TIME TRAVEL - and beyond!
I've been able to "veg up", recently, watching two movie versions of H.G. Wells', "The Time Machine." The first was the 2002 version, the time-lapse and Morlock animation being directed by the great grandson of H.G. Wells. It also had a 42-years-older Alan Young, (briefly appearing as a flower salesman), who had a larger role in the 1960 version. First, I will say that this movie did not deserve the something-like 29% favourability rating, by rotten tomatoes or whomever. I would give it somewhere between a C and a B-. It is a darkly whimsical and sometimes nonsensical variation on the spirit of Well's famous book. Being made in 2002, it went overboard with the scary monster animation but, since it was made in 2002, it still had a modicum of story and character-building. However, it departed from some important ideas in the book, like the significance of war on human decline, or, why did the main character WANT to move ahead in time? And why did most of the actors have crooked faces?
Next came the 1960 version, which adhered better to the book, and to Well's ideas, but which was more like a bad episode of the original Star Trek. (In fact, this movie might have helped inspire that Star Trek, including, as it did, a guy with a Scots accent. Alan Young, aka the Charlie Chaplin of TV, and the owner of Mister Ed, was actually born in Scotland). Not sure, but it looked like Perry Mason was also part of the cast - ?!
An interesting think about Star Trek... You had Scotty, and also McCoy - a Scottish name. And "Kirk" is probably Scottish. Otherwise, the rest of the characters represent the diversity of Earth, like Black Uhuru and the Ruskie. Does this predominance of Scots represent the spreading of Scottish Undustrial Revolution / Enlightenment to the rest of the Uiverse? Or does it mean that Roddeenbury was Scottis, himslef? I don't know if Roddenbery was Scottish, but look at this. Hmmmm...!
In this 1960 version, where humans evolved into evil morlocks and dumb Swedes, (the Eloi), the idea that part of humanity had become conditioned to fleeing into fallout shelters, any time they heard sirens, was expert. I don't recall, from the book, if this idea came from Wells. The book was published in 1895, so probably not.
But war was an important theme to Wells, who wrote, "War of the Worlds," as pre-WW1 xenophobia overtook Britain, while less fictional books by other authors came out, warning of the coming belligerent Germany, with yet no real hard evidence to back them up. Rather like today's paranoia over China, by some in the USA. It's all about how empires tend to sense the rise of new, challenging empires. Subconsciously.
By the way, the 2002 version sometimes reminded me of Spielberg's, "War of the Worlds." Interestingly, Spielberg partly modelled that rednition of H.G. Wells', "War of the Worlds," on the rise of German NAZIism and it's consumptive persecution of Jews. So, everything comes back around, in time. It soemtimes puzzles me, how writers like Wells and Verne could come up with such amazing, fantastic books, all so relevant to now. And I came up with this answer:
1 - They were rich and had time on their hands, and they knew a lot of important people. 2 - Of course they were curious geniusues. 3 - Works such as these had never been done before - it was an open season field day. 4 - Much of the time, they simply extrapolated from real life. For example, in War of the Worlds, Well's introduces the idea that the aliens die from some Ertly virus, or such. Well, how different is that to soldiers dying of smallpox, or such, upon arriving at some insulated, island-country? Earth Island.
It is interesting to me that Wells wrote about time travel decades before Einsteins theories came out, although the main character in the 2002 version of, "The Time Machine," supposedly was in touch with Einstein.
Speaking of killing all the Jews, there are racial undercurrents to these movies and the book, "The Time Machine." First of all, wells got his idea of the Morlocks, a subterranean race of devolved humans, from early ideas of Homo Neanderthal, who was assumed to be stupid and everything else bad. Because they had big brow ridges, and so on. (In fact, Neandertal actually had brains larger than our own).
