Mars Attacks!: Burton, Tocqueville, and the Self-Organizing Power of the American People
I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
--William F. Buckley, Jr.
Tim Burton’s wacky sci-fi film Mars Attacks! (1996) is not considered one of the highpoints of his filmmaking career. Although the movie took in over $100 million worldwide in its initial release, it was judged a box-office failure, given the fact that it was budgeted for roughly the same amount and its backers were hoping for another genuine blockbuster from the director of Batman (1989). Moreover, critics generally did not review Mars Attacks! favorably. Speaking for many of his colleagues, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote: “Mars Attacks! is not as much fun as it should be. Few of its numerous actors make a lasting impression and Burton’s heart and soul is not in the humor.”[1] From the moment of its conception, the movie risked falling victim to what literary critics call the fallacy of imitative form. Burton set out to recreate the cheesy flying saucer movies of the 1950s. True to his mission, he ended up with a cheesy flying saucer movie. How much could one have expected from a film that turns out to have been based on a set of bubble gum trading cards that depict the Earth being invaded by a particularly nasty bunch of Martians?[2]
I remember being disappointed myself with Mars Attacks! when I first saw it. At the time I was a devoted Burton fan. I was particularly struck by the consistency of his achievement, having been impressed by each of his first six feature films: Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992), and Ed Wood (1994). For me, Mars Attacks! broke this streak and left me wondering whether Burton had lost his magic touch. But like a good Bordeaux—and unlike bubble gum—Mars Attacks! has, at least for me, improved with age. I would still grant that it has more than its share of silly moments and cheap jokes. What changed my opinion of it, however, was realizing that it has something important to say. It is not just a random exercise in recreating 1950s flying saucer movies; it is a serious critique of the pro-government ideology they embodied.
The Federal Government to the Rescue
While Burton may seem to be following closely the formula of his cinematic models, in fact, he is inverting and deconstructing it. As products of a Cold War mentality, the 1950s flying saucer movies generally expressed a faith in the goodness of America’s political, military, and scientific elites and their capacity to save the nation from all threats. By contrast, Mars Attacks! systematically and mercilessly debunks the elites who claim to be able to protect America. It turns instead to the country’s cultural underclass, so despised by those elites—the trailer trash—and shows them to be capable of defending themselves. Always sympathetic to the underdog and the marginalized figure—from Pee-wee to the Penguin—Burton expresses a Tocquevillian confidence in the power of ordinary Americans to associate on their own to deal with any problem. In Mars Attacks! all the top down efforts by the authorities in Washington to respond to the Martian invasion fail utterly, while pockets of outcasts, misfits, and losers around the country spontaneously come together in a bottom up effort to defeat their enemies from outer space. As Bill Warren writes, “The leaders of Earth are helpless; it’s up to the little people to save the day.”[3] Mars Attacks! is Burton’s tribute to American pop culture in one of its more vulgar manifestations—the flying saucer movie—and at the same time it celebrates the power of pop culture itself to save America. In the end, the Martians are defeated, not by the combined wisdom of America’s scientists and the might of its military, but by the music of Slim Whitman, a yodeling country and western singer who virtually defines low brow taste in America—he holds the record for most albums sold via late-night television commercials.
To appreciate the polemical thrust of Mars Attacks!, the most fruitful point of comparison is Fred Sears’s Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). This is the film that Burton mentions most frequently in his comments on Mars Attacks!, and it provides more models for the plot elements and the special effects of his movie than any other sci-fi classic of the 50s. Moreover, it offers perhaps the purest distillation of the political ideology that informed this moment in Hollywood history. This was the height of the Cold War, when fears of communist aggression, from both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, gripped America. Anxieties focused, of course, on the threat of nuclear annihilation, but Americans were also worried about real and supposed attempts to subvert their institutions from within by communist infiltrators, spies, and traitors. By the 1950s, movies had begun to reflect and capitalize on these widespread concerns. Imaginary stories of extraterrestrial aliens invading the Earth became convenient vehicles for expressing fears that America might be facing real threats from foreign powers, and perhaps internal subversion as well.[4]
In Cold War ideology, the bulwark of American defense against all these threats was the government of the United States. Movie after movie—not just sci-fi films—celebrated the competence, courage, and integrity of federal officials, particularly if, like the FBI, they combated communism.[5] It is arguable that at no point in American history has the federal government inspired as much confidence as it did in the 1950s. In World War II, the federal government had successfully led the battle against enemies in Europe and Asia, and the United States had emerged from the conflict as unquestionably the strongest nation in the world economically and militarily. American triumphs in World War II were attributed to many factors; one of the most important was a sense of American scientific and technological superiority. The development of the atomic bomb was credited with having ended the war with Japan, and this Manhattan Project became a powerful symbol of the federal government’s ability to achieve whatever it set out to do, provided it devoted enough resources to the task and was able to mobilize the nation’s scientific elite behind it.
In view of all the skepticism about nuclear power today, one must make an effort to recall how widely and enthusiastically atomic energy was embraced in the 1950s as the solution to the world’s problems. The “Atoms for Peace” program, touted by the federal government, promised to translate its technological triumphs in wartime into a peacetime dividend.[6] The respect and, indeed, the awe with which most Americans were taught to view atomic energy in the 1950s epitomized the pro-government ideology of the day.[7] The federal government, the military, and the scientific elite had banded together to create this new power, which was supposed to lead the country into a glorious future. What the federal government, the military, and the scientific elite had in common in the 1950s was the aura of expertise they projected. On all issues, from politics to economics to technology, the ordinary people of America were supposed to defer to experts to know what was best for them. Science has never enjoyed more prestige in American culture than it did in the 1950s; grandfatherly Albert Einstein had become the poster boy for the goodness of nuclear physics. The prestige of the federal government and the prestige of science fed off each other; the one power endorsed the other. The federal government began to support science at unprecedented levels of peacetime funding, while scientists flocked to work for the federal government, directly or indirectly, and lent their authority as experts to government programs.[8]
The notion that ordinary Americans have to rely for protection on a benevolent alliance of military and federal government officials with scientific experts is at the ideological heart of the 1950s flying saucer movies. They generally present the American people as helpless in the face of an alien invasion, overwhelmed by superior technology, which renders their ordinary weapons useless, especially their firearms. In Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, for example, average Americans appear largely in the form of mobs, fleeing alien attacks in total panic. They seem completely incapable of organizing themselves into any kind of reasonable response to the flying saucer threat. In particular, they cannot rely on any local authorities to protect them. The police, for example, do not have anything approaching the technology needed to counter the aliens. Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is typical in presenting an ordinary traffic cop on a motorcycle as a comically inept figure. He gets involved in the struggle with the space invaders, but makes a fool of himself by thinking that his revolver will be effective against them. The aliens end up sucking out his brain, puny as it is.
Another classic of the genre, William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars (1953), carries this denigration of local authorities to an extreme. This movie is unusual because it tells the story from the viewpoint of an adolescent boy, who witnesses an alien invasion unfold before his eyes. The lesson he must learn is to distrust all the local authorities he has been brought up to respect, including his own family. Invaders from Mars follows a formula later made famous by Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956): the aliens systematically take over the minds of human beings one-by-one, in this case by implants in their necks.[9] The boy watches with horror as first his father and then his mother become zombified by the aliens and turn against him. When he goes to the local police station to get help, he discovers that the police chief has been taken over by the aliens as well.[10] The boy finds that he can rely only on a social worker to protect him by making him in effect a ward of the state. As a representative of the Department of Health, this woman symbolizes the need to replace the traditional family as a source of authority with a rational bureaucracy. The woman is, after all, a medical doctor, an expert, and thus better able to care for the child’s welfare than his own mother and father. And, of course, the force that ultimately saves the boy and the whole world is the United States military, which manages to marshal the technological resources to defeat the Martians.[11]
Reliance on the U.S. military and federal as opposed to local authorities is almost as prominent in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. The film is filled with important-sounding federal government programs and agencies, many with links to the military, such as Operation Skyhook, the Air Intelligence Command, the Hemispheric Defense Command, and the Internal Security Commission. Somehow even the Bureau of Standards and the Bureau of Meteorology get involved in fighting the space invaders. As this array of bureaucracies suggests, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers offers a union between science and the military as the salvation of America. The hero is a scientist named Russell Marvin (Hugh Marlowe), who is portrayed as a superior form of human being. As he himself says of his testimony as to the existence of UFOs: “there is a qualitative difference when you’re a scientist.”[12] Although Marvin encounters a few difficulties working with the military top brass, on the whole they form an effective alliance to defeat the aliens, and he is as militaristic as the generals. The film underscores the lesson about the dangers of appeasement learned from the run-up to World War II. Marvin says bitterly of the alien invaders: “They’ll sail into Washington in broad daylight and expect us to capitulate when they land.” But not in Cold War America, according to Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. One of the generals reassures Marvin: “When an armed and threatening power lands uninvited in our capital, we don’t meet them with tea and cookies.”
The film emphasizes the need to respond to the alien threat as a nation. The aliens try to make contact directly with Dr. Marvin and wish to deal with him alone. Here a general in the Pentagon draws the line: “If we are to be confronted with a hostile and unknown power, any decision to meet with them must be made at the cabinet level.” Accordingly, the film tells us, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense must fly back to Washington before any action can be taken. Nevertheless, Marvin decides to go ahead and meet with the aliens on his own. In another moment that seems to denigrate the family in the name of the nation-state, his new bride chooses to report him to the government agent assigned to shadow him, telling Marvin: “But it’s not your job alone.” Again and again the film asks us to put our faith in Washington, D.C. Above all, it stresses the unique ability of the federal government to respond to the technological challenge posed by the alien invaders. When they succeed in shooting down U.S. satellites and destroying a missile base, the portentous voice-over narration intones: “An aroused public demanded an answer. And the federal government dedicated the strength of all its branches to the task of finding one.”
