To dream some impossible tree sloth

For a lot of the new kids, 1950s science fiction is stilted, and dull, and perhaps those words could describe FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) if you were expecting constant laser tag and monster attacks, but a hundred viewings later and PLANET, for all its 50's patriarchal solemnity, still kicks ass. It just gets better, and its subtextual critique of its own patriarchal solemnity grows clearer. Based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, the film is uninhibitedly Freudian in a way few science fiction films of the time dared to be. The name itself holds all sorts of clues: Forbidden! Planet!

And who is doing the forbidding? Merely one of the driest and most patronizing of all patriarchy's authoritative voices, Walter Pigeon as the elusive Dr. Morbius. In elaborate dialogue that runs counter to most natural speaking patterns, Morbius lectures paternally, patiently, Disney-like, at nearly everyone he meets. He announces he "cannot be responsible for the well-being" of anyone who lands on Altaira, his private, remote, and most forbidden planet, and this is just where our lead saucer--helmed by Commander Leslie Nielsen (POLICE SQUAD)--is going to land.

Inquiring after a colony set up by the Bolero Fund years before, he's come out to see how the settlers are faring.  It's rare to have a movie start out in deep space, odder still to have earthlings piloting a flying saucer instead of the usual phallic rocket. Odder even still that a 1950s film bears a cold suspicion that private organizations will be colonizing and privatizing outer space, shades of Haliburton! Shades of ALIEN... and more ALIEN shades to come!

For Morbius, it seems, has found a groovy stash of ancient alien technology and doesn't want to share, like the Area 51 crashed saucer-hiders, like an acid dealer during a bad trip who decides "you aint ready" for this shit. "But Morbius, with his artificially expanded intellect, he's ready," notes Commander Nielsen, sarcastically.

Morbius, blind to his own amok tenure'd prof-style egotism, agrees that yes, he is ready: he took the Krell "brain boost" and survived the shock, but was then in a coma for "a day and a night." Having survived, he's in charge (in his boosted mind) and notes, "such portions of the Krell science that I deem suitable and safe, I shall dispense to earth."

Language like "portions" and "dispensing" perks up the ears of any dozing pharmaceutical enthusiast. How many grams in a portion and when will you please dispense it and should I wait an hour after eating and drink plenty of orange juice? The Krell "brain booster" is something than opens up whole new levels of Jamba Juice brain boost understanding, but can kill you too, so it's not too far from, say, an upstate ayahuasca weekend (the death in this latter case being of the ego, far more draining and terrifying than real physical death). 

Still, both the captain and his own doctor want to try it: "One of us must take that brain boost!" they tell each other, like competitive alpha males will. But it's the measurability-fetish that indicates this intelligence-enhancement is all left-brained denial, the butterfly pinned to the wall by science and expected to still be ephemeral. "You oughta see my new mind, it's up there in lights," the doc tells Leslie after he tries and it, sneaking away to do so. Is he speaking in the vernacular for the sake of his captain, or can he do no better for an analogy than the Bowery Boys-ish analogy of "up there in lights" to describe his new mind?

Either way for the doctor at least the brain boost is shown to be a liberator from the curse of intellectual showing off which makes Morbius's loyalty to his dry Wonderful World of Disney-style narration-style manner of speaking to be a strictly living in the past, man. Morbius may have "beheld the face of the gorgon and lived," but he's still a squaresville "philologist." Strictly nowhere, man. No grasp of the cosmic joke. That boost was wasted on him!

And yet, there is also in Morbius something of the Lacanian non du pere, with its implied understanding of the dualistic nature of prohibition and enjoyment. For in the end, Morbius is all talk when it comes to prohibition. He verbally forbids the captain to land his craft, forbids his hot daughter to go visit the spaceship and flirt with all the crew, but she does anyway and Morbius doesn't discipline her. Instead he listens to her swoon about boys and doesn't get all James Mason in LOLITA on her ass, which surprises and delights us. He listens attentively and withholds his opinion, hardly the actions of a typical 50s dad. And yet, almost to put on a show, his questioning and addressing her in the men's presence  becomes patronizing:  "Then my little girl never feels lonely or confined?" It's almost like he's posing as the 'anal father' when he's actually the wise sage and is just testing our hero's wooing mettle... like Sarastro in The Magic Flute!

