BONUS BLOG -- 1974: PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE

What’s it about?

A devilish record producer named Swan (played by hobbit-sized songwriter Paul Williams) steals the music to a rock opera version of the Faust legend for the opening of his new club, the Paradise. After infiltrating Swan’s mansion in an attempt to get his music back, the opera’s geeky composer is beaten up and thrown in prison, where a sadistic warden pulls all of his teeth and replaces them with metal prosthetics. (Not sure why.) After hearing that one of Swan’s no-talent pre-fabricated bands will be performing his rock opera at the Paradise’s opening, the composer escapes from prison and is hideously disfigured by a record press while trying to destroy all the 45s of the singles bastardized from his music.

As the opening of the Paradise draws nearer, the composer (now presumed dead) lurks about the club and starts killing those who sing his music. Sensing an opportunity, Swan strikes a deal with the composer to rewrite the rock opera and then have it performed on his terms. But no sooner is the rewrite finished, then Swan attempts to go back on his word. The composer, meanwhile, sets out on a new round of revenge that only brings more ghoulish publicity to the Paradise.




Is it any good?

After doing THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, I swore to myself that I would stick with straight up science fiction for a while. After all, straight up science fiction still covers a very wide range of stories -- everything from ant invasions to giant robot monsters to expressionistic allegories about shirtless Sean Conneries to Mel Brooks parodies to Afrofuturistic musical manifestos. In fact, I really should be writing about SPACE IS THE PLACE right now, since Afrofuturism is an influential but under-represented branch of science fiction.

The problem is that Afrofuturism is so little regarded by most sci-fi fans that I know practically nothing about it myself. Neither do I know anything about the music of Sun Ra (or even George Clinton, to name another more prominent Afrofuturist). The other problem is that I didn’t enjoy SPACE IS THE PLACE all that much. I’m sure part of it is that I don’t have any of the cultural context needed to appreciate a story about a jazz musician leading an exodus of the black people of Earth to a planet where there are no white people. But it’s also, in a lot of ways, not that good of a movie and not even that good of a document of Sun Ra’s music.

Anyway, since I can’t tell you anything at all about Afrofuturism, I’ll just recommend that everybody go look it up on Wikipedia. (That’s what I did after watching SPACE IS THE PLACE.) It seems interesting, and I’m going to try and learn some more about it. But in the meantime, I am going to talk about PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE instead, since it would be a travesty if we made it all the way through the seventies without mentioning any rock operas. And I am probably going to skip THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), since there is a whole phenomenon around that movie that I have only experienced a little bit.




PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not, strictly speaking, a rock opera itself. It’s about the production of a rock opera, and there are many songs in the movie -- many from the Faust show, but others not. Paul Williams is credited as the songwriter for all of the movie’s music. I’m not sure if you guys know much about Paul Williams, but he wrote easy-going seventies hits for groups like The Carpenters and Barbra Streisand and Three Dog Night. (“Just an Old Fashioned Love Song” and “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays” are all his work, for example.) He’s also a friend of the Muppets and wrote “The Rainbow Connection”, which is featured in THE MUPPET MOVIE. And, incidentally, he acted in a few movies -- including a role as an orangutang know-it-all in BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973).

The music in PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not much like any of those things I just listed. The songs are more prog-rock ballads (it is a rock opera, after all), and as Swan makes changes to the show they get heavier and more menacing. By the end of the movie, a mincing Transylvanian rocker named Beef is screaming the lyrics over grinding electric guitars while gyrating on the stage in full-body Frankenstein’s monster make-up as his bandmates pretend to dismember people in the audience. (By the way, one of the few unfortunate things about the movie is the stereotypically “gay” way that Beef acts. It’s too bad, since he’s otherwise a pretty great character.)




The movie’s story is obviously an update of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA with a heavy dose of FAUST, but it also weaves in bits of THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and FRANKENSTEIN. The plot is pretty complicated, and Swan does a lot of back-stabbing and double-crossing. The music is almost all integrated into the story as performances or rehearsals, and there is usually something else going on to forward the plot while the songs are being sung. (For instance, the composer/phantom puts many of his plans into motion while his intended victims are on stage, singing.) One of my biggest complaints about musicals is that the plot usually stops when people start singing, so I was happy to see that wasn’t much of an issue here. There’s one amazing sequence in particular that features two long simultaneous tracking shots in split screen that plays out like a surf rock version of the opening of Orson Welles’s TOUCH OF EVIL.