The speed with which the federal government manufactures weapons to combat the aliens is reminiscent of the Manhattan Project. With the help of other scientists, Marvin comes up with the idea for an ultrasonic gun that will knock the flying saucers out of the skies. He promises: “With enough scientific and engineering help, we could construct a working model in a very short time.” This is a Cold War movie, and so Marvin has his prototype ready for testing in the very next scene. He quickly discovers that an electromagnetic gun is more practical than an ultrasonic. As for mass producing the experimental weapon, once again the voiceover reassures us: “From all parts of the globe, under top priority, came every facility and scientific help the governments of the world could furnish.” The movie’s faith in government knows no bounds. My favorite moment comes again in the voiceover narration, when the federal government has less than two weeks to evacuate the citizens of Washington in the face of a planned alien attack: “Although the authorities and the military worked miracles, when the tenth day dawned more than 60% of the people of Washington were still in the metropolitan area.” Here Earth vs. the Flying Saucers inadvertently supplies a more accurate appraisal of Washington’s competence. It is, indeed, a miracle any time the federal government manages to accomplish as much as 40% of what it claims to be able to do.
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers hammers home the lesson that many political pundits were preaching in the 1950s. Technological developments during and after World War II, especially the dawning of the Atomic Age, supposedly had altered the human condition fundamentally, to the point where ordinary human beings were said to be no longer capable of running their own lives. Scientific and technological challenges, especially of a military kind, could only be handled at the national level, and Americans were made to feel grateful that they had a federal government devoted to their welfare and protection, with the vast resources needed to promote those ends. Of course, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is only one movie, and it offers a particularly rosy image of government omnicompetence and a particularly dim view of the capacities of ordinary citizens. Other alien invasion movies complicated the ideological picture. As we have seen, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers suggests that scientists and the military can easily form an alliance. Other 1950s sci-fi classics raise doubts about this possibility and show the two forces at odds.
For example, in The Thing From Another World (1951), directed by Christian Nyby and produced by Howard Hawks, when an alien being lands in the Arctic, the military leader and the scientist confronted by it differ over how to deal with the threat.[13] The Air Force captain wants to protect humanity by annihilating the alien being, but the scientist views the situation as a valuable opportunity to expand human knowledge and wants to preserve the Thing and learn how to communicate with it. The scientist is convinced that the Thing is a superior life form, free of the corrupting effects of human emotion (one hint that the alien may symbolize the threat of what was then regarded as “soulless” communism). But the scientist is proven wrong when the Thing tries to kill him, thus vindicating the military position. In the great Cold War debate—recall that The Thing came out during the Korean War—the movie clearly sides with the advocates of a forceful military response to communist aggression, and criticizes those who sought any kind of détente with the other side.[14]
Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, which came out in 1951 as well, also sets scientists at odds with the military, but this film champions the former over the latter. In this movie, a visitor arrives from another planet to warn earth people against their reckless and destructive militarism, especially now that they have developed atomic weapons. The military authorities, with their kneejerk hostility to anything alien and their overconfidence in their own power, bring the Earth to the brink of destruction. Only the scientists work toward a peaceful and productive rapprochement with the alien visitor. The Day the Earth Stood Still makes a strong pacifist statement, and has been viewed as subversive of American Cold War ideology.[15] Considering just these three classics of the genre makes it clear that a wide range of views on central Cold War issues was available in the 1950s flying saucer movies.
Yet despite their divergence in opinion, these three films--and many others from the era—converge on one point: Ordinary people cannot solve their problems on their own and must depend on some kind of higher authority to protect them, whether it be scientific or military or some combination of the two.[16] The Day the Earth Stood Still rejects the blatant nationalism of the other two films, but only by offering a supranational solution to human problems. The film holds up the United Nations as an ideal, and the scientists are pointedly from all different countries, constituting an international brotherhood ready to save humanity. In this respect, the film resembles the world government fantasies of H.G. Wells, who hoped that scientists might band together and use their technological superiority to force the rest of humanity into peace.[17] The Day the Earth Stood Still builds up to a long and tendentious speech by the alien Klaatu (Michael Rennie), who patronizingly informs humanity that intelligent life elsewhere in the universe has long since renounced violence by surrendering their sovereignty to all-powerful robots who automatically enforce peace on their planets. Whatever lesson The Day the Earth Stood Still teaches, it is not one of human freedom.[18] Indeed, it seems to teach the ultimate Hobbesian lesson—avoiding violent conflict is so important that we must surrender our autonomy to a Leviathan power that will keep us all in awe.[19] Wise’s film seems to go further than any other 1950s sci-fi classic in asking Americans to bow down to the dictates of a scientific elite.
The Hobbesian slant of The Day the Earth Stood Still suggests how the extraterrestrial invasion films of the 1950s can be linked to the Westerns we examined in Part One. By destroying the institutions of government, the alien invaders threaten to return Americans to the state of nature and the Hobbesian war of all against all. These films generally show civil society dissolved and collapsing into complete anarchy in the absence of effective control from the federal government. By merely raising the specter of social chaos, the flying saucer movies supplied an ideological grounding for the authority of the nation-state. For all their differences, the films as a group reflect the way the U.S. government was able to exploit the Cold War fears of the American people to increase its power over their lives.
But as we saw in Deadwood, Hobbes’s understanding of the state of nature is not the only one. Locke, for example, does not regard the state of nature as a condition of pure anarchy. He views civil society as capable of existing independent of the state, and credits ordinary people with being able to achieve complex forms of economic organization on their own. The alien invasions create what I referred to in Chapter Three as a post-political community, leaving open the possibility of Americans finding ways of dealing with disaster on their own initiative, with no help from government. As we will see, Burton shares with David Milch the idea that order is possible without law, than even and perhaps especially in the face of a catastrophic breakdown of government institutions, the resourcefulness and resilience of ordinary people will save the day.
Debunking the Elite
It is not surprising that Burton, with his anti-establishment impulses and his sympathy for the little guy, found the message of 1950s flying saucer movies unacceptable, and that when he came to parody them, he completely reversed their ideological polarities, championing ordinary Americans over the elites that view them with contempt. But before plunging into a serious political analysis of Mars Attacks!, let me acknowledge how absurd this enterprise may seem at first sight. On the face of it, Mars Attacks! is a very silly movie. Burton himself said of it: “On the depth chart, it’s like a Love Boat episode.”[20] In the face of this kind of statement from the film’s creator, it may seem pointless to probe Mars Attacks! for any kind of political message. Moreover, far from sounding like a critic of 1950s flying saucer movies, Burton has professed himself a fan: “I grew up with this kind of movie. They’re in my blood.”[21] Burton especially admired the work of Ray Harryhausen, who did the special effects for Earth vs. the Flying Saucers: “I love the old Ray Harryhausen movies, so a lot of this [Mars Attacks!] draws inspiration from those.”[22] As with all his films, Burton set out to create a distinctive look for Mars Attacks!, and for that purpose he stuck close to his 1950s models. He particularly admired Harryhausen’s mastery of stop-motion animation, and talks about that subject in his interviews more than he does about any message in Mars Attacks!. It would be easy to conclude from the interviews that, for Burton, the movie was a pure exercise in recreating the visual style of films that he enjoyed in his childhood.
Burton has, however, made some statements that hint at a polemical thrust to Mars Attacks!, particularly when he pointed to a specific historical/political context for the film: “It was during the Gulf War, when the media seemed to have taken it to another level—wars having titles and theme music—and I found it kind of disturbing. I felt like these characters were just a cathartic shakeup of that kind of thing.”[23] This comment strongly suggests that Burton saw the nationalism and militarism of the Cold War being revived by the enthusiasm for U.S. military adventures sparked by the Gulf War, and that he wanted to take some of the wind out of the government’s sails. This idea is supported by the fact that Burton’s principal creative collaborator on the film was the screenwriter Jonathan Gems, an Englishman. As a foreigner, Gems was well positioned to take a critical stance on American institutions, as he himself explained: “There’s a certain kind of joy in the way the Martians just come and smash everything up. I was a punk in London and we always used to do pranks. So here you get the Martians taking the piss out of society.”[24]
Gems identifies the anti-establishment spirit of Mars Attacks!, and further comments by Burton pick up the theme, particularly when he talks about the trading card series that inspired the film: “I remembered those cards from types of cards I had as a kid. I just liked the anarchistic spirit of them. Jonathan has sort of an anarchistic spirit himself, I think—being British and living in America and having an alien perspective of it, which I sort of have myself.”[25] For anyone wishing to give an anti-government reading of Mars Attacks!, it is encouraging to see the words anarchistic and anarchic keep coming up in Burton’s comments on the film: “I was feeling really strangely about things at the time, about America—everything just seemed really off-kilter to me, and I think that was a partial dynamic of what I liked about the material. I was just feeling more anarchic, and that was the energy I liked in it—I saw that in the Martians.”[26] With its disrespect for authority, Mars Attacks! is Burton’s contribution to a long tradition of anarchic comedy running throughout the history of American popular culture, a tradition perhaps best epitomized by the films of the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields.[27]
Burton’s talk of anarchism takes us to the thematic core of Mars Attacks! and its fundamental difference from its 1950s models. The original flying saucer movies were the very opposite of anarchistic in spirit. Their message was that, in the face of foreign threats, Americans had to get behind their government and work together as a nation to stave off alien destruction of their institutions. By contrast, in Burton’s own account, Mars Attacks! takes a perverse joy in portraying just that destruction: the annihilation of Congress, the humiliation and murder of the President, and a literal downsizing of the military when a particularly aggressive U.S. general is miniaturized by a Martian and then stomped underfoot. Evidently what attracted Burton to the Martians is precisely their lack of respect for American institutions. He speculated that the iconoclasm of the film may explain why it did better abroad than at home: “I actually felt European audiences understood it much better or seemed to get it better. They didn’t seem to have that American egotism of, ‘You can make fun of some things, but you can’t quite make fun of other things.’”[28]
Mars Attacks! is unrelenting in its mockery of American elites, including all the categories familiar from the 1950s sci-fi movies—the politicians, the military, and the scientists. But Burton adds one more element to the establishment—the media stars—and their narcissism provides a clue to the nature of all the elites in the film. Jason Stone (Michael J. Fox), a vain news anchor for GNN (a thinly disguised CNN), is mainly concerned about how to use the Martian invasion to advance his career. He is dismayed when his girlfriend Natalie Lake (Sarah Jessica Parker) scoops him on a rival network with an interview with the government’s chief scientist, Donald Kessler (Pierce Brosnan). Lake is just as vain as Stone, and even dumber. The fact that her show, Today in Fashion, gets to air the main interview about the Martians is the film’s comment on the shallowness of media coverage in America. Everything is reduced to the level of fashion and show business, even an Earth-threatening invasion from Mars. Stone and Lake are career-conscious media celebrities, and their vanity is the key to understanding all the elites in the film. Almost all the representatives of the establishment are portrayed as vain, more interested in their own celebrity and popularity than in public service or the common good.
