The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/When Genres Collide: Difference between revisions

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 Reading Mailer’s story, whether in that 1953 issue of ''Esquire'', or reprinted in the 1966 collection ''Cannibals and Christians'', or now, in ''The Mailer Review'', the challenges of filming Mailer’s action with the film technology available in the mid-twentieth century seem nearly insurmountable. ''When Worlds Collide'' and ''The Day the Earth Stood Still'', both released to theatres in 1951, did admirably well representing one spaceship and one robot, each, with the special effects technology of the time. ''This Island Earth'' (1955) ranged a bit wider, with credible aliens, a flying saucer, and action transpiring on two different planets, but the lower budget and pulpy action eventually intrudes, leaving the impression of a film intended for a Saturday afternoon matinee rather that an example of mature cinematic science fiction. Even the early 1960s television dramas ''The Twilight Zone'' and ''The Outer Limits'', while frequently offering stories with significant themes and philosophical implications, suffered at times from unconvincing visual effects. Mailer’s tunnels, ten miles deep into the earth, his cannon-fired missiles and his massive starships, certainly would have required a budget beyond what even his impressive literary stature could have commanded at the time. The only apparent option would be to present the drama as more of a stage play, restricted to the characters’ interaction as they describe fantastic events occurring off-screen. This approach, however, would inevitably eliminate the sense of grandeur, the perception that we are witnessing events of a cosmically-significant and mythical nature. Mailer was working outside genre, incredibly so, and ''The Deer Park'', written just a few years later and adapted by Mailer into a play produced at the Lucille Lotrel Theatre in early 1967, is more consistent with his body of work. So, why did Mailer choose a science fiction context for his treatment at all?
-. . .
+The answer, I suspect, is that Mailer is looking for a context of myth and fable, a method of accentuating his notion of the human defects, small and large, that every day contribute to the destruction of our planet. Mailer mythologizes the ultimate rebellion against a mother-world that seeks to nurture us but is rejected as we try to find independence and, somehow, maturity. Just as today’s prominent films attempt to find relevance in the quasi-mythical format of superheroes and uncanny villains, archetypes of ancient figures adapted from mythology and extended to reflect the concerns of a technological century, Mailer is trying to integrate his prophetic warnings into a new context, an environment of myth appropriate to a new era of technological advancement. Mailer is seeking to understand and employ the “new forces” notion of Campbell’s editorial commitment. The world must be at eminent, physical risk for Mailer to effectively make his point, a wide stage for archetypal heroes and their antagonists to struggle with a threat of cosmic proportions.
+The ambiance of myth or prophecy indeed saturates Mailer’s work, from his syntax and structure to the even pace of the film scenes recounting the events of the story. The rhetorical constrictions necessary for a successful treatment, in fact, promote the sense that we are hearing a grand story somehow outside of time and apart from the actual physics of the natural world. The effect is much like the narrative accounts of gods and heroes summarized by Thomas Bullfinch and Edith Hamilton, intent upon relating the mythological foundations of our culture without embellishment or individual style, film treatments from another age. Although Mailer’s criteria for an effective treatment warn against permitting too much introspection, his characters often talk in the rhetoric of myth and heroism. {{" '}}If even a few of us manage to live,{{' "}} the President says near the end of Mailer’s story,{{" '}}our seed will be changed forever by the self-sacrifice and nobility, the courage and the loss engraved on our memory of that earth-doomed man who was our ancestor and who offered us life. Man may become human at last.{{" "}}{{Sfn|Mailer|1953|p=250}} Such words may have been spoken by Odysseus to his crew during the long journey back to Ithaca, or by Moses leading the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt, or of Jesus, the implied “earth-doomed man” in the President’s prophetic comment, bringing salvation to a people who have lost their way. In the original ''Esquire'' printing, the religious and mythological significance of Mailer’s work is emphasized by the Charles O’Glass illustration printed on the verso page facing the beginning of the story. O’Glass, who contributed a dozen ''Esquire'' drawings between 1960 and 1968, depicts three wise men riding camels holding bottled gifts in their hands while observing a bright star in the night sky. The style at once evokes both a cartoon and holiday card or Christmas tree ornament, and a caption below quotes another pilgrim, apart from the others: “I know a shortcut.”{{sfn|Mailer|1953|p=150}} The illustration perhaps would be appropriate for any December ''Esquire'' issue from that era, but is particularly inspired in conjunction with Mailer’s story. The President, a savior obviously based upon John F. Kennedy at his most heroic, is served by the betrayer Stevens, the duplicitous Judas whose infidelity ultimately is discovered and punished. The bright star appearing to the men as they travel to offer their gifts in O’Glass’s illustration may well be our exploding Earth, offering a warning to another planetary civilization of the dangers of imprudent decisions.
