A Sense-of-Wonderful Century. Gary Westfahl
material to strengthen a maternal relationship. Perhaps this was done to differentiate the film from the television series then on the air, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995-1999), wherein an offstage Hera is a recurring villainess, or perhaps someone else complained about the absence of sympathetic mothers in Disney films, engendering this response.
11. Bob Hilliard, lyrics, Sammy Fain, music, “In a World of My Own” [song], Alice in Wonderland (Disney, 1950).
12. Some may argue these films are not truly “subversive”: all children like pretending to be parents, so films appeal to that desire by depicting children who pretend to be parents, and what’s subversive about that? However, just as children playing house must eventually return to their roles as children, films with youths acting as adults usually end with the characters returned to their previous status. In the Disney live-action film Pollyanna (1960), for example, young Hayley Mills first lords it over grumpy and confused adults, cheering them up and dispensing exactly the right advice to help them solve their problems. But at the end of the film, her aunt forbids her to attend a local fair, reminding everyone of her subordinate position; and when she attempts to defy her aunt by climbing out a window, she experiences a near-fatal fall. Again a vulnerable child, she recovers to learn that her aunt will now marry a suitor, providing her with a normal set of parents. As noted, animated films like The Rescuers and Oliver and Company also unite children with parents as the conclusion, and other live-action Disney films with animation—Song of the South (1946), Mary Poppins (1964), and Pete’s Dragon (1977)—similarly end with once-rambunctious children again supervised by parents. Only the animated films lack such humbling or restorative endings; the child becomes not a temporary parent, but a permanent parent. (Eric S. Rabkin suggested in conversation that audiences may find it easier to observe drastic role reversals involving animated characters, while they prefer more traditional resolutions in films that, while still fantastic, do feature live actors portraying children.)
4. THE TRUE FRONTIER: CONFRONTING AND AVOIDING THE REALITIES OF SPACE IN AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION FILMS
Though narratives of space travel characteristically resonate with historical and generic references—to pioneering and settling the American West (the Old Frontier), voyaging across vast oceans, diving deep underwater, or trekking into unknown polar regions—the fact remains that outer space is an environment radically different from all those that humans have previously explored. It is a realm without air, without water, and without material resources; a realm of zero gravity, extreme temperatures, and no protection from harmful radiation. A film about space travel, even if designed only to entertain, should in some way acknowledge these harsh realities; in the science fiction films of the last fifty years, I maintain, this has increasingly not occurred.
To distinguish films that confront the facts about space from films that avoid those facts, one can search for a simple but clear visual icon: the spacesuit. In both cinematic and actual space flights, these bulky, cumbersome costumes unmistakably signal that their wearers are in a dangerous and potentially lethal environment which demands an unprecedented degree of protection. Just as millennia of sea travel have not eliminated the need for lifeboats and life preservers, and just as a century of air travel has not eliminated the need for parachutes and emergency oxygen, anyone traveling through space will always need to have a spacesuit readily available, because all forms of defense one can imagine—force fields, tractor beams, photon torpedoes, strengthened hulls—will inevitably be susceptible to failure, and will inevitably fail someday, bringing travelers into contact with the deadly vacuum of space. A space film featuring spacesuits, whatever its other flaws, is realistic in at least one crucial respect; a space film that never displays or alludes to spacesuits, whatever its other virtues, is unrealistic in at least one crucial respect.
With space at a premium (in another sense), I cannot undertake a complete history of spacesuit films in relation to the larger set of space films, but a few important works can be named and discussed. Although there were space films before 1950, including A Trip to the Moon (1902), Woman in the Moon (1929), and the serials featuring Flash Gordon (1936, 1938, 1940) and Buck Rogers (1939), the first completely authentic spacesuit film was probably Destination Moon (1950), produced by George Pal and directed by Irving Pichel. While other critics have noted the film’s painstaking efforts to portray outer space accurately, employing black curtains and innovative lighting techniques to achieve a memorable effect, the film was equally attentive to the authenticity of its spacesuits; even Woody Woodpecker, in the film’s incongruous cartoon sequence explaining the principles of space flight, wears a realistic spacesuit during his flight to the Moon.
As it happens, the film’s co-author and technical advisor, science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, was uniquely qualified to provide expert guidance in devising plausible spacesuits, since he had worked during World War II on the construction of “high-altitude pressure suits”;13 and he later wrote a novel, Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958), which incorporated a detailed and loving description of a functional spacesuit. In his essay “Shooting Destination Moon,” Heinlein described some of the film’s efforts to achieve realistic-looking spacesuits:
Low gravity and tremendous leaps [require] piano wire, of course—but did you ever try to wire a man who is wearing a spacesuit? The wires have to get inside that suit at several points, producing the effect a nail has on a tire, i.e., a man wearing a pressurized suit cannot be suspended on wires. So inflation of suits must be replaced by padding, at least during wired shots. But a padded suit doesn’t wrinkle the same way a pressurized suit does and the difference shows. Furthermore, the zippered openings for the wires can be seen. Still worse, if inflation is to be faked with padding, how are we to show them putting on their suits?... To get around the shortcomings of padded suits we worked in an “establishing scene” in which the suits were shown to be of two parts, an outer chafing suit and an inner pressure suit. This makes sense; deep-sea divers often use chafing suits over their pressure suits, particularly when working around coral....It is good engineering and we present this new wrinkle in spacesuits without apology.14
Now, reading about an “establishing scene” (albeit a very brief one) to explain the design of the film’s spacesuits, some will discern misguided priorities, agreeing with Phil Hardy that “the script is colourless and wooden; the dominant concern of those involved was to make the journey to the Moon realistic rather than dramatic.”15 Yet it is infelicitous to describe the difference between Destination Moon and other space films in terms of “realism” versus “drama,” since we are actually dealing with two different types of drama: the brilliantly predicted drama of actual space travel versus the conventional drama of popular film.
That is, applying normal standards, one could easily claim that there is no “drama” in Destination Moon: there are no villains to overcome, no tensions between protagonists, no thwarted romances or comic misunderstandings. Yet there is a strong and definite conflict in this story—the conflict between frail human beings and the merciless hostility of outer space—and the critical weapon that people need to oppose this enemy is a spacesuit. With space cast as the opponent, a scene describing the spacesuits that the heroes will wear might be regarded as both interesting and necessary, a scene precisely equivalent to the well-loved introductory scenes in the James Bond films in which Q displays and explains the ingenious devices that Bond will use to battle his next foe. Attentiveness to the correct appearance of the spacesuit is also essential, for the same reason that a cowboy in a western film cannot be seen brandishing a toy gun: a hero’s weapons must look credible.
In a film that devoted so much energy to its spacesuits, it is only appropriate that its final crisis involves a spacesuit: seeking to reduce the weight of the rocketship so it can return to Earth, the astronauts craft an ingenious scheme to jettison the last spacesuit without endangering the life of Sweeney (Dick Wesson), the crewman wearing it. They tell him to drill a hole in the airlock, attach the suit to a line through the hole attached