In the media-dominated world the film portrays, the White House Press Secretary Jerry Ross (Martin Short) seems to have the status of a cabinet official. Indeed, he exercises more influence on the President than anybody else. The prominence of the Press Secretary reflects the corruption of politics by television. All the establishment figures are chiefly concerned with how they appear on television and how it will affect their status as celebrities. Kessler goes on Lake’s daytime talk show and openly flirts with her. A high-ranking general (Paul Winfield) is thrilled to be televised greeting the Martians at their first contact with the human race. And, of course, President James Dale (Jack Nicholson) is obsessed with his television appearances, carefully orchestrating his every move with Ross’s advice. He is overjoyed to be the one to announce the Martians’ arrival on television: “The people are going to love it.”[29] He instructs Ross to have a speech written for him that will be statesmanlike and historical, and yet still ingratiate him with the American people, ordering up “Abraham Lincoln meets Leave It to Beaver.” The 1950s flying saucer movies built up the Washington establishment by suggesting that the leaders are knowledgeable, public-spirited, and genuinely concerned with America’s welfare. Mars Attacks! shows them to be self-centered, devoted only to advancing their own careers, and concerned more with show than with substance.
The elites in the film generally consist of beautiful people—fashionably dressed and superficially elegant and sophisticated. The First Lady, Marsha Dale (Glenn Close) frets over redecorating the White House. Taffy Dale (Natalie Portman), the President’s daughter, comes across as a spoiled brat, but no more spoiled than the rest of the establishment. They all lead a life of privilege and self-indulgence. Jerry Ross sneaks prostitutes into the White House; the fact that he takes them to what is called the Kennedy Room suggests that higher officials have followed the same path. The establishment figures present themselves as raised above the level of ordinary Americans, but the film exposes that act to be a sham. They are hypocrites, standing up for morality in public while pursuing sexual affairs in private. One of the film’s most effective satirical devices is to have Jack Nicholson play both the President and a sleazy real estate developer named Art Land. Land becomes a double for Dale, and the obvious suggestion is that the President is as much of a con man as his gambling casino counterpart. At one point, Land insists to his wife Barbara (Annette Bening): “I’m not a crook. I’m ambitious. There’s a difference.” But the film suggests just the opposite, and the echo of Richard Nixon in Land’s statement cements the idea that ambition is indistinguishable from crookedness in the Washington establishment.
The film undercuts the idea that any form of integrity can be expected from the nation’s elites, but it goes further, suggesting that to the extent that they are at all guided by principles, they are, in fact, misguided. It does an especially good job of capturing the smug, self-satisfied political correctness of the elites in Washington. Mars Attacks! is filled with the high-sounding rhetoric of multiculturalism.[30] The most obvious difference from the 1950s flying saucer movies is that the aliens are initially welcomed with high hopes by the establishment, instead of being treated with suspicion and hostility. In the face of some doubts about the Martians’ intentions, the scientist Kessler repeatedly assures the President about the aliens: “They’re peaceful. An advanced civilization is by definition not barbaric.” Pierce Brosnan may have been chosen to play the scientist because, as an Englishman, he reminds us of Michael Rennie’s role as the alien Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Kessler makes similarly patronizing remarks about the human race in comparison to the Martians: “They’re an advanced culture—therefore peaceful and enlightened. . . . The human race, on the other hand, is an aggressively dangerous species. I suspect they have more to fear from us than we from them.” This way of speaking reverses the pro-Earth, pro-America chauvinism of the typical 1950s flying saucer movie, almost as if Klaatu had now moved into the White House as the President’s chief science advisor. Kessler is relentless in his multicultural embrace of the Martians: “We must be open to them,” “We need a welcome mat, not a row of tanks.” The President uses his announcement of the Martians’ arrival to pursue a similar multicultural agenda, telling the American people: “We have become one planet and soon will be one solar system.”
We are so used to this kind of talk in our culture that it may be difficult to believe that the film is satirizing it, but, in fact, events in the plot repeatedly undercut the apparently high-minded rhetoric of the establishment figures, who are made to look ridiculous in their blind faith in the aliens’ benevolence. Even after the Martians slaughter the greeting party sent to welcome them, Kessler sticks to his claims on their behalf: “I know this seems terrible, but let’s not be rash.” The film emphasizes the absurdity of Kessler’s position by counterpointing it with a more pragmatic response by an old-style general named Decker (Rod Steiger), who is a throwback to the trigger-happy military figures of the 1950s movies. Decker’s advice to the President concerning the Martians is concise and to the point: “Let’s nuke them now.” His disgust with Kessler’s views registers when he leaves a meeting speaking with a crescendo of contempt: “liberals, intellectuals, peacemongers, idiots!”[31] Yet even in the face of Martian violence, Decker does not prevail, as Kessler finds a way of explaining the initial disaster by falling back on his relativism: “This could be a case of cultural misunderstanding.”[32] The President seizes on this excuse for the Martians, and, when he gets a chance to speak with them, he, too, falls back on cultural relativism: “Our customs may be strange to you, but we mean no harm.” The President’s motives for pursuing a peace policy with the Martians soon become clear. He thinks that it will be popular with the public. When the Martians make the apparently peaceful gesture of asking to be permitted to address Congress, Dale readily grants the request, and proclaims: “It’s a great victory for our administration.”
But unfortunately, the Martians use the opportunity to kill everybody in Congress, thus vindicating Decker’s initial hostility to them. But even with all the evidence that the Martians cannot be trusted, Dale makes one last effort to strike a deal with them when they finally break all the way into the White House situation room. His speech is quite moving, and Nicholson delivers it with conviction:
Why be enemies? Because we’re different? Is that why? Think of the things we could do. Think how strong we would be. Earth and Mars together. There is nothing that we could not accomplish. Think about it. Think about it. Why destroy, when we can create? We can have it all or we can smash it all. Why can’t we work out our differences? Why can’t we work things out? Why can’t we just all get along?
One might think that the film endorses this eloquent speech, but, once again, the context makes Dale’s posturing laughable. The Martians respond by simply killing him.
Mars Attacks! portrays a political establishment so absorbed in its own ambitions that it loses sight of the public interest and so bewitched by its own multicultural rhetoric that it loses touch with reality and proves incapable of dealing with a genuine alien threat. For all the vaunted power of the American military, it can do nothing to halt the Martian invasion.[33] When a government fails at its most basic task of protecting its people, it loses its legitimacy. Dale’s efforts to reclaim his authority after the disasters that happen on his watch, especially the annihilation of Congress, are pitiful, epitomized by one of the signature lines of the film: “I want the people to know that they still have two out of the three branches of government working for them, and that ain’t bad.” Having failed as Commander-in-Chief, Dale has to fall back on partisan politics and the tired old claims of what government does for its citizens: “I want the people to know that the schools will still be open, okay, and I want the people to know that the garbage will still be carried out, and I want a cop on every corner, which incidentally we would already have if they had listened to me last election.” In the face of the threatened annihilation of humanity, routine campaign promises ring hollow. The satire of the Washington establishment in Mars Attacks! culminates in this image of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the political class in America.
Tocqueville and American Civil Society
Disgusted by the corruption he sees in Washington, Burton moves beyond the Beltway to the rest of America, to find a saving remnant. The geography of Mars Attacks! provides a key to understanding the film. Several scenes are set in the heartland of the United States—the farm belt—states such as Kentucky and Kansas—and Burton evokes the traditional view that virtue is to be found in rural America. But he does not operate completely within the conventional paradigm that presents rural existence as superior to urban.[34] From the beginning, Mars Attacks! alternates between two cities—Washington and Las Vegas—with Nicholson in his dual role presiding over both and providing a connection between the two. It is almost as if Burton is suggesting that the United States has two capitals, Washington as its political capital, Las Vegas as its entertainment capital (in fact, it claims to be the entertainment capital of the world). In a reversal of normal expectations, Burton prefers the entertainment capital to the political. Las Vegas is still Sin City in the film, focused on gambling, sex shows, and rampant real estate development. But in contrast to Washington, Las Vegas comes across in Mars Attacks! as a genuine city of the American people. Unlike Washington, it gives them what they want; it is, after all, there to entertain them. The Vegas of Mars Attacks! actually has a lot in common with the American heartland, and is populated by basically the same kind of people. In both places, average Americans are shown working together—especially as families—and therefore ultimately capable of defending themselves and what they value in life--especially their families. In the eyes of the cultural elite, places like Kansas and Las Vegas represent everything that is contemptible about America, epitomized by the lowbrow entertainment beloved by country bumpkins and rubes.[35] But in Burton’s view, the cultural elite are out of touch with genuine human values; it is the ordinary people in the cultural backwaters of the county who understand what really matters in life, and are willing to stand up for it. That is why Mars Attacks! champions local areas in the United States against the national government.
