Movie iconoclasm

The Day the Earth Stood Still has not withstood the test of time

One of the cable channels recently showed the 1951 sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still. The movie has been called "the first thinking person's science fiction movie." It was made during the second year of the Korean War and the formative years of the Cold War - the USSR detonated its second atomic bomb that year, and the United States was only a year away from testing the first hydrogen bomb. And of course, the world was only six years away from the abbatoir of World War II.

The drama is this: a large flying saucer lands in front of the Washington Monument. The military surrounds it with tanks and troops. A giant, humanoid robot emerges. We learn later its name is Gort. The special effects are very primitive by today's standards and probably were not been terribly convincing even in 1951. But that's okay - this isn't an effects movie. An alien man, Klaatu, comes out. He is human, or at least humanlike. He announces he wants to address all the nations of the world. American agrees but the Soviets refuse. Klaatu escapes from government minders, disguises himself as a businessman, and takes a boarding room in Washington to use as a base of operations.

The movie was fairly loosely based on a 1940 short story called, "Farewell to the Master," by Harry Bates. Bates was one of the towering figures of science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s, a time known as the "Golden Age of Science Fiction." Amazingly, I found the text of Farewell to the Master online - you can read it here, and I heartily recommend it to you.

In the end, Klaatu makes it back to his spaceship. Gort is revealed an extremely powerful and destructive machine, equipped with a vaporizer ray, for example, as two soldiers guarding him discovered. Many critics say that Klaatu is a Christ figure - he comes from the heavens, is rejected by the authorities, hunted down and shot by soldiers. He resuscitates, then announces just before his ascension into the heavens that his purpose is to save humankind.

While the cinematic parallels are doubtless intentional, Klaatu as Christlike doesn't hold water. Klaatu is really an emissary of the "civilized" races of the universe, but he is revealed in the film's denouement as a galactic bully, a mere thug delivering a cruel ultimatum: either humankind stops making war or "the earth will be turned into a cinder."

Moreover, it is Gort, not Klaatu, who holds the earth's fate in his hands. Klaatu explains that his race created Gort and others like him to annihilate any people or any planet that breaks the peace. The robots' power is absolute and cannot be revoked, says Klaatu. The result is that they live in peace, and if humanity wishes to survive it must accept the dictatorship of the robots.

What Klaatu seems not to understand is that while he and his fellows live in peace, it is literally the peace of the grave. They are slaves. Their message to earth is simple: becomes slaves like us or die. This is not a message for the ages, and were it not for the movie's technical merits, it probably would have rightfully passed into oblivion long ago.

There is a high level of technical excellence in the movie. The use of light and shadow, always crucial in a black and white film, is very well done. Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie, is kindly and attractive - that is, until he makes his naked threats. The movie foreshadows the coming of Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD - the uneasy, dangerous equilibrium of neither peace nor war the USSR and USA found themselves in not many years later. Like thermonuclear weapons, Gort and the robots are weapons of mass destruction, only on a cosmic scale.

Unlike TDTESS's approximate contemporary, 1953's War of the Worlds, the alien's mission is dramatically presented as intriguing, even hopeful, until the end. It is not Klaatu or Gort who are aggressive, except for Gort's inexplicable vaporizing of the two guards. It is the human beings who use violence, who shoot Klaatu for no good reason. Klaatu is dramatically developed as the soul of friendliness; he even becomes a father figure to the son of the woman running the boarding house.

Yet the idea of machines having ultimate destructive power is one that hardly appeals to us. Only 32 years later Arnold Schwarzenegger would become a star by playing another version of Gort, but one somewhat less powerful. The apotheosis of machine-driven WMDs is excoriated in that movie's second sequel, Terminator 3.

Another thing that doesn't hold up today is the total absence of media at the spaceship's landing site. No reporters, no curious crowds, no tour buses. Once Klaatu appears and enters into conversation with the authorities, the tanks are withdrawn and the ship is secured by two lonely soldiers after a temporary wall is built around it. Klaatu is thus able to go in and out of his ship with ease, even when the authorities are hunting for him. Oh, please.

I see why the movie did endure, but I can't see why it still does. Its ending no longer shocks but repulses, and because the ending is the whole point of the story, the movie's merits don't carry the day. ( Farewell to the Master's ending is altogether different, and much better, btw.)

Speaking of marriage and divorce. . . .

But both men and women are more reluctant to marry than in earlier times. Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43 percent since 1960. Instead of getting married, men and women are just living together, cohabitation having increased tenfold in the same period. According to a University of Chicago study, cohabitation has become the dominant way men and women begin their relationships, not courtship and marriage. More than half the men and women who do get married have already lived together.

