Forbidden Planet · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The monster is only visible where they shoot at it.

That's the image people keep. The crew of the C-57D throw up a force field, open fire, and something takes an outline in the empty air: red-lit, roaring, leonine, drawn cel by cel by Joshua Meador on loan from Disney and composited into the CinemaScope plate. Stop firing and it isn't hidden. It's gone. MGM's effects unit built an antagonist with no existence apart from the effort being made to stop it. Everything else in the picture follows from that.

On the surface this is the most orthodox kind of movie, and Deleuze has a name for the orthodoxy: the movement-image. Somebody perceives a situation and acts on it, the act changes the situation, and the cutting exists to keep that chain intact. Its grandest version is what he called the large form, where an encompassing milieu presses down until a decisive act transforms it. Altair IV presses. Commander Adams refuses the warning, investigates, and by the last reel has detonated a planet. Ferris Webster cuts it all in clean masters and coverage, unhurried, letting reaction shots carry the exposition. Nothing could be more classical.

And nothing the crew does works. Their blasters feed the thing they're aimed at. The film's engine is running on a different circuit, and Deleuze named that one too.

He called it the impulse-image, and the cinema built on it naturalism — Stroheim, Buñuel, later Losey. It has two floors. On top is the derived milieu: a furnished, socially legible place, a house, a job, a family. Underneath is what he called the originary world, which is not a location but a zone of raw drives, formless, older than persons, where an impulse reaches up, tears off a piece of the world above, and drags it down. Most naturalist films have to make you infer that second floor from behaviour. In Forbidden Planet you can take an elevator to it.

This is where the lens earns itself. Everyone already has the Freudian reading, because the film shouts it: Doc Ostrow's dying line about monsters from the id, dropped into a silence the picture declines to fill. Read that way the movie is a thesis with a creature attached, and you can be done with it in a sentence. Read as naturalism it gets better, because the two floors are literally the set. Cedric Gibbons and Arthur Lonergan keep three architectural languages rigorously apart. The C-57D is circular military modernism. Morbius's house is mid-century domestic luxury with Krell curves grafted on, sunken living room, sliding shutters, a study that opens onto alien technology the way a den opens onto a garage. Below the floor is the Krell plant: a cube twenty miles on a side, self-maintaining for two hundred millennia, scaled to bodies the film never once shows us. The derived milieu is a 1956 ranch house with a father, a daughter and a servant. The originary world is humming under the carpet.

The impulse-image doesn't hand you psychology. It hands you symptoms, acts that surface a drive nobody has named or licensed. Look at who dies. The Bellerophon crew, when they voted to go home and take Morbius's daughter with them. Then the men of the C-57D, as they court Altaira. Morbius never knows. Walter Pidgeon plays him as a proud man giving a lecture, courteous, pedantic, entirely certain, and the discipline of the performance is that the monstrousness is never acted. It isn't in the face. It's in the floor plan.

Naturalism always runs downhill; Deleuze calls it the line of slope, an entropy the world can't climb back out of. This film compresses it savagely. The Krell reached the summit of instrumental reason, switched on a machine that turned thought straight into matter with no tool in between, and were annihilated in a single night. Not a decline. One night, two thousand centuries ago, and then the same night again at the scale of one household.

That machine is a fable about thinking, and the film half-knows it. The Krell wanted thought without instruments. What they got is what Deleuze, following Artaud, says cinema keeps running into when it looks straight at thought: not its power but its impower, something at the centre of thinking that cannot be thought and doesn't stop operating. They built the most complete apparatus for reason in the universe and never asked what else in them was awake.

Meador's animation carries the idea. He came from Fantasia, where Disney's effects department had taught him to animate fire and water and abstract force as characters rather than as weather. Deleuze's expressionism is about exactly this: light and shade charged with a non-organic life, a life belonging to no organism. The Id isn't a creature. It's an intensity obliged to borrow illumination from its enemies. The stylised, nearly cartoon plasticity that gets called a mismatch is the right register. The thing is a projection, and it looks projected.

