David recommends . . . . go and see FORBIDDEN PLANET at Dulwich Picture Gallery Monday 18th October 2010

FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956, USA, 98 mins, Cert U)

1950s pulp sci-fi classic as Shakespeare meets spacemen meets Freud

Monday 18th October 7.15 for 7.45pm in the Linbury Room, Dulwich Picture Gallery

£8 (£6 for Friends of the Gallery)  Free nibbles and wine.  Google SE21 7AD for map.

In 1609 the Sea Venture set off from Plymouth as flagship of a small fleet bringing supplies and new migrants to the first successful English colony in the Americas, Jamestown. The ship was severely damaged in a violent tempest and deliberately driven onto a Bermuda reef to save it from sinking. Crew and passengers spent 9 months on that exotic island while their ship was repaired, before finally making it to Jamestown. And then the ship back to England.

This adventure was the biggest news story since the defeat of the Spanish Armada twenty years earlier. It captured the imagination of Jacobean England, including one William Shakespeare. 

To his contemporaries, America was a fantasy land offering riches and a new future. Much was written by wildly imaginative writers who had never set foot there. The Americas became for the 17th Century English a socially constructed fantasy of dreamlike possibilities. But combined with danger.  For Jamestown was the 12th English attempt to start a permanent colony on the land they called Virginia.  A majority of the souls who took part in the previous 11 efforts died - drowned, starved, or killed by the indigenous inhabitants. Virginia meant adventure and anticipated wealth, but also danger.  

Which is where Shakespeare and Forbidden Planet explore the same themes - psychological ambivalence.  

Most Americans today do not have a passport. Apart from day trips to Canada or Mexico only a small minority travels abroad. So abroad can seem an alien, scary place, as often represented in Hollywood films. Large numbers of Americans left their continent and found death,in 1917-18 and in 1941-46. Forbidden Planet was released 10 years after the War in the Pacific, and just 3 years after the Korean War ended.  And at the height of fears of Soviet invasion.  Not to mention Martian invasion. A new generation is now finding, in Iraq and Afghanistan, that exploration and the pursuit of gold are mortally dangerous.

The ambivalence of excitement versus danger begins in both The Tempest and Forbidden Planet with this geographical exploration. Forbidden Planet starts with the characters of The Tempest, and with its opening situation. A spaceship is sent to a planet to search for colonists not heard from for 20 years. 

Doctor Morbius is Prospero, enabling an update of Shakespeare's question about a second form of ambivalence: science. Can the exploration for new knowledge go too far? Prospero and Morbius use science to do good, but can they unwittingly do evil? Shakespeare wrote when the Renaissance was a hundred years old. But with the Scientific Revolution still a hundred years ahead. And the burning of women as witches in between. 

Forbidden Planet was released not long after the scientific horror of Hiroshima, and the scientific industrialisation of death at Auschwitz. And with worries about global warming, nuclear power, and GM crops lying ahead in the future.

Hence our third level of ambivalence - the psychologically deepest of all. Are humans good or bad? 

The Tempest's characters can be placed on a continuum from good to evil. Prospero and Morbius both have sweet, innocent, virginal daughters. Reflecting the Jacobean assumption that the natives of Virginia would be innocent, 'noble savages'. The 'natural' versus the civilised, including science. Prospero's helpful spirit Ariel has become Robby the Robot. In the middle of the continuum are the ambivalent figures of the two magician-scientists.  But what about the far end of the scale- Evil?

The most interesting character in The Tempest is Caliban,a  hideous, deformed monster. Not just evil but the son of evil, begotten by a witch. And confined by Prospero in a tree, repflecting the socially necessary suppression of our dark side. For Caliban expresses the dark side of nature / The New World / space. And of us, humans. Who is Caliban in Forbidden Planet? The film takes a thoroughly 20th Century route to answer this question.  And contemporary ones: how can we ensure we do good rather than evil?