The Illusion of Depth

Please note that this week's film has been rated  15   in the UK. Our previous film ( Fail Safe ) was a reflection of the ever-present threat of global nuclear armageddon that effectively defined the decades following the Second World War. The assumption was that all-out nuclear war was a virtual certainty; it was only a matter of time before those bombs began falling out of the sky. For the millions of people who had already lived through the horrors of Fascism, the Holocaust and the War itself, this was an exciting new kind of awful. But there was another group that experienced this era very differently. The end of the war had coincided with one of the largest population explosions in a generation, as all those surviving soldiers returned home and proceeded to do exactly what you think they would do after being away from home for so long. The Baby Boom (as it came to be called) was the post-war generation of young people who came of age in a world that (they were told) was con

Last week in our Halloween-themed film we saw Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre troupe destroy the world in front of a terrified radio audience. As one might expect, there was a great deal of soul-searching by the media in the days and weeks that followed. Some journalists were fascinated by the panic, some obsessed over the implications, and some were openly contemptuous of anyone gullible enough to believe that Martians were invading New Jersey. Hugh S. Johnson, a free-lance journalist (and former associate of President Roosevelt) wrote a particularly scathing diatribe in which he wryly noted that "there is no reason to believe that in Mars, or anywhere else, there are weapons that could devastate a State or two in fifteen minutes." He made this observation in November, 1938. He was partially correct. Such weapons   took a lot less than 15 minutes, and they  didn't come from Mars. They came from Manhattan. Before becoming a journalist, Hugh S. Johnson had been one of

No one ever disbelieved, in the last months of 1938, anything they heard reported to them over their radio sets. With infinite complacency, men went to and fro about their little affairs, serene in their assurance that everything the mass media told them about the world was generally true, accurate and sincere. Yet across the gulf of airwaves, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded the radio audience with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And on the 30th of October, 1938, came the great disillusionment. Invaders From Mars In case you haven't worked it out by now, I am of course paraphrasing The War of the Worlds , by H.G. Wells. Originally published in 1898, Wells' novel has become the template for all subsequent "alien invasion" stories. In fact, so many subsequent stories have been directly influenced by this one, a lesser author might have been tempted to sue for plagiarism. Happily, H. G. Wells wasn't as petty as so

Please note that this week's film is rated 12 in the UK, mostly for science fiction-style violence. When I launched our current series, I promised films that examine various aspects of contemporary society. All of the films I have screened thus far have been titles that anticipate future trends (sometimes by many decades). Of course no one involved in the making of those films knew just how prescient they were going to be, or if they were prescient at all. If society had happened to veer off in completely different directions, then the freak-show television programming of Network  or the fame hungry self-promotion of It Should Happen to You would look laughably dated today. As it happens, both film were closer to the mark than they could have predicted, but that's the problem with extrapolating the future; you have to stand and wait before you see how accurate (or otherwise) your ideas turn out to be. Hugo Gernsback in 1963, predicting that people would one day experience rea

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" -Overused philosophical canard "You don't understand the humiliation of it - to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable - that somebody is watching ..." -Tom Stoppard; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead "Enough about me, what did  you  think of my performance?" -Old Broadway joke About two years ago, my wife re-established contact with a childhood friend. They had been out of touch for about thirty years and (needless to say) had a lot of catching up to do. But the most complicated part of their new-found contact turned out to be explaining to her friend's 12-year-old daughter why they had been out of touch for so long. Being a child of the internet age, the girl assumed that there must have been some apocalypse-level falling-out for their friendship to have gone dark for three decades. Her mother had to explain that nothing sin