Suddenly, Gort doesn’t seem so powerful. We’re told of his strength and given a few meager examples. We have to take Klaatu’s word for it. The universe/world policeman is a weak presence, in reality, which cannot be found out unless challenged. We allow the physical and moral weakling to make us conform. Why not? His metal visor emitting the death ray would scare the shit out of anyone, including the young person who watched the film on Saturday Night at the Movies, March 3, 1963. What do we really know about the forces that want to help or destroy us? We fumble along with false analogies, historical and mythical. We absorb and possibly act on impressions received at eleven years old.
* * *
1.
Klaatu comes in peace.
But he threatens the total destruction of Earth.
Apparently, the other inhabitants of our solar system are worried that humans will take their destructive weapons (atomic bombs) into outer space. Note: the rocket technology and not the weapons have created this intolerable situation. Klaatu states that he doesn’t care about the violence we do to ourselves but insists we had better stop it here. Taking our violence to outer space will doom us.
He wants to be clear. Our freedoms will remain intact. But we must change into peaceful beings. It can be done.
The Day the Earth Stood Still’s (1951) Christian analogy comes into play. We have free will and can decide to ignore the superior beings’ instruction. However, to ignore it means we are condemned to a hellish end.
2.
Klaatu and his kind clearly don’t understand people. Human people.
Klaatu’s people have accepted their subjugation – becoming peaceful and reasonable and not stupid – and live in complete security. Free to enjoy the good things. Security as happiness.
However, giving a few billion people a warning – “be good or be eliminated” – has a better chance of being spurned than being accepted. Being reasonable is not a human instinct or reflex. Not like being unreasonable or suspicious or ungrateful is.
Humans generally reject what they are told to do – in a vacuum. In this case, the vacuum represents the unintelligible universe represented by Klaatu and his kind a few hundred million miles from Earth. Our concept of freedom and happiness includes not being given unsolicited advice and having outside interference in our affairs.
3.
I mentioned the film’s Christian analogy. Here’s a checklist (feel free to add your own):
a) Klaatu descends from the heavens at the behest of a supreme society.
b) His message is blunted by wholesale, willful ignorance.
c) He’s shot not five minutes after landing.
d) Going by the name Mr. Carpenter when he leaves the hospital, he lives a brief “hidden life.”
e) The name “Carpenter” refers to the Son of God’s earthly vocation.
f) He emerges from hiding – only to be shot again. But is killed this time.
g) He’s carried to the spaceship (cave).
h) He emerges – resurrected – from the ship and delivers a harsh message before his ascension to the heavens.
i) Klaatu/Carpenter’s gathering of scientists recalls the young Jesus talking to the rabbis in the temple.
I would ascribe no greater meaning to this Christian reading were it not for the underlying realities of the film itself.
But first. . . .
4.
Let’s play with another analogy.
Klaatu comes to Earth (America) and tells the inhabitants they must give up their guns.
He is shot twice – a presumptive answer by a trigger-happy society. The people are saying “we will kill all and sundry who try to make us give up our guns.”
Klaatu might respond: “You still have your freedom.”
But no! Klaatu has not done enough research. The society’s concept of freedom is neurotically tied to owning guns. Klaatu is to be feared. He’s part of the “Deep Space” conspiracy; namely, he and his kind are trying to control and take over our lives.
5.
Actually, the neurotically attached to a double-barreled concept of freedom have a point.
I refer to Klaatu’s final proclamation:
There must be security for all, or no one is secure. Now, this does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly. Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves and hired policemen to enforce them. We, of the other planets, have long accepted this principle. We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets and for the complete elimination of aggression. The test of any such higher authority is, of course, the police force that supports it. For our policemen, we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets in spaceships like this one and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked. At the first sign of violence, they act automatically against the aggressor.
Hold on, Mr Klaatu.
Police forces are the result of having an urban, industrial society from the mid-1800s. The function of police was originally held by sheriffs, constables, reeves, soldiers. A majority of criminals were not caught. Justice was sketchy and arbitrary. The Gort-like representation of the police who can do their worst makes the Gestapo look tame.
