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.