Following Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen argued the bones represented an ancient modern human form;[27][108][112][113] Schaaffhausen, a social Darwinist, believed that humans linearly progressed from savage to civilised, and so concluded that Neanderthals were barbarous cave-dwellers.[27] Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen met opposition namely from the prolific pathologist Rudolf Virchow who argued against defining new species based on only a single find. In 1872, Virchow erroneously interpreted Neanderthal characteristics as evidence of senility, disease, and malformation instead of archaicness,[114] which stalled Neanderthal research until the end of the century.[27][112]
See Neanderthals in popular culture. However, it seems that Neandertals might indeed have been deep cave, or underground-dwellers, and may have been more noctturnal than Sapiens. These remain hypotheses. In any event, Neanderthals were clearly not the violent beasts as depicted, especially, in the 2002 movie.
FYI, Jews don't have an especially high amount of Neandertal genes. But there has been generally antisemitic speculation that Jews derived from Neandertals, and even are non-human, in some dark circles. I have no idea if Wells meant to convey, or might have been imagining, that Morlocks represented throw-back Jews. It is possible, because antisemitism has had persistent sway throughout history, and often seems to be entangled with war. I don't know. Wells does seem to say that there is no such thing as clear good versus evil, and does paint a not so favourable picture of the seemingly idillic Eloi, as well.
In the 2002 version of, "The Time Machine," I noticed, the good people, the Eloi, were mainly black, and the king of the morlocks was uber white. The eloi were not as docile and ignorant as depicted in the 1960 version - in fact, they were just wonderful. They lived, impossibly, in upside-down wooden tent-cups, in peace and harmony, while beautiful African music played.
"What is this all about?" I thought. Was this a subliminal message that white people are the problem, and the est way to evolve is to return to Africa's Garden of Eden? Yes, I think it was. Because, around 2002, there was a lot of that feeling going around. Whoopi Goldberg, Morgan Freeman and The Lion King were the wise souls who would lead us into the light, towards greater compassion and purity.
I didn't mind that undercurrent in the 2002 version. Nobody has a monopoly on wisdom. Every race has something to offer. Just so long as all races are represented. And, apparently, the blond race is who was represented in the 1960 version. Yes, in that version, any human species who evolves becomes blonde, whether they be Eloi or Morlock. There was not one black person in this movie. But the devolved Morlocks didn't seem to represent black people, as they had long blond hair, but maybe they didn't represent anything. What we do know is that the idea of everyone evolving to be blond is anti-scientific.
The Eloi did represent the good part of humanity getting lazy and stupid, much like Americans in general. I think that this 1960 version better represented the idea from Wells that both sides of human nature are needed, not just the dark and not just the dumb Swede. You know, if you take either aspect of our nature too far in one direction, you get fascism anyway. Either way.
Here's an interesting quote from Wiki, regarding Well's book, "The Shape Of Things To Come":
As noted by Nathaniel Ward,[3] The Shape of Things to Come was published two years after Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In both works, a war leaves the world in ruins, a self-appointed elite takes over, rebuilds the world and engages in social engineering to refashion human society. Wells notes that as Huxley, "one of the most brilliant of the reactionary writers, foretold of them, [the leaders of the Dictatorship of the Air] tidied up the world".
The crucial difference is the society envisioned by Huxley is highly hierarchical, with intelligent "Alphas" on top and moronic "Epsilons" at the bottom, Huxley arguing that a society composed purely of the assertive and competitive "Alphas" would dissolve into chaos and all-out fighting. It was that vision that Wells believed would cause Huxley to be remembered by posterity as a "reactionary writer". Much of Shape of Things to Come is devoted to demonstrating that given time, an elite with control of world education can make such a society of intelligent and assertive "Alphas" harmonious and functional, without an underclass.
Mind you, "The Time Machine," is, like most Wells books, a dystopian look into the future. It says, "What would happen if...?" So, apparently, this book says that, if we lose touch with our Alpha side, then our base, Id side will take over. And so it is the Morlocks who become the Alpha controllers, feeding off of the Eloi. So, maybe Wells was partly racist. But, actually, that was a natural view, back then, when Freud and Jung were coming up with the idea of the base nature of man in psychological terms. And, empire was pushing hard to overcome rising entropy. War was a major obstavle to the balance and perfection of world Order, thus the idea of the final war to end all wars, which turned out pretty bleak.
