STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE 25.3

April 2003 | 25.3

Margaret Stetz

“A Breathtaking Ride!” “Creepy and Cool!” “. . . Mesmerizing!” [ellipses in original]. So proclaim the large-print quotations from reviews that are splashed across the reverse side of the printed cardboard slipcase for the 1996 The Island of Dr. Moreau, in its home-video release from New Line. The adjectives are both hyperbolic and non-specific; unmoored to any referents of plot, direction, or performance, they serve as atmosphere, rather than as information. They could be describing anything from a video game to a new attraction at a theme park. All that connects them to film—to any film—is the accompanying photographic collage of five stills; yet these stills are also peculiarly abstract and without ties to a discernible narrative. Certainly, they do not suggest the plot of Wells’s exercise in late-Victorian speculative fiction, let alone that of its most recent cinematic adaptation. The breathless exclamations and dynamic images are meant to convey a mood of excitement, rather than to explain what the videobuyer is supposed to find so exciting.

Quite different in aim and effect, however, is the first paragraph of text that follows:

Creature Workshop (Jurassic Park) creates the frighteningly real special effects.

Here all of the elements do have precise links, and they are to other films. And the presumed reason for excitement, as well as the incentive for buying this video, turns out to be name recognition—a variation on brand-name recognition of the sort that forms the foundation of modern shopping. The imagined consumer for this New Line production is someone who makes purchases on the basis of an acquaintance with the casts of recent big-budget movies in international release or, in the case of The Godfather, with those in well-publicized anniversary re-releases. The consumer in mind is also young—someone for whom the most desirable star attraction will be the male hottie, Val Kilmer. Thus the actor named first is Kilmer, although his actual screen time is relatively small. Marlon Brando, on the other hand—an older-generation figure, as well as an obese figure so physically unappetizing to the teenaged videobuyer that he must be elongated and thinned down in the frontside illustration—is relegated to the end of the list. The final sentence highlights the creator of special effects and links him to Jurassic Park, a previous international megahit meant to resonate particularly well with young audiences.

Only one name featured in this slipcase blurb is left unaffiliated and without its “tie-in”—that of H. G. Wells. Author of a novel described here as “best-selling,” but unidentified as to date, period, or place, Wells (1866-1946) has been brought into the aggressively current and geographically unindividuated world of global popular culture. His 1896 novel may have been a satirical, dystopic voyage-fantasy with direct application to a particular historical moment—a work dedicated to representing Victorian England, then at the height of its imperial success and smugness, as a nation of beasts, driven by sordid desires and bound by illogical religious dogma. But in this advertising copy, Wells’s book has been rendered “universal,” absorbed into an undifferentiated present, and stripped of cultural specificity. In the marketing of the video, Wells’s name and literary text have less commercial value than does the contribution of Stan Winston’s Creature Workshop. Neither teenaged consumers in the U. S., nor their English-speaking counterparts elsewhere in the world, are expected to care about the past or about so-called High Culture objects. Thus, the name of H. G. Wells matters far less than that of Val Kilmer.

More surprising, however, is the erasure of the film’s director, John Frankenheimer (1930-2002). His name appears only in the fine print, with that of other seemingly unimportant screen credits, such as costume designer and composer of the score. Known for a long and celebrated career that reached an early peak in 1962 with The Manchurian Candidate, Frankenheimer might have been expected to figure prominently as a marketable commodity. But the absence of his name and the emphasis instead upon bankable cast members is the first sign of what everyone knows who remembers the fate of the 1996 Island of Dr. Moreau: It was a commercial flop, and much of the blame was laid at the feet of its director. Although the film allegedly cost over forty million dollars to make, it returned a gross of less than twenty-seven million (www.thenumbers.com/people/directors/JFRAN.html).

