Paquete Orchestator

An astronaut infected with an alien organism stumbles across London (The Quatermass Experiment (1955)); alien-controlled humans construct a sinister refinery in the English countryside (Quatermass II (1957)); a Martian spacecraft is unearthed at a tube station (Quatermass and the Pit (1967)); an extraterrestrial masquerades as a housewife (Unearthly Stranger (1963)); aliens take over a country hospital (Invasion (1966)); a visitor from one of Jupiter’s moons kidnaps young women and returns them to his planet for breeding purposes (The Night Caller (1965)).

In reality Britain has rarely been invaded. In its fantasies the opposite is true. It is perhaps fitting that a nation with such an expansive imperial past should have developed a rich tradition of narratives about itself being invaded, whether this be in the thriller, horror or science fiction genres. All the examples of invasion referred to above come from British science fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s, an especially active time as far as imaginary invasions are concerned.

Sometimes dismissed as lesser versions of or adjuncts to the better known US science fiction invasion films of the 1950s, these British films actually have a distinctive character of their own and this chapter will seek to identify the nature of this distinctiveness. It will focus on the ways in which the films engage with issues to do with national identity that are quite different from those addressed by their American cousins. Also discussed will be the changes that occur in the British invasion fantasy as it moves from the 1950s to the 1960s.

Before embarking on this, however, it is worth considering some of the broader issues associated with the subject of imaginary invasion. A useful starting point is perhaps the most famous fantastic invasion of all.

Fears of invasion

No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinised and

Peter Hutchings

studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.

H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)

These resonant opening lines from The War of the Worlds–with the matter-of-fact sense they give of humanity being caught in the gaze of another race–constitute a founding moment in the history of the science fiction invasion fantasy, just as the novel in which they feature has proven to be something of a model for alien invasion narratives. It is also true to say that while Wells has secured a place for himself (albeit a marginal one) in the literary canon as the writer of ‘popular classics’, twentieth-century fantasies about alien invasion have generally received a bad critical press. It is as if the intelligence of Wells’s anti-imperial work–with its full-scale assault on British complacency–has been betrayed by a pulp tradition which has assimilated only the sensational qualities of the story and discarded its more serious elements. Bug-eyed monsters wielding death-dealing ray guns and, more recently, the increasing public fascination with UFOs and alien abductions have all been insistently associated with a credulous, juvenile point of view. This has been so regardless of whether one is concerned with real life–and the alleged actual presence of extraterrestrials amongst us–or merely with fictions about alien assault and invasion. The audiences for the latter, it is assumed, are content, keen even, to see any culture that is different from their own presented as threatening simply because of that difference. Matters are made worse by the association of this us/them attitude with a politically reactionary point of view–whether this be the anti-communism of 1950s America or the gung ho nationalism of the recent Independence Day (1996). The imperatives remain clear in all cases–we are good, they are bad, destroy them before they destroy us.

Film historians writing on 1950s American sf cinema–notably Peter Biskind (1983) and Mark Jancovich (1996)–have sought to dispel this prejudicial outlook through identifying a set of ambiguities and ambivalences apparent in a range of American invasion fantasies. In particular they have drawn our attention to the ways in which these films are as much about anxieties internal to America as they are about real or imagined fears of communist infiltration and invasion.

As Jancovich notes, ‘the concerns with the Soviet Union were often merely a displacement or a code which different sections of American society used in order to criticise those aspects of American life which they feared or opposed’ (Jancovich 1996: 17).

While this is certainly true, the stress laid in many of these accounts on films which are especially distinguished and insightful in their exploration of the collective national psyche–

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and the films of Jack Arnold–tends to cover over the fact that the alien invasion fantasy as a generic format is less straightforward than might be imagined.

The transformation presented in The War of the Worlds of what were once transcendent and

immutable values into a set of relative, contingent beliefs is actually a property of alien invasion fantasies in general, even (perhaps especially) those which seek most rigorously to deny it. This is because the mere imagining of an alien culture always involves an acknowledgement of Otherness and this in turn unsettles a certain complacency and racial self-centredness. Humanity’s imaginary dominion, its sense of itself as being at the centre of things, is wounded–and the extraterrestrial origins of this means that the wounding is especially traumatic, inflicted as it is against humanity in general rather than any circumscribed section of it. Once it is realised that, to use a phrase firmly associated with the science fiction genre, ‘we are not alone’, and once humanity is forcibly made aware of the boundaries or frontiers between it and an Other, then humanity becomes limited and is rendered fragile and perpetually vulnerable.

