Background
I need freedom of mind. I want peace for work. I am distressed by immediate circumstances. My thoughts and work are encumbered by claims and vexations and I cannot see any hope of release from them; any hope of a period of serene and beneficent activity, before I am overtaken altogether by infirmity and death. I am in a phase of fatigue and of that discouragement which is a concomitant of fatigue, the petty things of to-morrow skirmish in my wakeful brain, and I find it difficult to assemble my forces to confront this problem which paralyses the proper use of myself. 1
These are words which H.G. Wells spoke at age 64, writing an autobiographical account of his life, in which he addresses the societal phenomena which changed not only the direction of his life but also that of his colleagues, such as Henry James. The second half of the 19th century introduced in many middle class people an emancipation from a former existence in which one's life was necessarily devoted to primary needs and satisfactions, allowing a wider sustaining interest in pure science, art, and literature. Wells spent a large part of his life's energy in a drive to make a practically applicable science out of history and sociology, to find the working key for humankind to master a new world order with a clear sense of purpose and conviction. In his final book, he wrote that time was running out.
H.G. Wells was born in 1866, at Bromley, in Kent, England, the son of a professional cricketer turned failed shopkeeper. He spent the years 1880-1883 apprenticed to a draper and then to a pharmacist before winning a scholarship to further his education at the Normal School of Science in London. During his undergraduate days Wells was deeply influenced by the writings of Rudyard Kipling. Kiplingism became a philosophical genre which provided the phrases he and his peers needed to express their desire for discipline, devotion, and an organized effort furthering the socialist movement. (Those peers included Julian Huxley and G.B. Shaw.) Wells studied under the famous biologist, T.H. Huxley, and earned a degree in Zoology, the subject matter of which played a large role in his subsequent science fiction writing. A preoccupation with the near future, the remote future, and time-traveling forecasts filled his hours and gave him success as a writer; he was innately able to put into words his unusual approach to things in general. Many of his creative scientific theories proved to be accurate.
H.G. Wells began his writing career as a writer of textbooks. Soon afterward, he was publishing articles and fiction in prominent journals. Science fiction being his chosen genre, he gained recognition by pioneering influential books such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The War of the Worlds. Later in life, he wrote realist and comic accounts of lower-middle-class life. Theatre was definitely an option for Wells as many of his contemporaries embraced the theatre and felt that it offered great opportunities to the human mind. He tried working there but felt out of place, found the experience dull and boring and denounced the use of its existing methods and machinery. I find this honorable. In modern times, we look at book authors' desires for film adaptations, which may not only serve to disseminate the author's themes, but also to make many trips to the bank. Did H.G. Wells picture a theatre presentation of his work? Absolutely not.
In addition to his literary pursuits, H.G. Wells joined the socialist Fabian Society in 1903; a committed internationalist, he was appointed a member of the Research Committee for the League of Nations and wrote several books about the world organization. H. G. Wells married three times, to his cousin Isabel in 1891, to one of his students, Amy Catherine, in 1895, and to a young English author, Rebecca West, in 1914. I discovered a rare copy of a book about the latter relationship in the Beinecke Library at Yale. He continued to write prolifically, his later works devoted to realist and comic accounts of lower-middle-class life. Mind at the End of Its Tether, his final book, was published in 1945, one year before his death. I find my readings about the life of H.G. Wells absolutely fascinating, especially his autobiography wherein he states he was immensely unsure of himself throughout much of his life, and he regretted that his greatest hobby was playing what he termed the effeminate game of croquet. Even a quick reading by students of the author's life will surprise them. He felt a deep sense of both imperfection and incompleteness as he strove to write about universal interests, beauty, and truth and gained great fame as a writer of science fiction.
The War of the Worlds, the book, 1898
"The idea of treating time as a fourth dimension was, I think, due to an original impulse; I do not remember picking that up. But I may have picked it up, because it was in the air. If I did not then the bias was innate."2
Wells writes in his autobiography that he drew inspiration for his book from one specific scientific occurrence, Mars' close position to the Earth in 1894. This occurrence led to much observation and discussion amongst scientists, philosophers, and others of various pursuits. Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, reported seeing "channels" on Mars that year. At the beginning of the century which my unit addresses, the science fiction writer, H. G. Wells, gazed through the English sky at Mars, the planet he knew to be most like the planet Earth. Intelligent life might exist on the red planet, he surmised; how else might one explain the markings on the planet that look like canals? The idea for the book, The War of the Worlds, came to him. If the intelligent life on Mars were in peril, the planet dying, might not they look through their telescopes aimed at Earth? Might they be looking for a new place to live? The legendary book, The War of the Worlds, made H.G. Wells rich and famous. The book also fixed in the minds of earthlings just what might happen if Martians should invade the Earth. Wells writes of massively intelligent aliens from Mars touching down in Victorian England and threatening to destroy the civilized world. He sets his tale of extraterrestrial warfare in specific places near his home.