In this respect, Mars Attacks! recurs to the original conception of the United States propounded by the Founding Fathers and to the genuine spirit of federalism. The Constitution was designed precisely so that the federal government would not be all-powerful and intrude in every aspect of life in America. The document limits the powers of the federal government and reserves many governmental functions to the individual states and even smaller political units. A long standing principle of American government is that power is better exercised at local levels, where the authorities are more in touch with and more responsive to the needs and demands of the people. Perhaps the most acute analyst of the American regime, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, argued in his Democracy in America that the diffusion of power and authority in the United Sates is a key to its success. If democracy is in its essence self-government, Tocqueville was struck by the capacity of ordinary Americans to govern themselves, especially their penchant for forming associations to deal with their problems on their own, with no guidance from Washington, DC.[36] Tocqueville celebrated the vibrancy of civil society that he saw in America, the fact that many problems were dealt with outside the formal political system by people banding together voluntarily:
Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. . . . Thus the most democratic country on earth is found to be, above all, the one where men in our day have most perfected the art of pursuing the object of their common desires in common.[37]
It is striking how many of the activities that Tocqueville regarded as the province of private associations in the United States are now viewed as the legitimate (and perhaps even the inevitable) responsibility of the federal government (“hospitals, prisons, schools”). Tocqueville recognized that it is a great temptation in a democracy to turn over all activities beyond the capacity of individual human beings to government authorities. But he regarded that course as leading to the loss of freedom in the United States and the emergence of tyranny:
A government could take the place of some of the greatest American associations, and within the Union several particular states already have attempted it. But what political power would ever be in a state to suffice for the innumerable multitude of small undertakings that American citizens execute every day with the aid of an association?
It is easy to foresee that the time is approaching when a man by himself alone will be less and less in a state to produce the things that are the most common and the most necessary to his life. The task of the social power will therefore constantly increase, and its very efforts will make it vaster each day. The more it puts itself in place of associations, the more particular persons, losing the idea of associating with each other, will need it to their aid. . . . Will the public administration in the end direct all the industries for which an isolated citizen cannot suffice? . . . will the head of the government have to leave the helm of state to come hold the plow?[38]
I do not know whether Tocqueville would have enjoyed 1950s flying saucer movies, but it is safe to say that he would have been troubled by their implicit claim that the complexities of the Atomic Age mean that ordinary Americans are now incapable of managing their own lives, and must rely instead on the wisdom of government experts.[39] Prophetic in so many respects, Tocqueville was at his most acute in foreseeing the erosion of freedom as a result of the increasing reliance on government to solve problems:
The morality and intelligence of a democratic people would risk no fewer dangers than its business and its industry if the government came to take the place of associations everywhere. . . .
A government can no more suffice on its own to maintain and renew the civilization of sentiments and ideas in a great people than to conduct all its industrial undertakings. As soon as it tries to leave the political sphere to project itself on this new track, it will exercise an insupportable tyranny even without wishing to; for a government knows only how to dictate precise rules; it imposes the sentiments and the ideas that it favors, and it is always hard to distinguish its counsels from its orders.[40]
Here Tocqueville outlines what Friedrich Hayek was later to call the road to serfdom.[41] Anticipating Hayek, he argues that the national government, precisely by virtue of its remoteness from the people and their specific circumstances, lacks the local knowledge necessary to deal with their problems, knowledge that is—almost by definition—more likely to be available to local authorities or the people themselves. Moreover, the larger the sphere of a government’s authority, the more general are the rules by which it operates, leading it to impose “one size fits all” solutions on problems, when the solutions really need to be tailored to the local circumstances. Most importantly, Tocqueville worries what the effect of relying on the national government will be on the character of the American people. He fears that they will lose their spirit of self-reliance, precisely what distinguishes them among the peoples of the world. Tocqueville’s analysis of the healthy tendency of Americans to form associations lays the foundation for the concluding chapters of Democracy in America (Vol. Two, Part Four, chapters 6-8). There he expresses his concern about the possibility of a soft despotism emerging in the United States, if the American people, in the hope of making their existence easier and happier, allow their national government to keep expanding its powers and its ability to regulate every aspect of their lives.[42]
Trusting Trailer Trash
I do not know if Burton is at all familiar with Tocqueville’s writings—I tend to doubt it—but Mars Attacks! takes a Tocquevillian view of democracy in America, grounding it in the self-reliance of the American people, not the omnicompetence of their government. To be sure, the film cannot be accused of giving an overly optimistic portrait of the common people of America. In the Kansas scenes, it focuses on an extended and somewhat dysfunctional family, who can only be described as trailer trash—indeed, they live in a trailer. They are an urban liberal’s worst nightmare. “They cling to their guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiments,” to use the words of a famous urban liberal.[43] Although they live in Kansas, they seem more like southern rednecks, a point emphasized by having Joe Don Baker, often cast as a Good Old Boy, play the patriarch of the clan, Mr. Norris. His favorite son has the southern-sounding name of Billy-Glen (Jack Black), and he volunteers for anti-Martian duty at his army base. When he finally goes into battle against them, he is true to the redneck tradition, shouting at them: “Die, you alien shitheads.” As this remark suggests, political correctness is not a hallmark of the Norris clan. They are prejudiced, with not a hint of multicultural openness to the aliens. Seeing them on television, Norris says: “Martians—funny-lookin’ little critters, ain’t they?” Unlike the establishment figures in the film, Norris is hostile to the aliens from the beginning: “Any of them Martians come around here, I’m going to kick their butts.” The Norris clan is strongly committed to protecting their home, and proudly lock and load their many guns to do so. They know where to take a stand against the Martians: “I tell you one thing—they ain’t getting the TV.” As a tight-knit family, they close ranks against the rest of the world. Although they admire the military, they have no respect for the Washington elite. When the grandmother (Sylvia Sidney) sees what the Martians do to her representatives in the Capitol building, her only response is to say: “They blew up Congress” and laugh.
In sum, in Mars Attacks! the Washington establishment is tolerant, open-minded, cosmopolitan, and devoted to saving the world; the Norris clan is bigoted, close-minded, parochial, and devoted to saving their own family and their TV. And yet the movie seems to take their side. For one thing, they are right about the Martians, and willing to take action against them. The movie seems to suggest that there is something healthy about the ordinary human prejudice in favor of one’s own. If you care about something deeply, you will know how to defend it. In Mars Attacks! the common men and women are concerned with protecting, not their egos and their public images, but something far more basic and real, their families, and that seems to bring out the best in people. In one of the subplots, an African-American ex-boxer in Las Vegas named Byron Williams (Jim Brown) is struggling to be reunited in Washington with his divorced wife (Pam Grier) and their children. At the film’s climax, he becomes a hero by fighting the Martians with his bare fists, in the hopes of getting back to his family. Most importantly, it is the attempt by Richie Norris (Lukas Haas) to save his grandmother from the Martians that leads to the discovery that Slim Whitman’s yodeling will splatter their brains. The President’s effort to forge a cosmic alliance with the Martians accomplishes nothing; it is only Richie’s attempt to rescue someone in his immediate family that ends up saving the world.
Mars Attacks! thus rejects the conventional opinion that the ordinary people of America would be helpless in the face of a disaster or a crisis like a Martian invasion, unable to save themselves without the vast resources of the federal government working on their behalf. In fact, the film shows, the American people are remarkably resourceful, and especially good at improvising.[44] The fact that someone may be uneducated or unsophisticated does not mean that he or she is stupid, and, in real-life situations, common sense can often be more useful than expertise. The Washington establishment’s response to the invasion is hampered by its ingrained assumptions, especially its multicultural ideology, and its overreliance on technology, such as a computer to translate Martian. The ordinary Americans in the film are able to think outside the box, perhaps because they are outside the establishment. No expert would ever think of using yodeling to destroy the Martians—where is the scientific proof that it works?—but Richie is quick to recognize the potential of his unconventional weapon. The motif of an unexpected means of destroying the Martians goes all the way back to the first story of interplanetary conflict, H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), where the Martians are killed off by nothing more complicated than the common cold.[45] With no immunity to terrestrial germs, they eventually fall victim to ordinary diseases. Burton no doubt thought of Slim Whitman’s music as almost as common—and all-pervasive in the air—as the cold virus, and thus another case of something very ordinary preventing the Martians from conquering the Earth.
The Slim Whitman surprise ending adds another twist to Burton’s championing of the common people of American against the elites who look down upon them. The members of the Washington establishment we see in the film would not be caught dead listening to a Slim Whitman album. Thus they would never discover that it could defeat the Martians. The film shows that the elite keep themselves entirely separate from the common people they claim to champion. With all the complicated intercutting of plots in Mars Attacks!, the elites and the common people almost never meet each other and interact. The White House scenes show that when tourists show up, they are kept carefully cordoned off from what really happens in the building (the joke in the film is that the White House inhabitants are not allowed to interfere with the tours). The film pointedly portrays the lack of interaction between the elites and the common people when a scene between the African-American mother and her children ends, and Jerry Ross pulls up in the neighborhood in a limousine. He is there only to pick up a prostitute, and, indeed, the only ordinary person in the film admitted to the inner precincts of the White House is a prostitute (Lisa Marie Smith) brought by Ross (she actually is an alien disguised as a prostitute). In Mars Attacks!, the elites keep their distance from the common people, except when they want to exploit them.[46]
Thus, the common people in Mars Attacks! are forced to rely on their own resources. The trailer trash are appropriately saved by their trailer trash culture, and not just their beloved Slim Whitman albums. Much of the effective resistance to the Martians comes from members of the underclass, precisely in their stereotypical underclass roles. Byron Williams is modeled on Mohammad Ali—he is African American and a Muslim, and has fought Sonny Liston. He is the stereotypical down-and-out ex-boxer, reduced to working as a greeter in a Las Vegas casino. The cultural elite in America looks down on boxing as a vulgar sport, not to be mentioned in the same breath as politically correct sports in America like tennis and soccer (who ever heard of a “boxing mom”?). But the boxer Williams is able to use his fists to keep the Martians in check. Meanwhile, his adolescent sons back in Washington are presented as stereotypical streetwise youth. Coming from a broken home, they play hooky from school and use the time to play video games like Space Invaders. The establishment would frown upon their devoting themselves to video games instead of books, but it turns out that they are thereby preparing themselves for the real-life challenges they will face. Their truancy pays off when they come up against the Martians during a school field trip to the White House. Only the boys are able to pick up the Martians’ ray guns and know how to use them to kill the invaders—thanks to their video game experience.