+Thus the President’s final plan for attaining the thrust necessary for a starship to leave the solar system, a more audacious and technically questionable method than advanced previously and one that resonates with the O’Glass illustration, involves nothing less that the destruction of the Earth. “With proper timing,” Mailer writes, “the force released by blowing up the planet would more than counteract the gravitational pull of the sun.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1953|p=217}} The irony of obliterating the planet to save mankind accentuates the bit-by-bit ravages inflicted upon the planet by human beings too self-centered, too selfish for comforts and gratification to respect their cosmic home. Mailer implicitly wonders if this final act of matricide, following a century or more of unconscionable abuse, will serve to heal mankind or perhaps only represent the final, most violent transgression of all. He also suggests that faith in technology, in fact, may be part of the hubris causing us to ignore the healing value of spiritual contemplation. Arthur C. Clarke’s remarkable short story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” first published in ''Star Science Fiction'' #1 in 1953, emphasizes the essential ignorance of modern science as it confronts mysticism and religion, an effective anticipation of Mailer’s thoughts. In Clarke’s story, scientists who assist the members of a religious order in their attempt to find the nine billion possible names of God, thinking that discovering those names is the ultimate goal of mankind, are astonished when their computer completes its calculations and the stars in the nighttime sky begin blinking out.
+Mailer’s prophetic warning, written nearly fifty years ago, not only anticipates the environmental destruction and global pollution caused by mankind’s inattentive stewardship of the earth’s resources, but also explains the current coronavirus pandemic disrupting the world’s population. Our planet perhaps is rebelling against the presence of destructive parasites, human beings, that consume the resources of its host without substantial concern for its future. COVID-19 may be the Earth’s method of self-protection, a reaction similar to the human body increasing the production of white blood cells to combat a life-threatening infection. Rather than bringing individuals closer together while experiencing an event with potentially catastrophic results, this pandemic has forced us apart, preventing the intellectual and emotional connections with our family and friends that, in the past, had been taken for granted. Considering that the Internet, an apparently endless resource for content, began our retreat to solitary confinement over a quarter of a century ago, the isolating effects of the novel coronavirus are especially unnerving. At one point Mailer considers that our race may not be at all compatible with our planet. “Man may have been mismatched with earth,” he writes. “In some fantastic way, perhaps, we voyaged here some millions of years ago and fell into a stupidity equal to the apes.”{{sfn|Mailer|1953|p=279}} Matheson’s “Third from the Sun,” with its implication of Earth as a destination for alien repopulation, gains further credibility in Mailer’s apocalyptic mythos.
+Campbell’s emphasis upon change as an important aspect of science fiction, a principle ignored by mainstream authors relying upon the inviolate truths of the world, eventually affected the literary genre he helped to define. “Science fiction might have evolved into a viable art form with or without Campbell,” Nevala-Lee writes, “but his presence meant that it happened at a crucial time, and his true legacy lies in the specific shape that it took under his watch.”{{sfn|Nevala-Lee|2018|p=8}} Stories identified as science fiction in an earlier time are now more commonly considered “speculative fiction,” a general term that includes fantasy, horror, alternate history, and any other fiction predicated upon characters and events outside our natural experience. John W. Campbell may have been perplexed at this development, and perhaps annoyed that, now, mainstream authors incorporate the elements of science fiction in their works without acknowledging an indebtedness to the genre. Campbell, too, has become ''persona non grata'' due to his apparent views on race and gender, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, recognizing the foremost science fiction writers and their works since 1973, has now been renamed to celebrate the magazine he edited rather than the man himself. In fact, Campbell’s decline began with his acceptance of dianetics, L. Ron Hubbard’s conception of a new science of the mind, and his support of an improbable reactionless space drive invented by a mortgage appraisal executive, Norman L. Dean, both quasi-scientific conceptions that many ''Analog'' readers viewed with suspicion. The 1960 publication of a new magazine, ''Galaxy Science Fiction'', further contributed to Campbell’s decline, becoming popular with a new generation of science fiction readers as its editor, H. L. Gold, emphasized social issues and humor in the stories he selected, bringing the genre closer to the mainstream and to maturity.
+Mailer’s treatment first appeared at an important point in the development of modern speculative fiction and, in many ways, demonstrates both the early condition of the genre and how a great author may combine traditional literature’s considerations of the human heart with the cosmic implications of Clarke, Heinlein, and Norton. “The Last Night” helps to merge science fiction with mainstream literature, two genres colliding in Campbell’s era, into a single form capable of informing a technological culture. Mailer’s questionable science, along with the indeterminate time of the story’s setting, contributes to the aura of myth and heroism that that transforms the work into a document of prophecy. The Earth may not long survive, he warns, if its population continues the ignoble contention between nations, the governmental secrecy, and the treachery and infidelity that informs our relationships with each other. Perhaps, if we listen closely, Mailer’s mythic warning, outside of tradition and time, may save us yet.
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