Now, what about the science fiction? When Swan and the composer make their deal, part of it is that Swan will restore the composer’s voice, which had been destroyed in the same accident that disfigured him. This involves some shenanigans with a giant synthesizer that probably qualify as science fictional. But, yet again, this movie is probably more fantasy than sci-fi -- especially towards the end when the devil becomes an increasingly literal presence.

On the other hand, the look and sound of the movie is far more sci-fi than fantasy. The Paradise is a high-tech place, fitted for pyrotechnics and neon lights and all sorts of modern showiness. The Faust rock opera seems to have sci-fi elements as well -- I mentioned earlier that one of the characters is assembled in the style of Frankenstein’s monster. The composer’s phantom mask is also more like a space helmet or robot faceplate than any traditional kind of mask. And the movie is full of video cameras and synthesizers and all kinds of electronic doodads. It may be fantasy, but it’s not the old-fashioned unplugged kind.

BONUS BLOG -- 1974: PHASE IV

What’s it about?

Following a strange event in space, a biologist notices peculiar behavior in ant colonies in the American southwest. Specifically, ants from different species appear to be communicating and working together. He gets funding to research the phenomenon, and brings along a young mathematician who has done work with computers decoding animal languages. But conflicting personalities cause the biologist and mathematician both to stay tight-lipped about their suspicions and discoveries.

As the project’s funding begins to run out, the scientists still have not observed any interesting ant activity. They decide to destroy a series of strange geometric structures (presumably built by the ants) to stimulate a response. When the response comes, it’s in the form of an overwhelming attack by the ants. The scientists repel it using a powerful poison, but the ants quickly adapt and begin severing the scientists’ links to the outside world.




Is it any good?

I first saw this movie as a freshman in college during a science fiction marathon. At the time, I thought it was pretty great -- despite being very different from most of the movies I had seen until then. Having seen a lot more movies since those salad days, I can say that PHASE IV falls into a category of understated, low budget cerebral (or pseudo-cerebral) 1970s flicks with a cynical streak that bridge the darker B-movies of the 1950s with the dour independent movies of the 1990s. It fits very much with COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970), PUNISHMENT PARK (1971), IDAHO TRANSFER (1973), and many others of the same sort.

It probably goes without saying at this point that I have a soft spot for exactly this sort of movie, so I enjoyed PHASE IV plenty the second time through as well. But I should say that the other person I saw this movie with the first time ten years ago thought it was horrible. He usually has pretty good taste in movies, so I guess the lesson here is that PHASE IV may affect people differently. If you decide to watch it, be warned. You may hate it!

PHASE IV is a thriller about ants that want to take over the world. They aren’t giant ants like in THEM! (1954) -- they’re just normal-sized ants that are super smart. How smart? They do communicate somehow, and the mathematician decodes a bit of their language. Mostly he translates the parts that mean “stop” and “go” and “turn right” -- sort of the LOGO level of ant communication. But there are implications in the movie that the ants are talking about a lot more that the humans can’t figure out.




More implausibly, the ants also seem very familiar with human technology and weaknesses. In their first attack on the research station, they disable the truck engine that the scientists are using for a generator. (It’s later revealed that it was left outside on purpose as “bait” and that there is a back-up generator inside the station as well.) I’m not totally clear how ants manage that -- presumably they gummed up the works in such a way as to cause an explosion. In later attacks, they focus beams of sunlight on the station to overheat the computers and people inside. Not only that, but they send commandos to specifically disable the air conditioner to make the roasting more effective.

The ants are also capable of building complex structures. To focus the beams of sunlight, for instance, they build mounds with highly polished surfaces pointing at the research station just so to catch the sunlight. So clearly some of the applications of this supposed ant intelligence are more plausible than others. But the humans have some fairly wacky technology as well. The mathematician, for instance, is somehow able to “hear” the ant language and correlate it with individual ant movements perfectly clearly -- despite there being thousands of ants swarming around. And the biologist manages to locate the colony’s queen without stepping foot outside the research station.




