Monsters From the Id:
Futuristic Visions In 20th Century Science Fiction Cinema

By Eric Enders
Previously unpublished (1999)

In 1895 George Méliès, a 34-year-old professional magician from Paris, attended the first public exhibition of a new invention called the Cinematographe. The machine, developed by the Lumière brothers of Paris, was the first and most primitive form of motion picture technology. Inspired by the visual magic he saw on the screen that day, Méliès decided to make films. Within five years, he had become the cinema’s first narrative artist — the first filmmaker to deliberately alter time and space rather than filming straightforward documentaries. In 1903 Méliès produced his most famous work: A Trip to the Moon, a 14-minute film loosely based on Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon. Although audiences saw the film as a comedy, A Trip to the Moon is generally acknowledged as the first science fiction film ever made. However, though it inaugurated a film genre that has lasted nearly a century, Méliès’ film did not appear out of nowhere. According to critic John Brosnan, its origins can easily be traced to science fiction literature, which in turn was inspired by “the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when technology first allowed man to cut loose from Nature and, more importantly, to bring about changes — in the landscape, in a whole way of life, in Nature itself.” Science fiction literature, particularly the writings of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, attempted to answer the essential questions raised by the Industrial Revolution. Is technology a good thing? Should mankind play God by flouting the rules of nature? This essay will examine the ways in which, according to Brosnan, “these questions have echoed down through science fiction films ever since.”

If A Trip to the Moon was the first true science fiction film, then Metropolis (1927), directed by German expressionist Fritz Lang, was the genre’s first indisputable masterpiece. Set in the year 2000, Metropolis envisioned a world literally divided between the upper and lower classes. In this vast city of the future, elites inhabit towering skyscrapers while the working classes toil in underground factories, where their humanity has been stolen by the machines they operate. The story is one of class conflict: Freder, the son of the city’s ruler, falls in love with Maria, a woman from the lower world. Not only is Maria a member of the working class, but she is also its most vocal agitator. To silence her, Freder’s father, Frederson, kidnaps Maria. He then commissions a mad scientist to construct a robot in her likeness, which he can use as a tool to control the working class. This false Maria incites the workers to riot, and chaos threatens their underground world until the real Maria escapes and manages to save the day. The film ends with a truce, as Frederson promises to be nicer to his workers in the future.

Metropolis, with a cast of thousands — 37,000, to be exact — was the most spectacular and expensive film in German history. With its emphasis on class conflict, it is probably more significant as a reflection of post-World War I Germany than as an intellectual vision of the future. Still, the city itself is visually astonishing: expressionistic skyscrapers are interconnected by sky ramps; airplanes glide smoothly between the buildings. (Lang said the futuristic urban landscape was inspired by his first visit to New York, in 1924.) Lang’s silent epic created the archetype for cinematic visions of the future, so much so that filmmakers were still trying to escape it half a century later. “We found that Lang’s picture made such an impression on the minds of the whole Western world that nobody can think of portraying the future except in terms of towers connected by ramps,” said Saul David, whose film Logan’s Run (1976) attempted, unsuccessfully, to counter the Lang archetype. Filmmakers were not the only ones impressed by Metropolis. It was reportedly Adolf Hitler’s favorite movie, and in 1933 he offered Lang a position as head of German cinema. Lang, who was half Jewish, refused and fled to the United States, where he began making English-language films in Hollywood. Lang always claimed to be dumbfounded by Metropolis’ lasting influence; he thought his greatest contribution to science fiction was inventing the countdown for rocket launches in 1928’s Woman in the Moon.  However, Metropolis was the film that made its mark, in one way or another, on every futuristic film that came afterward.

Though it made audiences laugh, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) was no less ominous than Metropolis in foreshadowing a mechanized society of mindless workers. The plot follows the adventures of Chaplin’s tramp character, who can’t quite adjust to his job on a futuristic assembly line. At one point he gets caught inside the gears of the gigantic machine; later, he is attacked by a “feeding machine” that is supposed to help him eat more quickly. Chaplin soon begins to think like a machine himself: After a long day spent tightening screws, he instinctively tries to tighten the buttons he sees on women’s clothing. Through a series of ingenious gags, Chaplin attacks the machine age in a way nobody else has done before or since.

