun War Admiral at Pimlico, Crystal Bird Faucet will become the representative for the 18th district of Philadelphia to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, the first African American Woman to serve as a state legislator. Perl Buck will win the Nobel Prize in literature. LSD will be synthesized for the first time. Freak weather conditions will cause TVs in New York to briefly receive BBC broadcasts. This is novel enough that someone is going to film it, making it the only known surviving footage of pre-war BBC television. Also Kristallnacht is going to happen, because, y’know, Nazis.

Phantom BBC broadcasts aside, television does not really exist per se in any form we’d recognize it, but its specter is already haunting us: last week, the BBC televised its first hockey match, and in New York, John Warde became the second person — the second person in 1938 and also the second person in the history of ever — to have his suicide televised, though lighting conditions, poor reception, and the fact that it was 1938 and Television hadn’t finished being invented yet keep more than a handful of people from seeing it. CRTs are being produced in the tens of thousands despite the fact that there won’t be any proper commercial TV for another year or two in the US. In the US right now, radio is still where it’s at, and will be for a few more years yet. This month marks the premier of The Wonder Show, featuring Lucille Ball. Jack Benny does a send-up of one of those big August movies, Algiers on his show (Algiers, by the way, is the reason that the 1942 film Casablanca didn’t use its maiden name, Everybody Comes to Rick’s). Madeline Carroll guest stars on the Bergen and McCarthy segment of The Chase and Sanborn Hour. Doctor Christian‘s October episodes are “Baby on Doorstep” and “Boy loves Girl”, adapted, in accordance with the gimmick of the show, from listener submissions. Jungle Jim has been facing off against “Karnak the Killer” since the beginning of August in a serial that ends next week.

But look, the fact that you’ve stuck with me this long suggests that you’ve got at least a little background in geek-relevant media, so you probably already know what the deal is with radio and October 30, 1938. A young auteur named Orson Welles was still early in his career. Citizen Kane is still three years away. The Third Man is a decade away. The frozen pea commercial and Caesar’s Palace promotional video are thirty years away. Transformers The Movie is almost half a century away. Right now, he’s seventeen episodes in on a series of radio plays CBS commissioned him to direct, performed by Welles and the members of the Mercury Theater. In December, it would be picked up for sponsorship by Campbell’s Soup and would run as The Campbell Playhouse until Welles tired of having to deal with network censorship and decided not to renew his contract in 1940. But here, in October 1938, The Mercury Theater On The Air does the one and only thing you are liable to remember it for if you aren’t an Old Time Radio fan.

No one would have believed, said a different guy named “Wells”, that in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. But apparently people forty years on were more credulous, because when The Mercury Theater on the Air performed the radioplay “Invaders from Mars”, so the story goes, it brought on mass hysteria. Panic in the streets. A man in Washington falls dead from a heart attack as he imagines black smoke and heat rays drawing near. Radio stations across the country besieged by angry mobs demanding answers. Future Tonight Show host Jack Paar shouted down by callers as he attempts to reassure listeners. The FCC threatened to require all broadcasts be pre-approved from now on. Dogs and cats living together.

Or not. Practically everyone who actually researches these things nowadays has conceded that, yes, some people panicked, but no, it wasn’t rioting in the streets or anything. It may be impossible to believe in this day and age of modern journalistic integrity, but it’s just possible that the news media of 1938 may have embellished the extent of the panic. I know, unpossible, right? To actually get as far as a panic over The Mercury Theater on the Air‘s “War of the Worlds”, you’d have to be paying close enough attention to know you should panic, but not enough that you pick up on things like the fact that about five minutes into a broadcast that started at 8 PM, they announce the arrival of the first Martian cylinder at a quarter past nine. Or that Orson Welles’s character walks from Princeton to Times Square in the last third of the broadcast.

Well yeah, you might well say, but isn’t that how panic works? You hear a little bit and your critical reasoning turns off and you run off half-cocked? Besides, it was the thirties and people were really naive back then and assumed that anything you heard on the radio must be true!