If it gives you any comfort, Alex Jones has long thought that both Wells and Huxley were as evil as evil can be. Wells was a, "Fabien Socialist," and Huxley a, "Eugenicist." I take anything anybody, especially Jones, says with a grain of salt. Jones has probably read more history than anyone reading this post. But, history has always been about good groups versus bad groups, and so anyone can project any beliefs into history and come out feeling vindicated.
But, if Wells is interpreted as a Fabien Socialist, then he may have thought that, since the State isn't "withering away, as Marx had projected, then maybe war or revolution would be necessary to usher in the new paradise. He certainly grappled with war in most of his works. I don't know. But this ideological attitude, one shared admittedly with many on the USA far left, is contrary to the idea that capitalism and popular choice will bring about progress. But both views share some degree of "Alpha" bias.
Huxley, apparently, had a decidedly more grim view of progress. Something to think about.
One revellation I had, from the 2002 version, was that there seems to be an archetype or stock character, which may be referred to as, The Creepy Old Wise Guy, (TCOWG). There was no kind of the Morlocks in the 1960 version, but in the 2002 version, the Uber-Morlock was a famous actor made uber white and creepy smart and sadistic, at the very apex of the movie. Everything pivotted on dealing with this asshole.
It occurred to me that this sort of character pops up in many m ovies, mainly as the arch-villain. He shows up in the 2008 version of, "Journey to the Centre of the Earth," (Peter Fonda), in Apocalypse Now, in Batman movies, in Doctor Strange movies, in Spiderman movies, just everywhere. So often, he is white, but he could be any race, or even any gender. It depends on what the writer feels like doing. But, I am going to add this archetype to my notebook.
Another observation: It seems that most H.G. Wells movies, (so assumedly the books), find resolution through blowing things up.
(Here's a bad 1978 version of, "The Time Machine"). For more casual adventures in time travel, check out, "The Time Traveler's Wife," "About Time," "Interstellar," and others. A recent post of mine touches on UFO's being from ourselves in the year 8100. And, here is a sciency look into the possibility of warp drive - https://www.universetoday.com/155995/the-dream-of-faster-than-light-ftl-travel-dr-harold-sonny-white-and-limitless-space/
Click to viewNext came the 1960 version, which adhered better to the book, and to Well's ideas, but which was more like a bad episode of the original Star Trek. (In fact, this movie might have helped inspire that Star Trek, including, as it did, a guy with a Scots accent. Alan Young, aka the Charlie Chaplin of TV, and the owner of Mister Ed, was actually born in Scotland). Not sure, but it looked like Perry Mason was also part of the cast - ?!
An interesting think about Star Trek... You had Scotty, and also McCoy - a Scottish name. And "Kirk" is probably Scottish. Otherwise, the rest of the characters represent the diversity of Earth, like Black Uhuru and the Ruskie. Does this predominance of Scots represent the spreading of Scottish Undustrial Revolution / Enlightenment to the rest of the Uiverse? Or does it mean that Roddeenbury was Scottis, himslef? I don't know if Roddenbery was Scottish, but look at this. Hmmmm...!
In this 1960 version, where humans evolved into evil morlocks and dumb Swedes, (the Eloi), the idea that part of humanity had become conditioned to fleeing into fallout shelters, any time they heard sirens, was expert. I don't recall, from the book, if this idea came from Wells. The book was published in 1895, so probably not.
But war was an important theme to Wells, who wrote, "War of the Worlds," as pre-WW1 xenophobia overtook Britain, while less fictional books by other authors came out, warning of the coming belligerent Germany, with yet no real hard evidence to back them up. Rather like today's paranoia over China, by some in the USA. It's all about how empires tend to sense the rise of new, challenging empires. Subconsciously.