No reading of rights. We have the obligation to remain silent about our rights. In Klaatu’s universe.
The outer space police are above the law.
Gort (Lock Martin) kills two soldiers in response to Klaatu being killed. Reminiscent of the venal attitude of cops when one of their own is gunned down.
Remember, we are hearing the praises of the police-as-Gort from an enlightened society. A society all-too-ready to submit to authority. For the sake of security. “There must be security for all, or no one is secure,” we are told.
6.
Klaatu wants to meet the most brilliant person on Earth. Fortunately, the Einstein scientist, Professor Jacob Barnhardt (below), played by the Einsteinian-coifed Sam Jaffe (in his last Hollywood role for eight years because of the blacklist), is in town and the perfect guy for Klaatu to run by him Plan B. Plan A was the Pollyanna notion to have all the world’s leaders gather in DC and listen to Klaatu’s message. Significantly, he doesn’t want to speak to the American president alone, as he dismisses a presumptuous presidential aide’s suggestion for a meeting.
The faith in Einstein-ism is a Pollyanna B notion. Time magazine’s “Man of the Century” represents a secular myth about science. His views may be noble and foresighted and fair, but to project this image on his colleagues is untenable. Professor Barnhardt, remember, came up with the idea of “standing the Earth still” for a half-hour, as a means to convince humanity that Klaatu means business. He particularly delights in the fear created by this stunt. No one is hurt, but the effect proves fatal. The generals decide that now Klaatu must be taken dead or alive. The Professor and “Mr. Carpenter” scared them all right. Did these wisest of the wise believe that human beings make better rational decisions when they are scared shitless?
7.
Klaatu, as Mr. Carpenter, takes great heart and pleasure in Bobby Benson (Billy Gray), young son of the widow Helen Benson (Patricia Neal). His genuine delight in wanting to be around the kid is most remarkable for the fact that he’s not doing this to get into Helen’s pants. The kid is the only one not “jittery” over the idea of a spaceman walking anonymously among the people in DC. Is Klaatu seeing the hope and future in humanity in this boy? Is this another of his Pollyannish ideas? Judging the nature of children based on a single encounter? Then modeling long-term plans (the future of humanity) on the ways this ideal child responds to things?
Bobby is obviously in need of a father figure. Klaatu inadvertently fulfills this role for a few days. Undoubtedly, he wants Mommy to hook up with “Mr. Carpenter.” But no self-respecting Christ-figure would get married, let alone submit to being a stepfather. The good times with the kid would wear thin the more Klaatu witnessed Bobby’s stupidity.
8.
Stepfathers. Men who want to get into Mommy’s pants and have to be “nice” to the kid.
Tom Stevens (Hugh Marlowe, below) telegraphs his lack of enthusiasm for his future non-biological son. He is taking Helen on a picnic, but she can’t find a babysitter. He nearly loses the ability to speak when he says, well, sure, if we have to take him, I guess we have to. Then along comes Mr. Carpenter, who says he’ll be responsible for Bobby that day. Tom never liked Mr. Carpenter as much as he does at that moment. Although, after a few days, continually hearing how great the new tenant of the boardinghouse is, Tom’s resentment grows more and more palpable, confirming Helen’s instinct to put off their engagement.
Tom is the true representative of the human race to whom Klaatu should pay close attention. Tom is the future of the race.
Tom cannot wait to expose Mr. Carpenter. First, as too good to be true, or in other words, a fraud. Bobby shows some diamonds Mr. Carpenter traded with him for a few dollars (to pay for going to the movies). Tom jumps to the conclusion that Carpenter is a diamond thief. He goes to a diamond jeweler to study the stones. Tom virtually ignores the Earth standing still, he’s so driven to get the goods on Carpenter.
He has lost before he started. Tom can’t understand how attractive Carpenter is to women, or how unattractive he himself can appear. What he cares about is not Helen but HIMSELF. When he is told that exposing Carpenter could hurt the human race, Tom replies: “The hell with the human race.” He is going to inform the military and justifies it to Helen in perhaps the most pathetic terms possible: He is going to get his picture in every newspaper and be the most well-known person in the world.