Three political themes are written about in the book: colonization, expatriation, and war in England. In The War of the Worlds, Wells draws some parallels between the Martians' strategies with the Earth's inhabitants and Britain's treatment of its colonies. For example, the British almost eliminated native Tasmanians when they turned Tasmania, an island located off the coast of Australia, into a penal colony. Perhaps the most important historical event that influenced Wells to write his book was Germany unification and mobilization of its military forces. I can only guess. Incorporating the history of England in the 1890's into your unit can be a starting point for a strong interdisciplinary unit with your social studies department.
Humanity's esteemed knowledge proved to be of little use. No one would have believed that an intelligence far greater than man's and yet as mortal as our own could exist. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger nor did they think of those older worlds, only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. At most, Earthlings fancied there might be humans on Mars, most likely inferior to us. Then came the great disillusionment. Fortunately, there exist three versions of The War of the Worlds that suit the reading levels of the majority of our students, as editors have written at least two abridged editions.
Adaptation #1, The War of the Worlds, the radio broadcast, 1938
On just another ordinary Sunday evening, October 30, 1938, my mother, Dorothy Kaczala, her parents and three brothers, sat by their old Philco Radio, awaiting the weekly ceremonious 8:00 p.m. beginning of the Charlie McCarthy Show on NBC. At 7:55 p.m., in CBS Studio 1, Orson Welles and other actors assembled in front of their microphones. The CBS announcer welcomed radio listeners to the presentation of H.G. Well's The War of the Worlds in the form of a play. This was clearly announced. The announcement was followed by the playing of ballroom dance music. Within a few minutes, the dance music was suddenly and unexpectedly interrupted by a "news report" from Princeton University. A Professor Pierson of the Princeton Observatory was anxiously reporting in a scientific, controlled manner, a series of unusual gas explosions on the planet Mars. The ballroom music then continued, and thus Orson Welles' hastily written but beautifully orchestrated script had already begun to cause the part of the Sunday evening radio audience to listen and react, beginning to panic and spellbound. My mother and her family heard their first news report when NBC took its first commercial break, about 12 minutes into the Charlie McCarthy Show. Welles was reporting that a huge, flaming meteorite had fallen on a farm in Grovers Mill, NJ, not far from where the Kaczalas lived. Grandpa Kaczala forced the family into the damp, dank coal cellar, where they stayed, in fear, all night. Gramps listened to the "news broadcast" and ran up and down the steps every couple of minutes to report to the family. (He neither changed the station nor checked the day's newspapers for a listing of the radio play on CBS.)
My wish is for my students to interview my mother on a speaker phone from my classroom about this very scary night in her life. After all, she was teenager at the time, just like they are now. I called her at her home in San Diego several weeks ago to have her tell me about the radio broadcast from her own perspective. Radio at that time, she said, was not just the major entertainment of the day; it was the news authority. The President was used to speaking to the American public through this media. The fact that her immigrant Ukranian parents were able to purchase a radio was a big deal, Mom said. Looking back into her memories, she remembers listening to the Charlie McCarthy Show until its first commercial break, when they switched from NBC to CBS. They then heard frantic voices from the station and then a report from Princeton University, about reporting a meteorite falling in a nearby town. Mom was allowed to hear nothing else of the report, although she begged to, as Grandpa rushed the four children and Grandma down into the coal cellar. (I was born in that house; I remember how dark and dank the cellar was, yet safe and secure. In 1938, coal heated the small house, coming up the one single grate in the living room. There was no indoor plumbing there until I was nine years old.) Her Uncle Nick and Aunt Millie ran down the street with their three children to crowd in the cellar too, for familial comfort in a time of grave danger. Gram had put up jars of rhubarb, corn, and pickles from her garden. The family lived on them that night, shivered, and prayed. Uncle Nick and Grandpa Kaczala said the Martians were attacking the Earth. Mom says she was in ninth grade at Ridgewood High School, and she immediately doubted what he said. How could folks be so gullible, I asked? She replied it was all in the timing. War clouds gathered in Europe, as people feared an immanent attack by Hitler's Germany; propaganda abounded. In addition, one of the actor's voices sounded to her just like that of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Scientists were all the time talking about the canals on the red planet of Mars, signifying the likely existence of life there. "Wouldn't you be petrified too?" she said.3
It is essential here to play the radio broadcast for your students. It is available in most public libraries. The ballroom music is an historic lesson in itself, and my students giggled and loved it. Set the historic scene for them, have them close their eyes and listen without comment to the Mercury Theatre performance of The War of the Worlds.
It lasts sixty minutes.
