The double helix (2/21/03)
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World Without End. [Edward Bernds, 1956.]
Intrepid explorers Hugh Marlowe, Rod Taylor, Nelson Leigh, and Christopher Dark while performing the first circumnavigation of the planet Mars run into one of those troublesome time warps that seem to clutter up the solar system, and, after a period of intense acceleration during which all the dials on the console twirl round and smoke comes out from under the dash, black out [a narrative device usually introduced to code everything that follows as a dream, but, see below] and come to just in time to discover themselves crashlanding in an alpine landscape on an unknown world. After peering dazedly out the portholes for a minute or two, one of the party points out that they are “experiencing Plus Gravity”, which, in keeping with the tenets of Movie Science, means that there must be oxygen in the atmosphere outside; as they immediately verify by opening the door and sticking their heads out to take deep breaths. [I wouldn’t advise performing this experiment on Neptune.] Venturing forth to explore this alien planet, they descend into green but uninhabited country uncannily reminiscent of the American Southwest and realize presently that they’ve been magically transported five centuries forward in the future light cone and back to the Earth itself, where a nuclear holocaust has exterminated most of the human race and divided the survivors [maybe you saw this coming] into Eloi and Morlocks — though in this version the effete intellectual Eloi cower in the gleaming corridors of a futuristic city underground and the degenerate mutant Morlocks run around the surface clubbing anything that moves with savage gusto. Taking issue with the eugenic implications of this state of affairs, the newcomers, in a series of addresses to what looks suspiciously like the Student Council, attempt to convince the testosterone-deficient male Eloi of the virtues of sun, surf, sand, random gunfire, and economic imperialism; without much success, though they do manage to impress the Eloi chicks, a nubile lot of shameless hussies who prance around in high heels and miniskirts copping feels off Taylor’s biceps and making googoo eyes at his companions. This sexual tension/ideological conflict generates predictable friction, precipitating a crisis which is somehow not resolved in porno holocaust but in a rather silly final battle between the cute people and the cave trolls whose outcome does not exactly confound expectation for anyone who attended an American high school [and which, indeed, could have been staged without loss of generality as a trial by combat between the leaders of rival cliques in a parking lot.] The novelty is that, since the time warp for once really is irreversible, our heroes don’t have to escape at the last minute as the lost city is consumed by an erupting volcano [i.e., awaken from the dream], and, weird but true, we leave them, like Candide, cultivating their garden; and can expect several more centuries to elapse before the victorious pureblooded Aryans start squabbling over the composition of the Prom Committee and nuke one another all over again. — Thus, I guess, the title; or, as Joyce would have put it, high school is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Where are the Ramones when you really need them?
This owes not a little to previous exercises in the bubble-helmet-and-blaster genre, viz.
Catwomen of the Moon and
Flight to Mars, and in turn influenced later epics, notably
Queen Of Outer Space,
The Time Travelers, and
Planet of the Apes. — Which should probably set up some final wisecracks about the debased genetic inheritance of the mutant Morlocks bearing the same relation to that of their ancestors that this scenario does to H. Rider Haggard, but I haven’t the heart for it. As so often happens, I liked the silly piece of shit despite myself [maybe it was the space opera, or maybe it was just those cheerleaders’ outfits], and anyway I haven’t time to argue: I’m late for an appointment with my guidance counselor.
____________Black ice (12/23/02)