But those eyebrow-raising bits aside, the stand-off between man and ant is pretty interesting. It plays out like a chess game -- each side trying to penetrate particular weaknesses of the other. The ants, with their vastly superior numbers, get and keep the upper hand as soon as they are able to isolate the scientists. And since the biologist is weirdly stubborn, nobody on the outside really knows what is going on or that there may be any danger at all. (The mathematician didn’t even learn the truth until it was too late himself.) There’s a pretty obvious parable about working together versus keeping things to yourself not far under the surface of PHASE IV -- but luckily it’s pretty interesting for other reasons too.

The movie does have a lot of shots of ants doing a lot of ant-like things. I’m not sure exactly how these were created. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a mixture of real ants placed in artificial environments, and possibly some miniature or stop-motion work. Surprisingly, it is always pretty clear what the ants are up to. One long sequence where a series of ants sacrifice themselves to bring the poison into the colony so that the queen can adapt herself to it is especially good. There’s also another pretty funny and exciting bit where the ants trying to sabotage the air conditioner run into a preying mantis that the biologist left inside as a deterrent.

The ending of the movie (as with almost all of its kind) gets pretty silly. People do things for no other reason than to move the plot forward out of the stalemate. The ants remain unavoidably inscrutable, but there’s still a long monologue about what they want and how they will get it. I guess really the more I think about the movie, the goofier it sounds. But it is a movie about ants that want to take over the world, after all, and when compared to any other insect swarm movie by any metric, I think it acquits itself extremely creditably.

BONUS BLOG -- 1974: GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA

What’s it about?

Hoo boy, let’s see. As near as I can make out, an archaeologist discovers a cave on Okinawa which contains ancient artifacts, including prophetic murals and a small statuette of a dog-like monster. While transporting the statuette back to mainland Japan, the prophecies begin to come true (purportedly signaling the arrival of a terrible monster) and mysterious agents try to steal the statuette.

Meanwhile, earthquakes with “moving epicenters” rumble across the country, and it’s really no surprise when Godzilla emerges from one of them. But wait! This Godzilla doesn’t move or look quite right, and soon a second Godzilla has appeared to fight it. The first one is soon revealed to be a giant robot that defeats the real Godzilla, and the only hope now is to use the statuette to awaken the traditional defender of Okinawa, King Caesar.




Is it any good?

I haven’t seen that many Godzilla movies, or even really that many Japanese giant monster movies of any type. Obviously I watched the original GOJIRA (1954), which I liked a lot. And I did check in with MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA (1964), but I saw it too late to write about it in the blog. That’s a shame, since that movie is also quite good. GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA, on the other hand, is slipshod and disappointing.

With all the Godzilla movies to choose from, why did I pick this particular one? I had wanted to watch MOTHRA (1961) and DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968) -- both of which are pretty highly regarded by fans -- but couldn’t find a convenient copy of either. So looking down the list of other possibilities, I was mostly confronted by match-ups with other monsters I knew nothing about: Ghidorah, Hedora, Gigan, Megalon, and so on. I remembered seeing a bit of GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA as a kid, and I’ve always liked the idea of characters confronting different versions of themselves. So that was about all there was to it.

One problem, of course, is that Godzilla is not really much of a character. He’s a force of nature -- a destructive event to be endured, like a hurricane or earthquake, until he passes away again. From the three movies I’ve seen so far, Godzilla has hardly any personality or even awareness at all, so a robot version of him is really just exactly the same thing (with different weapons).




In GOJIRA, the human characters have clear precedence over the monster. The conflict is about whether a scientist is willing to share knowledge of a new destructive weapon to stop the attacks. In MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA, the focus is largely on Mothra. And despite being a giant moth puppet, Mothra has considerably more personality than Godzilla -- partly because she can communicate through a pair of pixie twins who live in a box, but also because she actually has objectives and makes decisions.

In GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA, there isn’t really any worthwhile human conflict. The aliens who control Mechagodzilla are cartoonish villains who seem to be invading the Earth for no particular reason. At one point, one of the human characters is forced to help repair Mechagodzilla, which is intended to create some kind of moral crisis. But even that is executed stupidly and perfunctorily, like so much else in the movie.

In fact, the biggest problem of GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA is that the script-writers just don’t seem to have been trying very hard. The beginning of the movie is both incredibly complicated and incredibly linear. Besides the events I outlined in the synopsis, there’s also a young girl who has a vision of destruction and a reporter who discovers a radioactive metallic scale from Mechagodzilla. There’s so much going on that’s it hard to keep the characters and events straight, but it all just points towards the same thing: the arrival of Mechagodzilla, which the ancient Okinawans apparently predicted. Nothing is introduced that doesn’t relate directly to the main story, and its almost always immediately obvious how each piece fits into the big, dumb puzzle.




I will admit that King Caesar is a pretty neat monster. There’s a nice bit where a young girl must go and sing to him to awaken him -- it’s both eerie and suspenseful, since other monsters are fast approaching. His appearance is apparently based on a mythical animal called the shisa, which is a cross between a dog and a lion. There’s no doubt that he looks pretty goofy fighting, but while sleeping and waking up, he’s one of the cooler Japanese movie monsters I’ve seen.

Mechagodzilla, on the other hand, is always ridiculous. I’m not sure who exactly thought that Godzilla would be more awesome if he was made out of grey plastic and shot missiles out of his fingers and toes, but that’s more or less what Mechagodzilla is. He looks silly no matter what he’s doing -- flying, fighting, standing around. Another disappointment is that almost none of the monster scenes feature any miniature buildings or military units. To the extent that I find Godzilla’s rampages interesting at all, it’s almost all due to the nifty miniatures he destroys. So the fights in this movie are (as far as I’m concerned) pretty dull. There’s one scene early in the movie where Mechagodzilla does some rampaging through miniature city. But the scene is nothing special, and after that the monster action is restricted to guys in suits shooting colored beams at each other or grappling impotently.

I can’t talk about the Godzilla series in general, so I don’t know if this particular movie is a dud or if it’s indicative of the direction the series has followed in the decades since GOJIRA. I can imagine that the movies would have been pretty exciting for fans at the time, since they are essentially title-card fights between some well-known creatures. (Though I’m not sure exactly how many had an existence before taking on Godzilla or other monsters -- besides King Kong, Mothra, and Rodan.) The series seems similar to Universal’s “monster rally” movies where Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and the Wolf Man met each other again and again. No doubt a person better acquainted with the history of Japanese movie monsters would get a lot more enjoyment out of watching them fight and defeat each other. For the most part, I’m not even sure who to root for, so a lot of that is completely lost on me.

1974: ZARDOZ

What’s it about?

Sean Connery is an “exterminator” in a savage world, a job that consists of slaughtering the hapless and defenseless masses who inhabit the countryside on the orders of the god Zardoz. But unlike most gods, Zardoz regularly manifests himself physically in the form of a giant flying stone head to issue edicts, dispense weapons, and collect tribute. One day, Connery hides inside a tribute of wheat and sneaks aboard to find out what is really going on behind the giant flying stone head.

What he finds when it lands is a secret village full of peaceful, educated immortals who have been controlling the outside world for hundreds of years. Though the immortals are afraid that Connery will disrupt their seemingly idyllic life, they decide to let him stay for a while -- more out of boredom than anything else. But their fears begin to come true when Connery’s presence begins to bring long-festering dissatisfactions to the surface. Before long, he’s actively colluding with rebellious elements among the immortals to bring the whole society down.



Is it any good?

I’ve thought about watching ZARDOZ a few times before, but I’ve always assumed it was pretentious, self-consciously weird, and (worst of all) boring. My prediction hadn’t really changed at all -- I mean, just look at that trailer -- but I figured this would be the perfect time to watch it nonetheless. It’s not as though there aren’t plenty of other sci-fi movies that are pretentious, self-consciously weird, and boring. Luckily, it turns out that ZARDOZ is never actually boring, and in fact is not nearly as weird as I expected it to be.

