FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
		ESPAÑOL

“My other malignant me is going to penetrate that door and I have no power at all to impede him” “Man can’t look directly at a dragon and survive” DOCTOR EDWARD MORBIUS

By Patric Laneuville Châlons*. Email: plch@tiemposfuturos.es (SUBJECT: CONTACT PATRIC)

 If we could materialize a sensation we would get something similar to “Forbidden Planet”. The sensation that I am alluding to could be the marvelous one that the viewers of “Pulp Fiction” had around the middle of the twentieth century, or of the pioneer magazines of the genre, like the legendary “Astounding Stories”, Amazing Stories” or “Galaxy”. The “Eastman Color” that appears in the credits, the innocently unsettling soundtrack (in its technique, also pioneer), the dreamy mauve backgrounds and that close to us “interplanetary” craft (a practical Berlina style UFO model), helped, without a doubt.

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Maybe without wanting to, the tandem of producer Nicholas Nayfack and director Fred Mcleod Wilcox achieved it. The ghosts of their subconscious emerged and were captured in film forever, asking permission please from Sigmund Freud and William Shakespeare, of course. From this last one, the paradigmatic English playwright was born and “The Tempest”, their indirect inspiration, was first performed in 1611. The parallelisms oscillate between evident and diffuse: Island-Planet, Prospero (Duke of Milan)-Morbius, A colonizing context of the New World-New Worlds, Alchemy that controls an island-Technology that controls an island, Daughter Miranda-Daughter Altaira, Classical Art Studies-Encyclopedia Krell Studies, Classic revenge because of love-revenge because of filial love…  

 Doctor Morbius, archetype of the wise and misanthropic narcissist, self made, who thinks that there is enough humanity and enough world (worlds, in this case), has incremented his already elevated intellectual coefficient thanks to an alien machine. The device, strangely, reminds us indisputably of the mallets in the fairground games, that make rise the level in proportion to how strong the player is, this too is the case, but for the exact opposite reason. Morbius studies with delectation the encyclopedia that was given form to by the fabulous Krells, that kept the secrets of a million generations of his race, after half-deciphering its language, maybe with a cosmic Rosetta stone. Beneath his thirst for knowledge lies his ghosts, his fears, which would have made him into fresh meat for Freudian psychoanalysis as soon as he lay down on the couch. Walter Pidgeon’s work is excellent, very credible, something that can’t be said of his co-star Leslie Nielsen, who could have shot with a mask of his own face and the end result would have been the same. Back to Pidgeon though, a veteran actor, we don’t know if he made double the money for playing two parts, maybe opposite, maybe complementary, in the film. In his second performance, discreet, implicit, he works… metaphorically! In both, as said, impeccable.  

Robbie deserves a paragraph of his own. Technological vertex on film would probably be the first robots that spectators saw evolve in 1956.  And now that we are here and that Isaac Whoever just sculpted the three laws of robotics at the beginning of the decade, Robbie (while the sideburned expert slept) escaped from his first story and played a more than dignified part in the film. He must have liked it because he did it again in “The Invisible Boy” (1957), in some episodes of “The Twilight Zone”, “Lost in Space” and some productions from the 80’s. The robot converted into a future cult object (?), an icon of the twentieth century, a cinematographical Mona Lisa idolized by an army of fans from various generations. Returning to the movie, the scene when the creator (Morbius/Frankenstein) orders the robot to stop the monster and he short-circuits is captivating. Guess why. The First Law (“You shall never hurt a human being or by your inaction allow any human to suffer any damage”), for intelligent enough androids, is applicable also to alter egos, of course. The machine has some exquisite manners later imitated by his cousin-grandson C3PO, even in the number of ways of communicating that both dominate. But there were always levels: the first, 187 languages, and gold guy, millions. Robbie, before speaking, makes a sound that seems like mechanical pieces fitting together, as if his words were a puzzle that the machine composed in real time. Isn’t it close to us, this artifact that is so artistically constructed? Constructed “to be beyond evil” and to “never to make mistakes” it resolves all the material necessity that father and son could wish for: food, clothing, utensils, jewelry… Furthermore, practically indestructible, apart from the “oxygen that produces rust” Does this sound familiar? A zinc bath would have solved the problem, but without going too far with the galvanoplasty, of course.  