Which makes a good narrative, but does it track with your experience of life? Yes, of course things were different in the 1930s, but you know and I know exactly what happens when you see something huge and unexpected and horrible and unprecedented appear on the news one morning. You don’t take to the streets in panic. You do literally nothing else for hours other than watch with rapt attention, silently demanding the world start making sense again. And as to the claim that people in the past would have assumed anything the heard on the radio was true, it was 1938. It’s not like fiction hadn’t been invented yet. I mean, the most popular show of this era starred a ventriloquist’s dummy. I don’t think anyone listening at home thought Charlie McCarthy was actually able to speak all on his own (I have no idea what particular appeal a ventriloquist act would have on the radio over any other kind of entertainment, but there you have it). And before you qualify it by saying that War of the Worlds was framed as a news broadcast — this wasn’t the first time that had happened either. In fact, Orson Welles himself had starred alongside future Bat-Villain Burgess Meredith in The Fall of the City the previous year. Like War of the Worlds, it was framed as a news broadcast, and like War of the Worlds, it told of a civilization quickly being taken over by a mysterious invading force, the major difference being that The Fall of the City is an experimental piece, its dialogue in blank verse, and kind of surreal (The approaching conqueror turns out to be a manifestation of the people’s desire to be subjugated). The actual documented evidence suggests that the reaction of the public consisted mostly of high call-volumes at radio stations and newspapers. That suggests concern, sure, but not panic. Calling the news media and asking them what’s going on is a very rational response to hearing something bizarre and alarming — if it’d happened today, I imagine the reports would be that “#Martians” was trending on Twitter.

Besides, The Mercury Theater on the Air was a minor little cultural-interest program on CBS. At eight O’clock on a Sunday, most everyone was listening to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy over on the NBC Red Network. Though astute listeners probably find it suspicious that the point in War of the Worlds where the Martians first appear occurs at almost exactly the moment that The Chase and Sandborn Hour took its first commercial break.

On the other hand, there are antecedents. In 1926, Father Ronald Knox did a satirical report of the outbreak of a communist revolution in England as part of his weekly BBC Radio show. The panic was slower-burning though; a big part of what spooked the public was that snowy weather prevented newspaper deliveries the next day, prompting fears that The Times had fallen in battle. The following year, Australian listeners were spooked when Station 5CL opened a season of Thursday night “stunts” one July night with a radio play in the style of a news report about an invasion by an unspecified foreign power. In a kind of beautifully 1920s Austrialian sort of way, the news reports kind of backhandedly impugned the manliness of anyone who fell for it. 5CL continued its stunts that winter (Austrialia, remember? Winter’s in the middle of the year), including, ironically enough, a purported live report of an expedition to Mars, actually launching a small rocket from their station to help sell the illusion to nearby listeners who happened to be looking skyward.

But look, even if there wasn’t actual rioting in the street, some people did get scared, and it behooves us to look into that a bit. The first thing to remember is that radio doesn’t work by the same rules as television. Although the narrative style of TV grew very directly out of radio, at a very fundamental level, they work in almost completely opposite ways. In fact, while I was researching this article, I found an excerpt from a 1940s book on writing for radio which outright says that the techniques of radio writing are utterly inapplicable to TV. But what do I mean when I say that TV and Radio work in opposite ways? The most obvious thing is the lack of visuals, of course. Vision is incredibly central to the human experience. A huge amount of our brains are devoted to processing images. Even people who can’t see are constantly surrounded by a world that demands they interpret — or “view”  — it in visual terms. It infiltrates our language (You see it all the time): to miss a key detail is to overlook it. A general sense of a situation is an overview, and to get one, you take a look at the big picture. To be caught unaware is to be blindsided, which you can avoid if you look out. When you part company with someone, you promise to see you later. You investigate something by looking into it, and when you finally figure out what it’s all about, you might well exclaim, “Oh! I see!” And then you can process that information and use it to draw a conclusion. Heck, I started this paragraph by inviting you to look, and I’m going to end it with another visual allusion. See?

This seems counterintuitive to our purpose, though, doesn’t it? I mean: seeing is believing, right? So why should a radio play be so convincing? The most cliche answer is that, robbed of what is for most of us the chiefest amongst the senses, our desperate brain starts inventing some extra reality all on its own to make up the difference. Which is true, I suppose, but it doesn’t, irm, paint the whole picture. There’s another element of how radio differs from TV that I think is key here, and it’s not one we talk about a lot.