By the way, the 2002 version sometimes reminded me of Spielberg's, "War of the Worlds." Interestingly, Spielberg partly modelled that rednition of H.G. Wells', "War of the Worlds," on the rise of German NAZIism and it's consumptive persecution of Jews. So, everything comes back around, in time. It soemtimes puzzles me, how writers like Wells and Verne could come up with such amazing, fantastic books, all so relevant to now. And I came up with this answer:
1 - They were rich and had time on their hands, and they knew a lot of important people. 2 - Of course they were curious geniusues. 3 - Works such as these had never been done before - it was an open season field day. 4 - Much of the time, they simply extrapolated from real life. For example, in War of the Worlds, Well's introduces the idea that the aliens die from some Ertly virus, or such. Well, how different is that to soldiers dying of smallpox, or such, upon arriving at some insulated, island-country? Earth Island.
It is interesting to me that Wells wrote about time travel decades before Einsteins theories came out, although the main character in the 2002 version of, "The Time Machine," supposedly was in touch with Einstein.
Speaking of killing all the Jews, there are racial undercurrents to these movies and the book, "The Time Machine." First of all, wells got his idea of the Morlocks, a subterranean race of devolved humans, from early ideas of Homo Neanderthal, who was assumed to be stupid and everything else bad. Because they had big brow ridges, and so on. (In fact, Neandertal actually had brains larger than our own).
Following Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen argued the bones represented an ancient modern human form;[27][108][112][113] Schaaffhausen, a social Darwinist, believed that humans linearly progressed from savage to civilised, and so concluded that Neanderthals were barbarous cave-dwellers.[27] Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen met opposition namely from the prolific pathologist Rudolf Virchow who argued against defining new species based on only a single find. In 1872, Virchow erroneously interpreted Neanderthal characteristics as evidence of senility, disease, and malformation instead of archaicness,[114] which stalled Neanderthal research until the end of the century.[27][112]
See Neanderthals in popular culture. However, it seems that Neandertals might indeed have been deep cave, or underground-dwellers, and may have been more noctturnal than Sapiens. These remain hypotheses. In any event, Neanderthals were clearly not the violent beasts as depicted, especially, in the 2002 movie.
FYI, Jews don't have an especially high amount of Neandertal genes. But there has been generally antisemitic speculation that Jews derived from Neandertals, and even are non-human, in some dark circles. I have no idea if Wells meant to convey, or might have been imagining, that Morlocks represented throw-back Jews. It is possible, because antisemitism has had persistent sway throughout history, and often seems to be entangled with war. I don't know. Wells does seem to say that there is no such thing as clear good versus evil, and does paint a not so favourable picture of the seemingly idillic Eloi, as well.
In the 2002 version of, "The Time Machine," I noticed, the good people, the Eloi, were mainly black, and the king of the morlocks was uber white. The eloi were not as docile and ignorant as depicted in the 1960 version - in fact, they were just wonderful. They lived, impossibly, in upside-down wooden tent-cups, in peace and harmony, while beautiful African music played.
"What is this all about?" I thought. Was this a subliminal message that white people are the problem, and the est way to evolve is to return to Africa's Garden of Eden? Yes, I think it was. Because, around 2002, there was a lot of that feeling going around. Whoopi Goldberg, Morgan Freeman and The Lion King were the wise souls who would lead us into the light, towards greater compassion and purity.
I didn't mind that undercurrent in the 2002 version. Nobody has a monopoly on wisdom. Every race has something to offer. Just so long as all races are represented. And, apparently, the blond race is who was represented in the 1960 version. Yes, in that version, any human species who evolves becomes blonde, whether they be Eloi or Morlock. There was not one black person in this movie. But the devolved Morlocks didn't seem to represent black people, as they had long blond hair, but maybe they didn't represent anything. What we do know is that the idea of everyone evolving to be blond is anti-scientific.