A short study of Orson Welles is most appropriate here, too, as your students, might continue to view him in his future theatre and film roles in later classes. Writing about himself at his earliest age, he publicly construed himself as "ACTOR, POET, CARTOONIST-AND ONLY TEN" in a press clipping. 4 He both courted and denounced the newspaper media in equal measure, while sensation-hungry newspapers meteorically advanced his popularity. Only his death, which provoked an unbelievable orgy of journalism, dissolved the co-dependency which Orson Welles and the newspapers seem to share. You might want to think about his most famous film, "Citizen Kane," and its relationship to the newspaper. In the future, your students may study his famous acting career, his brilliance, his many misgivings. You can plant the seed.
The following is a short interview with Orson Welles by reporter Kenneth Tynan:
- OW: I don't want any description of me to be accurate; I want it to be flattering. I don't think people who have to sing for their supper ever like to be described truthfully-not in print anyway. We need to sell tickets, so we need good reviews.
- KT: How do you reconcile that with-
- OW: For thirty years people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don't. Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.5
An ambitious, arrogant, and precocious producer, director, and actor at the age of 23, Orson Welles was already a radio personality, first gaining fame as the man of mystery known as "The Shadow" on the radio show of that name. (My mom's Kaczala family in New Jersey adored listening to this show too, mom says.) However, Welles was not yet the star he wished to become. Naming a new theatre after the radical magazine edited by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, "American Mercury," Welles and a financial partner wrote their plans for a new radio theater, the Mercury Theatre, in The New York Times on August 29, 1937. It would play to people who either had never been to the theatre at all or who had ignored it for a long time. Thus, creating a new and eager audience was foremost in his mind. As of Wednesday, October 26, 1938, there was no script for the Mercury Theatre's upcoming CBS Sunday evening 8:00p.m. radio show. He tossed a copy of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds on the table in front of the show's writers and demanded that, together, they write a script perfect for the night before Halloween.
Challenged by the reality that he had only 36 hours in which to write the script for Sunday night, Welles used his innate brilliance in order to attract a huge audience and newspaper publicity in one fail swoop. He modernized H.G. Wells' formal British language and placed the action close to the listeners, on a farm in New Jersey, to make it credible. He used Princeton University scientists as scientific sources and included news flashes for fake news bulletins in order to incite fear into the audience. Knowing that radio listeners relied on their sense of hearing, Welles was ready to deceive them with innovative sound effects. The script was written in a mere, amazing 36 hours.
Orson Welles' goal of inciting fear in the public came to fruition within 24 hours of the radio show: in Newark, N.J., more than 20 families rushed out of their houses with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to flee from what they believed to a gas raid. Five students at Brevard College in North Carolina fainted. A Pittsburgh man returned home to find his wife in a state of hysteria. Before he stopped her, she was about to swallow a household poison rather than die at the hands of the aliens. Thousands of Americans panicked upon hearing the broadcast. Meeting reporters afterwards, Orson Welles pretended he was sorry for that, but it's just what he hoped they would do. Did he break a law? If so, which one? Having become a national celebrity within the space of a week, his career took off. You can discuss the following issue with your students in various formats: Was Orson Welles acting responsibly when he broadcast the radio play? Should the media be held accountable for the public's reaction to a broadcast on radio or T.V.?
Adaptation #2, The War of the Worlds, the first film, 1953
"The moving image arrests its viewer inside motion; form this vantage we experience frames and bits and pieces of things as if they were fluid." 6
Film is a medium that engages its audience primarily as spectators; obviously, images are very powerful. Politicians and advertisers alike know that the viewed image is more powerful than words. I attempt to get that point across to my middle school students by teaching them an intensive unit on media literacy. Teenagers comprise one of the largest targeted audiences for products sold in the United States. The viewed image of film changes our lives and their lives, what we buy, whom we adore, the music and actions we adopt, the styles we wear, and our views of historical events, past, present, and future.
The first film adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds was produced by George Pal and directed by Byron Haskin. George Pal was renowned for his Puppetoon animation technique and for two live-action science fiction films. Cecil B. DeMille was due to direct the film when the rights were originally purchased but was not enamored by the subject matter and was pleased later on to hand over the job to Byron Haskin. The War of the Worlds was released in 1953 by Paramount Studios and won an Academy Award for special effects. These effects are my favorite feature of the film. This movie is appropriate for use in the middle school classroom, and it teaches not only the famous science fiction story but also the cinematic techniques of the era, the dress, religious and romantic conventions, scientific knowledge, and, of course, societal and political ideas. Therefore, it is a treasure for students. The movie is amazing and terrifying when one considers that, at the height of the Cold War, the 1950s viewer might just have replaced the Martians with Russians in their minds, in a direct assault to the planet where major cities are destroyed one after another. Neither humans nor the atomic bomb could stop The War of the Worlds Martians.