I’ve got one of those surround-sound setup dealies at home. Five small speakers, strategically arranged around the room. This is bizarrely cumbersome: if you don’t have everything adjusted just right, the sound is weird and tinny and sounds like it’s coming from the wrong place. In principle, of course, when you’ve got it all set up properly, you can do neat things with all that 5.1 digital nonsense. But ultimately, this is a very small part of the TV-watching experience, because no matter how you spacialize it, what you really want is for almost all of the sound to seem like it’s coming from the forty-inch rectangle at the front of the room.

Television, especially in the old days before we all got comfortable and complacent about it, is often touted for its ability to bring anything in the world right there into your living room. But that’s not quite true, is it? What television does is not to bring the world into the room, but to shrink it down and put it right outside your room. What we experience on TV is the world as viewed through a window. In the 1930s, a very small window. High definition and big screens and curved screens and 3-D glasses all purport to make the images we see as though they are “really there”, but other than when I’ve stuck my smartphone into a Google Cardboard rig, all those advances haven’t changed the fact that I never have to do more than turn my head about 45 degrees to escape the illusion.

Of all the senses, vision is uniquely spacial: to see something places it in the world in a way none of the other senses do. Vision is the one sense that directly links us to other things out away in the world. Touch and taste require that the thing we wish to sense comes to us, or we go to it. Smell can give us a notion of proximity, but only sometimes, it quickly dulls as it gets bored with each stimulus, and it often lies — the acrid chemical smell of a burnt-out bluetooth transmitter issues more strongly from the second floor vent registers than from the transmitter itself. And sound is very strange: it’s spacial, but only in one dimension. While our binocular vision generates a model of a three dimensional space by stitching together a pair of two-dimensional images, our ears pick up frequency and volume from two directions, and the most you can get out of that is roughly how far to the left or right something is. You can’t tell by sound alone whether something is in front of you, behind you, above, or below without moving your head (Your eyes cheat a little bit, because they also vibrate slightly, allowing them to pick up more information from tiny little perspective shifts. Weirdly, a recent study suggested that the extent to which your brain relies on that extra information is inversely proportional to testosterone levels. Since things like 3D glasses can’t yet accurately model this effect, one strange result is that 3D graphics are more convincing to men than to women, and that difference applies to cis and trans people alike). And even then, sound isn’t directional the way vision is. I can look away from something I don’t want to see. I can’t listen away from something.

I’m getting ahead of myself, but we can stop a moment and reflect that radio has at least the potential to be quite scary just because you can’t close your ears if you get too scared. The actual point I was trying to get to is this: Television shrinks the world down and puts it in a box for you. It lets you see amazing things from all over the world, but it maintains a strict subject/object separation: no matter how fantastic the world is on the screen, it has to stay in that box(And how effective is it when you have something like Ringu, or Poltergeist or the “It’s a Good Life” segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, where things can cross the TV boundary to get you? Or for that matter, the Doctor talking to Sally Sparrow via DVD). Radio is almost the exact diametric opposite. Radio comes out of the box. The box is the least interesting thing about radio (Still pretty cool though, if you’ve ever poked around inside an old tube radio). What you see on TV is by definition not in the room with you. What you hear on the radio is. The sounds come out into your space, invade it. Heck, those sounds do not even exist as sound until they leave the radio. Inside they radio, they’re just a pattern of electromagnetism, a vibrating membrane. They’re only turned into sound when the speaker beats on the air outside. Sound surrounds you.

Since this is the first time we’ve talked about adaptations of War of the Worlds, maybe a quick precis is in order. Most everyone knows the general outline of the story, but considerably fewer have actually read it, not least of all because HG Wells’s writing style is pretty dry and impersonal. He’s one of those golden-age Science Fiction writers for whom big ideas are more important than storytelling, and I think that makes his works better in adaptation than in the original (Though there is a touching chapter at the end detailing the protagonist’s search for and ultimate reunion with his wife that for some reason hardly ever makes it into adaptations).

