The most important scene, of course, is the explosion that concludes the opera. The main part of the opera arguably tries to simulate what Christian Metz calls “the impression of reality” experienced by cinema audiences (Metz 4). One could also argue that Doctor Atomic resembles the illusionism of Wagnerian opera, about which Bertolt Brecht said that “the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot . . . becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art” (Brecht 38). But this scene brings about a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, as the singers and dancers face the audience as they watch the explosion. According to Adams, this was done to make “[t]he audience members gradually realize that they themselves are the bomb” (Adams 291). Many documentaries depict scientists intently watching the explosions that prove their experiment’s success. This is also true for some science fiction films. For instance, in Beast, the scientists can be seen watching the explosion through goggles (see above). However, Godzilla and Them! only show footage of explosions. For Godzilla it can be argued that the explosion is a foreign affair, rather like a “natural” disaster not subject to human agency. In Them!, the causality of the explosion is an affair of a previous generation, of which the consequences still have to be suffered. Doctor Atomic’s explosion brings history into the here-and-now, signaling to the audience that the threat is not over yet and that the individual’s capacity in the nuclear status quo should not be underestimated—see Sellars’s pronouncement cited earlier that he wants to “once again bring up the atomic topic” (Sellars).
Example 1: Cluster chords of overture, mm. 1–7.
Example 2: Harp and celesta parts of “Rain over Sangre de Christos,” mm. 76–8.
Musical Criticism
In this article I have briefly examined musical, mythological, and nuclear-critical aspects of both Doctor Atomic and my selection of science fiction films. In the scenes of the opera I have discussed, either stylistic elements occur which are also prominent in the science fiction film soundtracks discussed, or the musical material directly resembles that of a certain film scene. In some cases, especially those of “Countdown Part I” and the orchestral introduction to “Batter my Heart,” it is not unthinkable that they were actually paraphrases from the film music of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.
It is not only the musical material—or Hollywood-like “historical” costumes and cinematic sound design—that can make one think of science fiction; both the opera and the films contain a mythological dimension. There are some differences in this respect between Doctor Atomic and the science fiction films that I examined. Because of the opera’s emphasis on realism, Doctor Atomic’s subject matter seems to have been treated more seriously: there was no need to use an unrealistic metaphor like a monster for either nuclear weaponry or the dangers and fears it brought into the world. But a critical message transpires throughout; there is a conflict between nature and technology, between spirituality and science without moral considerations. This critical dimension is supported by the staging created by Sellars.
Not only can those musical, mythological, and critical aspects be observed in the opera, but, as we have seen, they were also intentional. The association of Doctor Atomic, with an emblem of fear of nuclear warfare in the form of science fiction serves to underline its actual subject matter: the moral dilemma faced by J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of scientists and the fear their creation was to inspire for many years to come. Adams said he did not want to lecture his audience about the atomic topic. The libretto and staging were mainly Sellars’s work, but Adams’s contribution to the project, including the choice of referring to ’50s monster science fiction film music—and thus the historical fear expressed through the films of the genre—seems to make the nuclear arms criticism in Doctor Atomic all the more outspoken.
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Maarten Nellestijn lives in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Works Cited
Adams, John. Doctor Atomic. London: Boosey & Hawkes, 2005.
——. Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
Bould, Mark, and Sherryl Vint. The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.
Brecht, Bertolt. “The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre.” Brecht on Theatre. Trans. John Willett. London: Methuen & Co, 1964.
“The Bulletin Interview: Peter Sellars.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 64.1 (2008).
Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Trans. Catherine Porter & Philip Lewis. Diacritics 14.2 (1984).
Douglas, Gordon. Them! (1954). Warner Bros., 2009.
Eichler, Jeremy. “An Opera that Hovers on the Threshold of the Nuclear Age.” The Boston Globe Oct. 16 2008.
Else, Jon. Wonders Are Many. New Video Group, 2007.
Honda, Ishirô. Godzilla (Gojira) (1954). Warner Bros., 2006.
Hosokawa, Shuhei. “Atomic Overtones and Primitive Undertones: Akira Ifukube’s Sound Design for Godzilla.” Off the Planet: Music, Sound, and Science Fiction Cinema. Ed. Philip Hayward. Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing, 2004.
Ketterson, Mark Thomas. “Chicago.” Opera News 2008.
Lourié, Eugène. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Warner Bros., 2004.
May, Thomas. “John Adams on Doctor Atomic.” The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer. Ed. Thomas May. New Jersey: Amadeus Press, 2006.
Metz, Christian. “On the Impression of Reality in the Cinema.” Film Language : a Semiotics of the Cinema. Trans. Michael Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Reveaux, Tony. “Designing Dr. Atomic.” Entertainment Design July 2005.
——. “Gray Matter.” Entertainment Design Sept. 2005.
Ross, Alex. “Doctor Atomic: Countdown.” The New Yorker October 3, 2005.
Schmidt, Lisa M. “A Popular Avant-Garde: The Paradoxical Tradition of Electronic and Atonal Sounds in Sci-Fi Music Scoring.” Sounds of the Future: Essays on Music in Science Fiction Film. Ed. Matthew J. Bartkowiak. North Carolina: McFarland, 2010.