Yes, this is a movie where a giant stone head flies around and talks to men who wear nothing but red diapers and belts of ammo across their chests. But that’s considered weird even within the world of the movie. One character, as he is confronted with the reality of how the “outlands” are being managed, notes that nobody else wanted the job and the current manager is at least leavening his barbarism with some wit.

And the way the story is told is very straightforward. This isn’t some experimental narrative like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973), or even THE SEED OF MAN (1969) or THX-1138 (1971). In fact, the movie is precisely as weird as FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966) and BARBARELLA (1968) and PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and LOGAN’S RUN (1976). In other words, its story depends on the existence of a strange, semi-allegorical, upside-down society that could never really exist -- but which is nonetheless perfectly consistent and logical as soon as you make concessions for the impossible conditions it operates under.




In the case of ZARDOZ, those conditions are the division of the world into two distinct groups: the ageless immortals living in intellectual seclusion, and the masses of brutals killing and dying all around them. Despite the fact that the main character -- Sean Connery’s exterminator Zed -- is a brutal himself, we see very little of the way the world works in the outlands. All we know is that some brutals (the exterminators) constitute a very slightly privileged class that either kills or enslaves humanity as they are ordered. The world of the immortals, on the other hand, is extensively shown. Practically every element that we see, from the perfunctory democracy to the clinging conformity to the frustration and ennui, ring true. The movie seems to be saying that any society (even one with the noblest of intentions and the finest of citizens) so afraid of change that it outlaws aging, death and reproduction will necessarily stagnate and fester until it becomes self-destructive.

Even before Connery arrives among the immortals, they are already falling prey one by one to either of two social diseases. Some become rebellious and begin acting anti-socially, which is invariably punished by democratically selected sentences of aging. Eventually, the rebellious ones receive so many sentences that they age into senility and are placed in a kind of demented rest home apart from the others. Other immortals simply opt out of social life instead -- becoming “apathetics” who do nothing but stand around dumbly all day. Slowly but surely these two fates are spreading to more and more of the immortals, and it seems in time that it will eventually touch all of them.

When Connery arrives, then, the world of the immortals is already a hollow shell surrounding a pit of dissatisfaction, resentment and boredom. One interesting aspect of Connery’s character is that the immortals soon realize he is in fact superior to them in every way -- except possibly education. But physically and mentally, his powers exceed their own. In other words, Connery is not (as he first seems) some ancient relict of a simpler, earthier time. Instead, he is called a “mutant” -- the product of careful selective breeding, and potentially the next step above and beyond the immortals.




Which is not to say that Connery doesn’t have his earthy side. He spends much of his early life killing and raping other brutals in the outlands. True, he believes he is following the orders of the god Zardoz, but he also never seems to gain any awareness of his crimes even as he becomes more educated. (It is clear by the end of the movie that he won’t go on killing and raping -- but whether he has any remorse for his past actions is never explored at all.)

The ending of the movie is a bit bizarre, as these things tend to be. We learn that Connery knows more than he has been letting on, and that his arrival was no mere accident. When he sneaked aboard the flying giant stone head, he fully expected to discover an imposter behind the “god”. He probably didn’t imagine the kind of world that he landed in, but the plan was always to destroy whoever the imposter turned out to be. Connery soon discovers that many of the immortals would welcome such a release -- they have forgotten how to end their lives, and many simply want to die. But this requires destroying a computer that automatically resurrects any immortal who is killed, though none of them remember where the computer is or how to destroy it.

The events that surround the discovery and destruction of the computer don’t all make a whole lot of sense. Some of the immortals do escape to live out their lives naturally. Others are slaughtered by an invading army of brutals. In the carnage and confusion of the moment, Connery separates himself from both groups, and we never learn exactly what shape the world takes in the wake of the passing of the immortals.




What else happened this year?

-- A couple of arrogant scientists meet their match when they tangle with some super-intelligent ants alone in the desert in PHASE IV.
-- Afrofuturist cosmic jazz band leader Sun Ra returns from outer space to free the black race and take them away to a planet with no white people in SPACE IS THE PLACE.
-- And Mel Brooks directs Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Teri Garr, an almost unrecognizable Gene Hackman, and a sadly under-utilized Madeleine Kahn in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.
-- There’s also an interesting musical adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s THE LITTLE PRINCE. I only watched a little bit of it, but the sets and special effects look pretty amazing. The songs, not so much.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1974...