Most people are familiar with 1953 George Pal film, or the 2005 Spielberg film. They, like most adaptations, keep most of the major plot beats, but contort them a lot to give the story stronger characters and pacing. There are basically seven major scenes in the story: the first Martian ship lands and is initially mistaken for a meteorite; the Martians emerge, erect a war machine, and slaughter the first responders; the military responds and is routed by “heat ray” weapons; a suicide attack by Earth’s most formidable weapons of war destroys one war machine; the martians release poisonous black smoke, pretty much terminating the military response; the protagonist holes up in a farmhouse, where he gets a good look at the Martian modus operandi, usually by watching another survivor get eaten during a panic attack; the protagonist meets an artilleryman with delusions about setting himself up as leader of a new society; the Martians all die suddenly from disease. Different adaptations give different emphasis to these parts or introduce a twist — the George Pal movie has the war machine survive unscathed in their equivalent of the Thunderchild scene; Spielberg has the Martian warcraft buried underground ahead of time rather than arriving from Mars with their operators — but they’re usually all there. The basic beats are even pretty much all there in Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day; Randy Quaid basically plays the role of the Thunderchild, Area 51 takes the place of the farmhouse, and the invaders are ultimately brought down, after all of man’s devices had failed, by the humblest thing that God in His wisdom had put upon the Earth: Jeff Goldblum (I mean, yes, they used a computer virus, and that’s interesting (if nonsensical) in that it is such an obvious “clever twist” on the end of War of the Worlds that it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t a deliberate homage, but my answer is funnier).

War of the Worlds begins with an opening narration that frames the story in the most awkward of tenses, the present-as-past-in-future-perfect: “In the thirty-ninth year (Of course, technically, 1938 is the Thirty-eighth year of the twentieth century, as 1900 is part of the nineteenth century. But clearly even in 1938 everyone knew that was pointlessly pedantic) of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30, the Crosley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios.” We catch the tail-end of a weather report before the announcer hands over to a musical program, which in turn is interrupted by an announcement that an eruption of blue flame on Mars has been sighted by an observatory.

After a bit more back and forth between the announcer and the soothing sounds of Ramon Raquello and his Orchestra, we get to meet the man who will eventually become the protagonist of the story, Professor Richard Pierson, an astronomer at Princeton. Howard Koch’s radioplay stays fairly close to the major beats of the original novel, even more than the many later adaptations, but here we get one of the earliest and most influential changes. Wells, of course, rarely bothered with proper names for his characters. The protagonist of the book is described as an essayist, but doesn’t have a name. He seems most closely analogous to Carl Phillips, the reporter who interviews Pierson. In the ’30s, the Intrepid Reporter Hero would have already been a familiar trope. Instead, this version of the story will follow Pierson in its second half. There’s an analogous character to him in the original, the “famous astronomer” Ogilvy, but he’s killed off-screen at the beginning of the invasion. I can’t help but wonder if Professor Pierson is named for Pearson’s, the magazine that originally published War of the Worlds in serial form back in 1897.

Pierson exposits a bit, echoing Ogilvy’s sentiment that the chances of anything coming from Mars are “A thousand to one.” (Admittedly, a thousand times more likely than Ogilvy’s estimate), until they’re interrupted by a telegram, asking Pierson to investigate a suspected meteorite impact in nearby Grover’s Mills. Though Pierson doesn’t plan to investigate until the next morning, Intrepid reporter Carl Philips is summoned to the scene, and presumably gives him a lift. We’ve now pulled out fully an hour ahead of real time in our story; our announcer tells us that the meteor struck at 8:50, and refers to events as late as 9:20. About thirty seconds have passed for the listening audience when Carl and Pierson arrive in Grover’s Mill ten minutes later. Carl kills time by interviewing a yokel. I can’t stress this enough: the first fifteen minutes of this radioplay are really dry. Deliberately dry. This is really the key to selling the whole thing, because that dry, matter-of-fact style is really what sells us on this being a legitimate news report, and whether or not it actually “fools” you, it’s still what makes it effective when the world stops making sense in a few more minutes when Chase and Sanborn goes to commercial.

There is one bit I really like here, though: while describing the crowd around the fallen cylinder, Carl Phillips reports, “One man wants to touch the thing. He’s having an argument with a policeman. The policeman wins.” It’s just a beautiful bit of understatement that very efficiently evokes the idea of what happens and also gives us a real sense of Carl Phillips as a reporter. Frank Readick performs the lines with this really hard-core “detached disinterest” tone that shouts, “We all knew exactly how this was going to end.” Gates McFadden was a bit more fun with it in a 1994 production, conveying a building excitement that she suddenly suppresses on, “The policeman wins,” in a way that you know means, “The policeman just punched that guy in the face, but this is the ’30s, so reporters don’t talk about police brutality.”