 A little adorable woman, the daughter of Morbius, puts herself in the only female role in the film, with “18 crew members between the ages of 24 and 26”dressed as little sailors, a Walter Pidgeon, as they say, dressed up as himself, an inscrutable Leslie Nielsen (Captain John Adams) and a sexless Robbie, Asimov-esque and not at all apathetic, but strong as can be, he can transport tons of 217 lead isotope like it was just moving a chair. Lieutenant Farman robs a few kisses from Altaira, the star that heats up the Forbidden Planet- before the viewer can even kick back in his seat. The personified innocence evolves in the arcadian scenes, full of little animals, there’s no shyness in bathing nude… until humans pervert things with their evil. A jealous visiting tiger attacks his very own friend and gets atomized, which we must understand that is much better than being disintegrated, because they un-piece you in molecules and not in atoms, simpler, united and alone. Excuse us for joking a little bit but we do it with love and because of obligation: If you aren’t scrupulous with concepts, then you risk this a century after your work has been done. Going back to the girl, she studied poetry, mathematics, logic, physics, geology and biology. Trivium and cuadrivium carolingios in a planetary version. What else for? History vetoed, we suppose, to protect her father and mentor so they wouldn’t know, in all its length, the indescribable human condition.

On a technological and scientific level, the film does what it can pretty well, except for the classic mistakes, as we still don’t have a science fiction that healthily resists the passing of time, technically and plot-wise. In 1956, they already knew about the intergalactic traffic sign that Albert Einstein installed, with the speed of light inside a red circle, but any science fiction lover allows one to go beyond the limit, more than anything, to arrive somewhere before pigs fly or before “the neighbors’ son walks on the moon” (1) (2). Ok, we can accept hyper speeded light to travel around the cosmos. In the designs they use chromes, like the robot’s “suit”, various glass surfaces and high waistline and minimalist wardrobe: It seems correct. In the decoration, what seems like many abyssal stuffed fish, are of questionable taste but sufficiently disturbing for the viewer not to ask if they are anachronistic or where the hell they caught them in a planet that is semi-desert. Ok good, good. We don’t value the wireless communicators that they use now but, in a “non-wireless” society, they were revolutionary, really. The film, re-taking the rigorous path, ingeniously resolves many scenes, like the one with the force camps around the craft, or the traveler through “Krell City”, of the very own Monster of the Subconscious: fantastic: Those who saw the film as children surely have that silhouette of terrifying light, tremendous, still in their memory.  The Light and Magic still had a few years to be born although that Walt Disney version from the time had “something” to do with the special effects in the film. Let’s start questioning the other side of the scale: We’ll go, and keep going and keep going without software that governs technological instruments. The hardware imposes its law and I remember even in “Westworld” from 1973 we had a robotic Yul Brynner with a bad attitude and without even a miserable code put in himself. The model of the craft in the sphere in the cockpit has its’ charm and not even Captain Leslie Nielsen is capable of “holding on as best he can” to a plausible explanation to such a stupidity. Of the most numbered are the interrogators who provoke magic properties that the robot has to create “prime material” from a sample, like whiskey from Kansas City, softly, softly. (Would a few hectoliters be enough?) Let’s not be too hard on the robot: An explanation before which we have to keep quiet is that they used super advanced Krell machines to make the transformation, playing with material and energy. By the way, Altair 4 is 4.7% richer in oxygen than Earth, good, breathable but the gravity us 8.7… what? Maybe it’s badly translated, maybe they mean 8.7 % more powerful or weak than Earth, anyway, what’s the difference. We’ll leave it as similar. All in all, a pretty correct film taking into account the year that it was filmed.           

 
 Anyway, if the critique stayed here, we would have traveled light years to a forbidden planet and would have ended up with its uninhabited moon. What happened to the monsters of the subconscious, the monsters of the Id? In a Pidgeon/Morbius scene it recognizes that laws and religion really serve to placate them, meaning, it’s still an unsettling affirmation. What happened to the extraordinary extraterrestrial civilization that was the Krell? (3)(4) The Krell, a race of extraterrestrials who were “anything but divine” inhabited this world two thousand centuries ago, reaching their technological culmination: They dominated energy (“9000 nuclear reactors in a row, the energy of a whole planetary system”) and material. But when they were about to get rid of their physical weight something finished them off: Their own subconscious monsters. The moral seems clear and on a microscopic level we can apply it to ourselves as well: The material development of a civilization, if it doesn’t get out of control, parallel to spiritual/intellectual development, winds up self-destructing itself. From there, like the crew of the “Belerofonte” died, cut into pieces by a mysterious force….and now live in the cemetery of the planet, “victim of the greed of human insanity”. Those monsters of the Id, amplified by alien machines are capable of going through the indestructible Krell steel, feeding themselves with their own evil, “renewing their molecular structure from microsecond to microsecond”: “What’s out there is YOU!!” And it’s when the evil amalgamates with intelligence, one can’t put a stop to it. Altaira, has an extrasensory perception through a dream, and she sees the horror.

Belerofonte, in Greek mythology, was the hero that tamed the winged Pegasus and killed Chimera, the monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent. The settlers in the Belerofonte that arrived to the Forbidden Planet couldn’t finish off with the Chimera Moerbius dreamt about, with his ghosts of the unconscious, with his monsters of the Id, the ones that finally finished him off. The last sentence of the movie is also that of this critique: “One has to remind man that, in the end, we are not God”

* Pseudonym of Ramón Galí

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