ZARDOZ is the obvious choice.

BONUS BLOG -- 1973: THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE

What’s it about?

Two young sisters in 1940 post-civil war Spain go to see a traveling presentation of the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN movie that comes to their small village. The younger sister, Ana, is enraptured by the movie and asks her sister, Isabel, to explain why the monster killed people and why the people killed him. Isabel tells Ana that the monster hasn’t died at all, but is a spirit who will come if she is his friend and calls him.

Later, Isabel tells Ana that an abandoned crumbling house is the home of the monster, and Ana begins visiting the house every chance she gets. One day while trying to summon the monster, a fleeing soldier from the (losing) republican side of the civil war appears. Believing that he’s the spirit of the monster, Ana befriends him and brings him food and presents. The death of the soldier pushes Ana even deeper into her own FRANKENSTEIN-inspired fantasy world.




Is it any good?

I’ve written about quite a few movies so far that inhabit a questionable borderland on the very fringes of any acceptable definition of science fiction -- RED PLANET MARS (1952), THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957), EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), THE BIRDS (1963), THE WAR GAME (1965), WILD IN THE STREETS (1966), and so on. I’ve sometimes talked about why I think the movies ought to be considered sci-fi despite the fuzziness of their credentials, and I’ve sometimes just included them without comment.

Part of what I want to do with this project is to figure out where the borders of science fiction actually lie, which is one reason I keep straying so far from the safe zone. Part of the problem is that science fiction isn’t the kind of genre that is necessarily tied to a particular emotional response (as horror or mystery is). It’s also not the kind of genre that is necessarily tied to a set of recognizable conventions (as the western or noir is).

If there’s any defining feature of science fiction, it’s possibly that it speculates about things that haven’t happened yet. But that covers a lot of ground -- as has been pointed out many times, all fiction is speculative in one way or another. So what makes science fiction unique? Does it speculate only about things that cannot happen yet? Or does it speculate only about things that could happen, scientifically speaking? Or about things that have some bearing on science one way or another? None of these satisfactory. And even if we combine them all (and ignore the contradictions), there are still plenty of things that slip through the cracks.




In the case of THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, it really doesn’t fit any accepted or reasonable definition of science fiction. But, at the same time, the main character of the movie takes the story of FRANKENSTEIN as literal fact -- and does so to such an extent that the monster even appears on screen apparently in flesh and blood. So the movie forces the audience to decide whether they accept the reality of Frankenstein’s monster. Do we take him as a fact simply because he’s up on the screen, looking just as real as all the other characters? Or do we imagine that we are more sophisticated than the camera lens and that we can tell the difference between what can and cannot happen in the world of the movie?

There’s no denying that 99% of THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is what we would call “realistic” -- it mostly follows the lives of a handful of villagers in a provincial Spanish town without any sense of the fantastic intruding. And there’s no denying that Ana’s imagination is fired by the showing of FRANKENSTEIN, and that the only really sensible explanation for what happens in the movie is that she imagines the monster visiting her. (I should add that it’s a very short visit with a minimum of interaction.) But it’s possible to make much the same argument about a movie like THE ILLUSTRATED MAN (1969) -- the sci-fi vignettes in that movie could easily be entirely the result of an over-active imagination. And all of the supposed sci-fi events of IVAN VASILIEVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE (1973) very clearly take place within the framework of a dream. The difference here, of course, is that the sci-fi elements in those two movies are longer and more numerous. If THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is only 1% fantastical, then THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is at least 50% and IVAN VASILIEVICH is close to 99%, despite the fact that the fantasy can be explained away rationally. So do we say that there’s a line somewhere in between? Is there a minimum percentage of fantastic content that’s necessary to make a movie legitimately science fiction?




This is more or less why I have given up on trying to define science fiction at all. I think a better way to look at THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is to compare it to some similar movies. It very much belongs in the same category as CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944) and PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006). In all three movies, a young girl’s dream life brings her unknowingly into a dangerous adult world that she doesn’t understand (and doesn’t even recognize for what it is) but which threatens her nonetheless. There are vast differences in how the fantasy worlds are presented, and possibly even in whether the audience is meant to consider the fantasy real or not, but the similarities are unmistakable.