Boxing, video games, country and western music—all these mainstays of American pop culture prove to be the mainstays of the defense against the Martians. In perhaps the wackiest development of the plot, the pop singer Tom Jones, playing himself, turns up in Las Vegas and joins the coalition against the aliens. Jones’s performance in the film may be the most remarkable. One might describe it as self-parody, but, in fact, he really is just playing himself, and he is, of course, totally at home in Las Vegas. With the smoothness of a veteran Vegas performer, he takes everything in his stride, reacting as if nothing unusual is happening, even when the world is literally crashing down around him. Perhaps it helps that his signature tune is called “It’s Not Unusual” (which he sings twice in the film).[47] Jones’s unflappability symbolizes the ability of ordinary people to stay calm in a crisis. Whatever happens in America, the show must go on, especially in Las Vegas. In a telling moment that recalls hundreds of B-movies, the boxer asks Jones: “You know how to fly a plane?” and he, of course, replies without missing a beat: “Sure. You got one?” There in a nutshell is the resourcefulness of the common man (if Jones is not exactly the common man, he is the quintessential common man’s entertainer). The way the Las Vegas forces band together to fight the Martians becomes emblematic of the common men and women of America associating in their own defense. They know when a threat is real and they respond to it as real people. It is perhaps the deepest irony of Mars Attacks! that it presents the show business world of Las Vegas as more genuine than the political world of Washington, D.C.
Let me stress again that Mars Attacks! does not give a flattering portrait of the American people, even though it takes their side against the Washington establishment. Burton’s movie makes fun of everybody. It may show that the hawks within the military are better judges of the Martians than the doves are, but it still caricatures their hawkishness and makes General Decker look ridiculous. Similarly, Burton does not romanticize the ordinary people in Mars Attacks!. He does not, for example, present them as hidden geniuses or especially heroic in character. In fact, he portrays them with all their foibles because the point is to show them precisely in their ordinariness. The movie is not trying to find a new elite within the American people, but merely to suggest that in their ordinariness, they are able to muddle through, even in extraordinary circumstances. “Muddle through” is the operative term here. The triumph of the ordinary Americans over the Martians is obviously accidental. The Washington establishment prides itself on its superior wisdom and, above all, on its ability to plan for every contingency. Time and again, the elite in effect claims to the American people: “We have a plan, and you don’t. You can rely on us.” Mars Attacks! reminds us that government plans are likely to fall apart in the face of genuine crises and disasters. The full range of contingencies is exactly what no government can ever anticipate and plan for in advance. When confronted by the inevitable chanciness of the world, it is better to rely on improvisation, and that is what ordinary Americans, with their Yankee ingenuity, have to offer.
Mars Attacks! is deeply Tocquevillian in the way that it insists that America is much more than its governing elites, that the human resources of the country are spread widely—and unpredictably—throughout its population and territory—not concentrated in Washington. The film may appear to be unrelentingly cynical and iconoclastic, but, in fact, it expresses a democratic faith in the basic decency and capability of the American people.[48] Moreover, the film goes out of its way to suggest the multiethnic and multiracial character of the American people. The Washington elite may preach multiculturalism in the abstract from their remote, privileged position, but the common people actually live out multiculturalism in their lives. To be sure, the Norris clan appears to be bigoted (although mainly against Martians). But the film opens with a Filipino family living on a farm in the middle of Kentucky, who evidently get along with their mainstream American neighbors, thus suggesting that the United States has generally welcomed one kind of aliens in its midst. A little later in the film, in an image of racial and religious harmony, the African American Byron Williams, who is a Muslim, is being photographed with a group of white nuns. The little band that gathers toward the end of the film to fight the Martians in Las Vegas is almost as multiethnic as a platoon in a Hollywood World War II movie, including Williams, the very ethnic Danny DeVito character, and, of course, the Welshman Tom Jones.[49] Apparently, with no guidance from the Washington elite, different races and ethnic groups in America can get along with each other, especially when they have an enemy in common.[50]
The different races and ethnic groups in the film come together in Las Vegas, which is presented as a kind of melting pot, bringing exotic cultures into the American mainstream, including the giant pyramid of the Luxor hotel and casino in which Williams works, dressed up “like King Tut” in the words of the DeVito character.[51] By the end of the film, with all the carnage, the only group left to play the U.S. national anthem at a Washington ceremony is a Mariachi band, giving a peculiar ethnic twist to the occasion. American popular culture has always been multicultural in nature, and often quicker than elite culture when it comes to assimilating foreign influences.[52] The country-and-western star Slim Whitman was not alone in incorporating Swiss yodeling into his singing style. The multiculturalism of song, dance, and other folk arts is one reason why the film suggests that we cannot appreciate the vitality of the American people if we leave their popular culture out of the picture. Las Vegas, with its uncanny ability to assimilate and amalgamate foreign cultural elements, is as important to a full understanding of what constitutes America as Washington is. Elitism often takes a cultural form, and looks down on the entertainment of the common people as vulgar. By contrast, Mars Attacks! is a kind of backhanded compliment to one genre of pop culture, and, as we have seen, it presents pop culture as one of the great resources of the American people.
In sum, Burton suggests that on some fundamental level, America is its pop culture. If you want to see what Americans truly are, look at what they enjoy in common. The vulgarity of Las Vegas and other forms of popular entertainment may alienate cultural elites, but it does give Americans something to share as a people. Mars Attacks! shows Americans truly at home in their popular culture, feeling comfortable with their SlimWhitman albums, their video games, and their boxing memories. The fact that Americans live on the level of their popular entertainment means that different racial and ethnic groups actually share a culture. Boxing unites Catholic nuns with African American Muslims. Burton sees the positive side of pop culture, and does not share the sheer contempt that cultural elites express for it. To be sure, he maintains a critical distance from popular forms of entertainment. By its very nature, Mars Attacks! makes fun of cheesy flying saucer movies, and, within the movie, Burton emphasizes the tackiness of American pop culture, with his focus on Slim Whitman and Las Vegas lounge acts. Burton himself is not a B-movie director. And yet he sees nothing wrong with B-movies, and has never gotten over his childhood love of creature features. His remarkable mythic imagination as a filmmaker has fed on the world of horror movies, sword-and-sandal epics, and other popular genres of the 1950s and 60s. His roots lie deep in American pop culture, and Mars Attacks! is his tribute to it. It is, of course, an equivocal tribute, which acknowledges all the limitations of popular forms of entertainment, but, in the end, one gets the feeling that Burton thinks that Americans should put their faith in their pop stars rather than in their elected officials. I understand why critics have generally criticized Mars Attacks!, but I hope that my analysis might lead some to reconsider their opinion of the film. It has a manic energy, and in its own wacky way, it is an impressive achievement. It provides a good reminder that film genres embody ideologies, and working within a genre can be a way of subverting it and offering an alternate ideology. The look of Mars Attacks! may have its origins in nothing more than bubble gum cards, but, as I have tried to show, the thinking behind the film ultimately goes back to Tocqueville, the original spirit of American federalism, and a serious vision of the self-organizing power of the American people.
Epilogue: The Auteur from Burbank
Mars Attacks! is seldom discussed at length in general assessments of Burton, but, with its self-consciousness about genre, it can help us understand what distinguishes him as a filmmaker. His career is paradoxical. He is the auteur who is oddly at home in Hollywood. He is the very definition of a maverick director, with a unique vision of the world, a quirky and even bizarre visual style that is instantly recognizable as his and his alone. One can truly speak of a Tim Burton film in the way that one can speak of an Alfred Hitchcock film. He has put his stamp—and even his name—on films that he did not direct, such as Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Yet despite the idiosyncratic and intensely personal character of his films, Burton has often succeeded in connecting with mainstream movie audiences. Most of his films have done well at the box office, and he has several blockbuster hits to his credit, from Batman to Alice in Wonderland (2010), which made over $1 billion worldwide. As Kristine Mckenna writes in the preface to her Playboy interview with Burton: “It’s odd that director Tim Burton keeps finding himself at the helm of big-budget studio blockbusters, because he’s really not the type. Trained as a fine artist and described as a shy, withdrawn loner, he has indie filmmaker written all over him.”[53] Somehow Burton has reconciled the commercial demands of Hollywood with his integrity as an artist. Perhaps his secret lies in the fact that, while he is often critical of Hollywood, he does not have a blanket contempt for it. Recognizing the economic realities of the entertainment business, he has generally been willing to work with Hollywood, rather than simply struggling against it, as many would-be auteurs have done.
Indeed, as much as any other director, Burton has managed to work within the commercial system and still make the movies he wanted to make. He says so in an interview: “Movies obviously cost a lot, even if you’re doing a low-budget movie, and I try to keep that in mind all the time and not be somebody who’s thinking, ‘I’m an artiste! Leave me alone!’ I try to be responsible, because that’s a lot of money they’re giving me. But at the same time, I don’t have real trouble having to do something I didn’t want to do.”[54] Burton has a love-hate relationship with the Hollywood film industry. He grew up in the Los Angeles area (specifically in Burbank), totally absorbed as a child in the world of film. He was enchanted by the products of Hollywood, but he soon became disenchanted with how they are made, once he began to work in the film business, chiefly in the Disney studio in his early days. He was frustrated by all the attempts to impose conformity on creative artists. Fortunately, Burton had so much talent and, with luck, so much early success, that he has generally been able to get financial backing for his projects, even when they must have struck studio executives as odd, if not insane.