Though he was concerned about increased mechanization and the economic despair brought about by the Great Depression, Chaplin also had important personal reasons for making Modern Times. It was his personal statement about the importance of silent films. Nine years earlier, in 1927, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, had been a major hit. Though it was a mediocre film, The Jazz Singer was wildly successful because Jolson actually performed songs with synchronized sound. Hollywood quickly recognized the commercial potential of sound, and by 1930 silent films had fallen by the wayside. Chaplin, however, realized his appeal as a slapstick comedian was based on silence, and he refused to make sound pictures — the only Hollywood filmmaker to do so. Significantly, though the characters in Modern Times do not speak, the machines do — and the news is always bad. The only thing resembling human speech in Modern Times is a gibberish song performed by Chaplin, which critic Pauline Kael described as “a demonstration of how unnecessary words are.” However, Modern Times turned out to be Chaplin’s swan song as a silent filmmaker. Even he could not resolve the paradox of being anti-technology in an industry that relied so heavily on it, and he began making talking films in 1940.

Also in 1940, the third and last of the Flash Gordon serial adventures, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, was released. These cheaply made “cliffhangers,” shown on Saturday afternoons and marketed to teenage boys, were major moneymakers for studios. However, they were considered ludicrous as plausible science fiction. Even the successful Flash Gordon series, based on a famous comic strip, was ridiculed by serious filmgoers of its day. Still, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe represents the most significant vision of the future in the 1940s, a war-dominated decade that was notably lacking in futuristic visions.

Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe contained 12 installments of about 20 minutes each. In order to view the entire story, then, young filmgoers had to attend the movies every Saturday afternoon for three months. The story was pure schmaltz: All-American boy Flash Gordon, aided by brilliant Dr. Zarkov, manages to save the Universe from the evil clutches of Ming the Merciless, an villain whose ultimate goal is to conquer Earth. Though the series featured bad writing, overacting, and cheap special effects, the originality and creativity of the enterprise made it appealing to youngsters. The series features surprisingly original special effects and costume design, although these elements will look familiar to viewers familiar with Star Wars. (George Lucas, after seeing Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe on television as a child in the 1950s, based his screenplay for Star Wars on the series.) The characters also anticipate Star Wars: Flash Gordon, Dr. Zarkov, Dale Arden, and Emperor Ming are clearly the inspirations for Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Princess Leia, and Darth Vader, respectively. Though they are highly original, many of the effects in the film are poorly executed — the rocket ships look like misfit missiles, discharging so much smoke and sparks that one wonders why they don’t crash. Still, other elements are almost visionary: the series contains ideas such as “death rays” and “thermal control,” even though the filmmakers seem as if they’re not quite sure what those things are. Unlike nearly all science fiction films that followed it, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe is nearly devoid of intellectual pretensions: The closest it comes to philosophizing about the future is when Dr. Zarkov defies the evil Ming by telling him, “There is no dictator in the Universe powerful enough to destroy human thought.” The Flash Gordon serials are the quintessential example of 1940s science fiction: simplistic, fun, and utterly unconcerned with social problems.

Forbidden Planet, made in 1956, was perhaps the most ambitious attempt to combine the mindless hedonism of serial adventures with the intellectual trappings of serious science fiction. It is an psychoanalytical adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but its astronauts are free spirits whose main desires are drinking and sexual gratification. The story involves astronauts who have been sent to rescue survivors of a pioneer space expedition. When they reach their destination, they find only one survivor of the expedition, Dr. Morbius. Though his fellow explorers perished mysteriously, Morbius, along with his space-born daughter and his robot servant Robby, survived. His daughter, Altaira, has never seen a human being besides her father, and she immediately becomes the object of desire for a male space crew that has been traveling for months. The Altaira character is like something out of an exploitation film: She wears nearly invisible skirts and delivers memorable lines like, “What’s a bathing suit?” Meanwhile, when the astronauts discover that Robby the Robot can reproduce large quantities of any substance, they immediately instruct him to manufacture 40 gallons of whiskey. Visually, Forbidden Planet owes more to the corny Flash Gordon films than the stately Metropolis. Its brightly-colored costumes and silly-looking baseball caps make the astronauts look better prepared for interstellar softball than space travel.