Before it's visible, the film works the far side of the frame. An intruder moves through the ship unseen. Footprints in dust. Sabotage found after the fact. Deleuze separates the relative out-of-field, the room next door you could cut to, from the absolute out-of-field, which isn't anywhere in space at all and can only be sensed. The Id has no next room; it's under the floor and inside a sleeping man simultaneously. The Krell shaft runs the same trick in reverse. The camera tracks a gantry over an abyss that is a matte painting, ranks of gauges receding into a depth that does not exist. The largest object in the picture is the one least present.

All of this works because nobody was trying to photograph anything real. No location footage, no stock doing structural work. George Folsey lights Altair IV the way MGM lit its musicals: green sky, two moons, hard coloured keys, no atmospheric haze, horizon shut by a painted cyclorama. That method comes straight from The Wizard of Oz and the Gibbons house style — build the other world on stage, saturate it, close it. Altair's sky is Oz's sky reassigned. Whatever truth claim the film makes is not Bazin's; its realism is architectural, not photographic. The anamorphic frame is handled as a closed set, crew arrayed laterally across the bridge, the house presented as a horizontal band, and then the shaft sequence turns that wide frame ninety degrees against itself.

The sound finishes the argument. Louis and Bebe Barron built circuits on Norbert Wiener's cybernetic principles, drove them to overload, recorded the results and cut the tape into cues; the circuits died in the making. It's the first wholly electronic feature score, credited as Electronic Tonalities to keep clear of the musicians' union. There's no theme, no leitmotif, and often no border between score and effect, so the landing, the approach of the invisible thing and the emotional temperature of a scene all arrive in the same shrieking material. Deleuze would call that a pure quality-power: an intensity expressed for itself, belonging to no object and no person. You can't tell what you're hearing from what you're feeling. That is a working definition of the id and also an accurate description of the mix.

The debts are specific. Robby answers Rotwang's Maschinenmensch from Metropolis, Robert Kinoshita taking the sculpted machine-body and glazing the dome so the gyros and solenoids show and you watch a machine think. Things to Come supplied the procedure of designer-as-author, arguing a future through volume and material instead of dialogue, which is why three architectures can do the exposition here. Destination Moon supplied spaceflight as procedure, Bonestell mattes and hull work, extended into the C-57D's instrument business. The Day the Earth Stood Still had already made non-orchestral timbre the legitimate sound of the alien with Herrmann's theremins, and given the screen Gort, the impassive servant machine; the Barrons push the timbre past the orchestra entirely, and Robby takes the servant and gives him manners. Forward, Kinoshita designed B-9 for Lost in Space, and the courteous articulate robot runs from there to C-3PO and R2-D2. Star Trek is this ship's premise reissued: naval survey mission, a captain, doctor and science officer deliberating, landing parties, the Prime Directive's nervousness about interference. 2001 takes the ambition to treat travel as procedure and technology as metaphysics and actually reaches it. Alien inherits the buried alien machine and the crew eaten from inside. The Barrons reach THX 1138 and most ambient scoring after.

One invention deserves naming above the rest, and it belongs to the writing. The man delivering the exposition is generating the murders while he speaks. The monster is the plot's own protagonist. Nobody in 1956 genre cinema had built that, and it converts the long explanatory scenes screenwriting is supposed to avoid into the crime scene itself. There's no director to credit it to; Wilcox's hand isn't visible and inventing one would be dishonest. The authorship is a department — Gibbons and Lonergan, Kinoshita, Gillespie and Meador, Folsey, Hume, the Barrons — which is its own argument about how the studio system made art.

Watch it again for the floor. Whenever Morbius is calm and expansive, notice how much of the frame is the room he's standing in, and what the room is sitting on. Then ask the question the film raises and doesn't answer: the Krell were destroyed by getting exactly what they asked for. What do we imagine the machine would hand us?