Burton has had to learn how to live within the financial constraints of Hollywood, but he has always dwelled within its imaginative borders, that is, the genres that divide up the Hollywood landscape. He thus presents the paradox of a Hollywood outsider who very much works within Hollywood traditions. As Mars Attacks! exemplifies, his films are steeped in Hollywood history—and mainstream commercial Hollywood, not the twilight zone of art films. Ever since Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, his movies have been filled with references to and echoes of earlier movies.[55] Sometimes his cinematic allusions can be regarded as homage to his predecessors; sometimes he seems to be making fun of Hollywood clichés. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. Burton has a strong command of Hollywood genres, and works within them, if only to subvert them. That is one reason why he is able to connect with mainstream audiences, despite the idiosyncrasy of his creative vision. He does not make conventional movies, but he knows all about movie conventions, and how to use them to reach an audience.
Despite his occasional setbacks and frustrations, Burton’s career as a filmmaker is a testimony to the wealth of opportunities offered by American pop culture to creative talent, if it can prove itself. He has demonstrated time and again that creativity does not demand freedom from all constraints whatsoever, whether financial or artistic. He recognizes that movie making does not occur in a vacuum. Although he clearly is a case of what is called individual genius, and evidently a loner by temperament, he has accepted the nature of film as a collaborative medium. He has developed productive working relationships with screenwriters (such as Jonathan Gems), individual actors (such as Johnny Depp), and with other contributors to the filmmaking process (such as the composer Danny Elfman). In his interviews, he has even acknowledged the contribution that his financial backers have made to his creativity, and is actually grateful for all the money that has been placed at his disposal over the years, instead of simply complaining, like many directors, that it should have been more—and with no strings attached. By contrast, Burton feels that he needs limitations to bring out his creativity: “it’s almost like humans need boundaries. It needs to be in a framework, it needs to be held in check with other elements. . . . For me, there’s no such thing as unlimited resources in movies—you need boundaries.”[56] Unlike many creative artists, Burton acknowledges that checks on his imagination may be almost as important as his freedom to express it. He recognizes that other people may have something to contribute to perfecting his films. As he says in an interview about Batman Returns: “It’s good for me to be questioned about certain things; I think it’s healthy for me not just to spin off into the cosmos.”[57]
Burton often gives his actors considerable latitude to develop their roles and, unlike some directors, he does not speak of them with contempt as his enemies: “With Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice I was working with actors like Paul Reubens, Michael Keaton, and Catherine O’Hara. They’re so good at improvisation that most of those movies wound up being improvised. I get excited by actors who can surprise you.”[58] Contrary to the common understanding of the auteur, Burton is not a control freak as a director. Although he makes use of storyboards, he does not try to create a whole film in his head before he starts shooting, and then expect the actors and other contributors to follow his instructions slavishly to realize his vision exactly as he foresaw it.[59] Instead, he views filmmaking as a process, to which people other than the director contribute meaningfully, and which involves a large element of contingency. As he says, he likes to be surprised, and the results show in the often surprising character of his films, the quirkiness that endears him with audiences and critics alike. In harmony with the anti-establishment, anti-government attitude of Mars Attacks!, Burton does not like playing the role of an autocrat as a director. He does not insist on having a movie perfectly planned out in advance, but seeks instead the spontaneity of creation that comes only from improvisation and feedback on the set. His embrace of the often chaotic working conditions in the film business accords with the anarchic political spirit of Mars Attacks!. Whether in life or in art, Burton likes to see things shaken up.
In sum, despite going his own way in his films, Burton does not set himself up in simple opposition to the Hollywood community. He freely acknowledges his debts to earlier filmmakers, and not the usual pantheon of famous auteurs like Orson Welles, but the run-of-the-mill Hollywood directors who made the movies that he grew up with and that inspired him. In Ed Wood, he paid tribute to one of those directors, a man who made one artistic and commercial flop after another. Yet on some level, Burton identifies with Wood.[60] Burton includes a scene that improbably pairs Wood with Welles, reminding us that the two were, after all, in the same business, and that, if the auteur principle produced the greatest film of all time (Citizen Kane, 1941), it also produced the worst (Plan 9 from Outer Space, 1959).[61] Burton may be a maverick director, but he is at the same time acutely aware of his place in Hollywood history and in the Hollywood community. As in many of his movies, in Mars Attacks! he is self-consciously working within a Hollywood genre, but that becomes, not a brake on his creativity, but a spur to it. To be sure, many directors have become captive of the genres that the commercial demands of Hollywood have imposed on them, locking them into formulaic plots and dialogue. But that does not mean that we should speak, as cultural pessimists, of “the prison house of genre.” For someone with genuine talent like Burton, a given genre becomes a jumping off point, a chance to show, for example, that he can do something with the flying saucer movie that no one ever imagined before. As in all the arts, creative freedom in Hollywood is not absolute, but a matter of working within artistic traditions and reshaping them to one’s own vision. Burton’s love-hate relationship with the flying saucer genre in Mars Attacks! tells us something about creativity in popular culture. An artist can work within the constraints and traditions of popular culture, and still maintain a critical perspective on its conventions and ideologies. What prevented Burton from making just another routine flying saucer movie was his own creativity. Genuine artists are not overwhelmed by their sources; they triumph over prior works by reimagining them.
In the real world of filmmaking, Tim Burton’s career has not conformed to the common image of the director as auteur. He has not, like some divine demiurge, brought his films into existence in a single act of perfect advance planning, by himself, with no reference to prior models. Instead, he has worked with other creative talent, in a process that evolved over time and involved revision, experimentation, improvisation, and sheer scrambling to deal with the inevitable contingencies and accidents of film production. Even the best of his creations have not sprung Athena-like from his head, but have their roots deeply embedded in Hollywood tradition. As he himself insists, the man who made Mars Attacks! is not an artiste, but very much a product of American popular culture and a tribute to its vitality. It is no accident, then, that Burton chose to celebrate that vitality in Mars Attacks!
A Note on Independence Day
One of the reasons why Mars Attacks! failed to do as well as expected at the box office is that it had the bad luck to be released in the wake of the big summer blockbuster of 1996, Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day. As another “space invaders” movie, it is remarkably similar in plot and several motifs to Mars Attacks!, and therefore stole its thunder with movie audiences. Burton had no idea that the other movie was being made and was shocked to see it: “I was surprised how close it was, but then it’s a pretty basic genre I guess.”[62] Despite some humorous moments, Independence Day takes very seriously the subjects that Mars Attacks! makes fun of. At the time, it was hard not to think that Burton had set out to parody Emmerich’s work, as he himself admitted: “it almost seemed like we had done some kind of Mad magazine version of Independence Day.”[63] The fact that the Emmerich movie had struck a responsive chord in the American people, stirring patriotic feelings, made Mars Attacks! seem all the more blasphemous when it came out. Indeed, it came across as an assault on the hallowed American institutions Independence Day had just celebrated.
Like Mars Attacks!, Independence Day alternates between scenes of political, military, and scientific elites from Washington, D.C., and scenes of ordinary people in America responding to the crisis of an alien invasion. It similarly features trailer trash, offering at one moment a veritable flotilla of mobile homes converging on a remote military base. Like Mars Attacks!, Independence Day has several important African-American characters; Will Smith plays one of the heroes, Captain Steven Hiller. The 1950s flying saucer films, like many movies of the day, were predominantly, if not exclusively, white in their casts. Both Mars Attacks! and Independence Day show that racial and ethnic minorities have a contribution to make to American life. In Emmerich’s film, Judd Hirsch and Jeff Goldblum play identifiably Jewish characters, a father and son pair named Julius and David Levinson, who are central to the plot.
In Independence Day, just as in Mars Attacks!, the underclass plays an important role in responding to the invasion. For example, a stripper named Jasmine Dubrow (Vivica Fox) rescues the First Lady (Mary McDonnell) from a downed helicopter. The first death blow to an alien spaceship is delivered by a character named Russell Casse, played by Randy Quaid at his grungiest. Casse heads the main trailer trash family in the film, and earns his living in the unglamorous job of cropduster pilot. Goldblum plays a brilliant scientist, who has been reduced to working as a satellite technician for a cable TV company, whose subscribers are mainly concerned about how the space invaders have interfered with their reception of The X-Files. And yet it is David Levinson—not the establishment scientists with their gleaming laboratories and their white coats—who comes up with the means to defeat the aliens. In a clever updating of Wells, Levinson uses a computer virus, rather than a cold virus, to destroy the invaders.
In short, Independence Day shares with Mars Attacks! the idea that people outside the elites in America are capable of dealing with a crisis, rising to the occasion to contribute to the struggle against alien powers. The difference between the two films is that, in Independence Day, the common people work in concert with the Washington elites, not, as in Mars Attacks!, on their own. As we have seen, in Mars Attacks! the elites are carefully cordoned off from the common people, but in Independence Day the lives of the two groups keep intersecting, to the benefit of both. Julius Levinson marvels at the ease with which he and his son gain access to the White House in the middle of a world crisis. Moreover, the Emmerich film does not debunk the Washington elites. Although it does portray a couple of rotten apples in the federal barrel, it generally portrays the political and military leaders as decent people and dedicated public servants. President Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman) is an especially heroic character, who eventually climbs into a fighter plane to fly sorties against the alien spaceship. Russell Casse may come across as a misfit and a loner, ridiculed by his peers for his claim that he was once abducted by aliens, but he used to be an air force fighter pilot in the Viet Nam War, and is dependent on his prior military training to save the day. In Independence Day, the military is the great American equalizer. It ultimately brings together the President and the cropduster in the same fighter squadron.
Rather than suggesting, as Mars Attacks! does, an opposition between the American people and the elites who govern them, Independence Day does everything it can to portray a harmony between the Washington establishment and common men and women. In that respect, it is a throwback to the patriotic spirit of the 1950s flying saucer movies, with the one revision that it shows more respect for common people, especially for minorities. The flattering image that Independence Day creates of the unity of the American nation helps explain its great success with mainstream movie audiences. Given the film’s celebration of government authorities, Burton may not have been unhappy that he had inadvertently produced a Mad magazine version of it in Mars Attacks!. In any case, the almost simultaneous appearance of Independence Day and Mars Attacks! in 1996 shows that, decades after its movie debut, the flying saucer genre remained open to a wide range of ideological possibilities.[64]
Notes
My epigraph is taken from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_F._Buckly,_Jr. (consulted June 13, 2011). This quotation appears in different wording in different places: I quote the one offered as the original on this web site; to me, this sounds more like William F. Buckley, Jr. than the other versions.