Sellars, Peter. John Adams : Doctor Atomic. Opus Arte, 2008.
Swenson-Wright, John. Unequal Allies?: United States Security and Alliance Policy Towards Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Tommasini, Anthony. “Countdown to the Eve of Destruction.” The New York Times October 3, 2005.
——. “Pipe Down! We Can Hardly Hear You.” The New York Times January 1, 2006.
Tucker, Marilyn. “Doctor Atomic by John Adams.” American Record Guide 2006.
van Elferen, Isabella. “‘And Machine Created Music’. Cybergothic Music and the Phantom Voices of the Technological Uncanny.” Digital Material. Ed. Joost Raessens et al. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009.
Wells, Paul. “The New Barihunk.” Maclean’s 118.42 (2005).
Williams, Paul. “Nuclear Criticism.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Mark Bould et al. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009.
Wilson, Mark. “Doctor Atomic to Premier in San Francisco.” Physics Today Sept. 2005.
* * *
The Prime Error
Thomas A. Easton
In the history of science fiction, many writers have considered the question of whether there is a Most Important Thing for human beings to do—and then, of course, what that Most Important Thing might be. Candidates for Most Important Things have included humanity’s manifest destiny to spread out and conquer the universe, Reason (with a capital R), individual competence, the pursuit of knowledge, and more. Star Trek’s Prime Directive—that we should not meddle (even in a well-meaning way) in the affairs of alien intelligences—has been expressed by so many writers that, despite the negative phrasing, it may be a good candidate for the greatest of Most Important Things.
That there is such a consensus concerning the Prime Directive suggests that many writers have looked at human history and politics—and even at some of the other candidate Most Important
Things—and seen a tendency to meddle in the affairs of others. They have also concluded that such meddling is a major way in which we mess things up. They might even agree that it is humanity’s Prime Error.
And perhaps it is. It would certainly be possible to find a great many real-life examples to illustrate the case. But I would like to look at another candidate for humanity’s Prime Error.
In Highway of Eternity (Del Rey, 1986), Clifford D. Simak (1904–88) wrote:
He is looking for the basic errors we humans made and . . . [he] has found a few . . . the problem of surpluses, the profit motive, and the war motive which arises from one man or tribe having more than another man or tribe may have; or the need of huddling—the need of men and women to huddle in tribes, nations, and empires, reflecting that terrifying sense of insecurity that is part of the human psyche. (12)
Greed and war are pretty basic, and they have provided so many writers—in sf and out of it—with material that it hardly seems worthwhile to devote an essay to explaining why they are errors, much less Prime Errors. But huddling? Here is a novel idea, not one exploited by hordes of other scribblers. It deserves a closer look.
Simak was a journalist who lived his entire life in the Midwest, working for Minneapolis newspapers from 1939 to 1976. He was not widely traveled, perhaps because of a sense of insecurity such as he mentions in Highway of Eternity. I cannot say more than “perhaps,” for it is impossible to psychoanalyze a writer dead for 25 years. But the idea of huddling is one that Simak returned to many times, especially in his famous “Huddling Place” (1944), part of the City series. This is the tale Jerome Webster, a man powerfully attached to the family homestead of many generations. He feels its woods and fields and trout stream in his very bones, and though he traveled in his youth, he no longer cares to leave the homestead. Webster even calls it a sort of agoraphobia. And when an old friend asks his presence on Mars to carry out an operation only he can do, he cannot go. The homestead, his home and hearth, has become “a trap that would never let him go.”
Webster did not initally see being trapped in such a way as a universal human problem. It was personal, even familial (shared by the character’s father, and perhaps his grandfather, who “never went anywhere, either”). Humanity as a whole was “huddling” less than ever, for the once-teeming cities had been largely abandoned. People were moving out to the planets. But, of 250 men invited to visit his character, only three could tear themselves away from familiar haunts, and Webster feared that his personal problem was not his alone.
Indeed, in City’s 1973 “Epilog,” the world was left to robots as the humans left, and, in time, even the robots huddled, slaves to memory and attachment, subject to anxiety at the prospect of departure. Huddling became not just a human problem but one of all intelligent beings.
It is not, of course, an insuperable or even a continuous problem. Giving up attachment to old, familiar patterns need not mean abandoning all of the past. “All the Traps of Earth” (1960) shows an ancient robot, last servitor to an old family whose last member has died, inventorying the estate, including himself, and realizing that he did not want to have his mind destroyed so he could be resold. Better to flee the traps of custom and law and expectation until, in time, he finds a world that needs him and where he can huddle once more, trapped by his own need to be of service. But at this point, huddling is not a problem, for the character no longer feels trapped. Fulfilled is a better word. He has refound his niche.
