Dr Cyclops Will Garth

Nostalgia: 1950s 3-D films:

Who Is Watching Whom? Point Of View in

IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE

by Charles J. Garard

That kid on the front row of his father’s small-town movie theatre was me, looking up at the wide screen while wearing my 3-D glasses and surrendering my burden of personal consciousness to the science-fiction plot.

Film theorists suggest that the act of watching a motion picture, exceptionally in a theatre, causes audiences to temporarily lose their burden of personal consciousness. Although they may distinguish with the characters on the screen, they need assume no responsibilities. However, sure cinematic processes such as Cinerama, Panavision, 70mm prints with six-channel Dolby stereo, IMAX screens, and 3-D more actively implicate movie viewers. When any of these filming and projection methods are combined with the subjective point of view, viewers may feel that they are not only players but in control of the characters. In Jack Arnold’s 3-D film IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953), viewers are given control over the earthlings because the point of view when they confront the aliens is from the aliens’ perspective.

This film was not the original to rely to a considerable degree on the subjective camera (see LADY IN THE LAKE 1946), nor the last (see those FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH movies that put the audience members in the position of a brutal serial killer); however, the fact that the characters here distrust what they see, and further, relinquish control of their own lives to the aliens makes this other than as supposed or expected usual science-fiction entry in this over-stuffed 1950s genre worthy of another look. The point of view causes the viewers to discern with both earthlings as fearful victims as well as with the controlling aliens — the watched as well as the watchers. With earthlings as their doubles, viewers are capable to recognize their own fear of loss of control; when they view the earthlings from the aliens’ perspective, however, they are competent to determine the signification of this loss.

Three-dimensional cinematography, by it is very nature, involves audiences subjectively; they may see the characters on the screen as cinematic doubles of themselves. Since the film is shot in black-and-white, the real as rendered by this Natural Vision procedure may be thought less real than those films shot in color as well as in 3-D. But even in monochrome, 3-D may transform the Arizona desert into a life-sized, museum-like exhibit that we could, if permitted, step into as effortlessly as stepping through a window frame. Unfortunately, the controls on this window to the plastic world have been carelessly manned. The 3-D craze was short lived; in spite of ongoing attempts to resurrect it with such films as the re-issued 3-D version of Tim Burton’s THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (2006) and Imax features, 3-D has never re-emerged to repeat the mass appeal magic of all those gimmicky but stimulating 3-D films of the 1950s (like HOUSE OF WAX, THE MAZE, PHANTOM OF THE RUE MORGUE, SANGAREE, MAN IN THE DARK, GUN FURY, HONDO with John Wayne, INFERNO, DEVIL’S CANYON, KISS ME KATE, TAZA SON OF COCHISE, two of the three Creature of the Black Lagoon movies, and the first-out-of-the-gate BWANA DEVIL.)

The protagonist’s telescope, the golfball-like spaceship itself, and the rocks of a huge avalanche are the most remarkable 3-D effects, and in this film they seem less gimmicky than in other early 3-D efforts. However, the protruding cyclops eyeball of each alien meant to penetrate the personal knowingness of the audiences might irritate numerous viewers in the same manner that the spears and arrows do in THE CHARGE AT FEATHER RIVER, jolting them from their comparatively relaxed involvement of the subjective forward tracking shots through the desert. Unfortunately, the polarized 3-D prints used in the 1950s have been largely substituted by the red-and-green anaglyph versions shown in theatres and, in a good deal of cases, on television. Recently, at the end of November (2006), the independent PLAZA Theatre on Ponce De Leon in Atlanta, Georgia, ran a one-day showing of the film in 3-D. However, most of us today view IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) in it is flat, two-dimensional version on television showings or in DVD/VHS versions.