Alien invasion fantasies rely on what might be termed a relativisation of culture and cultural values. The instabilities and anxieties inevitably involved in this are managed in a variety of ways. In Wells’s case, for example, the day is saved via the intervention of germs, ‘the humblest things that God, in His wisdom, has put upon this earth’. Thus God–God in man’s image, so to speak–is restored to the centre, although this turns out only to be a provisional conclusion, for mankind is left in expectation of further possible attacks. Many readers might well be left suspicious that those helpful germs could in the end prove just as dangerous to humanity as they were to the Martians. One thing should be clear, however: there can be no going back to a life led in blissful–and, as far as Wells is concerned, complacent–ignorance of something which exists

‘out there’. Bearing this in mind, it does seem that the Martians’ lasting achievement is not their temporary occupation of Earth but rather their forcing humanity to acknowledge the existence of an alien culture and in effect to make mankind return the gaze directed against it at the novel’s beginning. Inasmuch as they succeed in doing this, the Martians have won, for they have effectively destroyed once and for all a particular human-centred way of existing in and making sense of the universe. It does seem that this destructive mechanism, by which humanity is presented with an overwhelming sense of its own limitations, is constitutive of all invasion fantasies. Regardless of the narrative outcome, the war is always over before the invasion even begins simply because the mere existence of an alien culture is sufficient to do the damage. It could further be argued that the articulation of such fantasies is dependent on a social and cultural context which has become relativised and less sure of itself. Hence the 1950s was a prime decade for invasions, not only because of the tensions associated with the Cold War, but also because of a number of shifts and new trends in the west, most notably a growing affluence and materialism coupled with a widespread sense that traditional values were increasingly being brought into question. Importantly, these various changes did not manifest themselves uniformly across the western world.

Consumerism, for example, meant something different in America from what it did in Britain (where it was often associated with anxieties about the alleged undue influence of American culture on the British way of life). It follows that any account of British sf, while needing to preserve a sense of the generic character of the alien invasion fantasy and how all such fantasies,

Peter Hutchings

regardless of their country of origin, share certain qualities, must at the same time take account of the socially and historically specific pressures exerted upon the fantasies by the context within which they were produced.

Quatermass and the aliens

Alongside the best-selling novels of John Wyndham (including The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)), probably the best-known inva-sion stories to emerge from 1950s Britain featured the character Professor Bernard Quatermass.

Making his first appearance (played by Reginald Tate) in The Quatermass Experiment, a highly successful BBC Television serial from 1953, he subsequently featured in two more serials, Quatermass II (1955, played by John Robinson) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958/1959, played by André Morell). All three were written by Manx writer Nigel Kneale (also responsible for the celebrated television adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 (1954)). Each of them presents a narrative in which an alien threat to the Earth gradually escalates to a point of absolute crisis at which time the knowledgeable Quatermass acts decisively in order to save humanity. In 1955 Hammer re-leased its film version of The Quatermass Experiment. Directed by Val Guest with the American actor Brian Donlevy in the title role, it proved to be the company’s first major box-office hit and in many ways was a forerunner to the Gothic horror cycle that was shortly to follow. Film adaptations of Quatermass II (again directed by Guest with Donlevy as the scientist) and Quatermass and the Pit (directed by Roy Ward Baker with Andrew Keir as Quatermass) ap-peared in 1957 and 1967 respectively. (A fourth Quatermass television serial apap-peared in 1979.

Known both as Quatermass and The Quatermass Conclusion, it featured John Mills as Quatermass. There was also a radio serial–The Quatermass Memoirs–in 1996.) Hammer’s film versions are better known today than the original television serials, if only because the serials are much harder to see. In writing about Quatermass, however, it is necessary to consider both ver-sions of each story. This is not only because the television verver-sions often contain significant sequences omitted from the films, but also because film and television programme alike display a considerable media awareness. Each contains comments about the medium in which it appears as well as about other media, and this in turn has implications for the way in which the alien inva-sion itself is presented.

The film version of The Quatermass Experiment concludes with the monster being discovered in Westminster Abbey by a live television outside broadcast team who promptly cease transmission, thus cutting off the television audience–but not the cinema audience–from the sight of Quatermass dealing with the threat. Charles Barr has linked this break in transmission with other attempts by 1950s British cinema to distance itself from television, its main rival, by presenting itself as ‘a more autonomous and full-blooded experience’ (Barr 1986: 214).This

insistence on the difference between the two media is also apparent in the film being sold on its initial release as The Quatermass Xperiment, a marketing device designed to draw a prospective audience’s attention to its status as an X certificate film. The X certificate, denoting a film for adults only, had been introduced in 1951 and had rapidly become associated with a growing explicitness vis-à-vis the representation of sex and violence. As Barr notes, there is a certain irony attached to this given that the film had itself been adapted from a television serial. The irony is compounded when one realises that the 1953 television version of the story contains a sequence set in a cinema during a screening of an absurdly juvenile, pulp-like science fiction film.

Here the television drama, with obvious aspirations to be a mature treatment of pre-existing generic themes, seeks to differentiate itself from what it perceives as the mindlessness of the mainstream, conventional science fiction product. One might add here that the television version of Quatermass and the Pit also contains a scene not unlike the film version of The Quatermass Experiment in which a television outside broadcast is interrupted. In the case of Quatermass and the Pit, this takes place at a press conference in front of the recently uncovered Martian spacecraft and is witnessed mainly from the viewpoint of some people watching television in a nearby pub.

Yet again television is shown as inadequate as a means of representing some appalling alien threat, although it is noteworthy that this time it is the television version of the story itself which is announcing its own shortcomings.