[1] Kenneth Turan, “Mars Attacks! Tim Burton’s Plan 9,” Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1996, as cited in the Wikipedia article on the film, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Attacks! (consulted on June 16, 2011).
[2] One can view the complete set of the 55 original Mars Attacks! trading cards, as produced by Topps, at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31558613@N00/sets/72157625601126001/ (consulted on June 16, 2011).
[3] Bill Warren, “Tim Burton Attacks!”, in Tim Burton: Interviews, ed. Kristian Fraga (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 111.
[4] For a concise overview of sci-fi films and their relation to the Cold War, see Richard A. Schwartz, Cold War Culture: Media and the Arts, 1945-1990 (New York: Checkmark, 1998), 114-15, 276-77. For a detailed analysis of 1950s invasion movies, see Marc Jancovich, Rational fears: American horror in the 1950s (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 1996), 10-79. See also Joyce A. Evans, Celluloid Mushroom Clouds: Hollywood and the Atomic Bomb (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), especially 117-26 and M. Keith Booker, Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), especially 105-37.
[5] I discuss the portrayal of the FBI in American popular culture during the Cold War in my book Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 115-17. Elsewhere in the book, I discuss other examples of the impact of the Cold War on American pop culture, specifically in the cases of Gilligan’s Island (1964-67) and the original Star Trek television series (1966-69), as well as the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991).
[6] The program was inaugurated by President Dwight Eisenhower in his speech “Atoms for Peace” given to the United Nations General Assembly on December 8, 1953.
[7] As a pupil in the New York City public school system in the 1950s, I remember being taught—incessantly—that the two greatest achievements in the history of humanity were atomic energy and the United Nations (both credited to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, incidentally). Like most baby boomers, I can still recall being shown the 1957 Disney film Our Friend the Atom in school.
[8] For the relationship between science and the federal government throughout American history, see James T. Bennett’s highly polemical and provocative book, The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and Panic From Sputniks, Martians, and Marauding Meteors (New York: Springer, 2010); for the Cold War era in particular, see Chapter 3, especially 45-46, 49, 53, 59, and 76-77.
[9] This motif appears at least as early as Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X (1951). The idea of aliens taking over the minds of humans reflects Cold War anxieties about the brainwashing of U.S. soldiers captured during the Korean Conflict. See David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 251 and Booker, Mushroom Clouds, 121.
[10] Invaders from Mars may be suggesting that the way the space invaders subvert the family and the police is precisely what is sinister about them. The film may be another allegory of a takeover of American institutions by an alien force that resembles communism. Still, the negative light in which it casts the family and local institutions was noted at the time by no less an authority than the Parent-Teacher Association, as Skal reports: “PTA representatives were not pleased about Invaders from Mars. Wrote one: ‘Here, in science fiction form, is an orgy of hate and fear and futility, with no hope of escape, no constructive element whatsoever. The child with whom one is asked to identify is bereft of any security from father and mother, from constituted authorities, and the adults burst into meaningless violence’” (Skal, Monster Show, 251; he cites “Transcript of 1953 PTA reports on Invaders from Mars, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center”). This description of the film may sound laughably alarmist to us today, but it shows that flying saucer movies were taken seriously and read for their political meaning even when they were being released in the 1950s.
[11] On this point, see Schwartz, Cold War Culture, 151.
[12] I have transcribed all quotations from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers from the Columbia Pictures DVD (2002).
[13] There is some debate over who really directed the movie: “Officially Howard Hawks was only the producer of The Thing, but for years it has been rumored that he also directed large portions of it” (Chris Steinbrunner and Burt Goldblatt, Cinema of the Fantastic [New York: Galahad, 1972], 224). Most commentators treat The Thing as a classic Howard Hawks movie, a typical Hawks tale of male comrades facing danger together on a frontier, a transposition of a Western into a sci-fi movie.
[14] See Schwartz, Cold War Culture, 331-32 and Booker, Mushroom Clouds, 119-20. Treating the film in the context of Hawks’s career, Steinbrunner and Goldblatt write: “Often, in the routine science fiction films of this period and later, the world is saved by, say, the Marines, but in no other film is the heroism, the professionalism, and the effectiveness of ‘our side’ so earnestly and dramatically portrayed” (Cinema, 224). For a different interpretation of The Thing, see Jancovich, Rational fears, 34-41.
[15] Schwartz, Cold War Culture, 75 and Booker, Mushroom Clouds, 133-34. Another pacifist film from this era is Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space (1953), based on a story by Ray Bradbury. The “invading” aliens in this film turn out to have merely crashed on Earth, and just need time to repair their spaceship so that they can go about their cosmic business. Only an amateur astronomer (Richard Carlson) is willing to help them against a mob of fearful and angry townspeople. Once again, the scientist is the lone voice of reason in a paranoid world; this seems to be the film’s negative judgment on America’s Cold War hostility to foreigners. This film is unusual—the national government (in the form of the army) refuses to get involved at all in the investigation of the crash of the UFO. Thus the movie focuses on the conflict between the scientist and a local sheriff. This is, then, another film that celebrates a scientific elite at the expense of local authorities. Only the disinterested scientific expert can rise above local prejudices. On this point, see Jancovich, Rational fears, 171-76.
[16] This plot formula was so widespread at the time that it even appears in a Japanese flying saucer movie, Toho Studio’s The Mysterians (1957). In this film, the common people of Japan can be saved from the devastation wrought by alien invaders only by prompt action from their government, their military, and their scientists. As in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, the Japanese authorities develop technological countermeasures against the Mysterians with remarkable speed. But in a twist that shows that science may be evil as well as good, one of the Japanese scientists turns traitor to his species and collaborates with the Mysterians because of their superiority in science. As the only people ever to have been the targets of nuclear weapons, the Japanese had a special reason in the 1950s to be skeptical about the power of science, and many of their sci-fi movies, from Godzilla (1954) on, reflect their concerns about nuclear weapons. If The Mysterians is a political allegory, it seems to express Japanese unease about U.S. military forces occupying their soil after World War II. Having landed near Mt. Fuji, the Mysterians make two demands: 1)to be given a small plot of land for their base on Earth 2)to be permitted to intermarry with Japanese women of their choosing. The contemporary relevance of these plot details seems unmistakable. On this point, see Booker, Mushroom Clouds, 173, note 15 and Jerome F. Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema: The apocalyptic imagination on film (New York: Routledge, 2002), 280-81.
[17] This motif is evident in Wells at least as early as his “atomic bomb” novel The World Set Free (1914), and is a principal theme of his later book, The Shape of Things to Come (1933), as well as of the movie he made from it with William Cameron Menzies, Things to Come (1935).
[18] Jancovich provides an insightful analysis of The Day the Earth Stood Still (Rational fears, 41-46). He is especially good on its hostility to freedom: “Klattu [sic] claims that this solution to war does not involve any loss of freedom, except the freedom to behave ‘irresponsibly’. But there is a problem with the word ‘irresponsible’: it is not as easy to define as Klattu implies. What may be irresponsible to one person may not be to another. . . . Klattu’s proposal does not reject violence, but places it firmly within the hands of the state. Nor is it presented as an option. He informs the scientists that there is no alternative. . . . The film demands rigid conformity to the universal order, an order from which there can be no valid dissent” (45-46). For the contrary view, that “Klaatu’s ultimatum does not violate anyone’s rights,” see Aeon J. Skoble, “Technology and Ethics in The Day the Earth Stood Still,” in The Philosophy of Science Fiction, ed. Steven M. Saunders (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 91-101.
[19] George Pal’s sci-fi movie Destination Moon (1950) may be unique in its day for the way it expresses some skepticism about the federal government’s competency, and champions the free enterprise system. It pointedly suggests that only private companies could successfully put men on the moon. The lunar project is led by a Howard Hughes figure (he has set speed records in planes, and owns both an aircraft manufacturing company and an airline), and it is supported by a variety of corporate sponsors. In order to launch their rocket, they must overcome obstacles created by government bureaucracies, overly concerned with safety regulations. The fact that the famous science fiction writer Robert Heinlein was heavily involved in this movie may explain what appears to be its libertarian slant. But even Destination Moon foresees a reconciliation between government and private enterprise. The entrepreneurs plan on eventually selling their rockets to the U.S. government. Moreover, the story clearly takes place in a Cold War context. The Hughes figure wins over his fellow entrepreneurs to the project when he invokes the challenge of the space race. American entrepreneurs must finance a rocket to the moon before unnamed foreign powers get their first. On this film, see Booker, Mushroom Clouds. 109-10.
[20] See Christine Spines, “Men are from Mars, Women Are from Venus,” in Fraga, Burton, 127.
[21] Warren, “Tim Burton Attacks!”, in Fraga, Burton, 108.
[22] Ibid., 109.
[23] Spines, “Men are from Mars,” 120.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Mark Salisbury, ed., Burton on Burton (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 145.
[26] Ibid., 146.
[27] This cinematic tradition was already evident in the silent era, well represented in Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops films. Sennett himself explained them in anarchistic terms: “Authority had been ridiculed! That was exactly the artistic effect I was after. . . . Nearly everyone of us lives in the secret hope that someday before he dies he will be able to swat a policeman’s hat down around his ears.” Quoted in LeRoy Asbhy, With Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 171. For more on the anti-elitism of silent comedies, see 172-73.
[28] Ibid., 153.
[29] I have transcribed all quotations from Mars Attacks! from the Warner Home Video DVD (1997).
[30] Given Burton’s sympathy for marginalized figures, one might expect him to be sympathetic to multiculturalism, and, indeed, he often speaks in favor of openness to different cultures. But Burton appears to become suspicious of multiculturalism when it becomes a political ideology. As I explain later in this chapter, Burton questions multiculturalism as an abstract slogan, but champions it in the practical life of the American people.