Even in two-dimensional viewings, without these 3-D protrusions from the screen, the subjective perspective of the camera is not only apparent but is still powerful, and therein lies it is significance. For our purpose, the fact that the film was in the first place shot in 3-D is no longer of major concern. It is the point of view of the aliens that intrigues critical scholars decades later, the subjective camerawork showing the earthlings through the cyclops eyes of the aliens. This point of view allows the audience to see the earthlings as victims. The residents of the sleepy desert town of Sand Rock, Arizona, find themselves enveloped in the billowing fog that borders the perspective of the viewers while the viewers themselves stalk victims from behind the bubble-eye of an alien. When the protagonists are captured, the viewers participate in their abduction the way viewers of the FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH movies participate in the murders of horny teenagers at Crystal Lake. When two miners, one of whom could be Gabby Hayes’ twin brother, emerge from a mine shaft entrance, the viewers participate in their capture. The characters look toward the camera as the misty arms of the audience reach out to enfold them. Even when linemen (Russell Johnson and Joseph Sawyer) drive along the desert road in daylight, the audience tracks them from a moving high angle that could scarcely be the point of view of an earthling. Both of these perspectives give the audience, as well as the aliens, a sense of control over the earthlings. These two affable linemen, Frank and George, tease resident novice astronomer and writer John Putnam* (Richard Carlson) in regards to the “riding” that the townspeople and the media have been giving him for insisting that he saw aliens from space, yet they prove to be just as mystified by the sights and sounds of the desert. George tells Putnam and Ellen that Frank, who listens to a tap he has placed on the wire, “is sure hearin’ things.” Putnam scales the ladder to listen through this phone tap, and, in one of the efficaciously haunting scenes from a 1950s science-fiction film, the audience also hears the whining — an eerie, high-pitched musical refrain that exploits our fear of, and fascination with, the unknown.

The ladder which John climbs extends out into the audience, inviting us to share his paranoia when Frank proposes that someone might be listening to them the way they are listening to whatsoever is on the line. Neither sight nor sound is to be trusted in the desert sun. As Frank points out: “After you’ve been working out on the desert fifteen years like I have, you listen a lotta things. See a lotta things too. The sun in the sky. Heat. All that sand out there. The rivers and lakes that aren’t real at all. And on occasion you think that the wind gets in the wires and hums and listens and talks. Just like what we’re hearing now. Still listen it?” Putnam no longer hears the walking wind; it becomes one of the mysteries of the film that he never unravels. He merely knows that something is tapping into his life, listening and watching him with a cool intelligence.** Because this something has not revealed it is identity or it is intent while it proceeds to manipulate persons and events like a cosmic film director, it maintains the control that Putnam has without doubt or question lost.

[Note * After Putnam presents Dr. Snell with an article unimaginatively titled "Report on the Arrival of Strangers from Outer Space" and walks away, his former consultant refers to Putnam as an intense young man. The assistant calls Putnam "an odd one," and Snell responds: "More than odd, Bob. Individual and lonely. A man who thinks for himself." Putnam has already been called an novice astronomer by a surly local newspaperman who prints a story with the improbable headline: "Stargazer Sees Martians." Pete, the helicopter pilot who primary flies Putnam and Ellen to the internet site of the UFO crash, tries to warn Putnam, as does Ellen, not to tell the others what he "thinks" he has seen, and expresses surprise that Putnam is going back to Sand Rock. He tells him that the townspeople will not let him "walk around in the open."]

[Note **History majors and film scholars need not be reminded of the political climate for the duration of the time when the film was made.]

After George tells Frank regarding a date that he has with Jane (Kathleen Hughes) that night, the two are captured by one of the cyclops aliens who protrudes his eye from the screen. For a moment, the audience is no longer safe in the theatre seats, yet once we are scrutinized by the alien intelligence, we are invited to become share of it; we see this later when Putnam and Ellen (Barbara Rush) encounter George’s zombie-like duplicate in a scene again efficaciously photographed from the alien’s point of view. The bubble representing the solitary eye and the sparkling mist surrounding it both condense into a solid replica of George’s arm an instant before it touches Ellen’s shoulder. The hand that does genuinely make contact appears to be totally human, but we recognise that it is not. The alien inadvertently reveals himself to Putnam and Ellen by staring point blank at the sun and by speaking in a voice that sounds as if it had been recorded in a tin shed. Putnam knows that what he thinks he sees is an illusion, but he rationalizes his confusedness over identities by again blaming the sun for playing tricks on him. Unable to cope with the fact that they are now the investigated, not the investigators, the watched and the watchers, he ignores any edge which the revolver he carries might give him and drags Ellen back to town to get the sheriff.