[raw]The detached disinterest continues even when the Martians actually show up a minute or so later. Listening to it now, with my upbringing on ’80s media, it produces a feeling of whiplash and disbelief: the words and the delivery are at odd angles to each other. I don’t really have the literacy in 1930s newscasting to say what it would have been like for the original audience. Readick prepared for the part by listening to Herbert Morrison’s reports of the Hindenberg disaster (The “Oh the humanity!” bit), but I can’t hear the influence personally. I actually think Gates McFadden comes closer to emulating Morrison’s “I am suppressing my shock and alarm as best I can because I am a professional,” though she cites not Morrison, but Lauren Bacall as the major influence for her performance. The only real hint that Carl Phillips cares about what’s going on in Readick’s performance comes at how he speeds up and slows down slightly, rushing over bits like the physical description of the Martians, which seems to disgust him, and slowing down as he tries to delay reporting his own inevitable death.

PHILLIPS: Now the whole field’s caught fire. The woods, the barns, the gas tanks of automobiles. It’s spreading everywhere. It’s coming this way. About twenty yards to my right.

Where McFadden finally breaks down at the end in a panic, it’s not fear but only sadness I pick up from Readick as he says his last words.

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And then we go back to the studio, where an announcer who doesn’t seem to have been listening guesses that there might be a technical problem with their field unit, reads an announcement that the explosions on Mars are probably just volcanoes, then cuts over to a piano interlude. Dwight Schultz does this part in the 1994 production, and I really like that he adds a little “um” at the beginning, like he doesn’t quite believe what’s going on.

We’re treated to some announcements about military preparations, then we get an interview with Professor Pierson, who gives a weirdly technobabble-heavy speech about the heat ray. It’s probably the most Star Trek thing in this play, and I’m doubly impressed that when Leonard Nemoy played the role in ’94, he sounds nothing like Spock even as he’s reading lines that could easily have been written for him. One nice touch: his voice is heavily filtered for this bit to indicate that he’s talking to them via telephone from the farmhouse where he’s holed up.

The announcer receives confirmation of Carl Phillips’s death immediately after the interview, and finally lets the dispassionate newscaster facade drop. From here on, we’ll be listening to panicked people try to keep doing their jobs anyway. A captain in the state militia reports as the military mounts a counter-attack, only to be routed when the first tripod war machine emerges from the spacecraft. News starts coming faster as more tripods emerge across the country and refugees flee in terror. The big “action scene” of the radioplay happens when the station airs a “live” feed from the 22nd field artillery. The artillery is able to damage one tripod, but all they get for their efforts is a face-full of black smoke. Setting aside the framing device of the news broadcast for a while, we start cutting directly between military broadcasts: a bomber out of Bayonne reports in as his plane, along with seven others, is shot down by heat rays, then to air traffic control, who confirms the bomber’s demise but reveals that his suicide run had destroyed a single tripod. An operator in Newark cuts in to announce the city’s evacuation in the face of encroaching black smoke. The operators at stations 2X2L and 8X3R try to exchange information, but 8X3R falls ominously silent.

[raw]We return to the radio announcer one last time. Resigned to his fate, he reports on attempts to evacuate New York City. It’s a tired, broken man who gives his final report: “They’re running towards the East River. Thousands of them. Dropping in like rats. Now the smoke’s spreading faster. It’s reached Times Square. People trying to run away from it, but it’s no use. They’re falling like flies. Now the smoke’s crossing Sixth Avenue… Fifth Avenue… one hundred yards away… It’s fifty feet,” and then we actually hear his body slump over as he too is overcome.

2X2L calling CQ… 2X2L calling CQ… New York? Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone…

Which would be chilling enough on its own, but we return one last time to 2X2L.