The pattern of cohabitation is dangerous. Most women agree to cohabit thinking it will lead to marriage, but most men ask women to live with them so they donÂ’t have to marry them. Forty of every hundred cohabiting couples never marry one another. Repeated research shows that of the sixty cohabiting couples who do marry one another, forty-five divorce within ten years.

A lot of the discussion on marriage/gay marriagerecentlyy has focused on what marriage is for, that is, what does marriage accomplish. A broad consensus is that marriage, the union of a man and a woman, is the best social arrangement human societies have ever found for the raising of children.

The Time cover story of Aug. 21, 2000, reported,

Danielle Crittenden, author of What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, argues that women have set themselves up for disappointment, many putting off marriage until their 30s only to find themselves unskilled in the art of compatibility and surrounded by male peers looking over their Chardonnays at women in their 20s. "Modern people approach marriage like it's a Bosnia-Serbia negotiation. Marriage is no longer as attractive to men," she says. "No one's telling college girls it's easier to have kids in your 20s than in your 30s."

Michael Broder, a Philadelphia psychotherapist and author of The Art of Living Single, decries what he calls the "perfect-person problem," in which women refuse to engage unless they're immediately taken with a man, failing to give a relationship a chance to develop. "Few women can't tell you about someone they turned down, and I'm not talking about some grotesque monster," he says. "But there's the idea that there has to be this great degree of passion to get involved, which isn't always functional. So you have people saying things like, 'If I can't have my soul mate, I'd rather be alone.' And after that, I say, 'Well, you got your second choice."

In evolutionary terms, marriage developed as the means by which women could guarantee to a specific man that the children she bore were his. In biological terms, men can sire hundreds of children in their lives, but this biological ability is limited by the fact that no one woman can keep pace. Siring kids by multiple women is the only way men can achieve high levels of reproduction, but women also have an extreme interest in the process, too.

Their is no adaptive/survival advantage for women in bearing children by men who are simply trying to sire as many children as possible. During the latter stages of pregnancy, women are disabled to some significant degree - perhaps not for office work, but certainly for food gathering and for protecting or caring for their other children. For a single mother, as our own culture's experience shows, child-raising is a resource-intensive, years-long business. Doing it alone is a marked adaptive disadvantage for single mothers and their children.

So the economics of sex evolved into a win-win deal: women agree to give men exclusive sexual rights and guaranteed paternity in exchange for their sexual loyalty and enduring assistance with child bearing and child raising. For the man, this arrangement lessens the number of potential children he can sire (although it can still be up to a dozen, at least), but it ensures that his kids are, well, his kids, not another man's. (In folk lore and literature, the cuckolded husband is one of the most pathetic figures there is). The only way women could guarantee paternity was to remain chaste until she and a man had agreed to this arrangement. For the woman, the man's promise of sexual loyalty to her meant that he would expend his labor and resources supporting her children, not another woman's.

Without guaranteed paternity, no man would ever have significant certainty that the child he was supporting carried his genes. Avoidance of genetic extinction is, many biologists say, the defining motive of human and animal behavior. That doesn't mean that every man or woman is inexorably impelled to have children - evolutionary biologists focus on groups, not individuals.

But what if women discontinued to guarantee paternity? What if the majority of men of a society discovered that they could enjoy sexual relations with women without promising sexual loyalty in return? Both have happened in America since the invention of The Pill. The impulse toward pre-marital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear.

Over the last four decades, men have discovered that marriage is only one way to enjoy sexual relations; visiting prostitutes was always another way but it has never been socally acceptable. Even today a man whose sexual activity is only or mostly with prostitutes is held in contempt by other men. The Pill enabled women to enjoy nearly risk-free intercourse, but unhappily also discover sex without betrothal is a highly unreliable way to gain a man's sexual and emotional commitment. As the old saying goes, "Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?" If most women offer men sex apart from marriage, then the need for men to commit to sexual loyalty to a particular woman is greatly lessened, even eliminated. Then women look around and wonder why so many men they know all seem to be rotters who aren't interested in marriage.

Ultimately, though, both men and women discover that the married life is both easier and more sexually fulfilling than singleness, and ultimately most men and women discover that they want to bear children. Repeated studies show that married men and women enjoy sexual relations far more frequently than singles and no one has ever discovered a better arrangement for children than being raised by both natural parents. For most singles, the effort and care that must be taken in gaining another sex partner along with the devotion to avoiding pregnancy, are draining. Unfortunately, by the time they realize this and decide to do somethjing about it, they have lost too many youthful years. There is a big difference between marrying in early 20s and having kids in mid-20s, and doing both in one's 30s or even 40s, not only for the parents, but for the children.