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conservative value of space-reveling in its material present-ness, its capacity to ‘overtake*
time by ‘saving’ the past as a collection of styles and artifacts . . . ” (273). She finds these
strains prevalent in the recent blockbusters—Star Wars, Close Encounters—but faults as
well mainstream cold war films for their “fetishization of technology; their arrogant
xenophobia grounded on the perpetuation of difference and then need for an alien Other”
(301).
Peter Biskind, a prodigious tagger of all manner of cold war film offerings, identifies
“therapeutic,” “progressive,” “corporate liberal,” “centrist,” and “conservative” films vying
for public attention and engaging each other in a debate that mirrored and shaped the
political issues of the 1950s. He notes that “Christian allusions occasionally popped up in
corporate-liberal sci-fi, but in these films, religion ultimately had to yield to science. . . .In
conservative films religion is used to chastise science” (116). Also “right-wing [science
fiction] films often used nature to flog culture” (118). We see that in the film under
consideration here, religion and nature (the resistant bacterial strains) join forces to humble
and disempower “radical” science.
16. For a discussion contrasting the Martian’s physical manifestations in novel and film,
seeRenzi 122-25.
17. Kathryn Hume, reading Wells’s original narrative, introduces the theme of
triangularity, specifically the Oedipal triangle, in her reading of the Martians as well:
“Take the Martians themselves. External forms differ, but functionally they have much in
common with the classic, man-eating giant of fairy-tale, a displaced image of the father. . .
.In The War of the Worlds, such a man-eating giant, armed with a terrifying heat-sword,
appears to be wresting the [mother] Earth away from the narrator and mankind” (287).
18. Renzi’s strong reading of Sylvia’s role (125-27) includes the observation: “The film
lets Sylvia, rather than Forrester, respond initially to all three encounters [with the
Martian], because, in terms of the former (now archaic) film conventions, the woman is
allowed (in fact, expected) to display her emotions” (127).
19. I appreciate Don G. Smith’s Darwinian take on even this seeming concession on
Wells’s part: “Wells’ main point is that progress is never assured. The Martians die as a
result of their advanced science. Having destroyed bacteria on Mars, they evolve and lose
their immunity and succumb to earth bacteria” (106).
Works Cited
Biskind, Peter. Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught us to Stop Worrying and
Love the Fifties. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
Cantril, Hadley. The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (With the
Complete Script of the Orson Welles Broadcast). Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982.
Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modem Horror Film.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London:
Routledge, 1993.
Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmakon,” Disseminations. 1972. Trans. Barbara Johnson.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.