As the forbidden daughter, Anne Francis is amazing: coyly innocent, yet hilariously knowing. If you've seen her in the Honey West TV shows (and you should) you know her voice dropped a smoker's octave and she could make that other broad with the surname West look bashful, so it's great to see her here kind of knowingly sending up the role of an innocent 1950s virgin as she teases the nervous, sexually frustrated and rather prudish Leslie Nielsen with her nudity in an outdoor swimming scene, or asks him "Why don't you kiss me like everybody else does?"

Yet another key element in FORBIDDEN's weirdness is the soundtrack: the electronic tonalities of Louis and Bebe Barron are awesome, but totally unmusical. They're random and abstract and never quite suited to the scene -- no orchestral swells or anything, just intensity of the mono-chromatic signal. When the invisible id monster approaches, the tonalities swell up slowly and strangely; when the danger sign is off and Robby and Alta are frolicking the music burbles like a fountain through a flanger. This atonal bizzaro 'music' both enhances and diffuses all tension as there's no  cliche-entrained expectations; there's no chintz or corn or bassoons or "paranoid" pizzicatos. The result is liberation,  a slowing down of expectations, allowing for an incredibly lyrical, relaxed quality in the home viewing experience. Whether from the indoor sets and crazy modern art sculptures (they'd be right at home on grandma's wall) and modular furniture, the movie is Acidemic in the way it illuminates the fundamental problem of western thinking in science and academia: the complete "blind side" to one's own inner demon --how all positions on issues are usually really only vain attempts to hide one's own warped desire from oneself. Our blind spots are synonymous with our inability to own up to them. The eye fills in gaps in sight and the brain covers its weak spots with camouflage and patriarchal bullying. Arguing with Morbius then becomes like trying to convince a Marxist professor... of anything. 

Adding to the spa-like fun is the leisurely goodwill and Bette Davis-ish sauce of Robby the Robot -- as he is voiced by a man who sounds just like, and is, one of the guys who do the voices for Rocky and Bullwinkle -- but is not Paul Frees! His deep manly voice is both familiar, reassuring and completely cool. And yet the drunken cook comic relief has to ask of the robot - "Is it a male or a female" and we're supposed to infer that this cook is horny enough to give it a whirl. In the end--even better--the cook and Robby become drinking buddies, with Robby jovially making our visiting astro-lush a whole mountain of "Rocket Bourbon" pints.  Robby also makes dresses for Alta. When she asks for a long dress to please the prudish captain, he replies "Thick and heavy?" as if he's a wizened old Shakespearean housemaid teasing his beloved charge. Both Ariel and Caliban in one Michelin-esque frame, Robbie is the ultimate in fifth business. 

There's another coded gay character in Oscar Madison (ala his momma's boy in THE LONG HOT SUMMER!) as the brown-nosing chief spark-plugger-inner. The camera makes a point of showing his complete lack of interest in Anne Francis' devastating hemline, instead eagerly but low-voicedly informing the captain that "I borrowed some solanite from your gyro stabilizers." Spock, who cares? There's a chick here! He doesn't even try to fake it the way, say, Sal in MAD MEN used to!

Last bit of weird 'impossible tree sloth' quality I need to mention is the film's odd pedigree: MGM is known for delivering heavy bourgeois morality, but here the studio seems to have tapped into some alternate universe of cool, sexually liberated science fiction. FORBIDDEN PLANET appears suddenly out of nowhere, as if it traveled back in time from 1967, with lovely Star Trek-pastel sets of red leaf plants, alien handwriting and long triangular doors; laser beams that make no sound and shoot little dashes of light that seem ridiculously, comically/ineffectually phallic as they dissolve tigers into wavy Disney lines. It's the driest anti-authoritarian parable we got, and maybe still the sexiest as well. I'll leave you with these kinky words from Morbius: "Young man my daughter is planning a very foolish action and she'll be terribly punished for it." O words, where are thy talons?