In fact the more one looks at the Quatermass stories, the more one sees how both television and film versions exhibit a sense that the material with which they are dealing is not easily assimilated into traditional forms and mechanisms of representation. Hence all the distancing references in both television programmes and films as well as the fact that the camera on board the original Quatermass rocket in The Quatermass Experiment (a device meant to provide a reassuringly objective account of the space journey) is broken in the crash which initiates the story. Hence too the presence in both versions of Quatermass and the Pit of a new type of recording device which picks up brain waves and translates these into images which can then be projected and viewed by others. Such a device abolishes the distinction between the prosaic mundanity of the television broadcast and the vapid escapism of the space opera shown in the TV Quatermass Experiment, engaging instead with private mental processes. In Quatermass and the Pit, the knowledge this provides finally enables Quatermass to discover the truth about the Martian invasion of the Earth that took place five million years previously. What the use of this radically new device suggests is that a new way of seeing is required in order to counter the alien threat, one that goes beyond what is currently available in 1950s British society. More generally, such moments of modest self-reflexivity–where, if only for a few sequences, a particular technology of vision and/or representation is foregrounded in the narrative–point to a widespread sense in these stories of they themselves being something new and strange within British film and television culture, something which is in many respects quite alien to the pre-existing norms of representation and storytelling.

Peter Hutchings

These narratives about alien invasion, and indeed the aliens themselves, are defined in their strangeness against what for 1950s Britain passes for reassuringly familiar contexts. This means that while many of the conventional trappings of the science fiction genre–rockets, extraterrestrials and the like–are present, they are invariably located in relation to a reasonably accurate approximation of the real, even humdrum, world. The opening of the film version of The Quatermass Experiment, in which a rocket crashes near a cottage in the country, neatly dramatises a much more widespread collision that takes place throughout this and the other Quatermass narratives between the fantastic regime of science fiction and the ‘realism’ of British everyday life. The climactic sequence in Westminster Abbey would have had a particular resonance in this respect, especially for the television audience who only a few months previously had witnessed the same location on their screens during the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. There is a kind of iconoclasm here, a furtive pleasure in seeing the Queen supplanted by a deadly alien monster about to reproduce, just as there is in Quatermass II (film), where the Shell Haven Refinery in Essex is transformed into an alien base, and in Quatermass and the Pit (TV), where the Martians and the surgically altered apemen are discovered in, of all places, Knightsbridge. One consequence of this mixing of the familiar and the strange, with the strange often concealed within the familiar and close to home, is that audiences are invited to look at their own world in a different light, seeing it to a certain extent as itself an alien world.

A comment made by Kim Newman in a discussion of US anti-communist movies offers a useful way of thinking about the view of 1950s Britain found in the Quatermass stories. Newman states that unlike their American counterparts, British sf invasion films of the 1950s seem to be

‘still fighting World War Two’ (Newman 1996: 79). It is certainly true that the Quatermass television programmes and films are replete with distancing references to a Cold War conflict. As the avuncular Inspector Lomax (played by Jack Warner) puts it in The Quatermass Experiment (film), ‘No one wins a Cold War’, an attitude fully endorsed by the discrediting of the views of the hawk-like militarist Colonel Breen and his cronies in Quatermass and the Pit (TV and film). It is also true that the Quatermass stories show Britain as a nation still bound to the experience of the Second World War. This manifests itself in a number of ways: examples include the workers at the alien factory in Quatermass II who seem to have been transplanted directly from a morale-boosting Second World War film and whose social club contains a poster boasting the war-like slogan ‘Secrets Mean Sealed Lips’; the concern with wartime unexploded bombs in Quatermass and the Pit as well as the way in which the destruction visited upon London at the conclusion of that story very clearly re-enacts the Blitz. It does not follow from this, however, that these stories are simply nostalgic or backward-looking. Instead this attachment to a collective memory of the Second World War needs to be connected with another distinctive feature of the Quatermass stories–one which further separates them from the US invasion fantasy–and that is their marginalisation of romance and sexual desire and their general suppression of domestic matters.

In the 1950s Quatermass stories, Quatermass himself is someone who, while working to protect the nation, remains a curiously isolated figure, bereft of anything resembling a meaningful relationship. (In the 1979 Quatermass, he has acquired a granddaughter; possibly connected with this is the fact that here he seems a much weaker figure who can only defeat the aliens through the sacrifice of the lives of both himself and his granddaughter.) The standard, if not clichéd, figures of the clean-cut square-jawed hero and his girl, which are present in some form or

In the 1950s Quatermass stories, Quatermass himself is someone who, while working to protect the nation, remains a curiously isolated figure, bereft of anything resembling a meaningful relationship. (In the 1979 Quatermass, he has acquired a granddaughter; possibly connected with this is the fact that here he seems a much weaker figure who can only defeat the aliens through the sacrifice of the lives of both himself and his granddaughter.) The standard, if not clichéd, figures of the clean-cut square-jawed hero and his girl, which are present in some form or