Why was it so unprofitable? An aesthetics-driven answer—that it was a “bad” film killed off by its “bad” reviews—will not suffice. Many a production has received just as severe a critical drubbing, but has gone on to make money. Why didn’t that happen in the case of this big-screen version of H. G. Wells’s novel about a shipwrecked Englishman stranded on an imaginary island, the third such adaptation? I suggest that the film failed, because it was set up to do so. And its failure is a more general signifier, a kind of dead canary in the mineshaft, for the fate in the turn-of-the-twenty-first century, globalized marketplace of a particular genre: the film that has a distinctive political perspective and that tries to perform what critic Jane Tompkins calls “cultural work.” I borrow this last phrase from Ann Ardis, who has applied it to late-Victorian feminist novels of H. G. Wells’s time. As Ardis says, echoing Tompkins, the term “cultural work” refers “to the way works of fiction attempt to ‘redefine the social order’ by offering their readers a ‘blueprint for survival under a specific set of political, economic, social, or religious conditions’”; “literary texts were evaluated in the 1880s and early 1890s as ‘agents of cultural formation,’ not as works of art whose formal complexity was to be admired” (29). In other words, late-Victorian fictions were regularly conceived, received, and appreciated or reviled as political interventions. Certainly, Wells’s 1896 allegorical novel was just such an agent of cultural formation and reformation. It held up the mirror of allegory, inviting English readers to recognize their island as merely an Island of Beast People. It attacked, moreover, the Christian belief system that underpinned their arrogant delusions of being little less than angels.

One year before the publication of The Island of Dr. Moreau, Wells had launched a new genre: the “scientific romance.” But the term was a misnomer, or at least an incomplete description of works such as The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and the 1896 The Island of Dr. Moreau. All four utilized traditional elements of romance (adventure) narratives and set these within a modern framework of scientific exploration. Yet the drive behind such “grafting,” to borrow a word from Dr. Moreau, lay not in a wish to entertain, but to warn and instruct. Following the lead of his early idol, Thomas Carlyle, Wells deployed fantasy for didactic ends, to make his contemporaries see a vision of their downward course that would not be visible otherwise. (For more about Carlyle’s influence, see Stetz, 9-14). Thus, Moreau functioned not only as speculative fiction, but as a political jeremiad about the current social ills of late-Victorian England. These conditions were reflected fantastically, in the cruelty, violence, and indifference to one another’s sufferings that overwhelm an imaginary island of Beast People and their self-proclaimed “masters.” Wells’s text demanded that its English audiences acknowledge—and I employ deliberately this play on upper-class British phrasing—their own “beastly” behavior as empire-builders and as rulers who had paid no attention to the pain of those they were exploiting. H. G. Wells disavowed capitalism at home and imperialism abroad; he was shocked by the disjuncture between the Christian rhetoric of those who administered England’s empire and their inhumane conduct not only toward conquered races in foreign lands, but toward London’s poor. At the conclusion of The Time Machine, Wells’s narrator had held out to readers the alternative ideal of “mutual tenderness” (152) as England’s only possible salvation. By 1896, however, despair was already beginning to replace hope, as Wells watched his earlier message go unheeded. Moreau became, therefore, a harsh warning to English readers to reverse their political course, before their Island met the same end as Moreau’s, with a destructive population obliterating itself.