Intellectually, however, Forbidden Planet is every bit as serious as Metropolis. It posits that man, aided by technology, is not only capable of destroying himself, but is very likely to do so. Dr. Morbius, playing God, has invented a robot that has powers beyond those of any human being. Morbius built Robby the Robot based on plans left by the Krell, an ancient people who were destroyed by their own technology. Although Robby appears to be benevolent, Morbius loses control of him and eventually succumbs to the “Monsters from the Id” — the demons of his own subconscious. The film’s message is encapsulated in its last line: “We are, after all, not God.”

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), meanwhile, took Metropolis’ fear of technology and turned it into a chilling study of dehumanization. Like Metropolis, Modern Times, and Forbidden Planet before it, 2001 warned of the dangers of mechanization; unlike those films, it went so far as to predict mankind’s eventual destruction by computers. Earth at the beginning of the 21st century is run by computers, a sterile world devoid of compassion or any other emotions. The faceless humans interact with each other as if they were the computers; technology has stripped them of their humanity. The computer HAL, meanwhile, is by far the most “human” character in the film. (HAL is an acronym derived from the words heuristic and algorithmic; conveniently, its letters, when each is pushed forward one space, also spell “IBM.”) HAL expresses happiness, sadness, and jealousy better than the astronauts who are his shipmates. He also has the self-defense mechanisms of a human, killing the astronauts when he fears they intend to disconnect him, then desperately begging one of them to leave his circuits intact. In addition to its indictment of technology, 2001 echoes Modern Times in proving how unnecessary words are in cinema. The vast majority of the film lacks dialogue, instead relying on classical music and dazzling imagery to make its points.

Though George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) shares 2001’s visual conception of space travel, it is diametrically opposed to Kubrick’s film in almost every other way. Instead of relying on intellectual pretension and ambiguity, it hearkens back to the Flash Gordon serials’ sense of wonder and nonstop adventure. Like 2001, Star Wars’ most “human” characters are its robots, C3PO and R2D2, but Lucas shares none of Kubrick’s fear of technology. His robots are lovable instead of threatening, and he clearly sees technology as a positive expression of mankind’s creativity.

Though the prologue claims it takes place “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” Star Wars is clearly a vision of the future in the science fiction tradition. However, Lucas drew his inspiration not just from science fiction film and literature, but from a much wider array of sources. Almost every element of the film is derivative, so that, as Roger Ebert wrote, “Star Wars taps the pulp fantasies buried in our memories, and because it’s done so brilliantly, it reactivates old thrills, fears, and exhilarations we thought we’d abandoned.” Lucas admitted that certain elements in his film were inspired by science fiction classics like Flash Gordon, Forbidden Planet, and 2001; however, he also adapted material from samurai films (Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress) and westerns (John Ford’s The Searchers). In addition, the strange creatures in Star Wars bear a striking resemblance to those in The Wizard of Oz. While writing the screenplay, Lucas also came home every weekend with stacks of science fiction magazines and comic books, which, Pauline Kael wrote, makes the film seem “like a box of Cracker Jacks that’s all prizes.” In addition, the film contains recognizable elements of Greek mythology, eastern philosophy, and Judeo-Christian religion. The result, incredibly, was the most successful motion picture in history. By incorporating elements from every imaginable corner of popular culture, Lucas created a futuristic universe that surpassed any in film history.

The future in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), on the other hand, is as bleak as Star Wars is wondrous. The film is set in Los Angeles in the year 2019, when a race of robots called “Replicants” have become a menace to society. Identical to human beings in every way (except for having superior physical skills), Replicants have been banned from Earth. Special policemen, called “blade runners,” are assigned to hunt down and destroy stray Replicants. This causes complications for a blade runner named Deckard, who falls in love with one of the Replicants he is supposed to kill. Eventually, Deckard is forced to question not only the morality of his mission, but also his own humanity.

Like 2001, Blade Runner features robots who, though they are not supposed to display emotions, do so in a more meaningful way than human beings. Also like Kubrick’s film, the Replicants become hostile and homicidal when human beings attempt to eliminate them. Both films follow Metropolis in portraying a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that cannot be controlled once it has been created. Critical opinion on Blade Runner was greatly divided. Many hailed it as the most imaginative science fiction film since 2001. Others, like sci-fi writer Robert Silverberg, called it “simply silly” and complained that “it is hard to find much useful speculative thought of a science-fictional nature in Blade Runner.” Still, whatever its merits as science fiction, Blade Runner presents a futuristic vision of Los Angeles that is both frightening and breathtaking. Even Silverberg lauded the film’s cityscape as “one of the ultimate urban nightmares… Everything manages to glitter with futuristic pizzazz and nevertheless reveals itself simultaneously to be tinged with rot and decay: new and old, light and dark, airy and ineluctably heavy, both at the same time.” Scott said his goal was to portray “a time of self-protection and paranoia… I presented a future world that I believe would come close to being a totalitarian society — if not quite 1984, then one step from it.” In creating his Orwellian city, Scott made the most effective visual statement about Earth’s future since Metropolis.

