Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Forbidden Planet
1956 · Fred M. Wilcox · Forbidden Planet on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for where the music stops and the effects begin. (sound)
Louis and Bebe Barron made every sound on circuits they built and drove to overload. There is no melody and nothing repeats. A landing, an approach and the mood of a scene all arrive in the same warbling material.
Payoff: You cannot separate what you are hearing from what you are feeling. The soundtrack offers no comfort and no guidance. In the reading: qualite-puissance. The reading calls this a pure quality-power: an intensity expressed for itself, belonging to no object and no person.
Look at the three kinds of architecture: ship, house, machine. (staging)
Cedric Gibbons and Arthur Lonergan keep them rigorously apart. The cruiser is circular military modernism. Morbius's house is mid-century domestic comfort with alien curves grafted on. Underneath it the Krell plant is pure abstraction.
Payoff: The design does the explaining. Three buildings lay out the whole arrangement of this planet before anyone describes it. In the reading: originary-world. The reading calls the humming plant below an originary world: not a place but a zone of raw drives under the furnished one.
Notice the green sky, the two moons, the painted mesas. (light)
George Folsey lights Altair IV the way MGM lit its musicals: hard colored keys on faces, no haze in the air, the horizon closed off by a painted backdrop. Nothing pretends to be shot outdoors.
Payoff: The planet is a sealed, designed room rather than a location, and that closure works on you for the whole film.
Look through Robby's clear dome at the spinning gyros. (setting)
Robert Kinoshita glazed the head so the mechanism shows. Gyros turn, solenoids fire, and Marvin Miller's voice stays courteous and faintly amused while Robby cooks, sews and distills bourbon by the gallon.
Payoff: You are watching a machine think in public. Every polite screen robot after this one is copying it.
Count how often Altaira is framed with pools and tame animals. (camera)
Anne Francis is placed in gardens, beside water, among creatures that obey her. Eighteen men arrive and start competing over her within a day. Her father keeps her inside grounds he designed.
Payoff: The framing treats her as property long before any character says anything of the kind.
Once you have seen it
Track who dies and what each of them wanted. (structure)
The Bellerophon crew voted to go home and take Morbius's daughter with them. Then the men of the C-57D begin courting Altaira. The deaths follow one man's wishes precisely, and he never knows it.
Payoff: The long explanatory scenes are the crime scene. The man explaining the danger is producing it while he talks. In the reading: symptom. The reading calls these killings symptoms: acts that surface a drive nobody has named or admitted to owning.
Watch the shaft sequence stand the wide frame on end. (camera)
Gillespie's unit builds the Krell plant from forced perspective, glass, miniatures and matte painting. Ranks of gauges recede into a depth that does not exist. The anamorphic frame gets turned ninety degrees against itself.
Payoff: The largest object in the film is the one least actually present in front of the camera.
Watch the outline the blaster fire draws in empty air. (light)
Joshua Meador, on loan from Disney, hand-drew the creature cel by cel into the CinemaScope plate. It shows only where gunfire and the force field light it up. Stop firing and it is not hidden, it is gone.
Payoff: The thing has no existence apart from the effort being made to stop it. The weapons supply its body.
Carry this in: Watch the floor. Morbius delivers his calm lectures standing on a machine that has not stopped running in two hundred millennia.