In terms of narrative design and structure, the text that Wells issued and that twentieth-century filmmakers inherited was a mess. It drew upon such creaky, eighteenth-century devices as the posthumously discovered journal. It was framed and introduced clumsily by two narrators. Midway through, it required a static, chapter-long monologue, called “Dr. Moreau Explains,” that stopped the action cold. And it relied upon the hoary Gothic conventions of imprisonment within locked rooms, secret sites of torture, and a desperate chase through a forest (which it employed not once, but twice). Wells’s Moreau, in fact, can scarcely be called a “novel,” if we associate that term with realism or with psychologically-motivated plotting. Yet neither its lack of narrative coherence nor its piling on of fantastic and grotesque developments had ever been a barrier to popularity. From the start, it was valued for what it was: a work—much like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (to which Wells explicitly paid homage)—of social critique and political intent, a satire with multiple targets, and a polemic with a variety of arguments to make, using the loose structure of a voyage to the unknown as a way to bring the reader back discomfortingly to the known. Its early critical reception was mixed, because its tone was so scathing and its objects of opprobrium so diverse. As the reviewer for an Anglican weekly, wrote in 1896, “Sometimes one is inclined to think the intention of the author has been to satirize and rebuke the presumption of science; at other times his object seems to be to parody the work of the Creator of the human race, and cast contempt upon the dealing of God with His creatures” (Parrinder, ed. 53). Yet, despite their initial sense of affront, critics acknowledged what Wells himself asserted in 1897—that this was a serious work and not “a mere shocker” (qtd. in Bergonzi 26). Wells used his crowded, unshapely narrative to assault the whole spectrum of moral certainties that underpinned Victorian political enterprises; as Darko Suvin says, the novel “turns the imperial order of Kipling’s Jungle Book into a degenerative slaughterhouse, where the law loses out to bestiality” (27).

But what of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Hollywood filmmaking? Can its products today be recognized and appreciated as similar works of “cultural formation”? Can these, too, achieve popularity by addressing a particular society’s ethical issues, rather than by adhering to a predictable formula, such as that of the action flick? Not, it would seem, in the world of youth marketing, where nothing beyond the range of an adolescent’s interests is allowed, and not in the environment of global marketing, where only “universal” stories (especially those dependent upon visuals alone) sell. As Fredric Jameson argues, the economic impact of globablization upon cultural objects such as films has meant “the rapid assimilation of hitherto autonomous national markets and productive zones into a single sphere,” resulting in “a picture of standardization on an unparalleled new scale” (57). I would assert that the charges of confusion, lack of compelling storytelling, absence of credible plotting or realistic characterization, and reliance on jarringly ironic touches bordering on “campiness”—all of which were leveled against John Frankenheimer’s Moreau—say more about the climate of reception and about current hostility to the genre of speculative art ( a genre inherited from Wells) than about the film itself.

More than fifteen years ago, cinema scholar Robin Wood noted a shift during the corporate-dominated 1980s—the disappearance of a kind of Hollywood film that had been possible in the 1970s: the “incoherent text” that is “interesting,” because “the ordering of experience [in its narrative] has been visibly defeated” (47). Wood praised 1970 films, such as Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, that opened up space for the viewer. Their “incoherence” illuminated “the cultural assumptions” of society, which “have a long history [and contain] . . . accumulated strains, tensions, and contradictions” (47). Such ambitious films invited many kinds of reflection, including political analysis. But they were, according to Wood, already gone by the first years of the Reagan administration, along with the climate in which they could be appreciated. Frederic Jameson echoes Wood’s pessimistic conclusion that global consumerism has meant “the death of the political” in cinema (62). What was true in the 1980s is all the more so now.

Earlier, I stated that The Island of Dr. Moreau was set up to fail. In fact, it was John Frankenheimer who was set up to suffer that failure, when he was called in during production at New Line to replace the film’s orginal screenwriter and director, Richard Stanley. In a conversation with Gerald Pratley, Frankenheimer records what happened after he took over: “When I came on the film it was obvious that the screenplay was weak. No one seemed to know what kind of film they wanted: science fiction, a parody, a tale of horror, a condemnation of science misused? I re-read the original story and it seemed very clear to me that H. G. Wells had written a moral fable and so a moral fable is what I decided to make. . . . I feel that what we ended up with was a pretty faithful interpretation of what Wells was saying” (266). But to produce a faithful interpretation of Wells’s perspective was surely not why Frankenheimer was brought on board. Over the course of three adaptations, Moreau had been dragged ever farther from its original source. Erle C. Kenton’s 1933 The Island of Lost Souls introduced romantic melodrama in the form of a love triangle for the male protagonist. Don Taylor’s 1977 Island of Dr. Moreau pulled the narrative even further from its roots as a clash of ideas and as a mirror of contemporary politics, into the realm of the conventional mad-scientist horror film. (This view is supported by Thomas Renzi, who concludes that “Taylor’s film deviates more from Wells than does the 1933 film” [82].) As for the 1996 version, the theatrical trailer tells the tale of what the studio bosses hoped for, in hiring John Frankenheimer. It packages Moreau as just what the video slipcase promises: a “sci-fi thriller,” loaded with special effects and violence.

At various points in his television and film career, Frankenheimer had been associated with “thrillers,” including the 1966 sci-fi film, Seconds. No doubt the president of New Line assumed that Frankenheimer would deliver a simple thriller and action movie, evacuated of other content (see Pratley 266). But this was a misreading of his interests—indeed, of his sense of mission—as a filmmaker. As Frankenheimer said to Charles Champlin in 1995, “I think it’s harder and harder for a director like me to keep functioning in the Hollywood we live in today because most of the executives who make decisions don’t really know what a director does” (183). Although, in a 1969 conversation, Frankenheimer demurred at the suggestion that he was as an activist artist, saying, “I am primarily a film director and not a social reformer,” he nevertheless insisted that “Without being pretentious, I think you have a special responsibility when making films . . . [to] do the things that you believe should be done” (Pratley 94). He went on, moreover, to assert that “there is no such thing as an unpolitical man. You have to take a stand in life” (95).

New Line productions was hoping for a Moreau that it could market as an action thriller. Frankenheimer, however, had never defined himself as a maker of action flicks. He told Gerald Pratley adamantly, “I don’t think I’ve ever done an action picture except for The Train and Grand Prix. You might call them action pictures, but . . . like my other films, they are also dramas” (263). Frankenheimer, too, was a foolish choice for a studio out to capitalize on teenaged male spectators’ taste for explicit violence. He had made his feelings on the subject clear to Pratley: “I think it is unacceptable in movies and should not be tolerated. People use violence for violence’s sake, and I think it’s totally wrong” (72); “I have tried to avoid unnecessary violence in my films even though some of them have been about violent events. . . . I don’t believe in violence for the sake of exploitation” (81). Indeed, he had thought carefully about this, admitting, “I can look at gruesome sights and it doesn’t affect me. . . . As a filmmaker, I have to be very careful how I depict painful and violent scenes. I have to watch myself, because I know this about myself. I know also that I’m capable of tremendous violence, which is why I’m not a violent man” (112-13).

His adaptation of Wells’s text began and ended with two different montages that embodied visual meditations upon violence as a force carrying the potential for both creativity and destruction. Neither set of images corresponded to particular scenes or commentary in the 1896 “scientific romance.” Yet Frankenheimer may be justified in claiming to be a “faithful” interpreter, at least of the spirit of Wells’s fantasy; for both works, a century apart in time, are more interested in offering critical perspectives upon current-day questions than in producing thrills and chills. The 1996 Moreau argues for the impossibility of transcending violence. It castigates those who, whether through social or genetic engineering, might attempt to banish it, as well as those who might discount its importance, when framing their notions of human community. In Frankenheimer’s view, anyone who imagines that a permanent condition of peace (either at the individual or the state level) is an achievable reality, rather than a utopian dream, deludes himself. At the film’s conclusion, the protagonist’s voiceover says directly that this account of the doomed efforts to enforce an imperialistic dictatorship of peace is “a warning to all who would follow in Moreau’s footsteps.”

The opening montage of the title sequence employs rapid cutting between shots of stormy skies, bolts of lightning, extreme close-ups of human eyes, animal eyes, and animal teeth, fields of plants parting before an unseen force, human fetuses, as well as magnified views of cells dividing and single-celled creatures swimming and colliding, all to effect a sense of violence as “natural”—inherent, pervasive, and allied with scenes and sites of reproduction, consumption, and creation. After this deliberately jarring sequence comes a high angle shot of a seemingly stable raft drifting in what is identified as the Java Sea—a lone object afloat within immensity that recalls the image of the single cell isolated on a laboratory slide. This raft, too, immediately becomes the scene of a violent struggle that is not creative, but destructive—yet part of the cycle of what is being constructed as “natural”—as two human survivors fight, fall overboard, and provide a shark’s dinner underwater. Humans and animals are one; both are part of what is defined here as “nature”—an impersonal, powerful system to which conflict and violence are endemic. After the remaining inhabitant of the raft is rescued by a passing boat, we learn that he is an Englishman who was on a mission to promote lasting political harmony before his plane crashed,. As he tells his American rescuer, “I’m working on an assignment for the United Nations. I’m working on the Peace Settlement.”

The rest of the film will deepen the ironies and emphasize the futility of any such projects, whether political, religious, or—in the case of Dr. Moreau’s attempts to remove the genetic imprint for aggression—surgical and biological. Before long, this man of peace will take up a gun and nearly use it on Moreau. The animals themselves will kill off one another, as well as Moreau and his American assistant, even though supposedly cured through gene-splicing of any desire to attack and though brainwashed with a theological system that emphasizes their unity as the “children” of Moreau, “The Father.”

The film’s closing montage is accompanied with a voiceover by the protagonist, who (as in Wells’s novel) has returned from Moreau’s Island to so-called civilization and (like Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver) has found each location to be a mirror of the other: “I look around me at my fellow man. . . . And I am reminded of some likeness to the Beast People, and I feel the animal is surging up in them.” Noting the “unstable” combination of beast and human in all around him, Frankenheimer’s protagonist says, echoing a line from H. G. Wells’s text, “I go in fear.” The brief and unidentified visual images that Frankenheimer has chosen for this rapidly-cut sequence are from global news footage— glimpses not just of police beatings, military attacks upon civilians, and other violations of human rights, but also of a stadium filled with fans in aggressive motion during what is clearly an American sports event. Social violence, it would seem, is explicitly an American phenomenon, too.

Indeed, despite asserting his faithfulness to Wells, Frankenheimer has Americanized this Moreau from start to finish. His adaptation is not a literal one; it does not reproduce Wells’s assault upon the British Empire of the 1890s. Instead, the 1996 film “updates” it by bringing Wells’s jaundiced perspective into a new political context. Frankenheimer criticizes the dominant culture of his own day and casts a cold eye on the supposed glory of the current world superpower. His range of targets is broad, seemingly scattershot, yet clearly grounded in deep personal prejudices and convictions. These include his lasting disgust with the Vietnam War. (The site of Wells’s narrative has been moved from its original location off Callao, near Peru, to the Java Sea—thus, to Southeast Asia, the scene of America’s disastrous exercise in imperialism). The U. S. military as a whole comes off badly here, invoked through visual allusions in the army-fatigue-like garb of Moreau’s assistant, who drives what appears to be an army jeep. But the film also looks askance at drug culture, fandom and celebrity worship, reproductive technology, and—in what is for Frankenheimer an uncharacteristic streak of conservative backlash—such progressive American causes of the 1990s as multi-culturalism, feminism, and the elimination of homophobia. (This surprisingly conservative strain is, however, also present in Wells’s 1896 text, which Heather Schell has called “reactionary” in it is representations of race, gender, and sexuality [30].) Most of all, though, the 1996 film builds upon Wells’s parodies of Christian rituals and rhetoric to emphasize Frankenheimer’s personal anger over the Roman Catholic Church’s ongoing attempts to rein in the independence of American Catholics. Its viciously satirical image of a grotesque white-robed figure, called “Father,” riding his Popemobile, is just what one might expect from a director who told Charles Champlin that, during his youth, “I’d been deeply religious, really deeply religious. I had wanted to be a priest . . . [but] I began to break away from the Catholic Church” (4). In general, there is no harsher screen treatment of organized religion than in the work of ex-believers.

But does this film’s address of a wide spectrum of American political and cultural issues, in a variety of registers from the suspenseful to the comic, mean that Moreau is “confused,” as it was often called on its release? I would argue instead that such criticism signals a climate of reception hostile to any film that breaks out of the narrow genres permitted by youth-marketing and global-marketing. The 1996 Moreau is no more or less a polemic, touching upon a range of current-day topics, than was H. G. Wells’s 1896 fantasy or Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satirical hodgepodge, Gulliver Travels. Wells’s and Swift’s efforts have been brought into the canon; Frankenheimer’s has been dumped in the can. But as the director himself said, all too presciently, in 1992, “Hasn’t everything come down to fast food? It’s all Macdonalds and Wendy’s, including the subject matter in many movies. People are looking for short cuts, they don’t like to read, and we live in a very illiterate society brought up on television and music videos. They don’t read any more, so short cuts get their attention” (Pratley 223).

The latest short cut is an effort, on numerous Internet sites featuring film discussions, to re-label Frankenheimer’s Moreau a “cult classic.” Professional critics paved the way in 1996 for this later process of devaluation, which masquerades as a form of appreciation. In the Washington Post, for instance, Richard Harrington had suggested snidely, at the time of the film’s release, “Like Moreau’s experiments, something went wrong with the film, but the results are. . . in unintended ways, enjoyable” (D6), while the Barbara Shulgasser had written in the San Francisco Examiner that “The Island of Dr. Moreau is exactly the kind of terrible movie that becomes legendary for its absurdity . . . [and] 20 years from now this miserable excuse for a movie will be . . . a classic” (D1). To repackage the film now as a mere “cult” commodity, for gloating ridicule, is to reduce it to the status of trash entertainment— to evacuate it of political import and of the danger created by work that embodies challenging, unflattering perspectives with a specific application to American viewers.

Consumerism, as Fredric Jameson has said, is “the mode of daily life in which all our mass culture and entertainment industries train us ceaselessly day after day,” and whatever goes down most widely and quickly is also most profitable (64). But speculative art—especially when it contains political allegory that refers back to ourselves—is demanding and often difficult to swallow, just as Wells’s text was for his contemporaries. I hope that my essay has suggested why we should resist attempts to bring a work such as Frankenheimer’s The Island of Dr. Moreau into the fast-food consumerist world and to render it easily and universally digestible.

Ardis, Ann. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers U P, 1990.

Bergonzi, Bernard. “The Early H. G. Wells.” The Critical Response to H. G. Wells. Ed. William J. Scheick. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995. 25-28.

Champlin, Charles. John Frankenheimer: A Conversation. Burbank, CA:Riverwood, 1995.

Harrington, Richard. “It’s All in the Genes: Brando’s Mad ‘Moreau.’” Washington Post 23 Aug. 1996: D1+.

Jameson, Fredric. “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue.” The Cultures of Globalization. Ed. Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1998.

“John Frankenheimer.” The Numbers [film box office data website]. 29 May 2001. <http://www.thenumbers.com/people/directors/JFRAN.html>.

Parrinder, Patrick, ed. H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1972.

Pratley, Gerald. The Films of Frankenheimer: Forty Years in Film. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh U P, 1998.

Renzi, Thomas C. H. G. Wells: Six Scientific Romances Adapted for Film. Metuchen, NJ, and London: Scarecrow, 1992.

Schell, Heather. “Man-Eating Wives of the 1890s.” Journal of the Eighteen Nineties Society. 26 (1999): 23-31.

Shulgasser, Barbara. “‘Island’: Brando Washed Up.” San Francisco Examiner 23 Aug. 1996: D1+.

Stetz, Margaret Diane. “Visible and Invisible Ills: H. G. Wells’s ‘ScientificRomances’ as Social Criticism.” Victorians Institute Journal. 19 (1991): 1-24.

Suvin, Darko. “Wells as the Turning Point of the SF Tradition.” Critical Essays on H. G. Wells. Ed. John Huntington. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. 23-33.