As the audience, we portion Putnam’s feeling of annoyance at being hindered or criticized at not being competent to convince any person of the presence of the aliens. Putnam is an ineffectual adolescent in the face of “parental authority figures” like the professor, the pushy newspaper reporter, the Army major, and specially the small-town sheriff until he fights with the sheriff (Charles Drake) and takes his gun away. He has failed to use a gun versus the evidently superior strength of the aliens, yet the weapon grants him temporary equality with his peers and power over the authority figure. He has regained at least a fixed amount of control over his life.

Curiously, the audience remains in a neutral position when Putnam grapples with the sheriff, even altho the 3-D procedure could place the audience within range of thrown punches, flying chairs, and phallic gun barrels. Directors of other 3-D films have exploited the depth procedure by including such gimmicks, but Arnold resists the overkill temptation by reserving the first-person point of view for the sequences in which the aliens directly contact the earthlings. Like a boy who whistles in the dark to mask his fears, Putnam tells the unseen alien who speaks to him from inside the mine to “stand out in the sun.” Putnam reveals that he can not trust what he cannot see, even though he knows that his imagination in the brightly lit desert is not trustworthy. When the alien, who insists that he and his fellow travelers have souls and minds and “are good,” reveals himself to be a cyclops more frightening than Polyphemus but much more civilized (he doesn’t eat visitors the way that the son of Poseidon devours the men of Odysseus), Putnam turns away in horror.

The fact that the eye of this cyclops often times penetrates the space around it as well as the space beyond the screen in 3-D showings substantiates such a reading, and both of these fears represent, for many, a loss of control or power (a figure which the sheriff, more than Putnam, represents). Even in the daylight, however, Putnam has been blind, different from the other humans who have not caught a glimpse of the roving eye, he becomes conscious of his handicap — his loss of control. Even even though the alien has identified his race as “good,”he frightens Putnam by imparting the requested knowledge. Knowledge, after all, has a price. Even when he does “see” what is going on, he can not share this vision; he may only realize that he, like the sheriff and the others, is unquestionably not in control.

When the aliens capture Ellen and construct a double that may be sent forth to entrap Putnam, the audience sees her abduction from her perspective as she honks at Frank’s duplicate in the middle of the road, then from the alien’s point of view as the duplicate apparently drops it is camouflage to become the reality that terrified Putnam earlier. The point of view prevents the audience from seeing the alien’s visage a second time. This alien’s-eye view gives the audience, whether or not they are wearing their 3-D glasses, the perspective of a judge with cool, superior intellect, but the persons they are looking at and judging are not others — not members of the starship Enterprise distanced from their lives by centuries — but themselves; viewers may see their own frailties and limitations that these characters embody. These characters genuinely are doubles devised for an audience to view and — through the aliens — observe, judge, and control.

Curiously, Ellen’s double appears to be less benevolent then the other aliens; when Putnam and the audience see the mysterious figure atop the hill, she wears a black evening gown with a flowing scarf rather of the conservative schoolteacher suit she wears for the duration of her abduction. The double’s mere presence, resembling the heroine on the cover of a romantic paperback novel as well as a film noir heroine or femme fatale, compels Putnam to follow, which she does. However, she remains beyond his — and our — reach because her function is to lure him to the entrance of the mine, to the threshold of the heart of darkness which he is not yet ready to enter. After all, he does not trust his visual judgment in the daylight. How may he suppose to fare better in the dark?

However, Putnam does gain the courage to penetrate the darkness and journeying toward it is center. He encounters there the double of Ellen who informs him that he may no longer be trusted. She tries to lure him into the River Styx that separates them, then attempts to kill him with a phallic wand (which, in 3-D, protrudes from the screen like the sword of Achilles). When she shoots a white ray at him like Harry Potter and his friends sending a powerful strength from their magic wands, the perspective is that of the alien; the audience participates in the try to penetrate him and to kill him. This power in her hand is ineffectual, however, as it swings in a wide swath above his head. Despite their power, the aliens (and the audience, since they see this from the alien’s point of view) are unable to ruin the humane introductory (and viewer counterpart). He fires a revolver at her, penetrating her shell (and the audience’s); the alien and the audience fall into the gulf among them. Since never again in the film are any on-screen actions or earthlings seen from the point of view of the aliens, both Putnam and the audience have achieved a state of awareness. Instead, they confront the doubles and their originals — the captives.