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One of the things my dad told me when I was younger and trying to understand the alleged panic was that back then — this was about a decade before my dad was born, but it’s about the right vintage for his siblings — radio was kind of hit-or-miss. I mentioned before how British TV got picked up in New York. Sometimes, when the weather did the right things or your tuner did the wrong things, or the vacuum tubes weren’t all screwed in tight, you’d sometimes pick up stray signals on your radio. It wouldn’t have been unbelievable in 1938 for a listener to imagine that, in the confusion of war, military or government broadcasts had drifted into the commercial frequencies.

I don’t know that such a thing would explain why, after they paused for station identification (and repeating that this was an original dramatization), the mode of the narrative shifts completely. The last act of The War of the Worlds is a traditional narrative, told in the first person and styled as the diary of Professor Pierson as he makes his way from a farmhouse in Grover’s Mill to Times Square. This first segment is a strange transition as the professor rambles philosophically: “My wife, my colleagues, my students, my books, my observatory, my–. my world… where are they? Did they ever exist? Am I Richard Pierson? What day is it? Do days exist without calendars? Does time pass when there are no human hands left to wind the clocks?” The farmhouse scene is greatly simplified here; there’s no equivalent character to the curate (A clergyman the protagonist holes up with and eventually kills or incapacitates when his bout of hysterics threaten to reveal their location), nor much detail about what the Martians have set themselves to doing now that humanity has fallen. There is no red weed in this version, and the most we learn of what use the Martians make of conquered humans is Pierson’s ominous warning that, “I have seen the Martians… Feed.”

[raw]He makes his way to Newark, where he’s accosted by my favorite character, the artilleryman. The artilleryman really prefigures the doomsday prepper in a lot of ways. He’s presumably a survivor of the 22nd Artillery, and he initially orders Pierson out of “his country”, but the two stop and exchange information for a bit. The artilleryman’s got a grandiose plan for the survival of the human race. He means to go to ground, excavating an underground empire where humanity can be preserved until they’ve built up their forces enough to wage a covert insurrection against the Martians.

STRANGER: I’ve got it all figured out. We’ll live underground. I’ve been thinking about the sewers. Under New York are miles and miles of ’em. The main ones are big enough for anybody. Then there’s cellars, vaults, underground storerooms, railway tunnels, subways. You begin to see, eh? And we’ll get a bunch of strong men together. No weak ones; that rubbish, out.

Very romantic and all, but something sinister quickly peaks its head out underneath.

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That’s the core of the character. He holds most of humanity in contempt, and what he sees in the destruction of civilization at the hands of the Martians is an opportunity — a chance to get rid of the great throng of mankind — the folks Ayn Rand would call “takers” or “parasites”. A modern internet libertarian might call them “sheeple”, and the artilleryman even likens them to cattle, suggesting that before long, the Martians will start herding the human survivors as livestock. Only “strong men” would survive in the new world order — and, of course, it goes without saying that he would be one one of those “strong men”.

We’re early in the history of this particular kind of dystopian fantasy, but this archetype is going to become so universal in this genre. The grizzled survivalist who despises the weakness of humanity and sees the zombie horde as purging the world of the unworthy: all those crass consumerist sheep he’s always despised are now zombies, so it’s FINALLY okay to do what he always secretly wanted to do and kill them. Or the protagonist in most Christian End Times stories, who maybe, yeah, acknowledges that the whole “seven years of plagues, four horsemen of the apocalypse, and a charismatic UN Secretary General with glowing eyes,” thing might well suck, but isn’t it just glorious that those sinners are finally going to get the hellfire and damnation they deserve? Or the local strong-man who’s given himself a title like “Governor” or “General” and set himself up as the fief of the local fortified town. Or scientist who wants to withhold the cure for the encroaching pandemic, because, really, the world could do with a few million fewer mouths to feed as long as we make sure the worthy all get inoculated.

My first metric for whether or not I’m going to enjoy a piece of dystopian literature is how it treats this archetype. A lot of times, they’re the hero. The one who Saw it Coming and is Strong Enough to Do What Must Be Done. Who aren’t blinded by silly notions like equality or helping other people.  I don’t usually like those versions of the story. Or if I do, I tend to like it subversively.

[raw]Welles passes the test, though. The artilleryman eventually muses on the possibility of his insurrectionists seizing control of a war machine.

STRANGER: Gee, imagine having one of them lovely things with its heat ray wide and free! We’d turn it on Martians! We’d turn it on men! We’d bring everybody down to their knees! You, and me, and a few more of us, we’d own the world!