At my first of many viewings of this film, I was quite shocked to see The War of the Worlds set in California. I rented the VHS version, and it cracked and popped on the sound track. My DVD is excellent, and I've viewed it with excitement. A meteor lands in the hills outside a small town not far from Los Angeles. Dr. Clayton Forrester comes from a prestigious California university to investigate the meteor, which opens to reveal several deadly Martian machines whose weapons and defenses are unmatched by anything that man has known. This is a change in adaptation from the H.G. Wells book, wherein Dr. Forrester is a reporter, and the meteor lands in England. In the 1953 movie, in a nearby town, Dr. Forrester meets Sylvia Van Buren and her uncle Matthew Collins, a church pastor. There is a new religious overtone in this film which I found fascinating; to me, it seemed to form a sort of barrier between religion and science. A romance develops between Dr. Forrester and Sylvia, and I so appreciated its depth without a sex scene. Dr. Forrester's relentless search for Sylvia as he battles the frightened mobs of Los Angeles was memorable.
In my research at Yale, I've discovered facts about the film which have me totally fascinated. Orson Welles, being pressured into making this his first feature film, wanted no part of it. Two days into the filming, Paramount Pictures discovered that their filming rights to the novel were only for a silent version. This was resolved through the kind permission of H. G. Wells' estate. George Pal, the producer, did not know how to film Wells' Martian war machines on walking tripods, so he went with flying machines. The sound effects were created from three electric guitars playing backwards, and the sound of a Martian screaming after Dr. Forester hit it was a mixture of a microphone scraping along dry ice and a woman's scream played backwards. These sound effects became widely used stock sound effects after the film was released, and they are in use to this day.
Adaptation #3, The War of the Worlds, the second film, 2005.
The second film adaptation of The War of the Worlds was directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 2005, and it reflects the societal, political, historic era of its time, but it deviates so much from the original text that I cannot embrace it, although my seminar professor, Dudley Andrew, spoke to us of the validity of borrowing in adaptation from the cultural reservoir. How does viewing a film make us feel? What values come out? What are the qualities of the experience? I've viewed the 2005 adaptation several times, and the 1953 version remains much more to my liking. Taking into account the Martians are attacking California, not England, it still seems more faithful to the spirit of the original H.G. Wells text, and that is important to me. I cannot yet gauge my students' responses; they've all seen the Spielberg as they are very much into modern day cinema, but, with their continuing study of the history of cinema, they will hopefully glean the respective genius of filming in both decades. A great lesson might be for the students to tell how they would film it.
I think the Spielberg film deals with our current fears of terrorism, just as the 1953 film did with the Cold War. Buildings are collapsing; airplanes fall from the sky, and walls are lined with "missing" posters. There is a snowfall of ash and clothes that occurs during several scenes. The movie reminded me so much of my September 11, 2001, 7:15 a.m. viewing of the Today show, the exact time I should have been out the door to school. As the attacks were happening in front of me, I truly believed they might be unreal, another Orson Welles trick being played on the public. Within 30 seconds, I knew differently. Adapting The War of the Worlds text to modern society was logical, but Tom Cruise's family problems deviated too far from the text for my comfort level. However, my college roommate who lives in New York says it was reassuring to sit eating popcorn in a warm theatre in the city watching the movie with family and friends. She felt better equipped to process the terror and confusion of 9/11 even given Tom Cruise's personal problems. For her and her New York friends, the film was a cathartic therapy session.
Dr. Dudley Andrew spoke to the Yale film seminar group about a phenomenon in war films after the post Cold War era. As the United States no longer has an enemy, such as Japan or Russia, war movies are centered around the saving of someone. This is true in Saving Private Ryan, and it is also true in the second film adaptation of The War of the Worlds.
There is a good sense of realism in Steven Spielberg's masterful special effects, and we have moved into computer generated imagery combined with what I think is wonderful music. I missed not being taken into the original text quickly here, as we are in the 1953 film. Indeed, we first are introduced to Tom Cruise's life and quirks and his relationship with his ex-wife and boyfriend and his two kids. He appears irresponsible and hardly able to lead us through an alien invasion nightmare, a character whom I didn't want to root for at the end. The atom bomb of the 1953 film is not present; instead, Cruise eventually seems to succeed with a simple hand grenade, liberating his daughter from abduction/captivity, even though the world in modern times has 1,000+ times more firepower. There is much for our young students to listen to, watch, and judge as they grow in their ability to critique cinema. The teacher should remind the students that each of the two films exists in its own time.
My conclusions are that the characteristic thoughts and judgments we make are deeply rooted in the culture that surrounds us. The prevailing social conditions provide the context for our making decisions. Media affect our decisions greatly: text, radio, newspaper, and film.
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