I said earlier that science fiction is not necessarily a genre that’s tied to a specific emotional response. I think that’s true, but it doesn’t mean that the reactions of the audience are insignificant to science fiction. Every scary movie is on some level a “horror” movie, and every perplexing movie is on some level a “mystery”. You can’t say that every wondrous movie is science fiction, but I think you can say that one of the features of science fiction is a desire to show things that are outside most folks’ normal experience.

This is the sense where I think THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE approaches science fiction. When Frankenstein’s monster appears on screen, it’s clear that we’ve left the ordinary world and are now in a place with different rules altogether. Perhaps the movie is really closer to “fantasy” -- as both CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE and PAN’S LABYRINTH are -- especially since this version of Frankenstein’s monster is partly informed by Isabel’s talk of spirits and summoning. But this is a story about a person who is so deeply moved by a science fiction story that she begins to imagine she is living it in some ways. It may not be particularly easy to defend THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE as science fiction itself, but I also think that it makes perfect sense to talk about it in the company of science fiction movies.

BONUS BLOG -- 1973: IVAN VASILIEVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE

What’s it about?

A Soviet scientist working on a time machine in his apartment gets in trouble with his local party representative when he keeps tripping the fuses in the building. While demonstrating his time machine to the official, he temporarily opens up the wall to the next apartment, where a burglar is in the middle of a raid. Immediately seeing the practical application of such a machine to the burglary industry, the thief joins the two others for a real test.

However, the real test of the time machine only results in chaos as the bumbling party official and the thief are stranded in the court of Ivan the Terrible, while the historical czar ends up in modern Moscow. The scientist must then race to fix the damaged machine to set things right before the displaced people are discovered and things get complicated. But then he wakes up and we learn it was all just a dream.



Is it any good?

This is another movie that I am not going to talk about too much specifically -- partly because it’s been a few weeks since I watched it and the details have mostly faded. But I did want to bring it up because it’s a Soviet flick, and I don’t think I’ve written about any of those yet. It’s also a Soviet comedy, which is something I don’t think I have ever seen before in my life.

I find that whenever I watch a movie from a communist country, I usually approach it with a different mindset than I do a movie from the west. I end up spending most of the running time playing “spot the propaganda” and searching for collectivist themes. But the more movies I see from Soviet bloc countries, the less I feel like that kind of thing is really as much of a defining feature of their cinema as I have been led to expect. (Led by whom? I’m not sure. Maybe it is purely my own prejudices that have made me think that way.)

This is not to say that IVAN VASILIEVICH seems subversive at all. It’s primarily a slapstick comedy, with lots of misunderstandings and switched identities and Benny Hill-style high speed chases through hallways. The characters are all very self-centered as well. Even the scientist (the ostensible protagonist) is largely a passive lump who is devoted entirely to his time machine. When his wife leaves him for a movie director at the beginning of the movie, she is offended at how philosophically he takes the news. Other characters covet expensive imported bourgeois goods from the west like tape recorders and leather jackets, and everyone disrespects and ignores the overly officious party representative.

That party official is also the one who falls most rapidly and deeply in love with the czarist world when they travel back in time -- no doubt largely because he is at first mistaken for the czar himself. Ivan the Terrible, meanwhile, actually seems fairly effective in the twentieth century as he applies his “might is right” philosophy to minor domestic situations. Of course, he shortly ends up being dragged off to an insane asylum, but he really is one of the more likeable characters in the movie.

And then, as I mentioned above, the scientist wakes up and we realize the entire movie has been a dream. His wife hasn’t left him, his time machine doesn’t work, and nobody has been stranded in the past or future. On the one hand, the it’s-all-a-dream ending is always a let down. On the other hand, the movie is so slight and goofy that there’s really no sense of loss at being robbed of a real ending. It’s an earlier Soviet version of BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989), and the enjoyment really comes more from the performances, the gags, and a couple of zany dance sequences than from the story itself.