Putnam takes viewers deeper into the labyrinth in search of a cyclops or two where he encounters his own double wearing his costume — but costume that is not similar to the dull suits he normally wears. This double, however, possesses a more inviolable weapon than the wand which, rather of cutting Putnam in half, only carves slashes in a cave wall. This phallic machine that shoots a more powerful white ray at a spherical object may ruin the entire world — threatening sufficient to make it a hot topic on George Noory’s middle-of-the-night radio show COAST TO COAST AM. “Look at it is power,” intones the alien in humane form,*** illustrating how this power allows them to be completely in control. The weapon provides sufficient “power to drive a ship through space. Power to tear your world apart.” These doubles, the audience sees, are more inviolable than, and more in control of, the originals than the originals are of themselves, even even though they are illusory projections.

[***Society is represented by the sheriff who reaches for his gun (which, in 3-D, is in the audience's face) while talking with regards to a kinship amid air temperature and murder (listen to the policeman's remarks on the same topic in the 1981 film noir masterwork BODY HEAT). Society can not deal with it is own repressed nature, so it projects this onto the monster or, in this case, an alien race. (Putnan, who wanders the desert in search of a glimpse of the creature, is waiting, as Robert Ensign asserts in his biological perspective of the film, to become social, just as primates had to when they jumped down from the trees and formed survival groups on the savanna.) In the cave, Putnam introductory reveals his survival achievements by shooting not only the alien double, the harbinger of death, but the audience. Then he saves mankind by acknowledging the potency of it is superior force: "You may always reach out and destruct us [the society] with that.”]

The aliens, in spite of their control, can not destruct the humane earthlings because these humans are a primitive form of themselves, and because it was they who fell upon the world of the humans and not the humans who invaded their world. When the duplicate of Putnam orders the release of the humane prisoners, none of whom have been harmed, the other alien duplicates look on. Except for the dissimilar — but earthly — garments they all wear, one group is a mirror effigy of the other. The point of view in this scene is neither that of the persons nor of the aliens; the audience is free to valuate both the humane originals (their counterparts) and the alien duplicates (the illusory but powerful projections of themselves).

After Putnam emerges from the mine with the abducted persons and — in a gesture to convince the other humans to give up control of that of which they have only imagined control anyway — seals off the entrance, the sheriff assumes that the alien doubles have been repressed. However, the ground shakes as the engines of the spaceship are activated and, in a reverse of the opening shot of the film, the aliens leave. Ellen asks if the aliens have gone for good, and the camera brings the audience in for a close-up of Putnam as he delivers a dose of 1950s philosophical moralizing. “Just for now,” Putnam utters wistfully. “It wasn’t the right time for us to meet.” The dual perspective might invite us to add: “the right time for us to meet ourselves.” Putnam proceeds that “there’ll be other nights, other stars for us to watch. They’ll be back.”

Aliens did return in more dreadful and subtle films such as the noir classic INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1955) and much later in such high-tech films as the special effects extravaganza CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and the more or less maudlin E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL, but, unfortunately, mankind, still thinking that it is in control, remains blind and repressed beneath tons of rock. even in the glare of tricky sunlight. The message of IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (the screenplay was based on a treatment by Ray Bradbury, therefore the poetic dialogue) does urge audiences, through the point of view which involves them as well as through the innocuous-sounding dialogue, to be understanding and tolerant. Let’s hope this was the message that the little boy sitting on the front row of his father’s theatre wearing those cardboard 3-D glasses, like other little boys and girls who are now grown-ups, came away with.

END

Dr Cyclops Will Garth Image

Dr Cyclops Will Garth Pic

Dr Cyclops Will Garth Image

Dr Cyclops Will Garth Photo