That’s it for the relationship.
He still can salvage it, possibly. By not calling the military authorities – and, later, performing a lot of selflessly hard work around Helen and the kid.
He decides to go for the glory. Because there is no glory in being a stepfather.
Tom IS America.
9.
Which brings me to talking about the film AS IT IS.
Klaatu doesn’t represent the other planets. He is speaking for the United States of America. That’s why he lands in DC and is summoning world leaders there.
It is 1951. The Korean War has reached a battlefield stalemate. But not quite in the minds of Americans. We have taken back Seoul for the second time. MacArthur is on the cusp of being fired.
Elsewhere, the decisive factor indicating America’s power is that 50 percent of the world’s automobiles are made in the U.S. The auto industry represents both the symbolic and real might of the USA. We are the economic version of Gort.
Serendipitously, President Truman called the Korean War a “police action.” A Wikipedia definition sums up the essence of this term: “It was also used to imply a formal claim of sovereignty by colonial powers.” He had used it because it was an undeclared war, but it nicely filled the American fantasy of being an imperial power by another name.
World policeman.
We are Gort.
Via the film, we the people of the United States are indicating that we will destroy the world in order to save it – echoed later by an Army officer infamously saying that his platoon was destroying a Vietnamese village in order to save it. In Vietnam, we literally inherited the French colonial mandate.
And better dead than red.
10.
Gort could destroy the world. Not that it looked like he could. Early on, he showed what he could do. Zap a tank here. Zap a couple soldiers there. A fearful-looking robot. Full of potential destruction.
Before we had Kenny Baker stuffed into R2D2, 7’7″ Lock Martin portrayed the impenetrable robot of steel. He had previously appeared as “Giant” in Anchors Aweigh (1945) and as a Circus Club doorman in Lady on a Train (1945). He was a doorman at Grauman’s Chinese Theater when he found cinematic immortality in The Day the Earth Stood Still. He had many problems portraying Gort, being too weak to carry the bodies of Helen and Klaatu, as well as having trouble standing still for long periods. Most telling is the robot suit, the supposedly impenetrable steel, which we see creasing when Gort walks with his back to us, besides overheating and exhausting the poor actor.
Suddenly, Gort doesn’t seem so powerful. We’re told of his strength and given a few meager examples. We have to take Klaatu’s word for it. The universe/world policeman is a weak presence, in reality, which cannot be found out unless challenged. We allow the physical and moral weakling to make us conform. Why not? His metal visor emitting the death ray would scare the shit out of anyone, including the young person who watched the film on Saturday Night at the Movies, March 3, 1963. What do we really know about the forces that want to help or destroy us? We fumble along with false analogies, historical and mythical. We absorb and possibly act on impressions received at eleven years old.
11.
The Day the Earth Stood Still has a liberal feel. Robert Wise, a lifelong liberal, directed The Sand Pebbles (1966), an early critique of the Vietnam War. It would seem counterintuitive that he would be directing a pro-police state film. In 1951, though, liberals could be anti-communist. They could believe in containment – even up to the Vietnam War. Liberal Americans, and not only liberals, trusted the government. Being the cop on the World Beat to stop criminal communism seemed a rational way to maintain freedom and spread democratic values. Many liberal filmmakers may also have been dodging the nation’s internal policemen – HUAC and Joe McCarthy – and losing their voice to criticize America’s new role in the world.
The same Robert Wise, editor of Citizen Kane (1941), felt justified altering The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), an RKO police action against the very independent (and very liberal) Orson Welles. Welles would never speak to Wise again. Welles had left the United States by 1948. Had his Hollywood film career not been ruined, it’s inconceivable he would have made a film like The Day the Earth Stood Still.
12.
And God created remakes.
In 2008, Keanu Reeves as Klaatu arrives on Earth, with another hot-button message for the world. Again, his DC destination suggests the United States is the major participant/recipient of Klaatu’s message. Indeed, the message is as polarizing as the 1951 message to limit weapons (of the nuclear variety, for starters).