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And Pierson walks away. He’s not willing to live in the artilleryman’s world. Welles’s Pierson delivers his goodbye with understated contempt. Nemoy does it with tired disappointment.

Strangely, Welles handles this a lot better than Wells: in the original book, the artilleryman elaborates on his plans at greater length and is more forthright about it, “No singers or mashers,” he says, and “Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.” And the nameless protagonist is swayed, “dominated”, he says, by the “tone of assurance and courage he assumed.” Okay. That’s fair. I don’t object to the artilleryman archetype being persuasive. But what troubles me is how they part. The narrator spends a day working with the artilleryman, and comes to see, “the gulf between his dreams and his powers,” quickly growing to despise the would-be dictator for his laziness, even feeling like a “traitor” for playing cards and smoking a cigar when the artilleryman insists on a break from work. He quits the artilleryman’s company not because he disagrees with the idea of his plan, but because the artilleryman has revealed himself to be one of those “useless and cumbersome” sorts who “ought to die”.

My distaste for that rendering of the scene is compounded by the fact that the society the artilleryman proposes isn’t too far afield from the “Air Dictatorship” Wells proposes as a future world government in The Shape of Things to Come. His “Air Dictatorship” is a benevolent one — you can tell because when they decide to execute you, you can opt to take a painless poison pill rather than being shot — that isn’t per se the perfect system of governance, but which he sees as a necessary transitional phase to a proper utopia before the dictators are bloodlessly deposed and sent off to live in honorable retirement. (By a weird and wacky coincidence, Wells predicts his Air Dictatorship to rule from around 1980 to 2059, which is a reasonable estimate of the years in which I am liable to be alive.)

So yeah. Wells didn’t object to the artilleryman’s plan. He objected to the useless parasite fancying himself one of the chosen elite. It’s ironic in a way that Wells seems to have stumbled onto a  fundamental truth that undermines the Artilleryman’s Fantasy (as I like to call it) without noticing it: the very fact that one views the world in those terms, where the great bulk of mankind are parasites fit only for slaughter or slavery at the hands of the benevolent Randian Super-Men is in and of itself strong evidence against being fit for that hypothetical elite class.

But Richard Pierson passes the test even if H.G. Wells didn’t, and quickly moves on to New York City, where the story ends as we all knew it would, when he finds dormant tripods in Central Park, their pilots dead on the ground, being pecked apart by birds. “Later,” he explains, framing the narration as his final diary entry, made the following April, “When their bodies were examined in the laboratories, it was found that they were killed by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared. Slain, after all man’s defenses had failed, by the humblest thing that God in His wisdom put upon this Earth.” He strays back into the philosophical, musing on the question of whether humanity will now spread out into the universe, or be vanquished by some future invasion.

So were people fooled? Does this sound like a narrative that would fool people? I’m going to say, unhelpfully, both “no” and “yes”. The War of the Worlds panic is something of an urban legend. I don’t just mean that the stories of people panicking are false or exaggerated; The Mercury Theater on the Air‘s “War of the Worlds” has aspects of an urban legend inside itself. Almost any urban legend falls apart on a factual level when you examine it. Someone would notice if thousands of children each year were kidnapped for ritual sacrifice. She couldn’t possibly have written a poem about the car crash if she died in it. The UN can pass non-binding resolutions that do not have any real force of law, and can only do that much if none of the big powerful countries object; they can not exercise sovereignty over and against the will of the US government. As a publicly traded corporation, how Proctor and Gamble uses its profits are a matter of public record; if they were tithing to the church of Satan, it would be in their shareholders’ statement. And Ernie is permanently five years old; he is not in a sexual relationship with Bert.

It’s less than true and more than false to say that people believe these things. It’s closer to true to say that they choose to accept them as though they were true. One idea I’ve found myself returning to a lot is this: not all lies are intended to deceive. Some are intended as an invitation. That is how urban legends work. That is how political muckraking works. That is how professional wrestling works. That is how War of the Worlds worked. No one is “fooled” into believing that the UN is coming for your guns or the president of the United States was able to conceal the fact that he wasn’t eligible, or that Wrestlemania isn’t scripted, or that the Church of Satan is using your pharmaceutical money to fund child sacrifice. No, people are being invited to go live in a world where that’s true. But there has to be something in it for them. Usually, it’s the monsters. I mean, if I live in a world full of child-murdering satanists, then the fact that I am not a child-murdering satanist puts me ahead of the game — in fact, I’m downright heroic because I am bold enough to stand up and decry satanic child-murder. If I lived in a world free of such monsters, I might start worrying that the fact that I live more comfortably than 90% of the human race, thanks in no small part to my lifestyle being subsidized by sweatshop labor overseas makes me a bad person.