The Eloi did represent the good part of humanity getting lazy and stupid, much like Americans in general. I think that this 1960 version better represented the idea from Wells that both sides of human nature are needed, not just the dark and not just the dumb Swede. You know, if you take either aspect of our nature too far in one direction, you get fascism anyway. Either way.
Here's an interesting quote from Wiki, regarding Well's book, "The Shape Of Things To Come":
As noted by Nathaniel Ward,[3] The Shape of Things to Come was published two years after Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In both works, a war leaves the world in ruins, a self-appointed elite takes over, rebuilds the world and engages in social engineering to refashion human society. Wells notes that as Huxley, "one of the most brilliant of the reactionary writers, foretold of them, [the leaders of the Dictatorship of the Air] tidied up the world".
The crucial difference is the society envisioned by Huxley is highly hierarchical, with intelligent "Alphas" on top and moronic "Epsilons" at the bottom, Huxley arguing that a society composed purely of the assertive and competitive "Alphas" would dissolve into chaos and all-out fighting. It was that vision that Wells believed would cause Huxley to be remembered by posterity as a "reactionary writer". Much of Shape of Things to Come is devoted to demonstrating that given time, an elite with control of world education can make such a society of intelligent and assertive "Alphas" harmonious and functional, without an underclass.
Mind you, "The Time Machine," is, like most Wells books, a dystopian look into the future. It says, "What would happen if...?" So, apparently, this book says that, if we lose touch with our Alpha side, then our base, Id side will take over. And so it is the Morlocks who become the Alpha controllers, feeding off of the Eloi. So, maybe Wells was partly racist. But, actually, that was a natural view, back then, when Freud and Jung were coming up with the idea of the base nature of man in psychological terms. And, empire was pushing hard to overcome rising entropy. War was a major obstavle to the balance and perfection of world Order, thus the idea of the final war to end all wars, which turned out pretty bleak.
If it gives you any comfort, Alex Jones has long thought that both Wells and Huxley were as evil as evil can be. Wells was a, "Fabien Socialist," and Huxley a, "Eugenicist." I take anything anybody, especially Jones, says with a grain of salt. Jones has probably read more history than anyone reading this post. But, history has always been about good groups versus bad groups, and so anyone can project any beliefs into history and come out feeling vindicated.
But, if Wells is interpreted as a Fabien Socialist, then he may have thought that, since the State isn't "withering away, as Marx had projected, then maybe war or revolution would be necessary to usher in the new paradise. He certainly grappled with war in most of his works. I don't know. But this ideological attitude, one shared admittedly with many on the USA far left, is contrary to the idea that capitalism and popular choice will bring about progress. But both views share some degree of "Alpha" bias.
Huxley, apparently, had a decidedly more grim view of progress. Something to think about.
One revellation I had, from the 2002 version, was that there seems to be an archetype or stock character, which may be referred to as, The Creepy Old Wise Guy, (TCOWG). There was no kind of the Morlocks in the 1960 version, but in the 2002 version, the Uber-Morlock was a famous actor made uber white and creepy smart and sadistic, at the very apex of the movie. Everything pivotted on dealing with this asshole.
It occurred to me that this sort of character pops up in many m ovies, mainly as the arch-villain. He shows up in the 2008 version of, "Journey to the Centre of the Earth," (Peter Fonda), in Apocalypse Now, in Batman movies, in Doctor Strange movies, in Spiderman movies, just everywhere. So often, he is white, but he could be any race, or even any gender. It depends on what the writer feels like doing. But, I am going to add this archetype to my notebook.
Another observation: It seems that most H.G. Wells movies, (so assumedly the books), find resolution through blowing things up.
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
(Here's a bad 1978 version of, "The Time Machine"). For more casual adventures in time travel, check out, "The Time Traveler's Wife," "About Time," "Interstellar," and others. A recent post of mine touches on UFO's being from ourselves in the year 8100. And, here is a sciency look into the possibility of warp drive - https://www.universetoday.com/155995/the-dream-of-faster-than-light-ftl-travel-dr-harold-sonny-white-and-limitless-space/