[31] The film is, of course, satirizing Decker as well for his militarism, but at least his view of the Martians proves to be correct.
[32] In fact, the Martians do misinterpret a human gesture of peace at the greeting ceremony—the release of a dove—as an aggressive act. Evidently, the Martians do not like birds.
[33] By contrast, in the Mars Attacks! trading card series, the American military, although it suffers initial defeats, quickly responds to the Martian threat by invading Mars, taking the fight to the Martians, and destroying them on their home soil.
[34] For the contrast between the big city and the small town in American popular culture, see Chapter Two, on Have Gun-Will Travel.
[35] One can see this kind of liberal prejudice in the title of Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan, 2004).
[36] On this subject, see William A. Galstone, “Civil Society and the ‘Art of Association,’” Journal of Democracy, 11, 1 (January 2000): 64-70. As we saw in the case of Locke in Chapter Three, Tocqueville thought that civil society can be conceived as independent of government, logically, if not necessarily historically, prior to it.
[37] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 489-90.
[38] Ibid., 491.
[39] As odd as it may sound, I have speculated in print as to what Tocqueville would think of Las Vegas if he could revisit America today. See my “Postmodern Prophet: Tocqueville Visits Vegas,” Journal of Democracy, 11, 1 (January 2000): 111-18.
[40] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 491-92.
[41] See Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).
[42] On this subject, see Paul A. Rahe, Soft Despotism, Democracy as Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Project (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
[43] These words were spoken by then presidential candidate Barack Obama in a fundraising speech delivered in San Francisco on April 11, 2008; he was referring to Americans in small towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest. The text of the speech can be found by Googling “cling to guns and religion,” as, for example, at this site: http://inkslwc.wordpress.com/2008/04/12/barack-obama-bitter-pennsylvanians-cling-to-guns-or-religion/ (consulted June 16, 2011).
[44] Strictly speaking, the Americans of Mars Attacks! do not create associations in the formal sense that Tocqueville speaks of in Democracy in America. They spontaneously act alone or in small groups. Nevertheless, the film does point to exactly the self-reliance in Americans that impressed Tocqueville. I also want to acknowledge that Mars Attacks! includes several scenes of ordinary Americans who panic when faced with the Martian invasion. The film does not claim that all Americans are capable of dealing with disaster; it shows only that some are, but that is enough to deflate claims for government omnicompetence.
[45] As the prototype of all subsequent Martian invasion stories, The War of the Worlds already contains many of the motifs that were to be developed in later book, movie, and television versions. Wells wrote the novel as a lesson to the British Empire. In 1898, the British were sitting on top of the world, confident that their military and technological superiority would prevail in the twentieth century and continue to secure their hegemony over their colonies. Wells showed that a militarily and technologically superior force from Mars could do to the British Empire what it had been doing to non-European peoples around the world. In that sense, The War of the Worlds can be read as an anti-government novel. Nevertheless, the novel betrays Wells’s growing socialist convictions and celebrates the centralized power of strong governments. Wells appears to admire the tight organization of the invading Martian forces, especially their ability to co-ordinate their movements perfectly and pursue a campaign planned in advance with single-minded devotion. By contrast, when Wells turns to human beings, he shows them panicking as they flee the Martian invaders. He thus established what has become a convention of this genre: portraying the chaotic response of ordinary people to an invasion. Their only hope seems to lie in help from their government and its military; Wells pictures them as utterly incapable of organizing themselves or of responding rationally to the Martian threat. Wells has particular contempt for any free enterprise responses to the plight of the refugees; he has great disdain for the private boat operators who come to rescue people--because they charge exorbitant sums for the service. As in much of his science fiction, Wells’s socialist belief in central government planning as the only solution to human ills shines through in The War of the Worlds.
[46] The one exception to this rule occurs near the end of the film, when the President’s daughter Taffy, evidently the only surviving member of the Washington establishment, awards the Congressional Medal of Honor to Richie for saving the world. With the characteristic modesty of ordinary people, Richie says: “There’s a lot of people in the world that have done a lot more than I have, and they’re the ones who should be here now, getting a medal.”
[47] Burton must like this song; he had used it already in Edward Scissorhands.
[48] The film’s iconoclasm is evident in the way it treats its own Hollywood stars with sublime disrespect. Burton reports: “I just thought it would be fun to see big stars getting blown away. It’s like all those movies that they used to make where you never know who’s going to make it. I remember seeing Robert Wagner on fire in The Towering Inferno. I didn’t expect Robert Wagner to be on fire. It’s kind of cathartic in a way” (Spines, “Men are from Mars,” 121). The stars appearing in Mars Attacks! become part of Burton’s debunking of the American elite. They compete as to who can die more ignominiously (Glenn Close’s death by chandelier may take the prize). Burton treats his stars as just more American icons who need to be smashed. As he says elsewhere: “I’ve always loved those Irwin Allen films—those ‘Celebrities Getting Killed’ movies. That’s a genre unto itself. . . . It seemed like a good idea just to blow away celebrities with ray-guns” (Salisbury, Burton, 148). Once again, we see Burton’s urge to liberate the American people from their idol worship of their elites. For a similar debunking of the Hollywood elite in South Park, see Chapter Six.
[49] For some reason, DeVito’s character did not merit a name in the script; he is identified in the cast simply as “Rude Gambler.”
[50] That racial issues are in the background of the film is suggested by the way President Dale’s final appeal to the Martians echoes Rodney King’s famous words “can we all get along?” in his May 1, 1992 attempt to calm things down during the L.A. riots (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King; consulted June 25, 2011). I am indebted to Michael Valdez Moses for calling this echo to my attention. The line “Can’t we all just get along?” recurs in a clearly racial context in Burton’s The Planet of the Apes (2001), spoken by Limbo (Paul Giamatti).
[51] For the democratic character of Las Vegas as a cultural phenomenon, see my “Postmodern Prophet” essay.
[52] On this subject, see LeRoy Ashby, With Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006).
[53] Kristine McKenna, “Playboy Interview: Tim Burton,” in Fraga, Burton, 155. For more on Burton as auteur, see Jenny He, “An Auteur for All Ages,” Tim Burton (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 16-23.
[54] Warren, “Tim Burton Attacks!”, 115.
[55] In this regard, the audio commentary provided by Burton and Paul Reubens (the actor who created Pee-wee Herman) on the DVD of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (Warner Home Video, 2000) is very instructive. They continually talk about the movies they imitated in their film, and Burton brings up the subject of genre again and again; for him, making the movie was an exercise in “another day, another genre.”
[56] Salisbury, Burton, 151. Cf. a similar statement by Trey Parker, one of the creators of South Park: “The boundaries are part of the fun” (Reason, December 2006, 64).
[57] Salisbury, Burton, 109.
[58] McKenna, “Playboy Interview,” 161.
[59] Storyboards, a kind of cartoon version of a film that allows the production team to visualize what it will look like and work out problems in advance, were first used by the Walt Disney Studio in the 1930s. Several auteurs, such as Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa, are famous for their use of storyboards. A generous sampling of the storyboards for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is available in the Special Features bonus on the DVD (“Production Sketches and Storyboards”). Having worked in the Disney studio and being trained as a cartoonist, Burton does make good use of storyboards, but his increasing sense of the messiness of movie production has led him to rely on them less and less, as he says in an interview about Ed Wood: “The problems of making a movie is [sic] really such a goofy thing. It’s not an exact science and many things can go wrong. . . . That’s great, because that’s what makes it kind of fun. . . . I’ve gotten more away from storyboards, . . . Obviously on a effects picture you board a lot more. On a picture like this [Ed Wood] I find you don’t need to storyboard. You’re working mainly with actors, and there’s no effects going on, so it’s best to be more spontaneous. We did this one a little more on the spot. The approach I took was to start with the concept. Who the characters are and so forth, then just sort of do it. It’s got an episodic, matter-of-fact approach. We didn’t want to impose too much of a style on it. Let the people be the focus and the style will come out of that” (Lawrence French, “A Meeting of Minds: Tim Burton’s Ed Wood,” in Fraga, Burton, 104). Many critics speak of Burton imposing his distinctive style on every movie he makes, but here he claims that the style emerges spontaneously from his material as he and other people (including the actors) work on the film. Burton appears to view filmmaking as a form of spontaneous order.
[60] See McKenna, “Playboy Interview,” 160-161 for Burton’s tendency to identify with Wood: “I’m like Ed Wood in that I go into every movie with the same mixture of optimism, enthusiasm, and denial.”
[61] Many people choose Citizen Kane as the greatest film of all time, but not, as it happens, Tim Burton. His comments on Welles and Citizen Kane may surprise the critics who think of him as working in the art film tradition. When asked in an interview whether he admires Welles’ work, Burton replied: “I never really saw Citizen Kane. The Welles’s films sort of passed me by. I haven’t seen The Lady from Shanghai. I have seen The Third Man, and I guess I must have seen Citizen Kane. Yes, I’m sure I’ve seen Citizen Kane” (French, “A Meeting of Minds,” 105). This statement does not suggest that Welles was a great influence on Burton’s development. If he has a personal pantheon of filmmakers, it seems to include Ed Wood, Ray Harryhausen, and Irwin Allen, rather than Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, and Jean Renoir. (He does, however, express admiration in his interviews for auteurs such as Frederico Fellini and Roman Polanski). In a moment in the Playboy interview even more troubling to elitist auteur theorists, Burton pays tribute to commercial television: “As far as the work that influenced me, I’m a child of television and I grew up on monster movies, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits” (McKenna, “Playboy Interview,” 169). Here is perhaps Burton’s most telling admission: “Growing up as part of the television generation, I probably veer toward bad taste” (Salisbury, Burton, xv).
[62] Salisbury, Burton, 153. Note again the way Burton is always thinking of movies in terms of genres.
[63] Ibid.
[64] For a discussion of the continuing fascination with alien invasion narratives in American pop culture, and their ideological significance, see below, Chapter Ten, on Un-American Gothic.
Related Work