That’s awfully venial, but there’s less venial reasons to want there to be monsters. If Satanic Child-Murderers or Kitten-Burners or Sasquatch or Slenderman are real, and they’re out there, I can be vigilant about them. And if they’re not out there, but I choose to act as though they are anyway, then I can still be vigilant about them but there’s no actual risk to me. And being able to worry about Satanic Child-Murderers, Kitten Burners, Proctor and Gamble, and the President’s Birth Certificate — mysterious otherworldly forces I can’t do anything about and am never going to encounter anyway — means I don’t have time to worry about global warming and income inequality and the collapse of the power grid because SERIOUSLY BGE, this is getting to be a twice-a-month thing now — things I’m not sure I can do anything about but I am liable to encounter anyway.

So what was “in it” for the audience that they might choose to “be fooled” by War of the Worlds? Well, first and most simply, it’s Halloween. In a 1940 interview, Orson Welles called it, “The same kind of excitement we extract from a practical joke in which someone puts a sheet over their head and says “boo!” I don’t think that anybody believes that individual is a ghost, but we do scream and yell and rush down the hall. And that’s just about what happened.” People were looking to be scared; that’s the fun of it, it’s how Halloween works. But I think there’s something more than that — some specific reason that this play was so effective.

The past is haunted by the future. A constant litany of little specters of the future trying to happen until they finally do happen and thereby cease to be the future. Halloween’s a better time than most for these little specters to pop up, and that’s what happened here. What ghost haunted that 1938 broadcast? Orson Welles hinted at it right at the beginning:

It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up.

The war scare was over. It was October 30, 1938, and people were feeling optimistic, because a month ago, it sure did look like Europe was going to get itself into another world war, but now, the scare was over.

Ten days later, Kristallnacht happens, because Nazis.

The past is haunted by the future. We are less than one year from the formal beginning of World War II. We’re not out of the Great Depression yet. At this time and in this place, being scared of invaders from Mars is better than being scared by invaders from Nazi Germany. A faceless horde that sweeps in and there’s nothing we can do about it, where we are only be saved by divine intervention is preferable to this wretched indeterminate state where we actually could take action: intervene for the Nazis, intervene against the Nazis; keep the hell out of it. And we can all agree which side we’re on against the Martians: in 1938, you had a surprisingly even split among Americans over which side we should throw our lot in with should it come to war (Not even really, but sitting here in 2014, it is pretty shocking and pretty scandalous that the percentage of Americans who reckoned that if it came to blows, we should side with that short fellow with the Charlie Chaplain moustache was nonzero).

That Orson Welles quote above? The one about ghosts and Halloween? That’s from a little historical curiosity: an interview in San Antonio when a local radio host lucked into finding out that Orson Welles and H.G. Wells were in town at the same time. Wells, though disparaging the younger man for his superfluous second ‘E’, was magnanimous enough to plug the then-upcoming Citizen Kane, and they had this little exchange:

WELLS: You aren’t serious in America yet. You haven’t the war right under your chins, and the consequence is that you can still play with ideas of terror and conflict.

HOST: Do you think that’s good or bad?

WELLS: It’s the natural thing to do until you’re right up against it.

WELLES:  Until it ceases to be a game.

WELLS: When it ceases to be a game.

In 1938, we could still play with ideas of terror and conflict. We could make it a game. Let’s all pretend the Sunday night cultural program on the Columbia Service is real. Because in 1938, we really did know — perhaps not on a conscious level, but on some level — that there really were monsters out there poised to invade. It was easier to live with if they’d been actual Martians.

So goodbye everybody, and remember the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian; it’s Halloween.

(For further reading, check out the links below the fold…)

Continue reading Deep Ice: Darker Days are Drawing Near (Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds)