“Hypernormalization”—that is the single word I think would best describe 2025. To the best I understand, it is how nobodies like me continue to function in a world where there is a seismic change, especially when there atrocities happening around you, yet to continue to do your job, buy food, etc. It is the kind of compartmentalization we all do to a certain extent is less stressful times, but which takes on a new flavor in times like these.
I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about how I have had to do some logistical gymnastics (logistastics?) to function on a day-to-day basis. And, in seemingly every other movie I see from the first half of the 20th century, I see parallels to the time in which I write this. I didn’t expect to see any parallels in 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, and yet there is a flying saucer heading towards D.C. while the residents, workers and visitors there basically continue as if nothing is odd. A reporter even comments that there is “still a sense of normality”. So, people were hypernormalizing even then.
Mind you, everybody freaks the fuck out when the saucer actually lands. This happens on a baseball field, as if humans had conveniently provided designated saucer parking areas in advance. Military men create a wide circle around the perimeter of the craft. That there is a large group of curious civilians right behind these soldiers seemed like poor planning on the part of our armed forces. That the group of gawkers isn’t vastly larger beggars belief.
Out of the spaceship steps Michael Rennie. For this introduction to the people of Earth, he unwisely wears a suit which obscures his features, leaving the public to speculate as to what he looks like. And, if there’s one thing you don’t want humans to do, it is to start their imaginations going. He also pulls out what appears to be a weapon. Whatever it is, that is seems to be aimed toward the crowd prompts a loose cannon among the army men to shoot it out of his hand. Wounded and laying on the ground, Rennie says, “It was a gift for your president. With this, he could have studied life on other planets.” It would have been smarter of him to explain that beforehand.
I found it odd he brought the U.S. president a gift, and something that would give him and his country an advantage over the rest of the world. This is different than how Rennie regards the world in other ways, as he has arrived to deliver a message to representatives of each of the world’s nations, and to do so in person. When informed on the impossibility of arranging such a meeting, he says, “My mission here is not to solve your petty squabbles […] the very future of your planet is at stake.” The problem is technological advances have made the world a bit too big for its britches, and other planets have started to be alarmed.
For the time being, Rennie is put in a secured military hospital. Tests ran on him while there reveal he is essentially human, even if he is from somewhere at least 250 million miles away and has a life expectancy of at least 300 years. One of the physicians tells another, “He says it’s because their medicine is that much more advanced.” Without the slightest trace of irony, he offers the other doctor a cigarette while saying this.
Rennie will soon escape, though it isn’t revealed how he was able to circumvent America’s door lock supremacy. When one can travel to another planet via flying saucer, such concerns become moot. Whatever he does, it is presumably the same technique he uses to open the locked French doors at the townhouse of Sam Jaffe, as obvious surrogate for Einstein, and who is supposedly the smartest man on Earth. He is a receptive audience for Rennie after the spaceman has left a “calling card” on the blackboard, correcting a long equation the scientist has been working on for the longest time.
The visitor from another world didn’t even know about Jaffee until informed of him by young Billy Gray. He’s the son of Patricia Neal, and they live together in a boarding house where Rennie also takes a room. The alien has been able to pass as an Earthling because he stole the suitcase and clothes of a military official. For such a superior being, he has no hesitation in carelessly tossing the dry cleaning tag on the suit jacket, the litterbug.
Around the breakfast table at the boarding house, Rennie gets to hear some interesting points of view on the alien they do not realize is seating there among them. Frances Bavier (Aunt Bee from The Andy Griffith Show) owns the boarding house and she says, “In my opinion, he comes from right here on Earth. And you know what I mean…” Neal, on the other hand, is sympathetic, saying she believes the interstellar traveler would be scared and feel alone on a planet which is strange to them. This will endear her to Rennie enough that he will later trust her with something very important at a critical moment.
And she trusts him enough that she will allow him to watch Gray just the day after she first met him, so that she and boyfriend Hugh Marlowe can have some time together. One of the sights Rennie and Gray take in is Arlington, to visit the grave of Gray’s father. The visitor asks, “Did all those people die in wars?” He explains he is from a place where there aren’t any wars, and Gray says that’s a good idea. Given the movie was released only six years after the end of WWII, the anti-war sentiment was typical of the time. Alas, that sentiment would then shift again with the conflict in Korea starting not too much longer in the country’s future.
The most interesting part of the story is when Rennie arranges for a demonstration of his powers, something that will get the attention of everybody around the world, and without being destructive. For a half-hour, all machines will stop working except such essential services as airplanes currently in mid-flight and hospitals. I wondered if ambulances and police cars on their way to or from emergencies are exempt, but we don’t get those details. Jaffe had to convince Rennie to not use violent means to get the world’s attention, as Rennie believe violence “is the only thing you people seem to understand.”
What should have been simply been a way to get the world’s attention gets only bad attention from the government, which now decides Rennie must be captured dead or alive, and they have no qualms with it being the latter. But they also with have to contend with Gort, the robot which is one of the intergalactic policemen which has ensured peace across the planets which are now in fear of Earth. Though the Gort costume is obviously a rubber suit (or constructed of a similar material), the visor on the helmet is intimidating, as it raises slowly to reveal the death ray beneath. A justifiably legendary scene of suspense has Neal trying to disarm Gort by repeating a phrase which has worked its way so deep into the public consciousness that the origin is often forgotten: “Klaatu! Barada! Nikto!”
This movie is justifiably famous, and it is no surprise it was helmed by Robert Wise, in whose competent hands such disparate classics as The Andromeda Strain, The Sound of Music and The Haunting were made. Much of the lighting gives the picture the look of noir, and something about a fugitive on the run even gives the film the feel of noir, even if the man on the run is an extraterrestrial.
I normally smirk at the idea of flying saucers, but I can also adjust my expectations of a picture based on the era in which it was made. Fortunately, the special effects are solid, rendering a flying saucer as convincing as I believe can be done on the screen. I love the shadow it casts upon landing, and how that shadow distorts as it hovers over the landscape. The ship itself is impressive when it opens and closes, with a two-part walkway blending into the lower half well until extended, and the dome which is the top half somehow pulling apart into two halves from what appears to be seamless whole.
The score is also interesting, musical but still using the theremin to great effect. In fact, it uses two of these, one for higher frequencies and one for lower ones.
But what really makes The Day the Earth Stood Still succeed for me is the little human touches, and many of those are courtesy of Rennie, as somebody who is human but somehow not an Earth human. There are little touches of the world through his eyes, and he effectively conveys an almost childlike wonder at such mundane things as a music box and a flashlight. He’s even impressed by Gray’s train set, though he intends to one day tell the lad “about about a kind of train, one that doesn’t need any tracks.” So, not a train then, but I’m willing to cut a guy some slack when he has travelled a quarter of a billion miles to get here. After all, with this superior intellect, even Earth’s most superior door locking technology doesn’t stand a chance.
Dir: Robert Wise
Starring Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe, Billy Gray
Watched on 20th Century Fox UK blu-ray (region-free)