By the time of Highway of Eternity, more than 40 years after “Huddling Place,” Simak apparently had thought much more upon the problem, which may or may not have been his own. Huddling, attachment to the familiar and reluctance to depart from it, became in his mind one of humanity’s major errors. The opposite of error—Simak’s own Prime Directive—is a willingness or even eagerness to venture forth, to explore, to embrace the new. This is a more conventional science-fictional theme, but it repeats so often and so powerfully in Simak’s work that, especially in conjunction with the Prime Error of huddling, it gains significance.
Why embrace the new? For knowledge, Simak says in “Jackpot” (1956), “The Big Front Yard” (1958), Way Station (1963), and more. And if you can’t go looking for knowledge in the flesh or have it brought to you as in Way Station, go in mind as in Time Is the Simplest Thing (1961) and Project Pope (1981). With both methods, you meet others and broaden your perspective.
Is broader perspective the benefit whose lack makes huddling a Prime Error? Many of the world’s ills do indeed seem attributable to parochial and short-term thinking. The interests of the few and the present are favored over those of the many and the future. We can see this dichotomy in religious conflicts, economic disasters, or debates over what to do about environmental problems. So here, no matter what he started from, may be the conclusion to Simak’s thought: Go forth, open yourself, learn and learn some more, and the universe is yours.
To the science fiction fan, this is not a terribly profound thought. Fans take it quite for granted, having breathed it in from the very start of their exposure to science fiction. Yet this thought was handed to them in their reading. They did not come to it slowly, working it out over the course of four decades as did Simak. To him, it was a discovery. I’m sure that it did not escape him that the basic idea was close kin to what he did as a journalist, going out into the world daily to discover what new thing had unfolded among people unknown.
Perhaps, if he indeed shared in the anxiety he described in 1944, learning that one could go forth physically and mentally reconciled him to his own tendency to huddle.
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Thomas Easton lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.
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Possession and Lovecraft: An Exchange
Darrell Schweitzer and Kevin J. Maroney
DARRELL SCHWEITZER: Sometimes I feel as if I am trying to bat down shoggoths with a hammer. In the very issue in which we have Graham Andrews graciously acknowledging that he hasn’t read The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in a good long while, we have JeFF Stumpo perpetuating exactly the same error on page 9 in the midst of an otherwise excellent article (NYRSF 294). I wonder why Ward is so commonly misread. It is not actually all that subtle. Lovecraft tends to spell out his “clues” quite explicitly. The novel is not about “a dead necromancer who possesses the body of his descendent, Charles Ward.” It is about a necromancer who is physically resurrected from his “essential saltes” by his descendant. The necromancer, Joseph Curwen, bears an uncanny resemblance to Charles Ward, but there are differences. Ward has a birthmark on his leg; Curwen does not. Curwen has a “witch mark” on his chest and a scar on his forehead that Ward lacks. The resurrected Curwen assumes the identity (complete with a fake beard as a disguise) of “Dr. Allen,” whom Ward presents to his parents as a colleague.
It’s about time everybody gets out their corrected edition of the Arkham House At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels and reread key passages. On 194–197, we are given some intercepted correspondence of Joseph Curwen’s old-time colleagues (still surviving from the eighteenth century) in which they plot against “ye Boy” who is too “squeamish” to follow their eldritch agenda, for all he may have collaborated with them to this point. Dr. Willett (the family physician, who is the protagonist of the novel) and Charles Ward’s father read this and realize that the bad guys are plotting against young Charles. On 225, it is made very clear that the person taken to be “Charles,” who is now in the madhouse, has the scar that was visible in the old portrait of Curwen (now destroyed), which the real Charles does not. Dr. Willett soon figures out what has happened. “Dr. Allen” has murdered Charles and attempted to impersonate him, not very convincingly, which is why he was hauled off to a madhouse. On 227, Dr. Willett goes into Charles’s study and locks the door. Detectives have already gone through this room but noted nothing other than “Dr. Allen’s” discarded glasses and fake beard. (Someone even pencils glasses and a beard onto a photo of Charles Ward and prod
uces a recognizable likeness of Mr. Allen.) Ward’s father is listening outside. He hears wood creak. There is a cry. The air fills with noxious odors. Willett burns quite a bit of material in the fireplace and removes more in a covered basket. A little while later, he writes to the elder Ward, telling him that they must agree to a cover story about how “Charles” escaped from the asylum, never to be seen again, but reassures him that in a year or so he may put up a headstone at a certain spot in a cemetery where the remains of the real Charles Ward are buried (229–31). Willett then confronts the person he knows to be Joseph Curwen in the asylum, defeats him by magic, and reduces him to a fine dust. There is no “possession.” The physically resurrected Curwen co-exists with Charles Ward for a time until Curwen murders Ward, then impersonates him. What Dr. Willett found behind the wall in the study, of course, was the decayed body of Ward where Curwen had hidden it. He partially burned it in the fireplace and removed the rest in the basket.
I do not understand the confusion. It’s as if, after all this time, many readers were not really sure what is actually going on in, say, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Lovecraft spells it out if you read him closely.
KEVIN J. MARONEY: I blame myself for not catching that—I was too caught up in the argument of the piece as a whole, I suppose.
The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue #296 April 2013 Page 8