Environmental issues.
The United States at once tries to be the most powerful enforcer of world pollution control while being the biggest source of pollutants like carbon dioxide and plastics.
Who better to divorce the perceived messenger (an American) from the message than having an actor who played the Buddha in Little Buddha (1993) and a Buddha-Christ figure in The Matrix films (1998, 2002, 2003).
How was this version of Klaatu received by the powers that be – the powers caricatured in the film?
They want to lock him up, and mentally and physically dissect him. This film’s Helen (Jennifer Connelly) frees him, not knowing the surprise he has ready for her and the human race. The Gort accompanying Keanu is much bigger and more destructive, just to let the audience know that this is no weakling. Cinematically, it is unconvincing, as is much of the action taken by the government officials (led by Kathy Bates), Helen, and Helen’s stepson (Jaden Smith). It was difficult watching the film, an exercise I persisted with because I had to know what was bugging the universe’s policeman.
I mentioned the surprise Klaatu had in store for Helen. He says: “This planet is dying. The human race is killing it.” Helen’s stock reaction is: “So you’ve come here to help us.” Not quite, sister. “If the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the Earth survives.”
She still believes that the catastrophe can be prevented.
Now we come to the part that blows Helen’s mind. It redeemed the film, for me, despite still not wanting to view it after he tells her that the process for the killing of the human race has started.
Maybe I didn’t watch further because I didn’t want Klaatu to change his mind. More, because if he did, then it was tied into something about Helen’s stepson. Foreshadowed by Michael Rennie’s Klaatu bonding with Bobby Benson.
A part of me, the majority of me, wanted the end of the human race. We have caused the sixth mass extinction (actually, I’ve lost count). Maybe killing off so many other species is our death sentence. We don’t need Klaatu or Gort to kill us off.
13.
It took fifty-seven years to remake The Day the Earth Stood Still. It is very informative to see how the respective threats in the films veer away from the other. Rennie’s Klaatu wants to protect the solar system from human encroachment with nuclear weapons. We take the weapons into outer space, Gort will take care of us.
The “Scared Straight” program on a universal scale.
There’s hope for the miserably obnoxious pugnacious humans in 1951.
Or, to put it into terms Americans can understand, the United States has hopes that the rest of the world will accept democracy as the means to a secure future.
Keanu’s Klaatu has, for the moment, judged humanity as incorrigible. History has shown we can’t right ourselves. Mistakes on every level have been repeated for the last ten thousand years. We cannot be allowed to kill the planet. It’s certain our current actions have not limited populations, plastics, and cars. We still have nuclear weapons and their threat doesn’t seem any less than they were in 1951. The environment seems headed for multiple catastrophes, despite the forty to fifty million tickets sold worldwide to an audience sympathetic to the second Earth Stood Still’s basic themes.
14.
Remember Tom Stevens. The man I claimed is America. The real American ideal. The person who will give up his humanity in order to be KNOWN.
It’s very early in the “celebrity is everything” game. Television is in its infancy. The United States has not become a simulacra. It is not Baudrillard’s “Disney World.” Disneyland is still a dream of an FBI informant animator. But the forces are building. Tom’s enthusiasm is but a premature eruption of the future.
If, in 2065, a third remake comes to fruition, I imagine a confused Klaatu unable to find anyone to speak to, even if it is to tell us (as Keanu did but then renenged) that the odds are against tomorrow for human existence. It’s a bit like the matrix in The Matrix. Satisfied humans living the ultimate fantasy. In a sense, Klaatu discovers a world beyond death. No one to scare. The few holdouts are so far underground or off the grid that contact with them is hopeless. This future Klaatu police action will amount to pulling a plug on the machines. The ultimate anticlimactic drama. In part, it is the result of there being no more cinemas to show this reboot. There will be no one to remember the two previous versions of the film.
No one to be saved.
No one to convince Klaatu to give humans another chance.
He will be killed virtually.
There will be no resurrection.
* * *
Images from the film are screenshots from the DVD.