Proyas’ Dark City (1998), however, created an even more impressive visual world than Blade Runner. The plot is reminiscent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A race of aliens (known as “The Strangers”) are dying out and have invaded Earth to steal its inhabitants’ humanity. The Strangers have the power to change objects’ size and shape at will (called “tuning”), which they use to create a false city in which human beings are held prisoner. With the help of a human pawn, Dr. Schreber, The Strangers stop the world every night at midnight to rearrange its elements and alter the humans’ memories. “They steal people’s memories and swap them between us, back and forth, back and forth, until no one knows who they are anymore,” Dr. Schreber says. What people think are their memories, then, are only fabrications placed in their heads the night before. But this mind altering has a risk: “Once in a while one of us wakes up while they’re changing things — but it’s not supposed to happen.” However, it does happen to the film’s human protagonist, John Murdoch, who discovers the truth and sets out to destroy The Strangers. Dark City is yet another in a long line of films to warn of the perils of playing God — whether it’s humans or aliens doing the playing.

Roger Ebert named Dark City the best film of 1998, calling it “a great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like Metropolis and 2001: A Space Odyssey.” Indeed, Dark City is perhaps the most visually imaginative film ever made, an incredible hodgepodge of elements from eclectic sources. It contains the wet streets and dark imagery of an American film noir, and though the story is clearly set in the future, cars from the 1940s drive through cobble-stoned streets. The film also contains the bright colors and trenchcoat-wearing figures of comic books like Batman and Dick Tracy. Though its main influences are film noir and futuristic comics, Dark City draws from countless other sources, including Metropolis and Blade Runner. In fact, Dark City’s vision surpassed that of Blade Runner, Ebert wrote, because “while Blade Runner extended existing trends, Dark City leaps into the unknown. Its vast noir metropolis seems to exist in an alternate time line, with elements of our present and past combined with visions from a futuristic comic book.” Dark City, unlike other futuristic films, explicitly acknowledges its debt to Metropolis. In The Strangers’ underground home, a statue of a huge female face looms over the dungeon, as if overseeing the proceedings. It is Maria, the robot from Metropolis.

          Like Star Wars, although virtually every element of Dark City’s visual style is derived from another source, the combined effect is a seamless world of stunning originality. It seems wholly appropriate that Dark City was made in 1998, as the 20th century draws to a close. The film is a unique hybrid of the century’s differing visions of the future, and while it sums up the century in a nutshell, its originality and vision also offer a glimpse of what is to come. It is both a farewell and a foreshadowing.

Filmography

1927: Metropolis. Directed by Fritz Lang. Written by Fritz Lang and Thea Von Harbou, based on the novel by Von Harbou.

1936: Modern Times. Directed by Charles Chaplin. Original screenplay written by Charles Chaplin.

1940: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Directed by Roy Beebe and Ray Taylor. Written by George H. Plympton, Basil Dickey, and Barry Shipton, based on the comic strip by Alex Raymond.

1956: Forbidden Planet. Directed by Fred M. Wilcox. Written by Cyril Hume, based on a story by Irving Block and Allen Adler.

1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, based on the story “The Sentinel” by Clarke.

1977: Star Wars. Directed by George Lucas. Original screenplay written by George Lucas.

1982: Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

1998: Dark City. Directed by Alex Proyas. Original screenplay written by Alex Proyas, Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer.

Bibliography

Brosnan, John. Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978.

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.

Kinnard, Roy. Science Fiction Serials. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1998.

Peary, Danny, editor. Screen Flights, Screen Fantasies: The Future According to Science Fiction Cinema. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1984.

Pohl, Frederik, and Frederik Pohl IV. Science Fiction Studies in Film. New York: Ace Books 1981.

Pollock, Dale. Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas. New York: Harmony Books, 1983.  

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