The Word, the Image

In the Beginning was The Image

I first came to science fiction through the visual media of comics and movies. I remember being enthralled by the intoxicating adventures of Brick Bradford and his Time Top, by more exotic time travelling with Alley Oop, by the beautifully drawn space operas of Flash Gordon, and above all by the promise of a glittering future where only adventure, villains, spaceships, beautiful women and derring-do existed in the world of Buck Rogers.

The Comics

In 1942, I was at boarding school in Sydney overlooking the harbour, when on the night of June 1st we were all woken by sirens, searchlights and explosions, for this was the night that three midget Japanese submarines had entered Sydney Harbour and were attempting to torpedo as many ships as possible. Teachers herded us all into air-raid shelters. The main reason why I remember this night was not because World War 2 impinged on Sydney, but rather because this was the only time at school when we were allowed - indeed, encouraged - to read comics, and I can still recall both Buck Rogers and Don Winslow of the Navy. The school was then evacuated to temporary quarters in the Blue Mountains, and once again one of my most vivid memories is of yet another Buck Rogers comic. Even though I was only seven years old, I already knew that SF was the real world, and of much greater relevance and importance, to myself at least, than that which less imaginative minds held to be reality.

The Flicks

There were also Saturday afternoon movies, and the main attraction there, week after week, were the serials, where I discovered new sides to Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, was introduced to The Green Hornet, and was overwhelmed by the most surreal serial which was ever made. This was the world's first, and only, all-talking, all-singing, science fiction, western, lost-world thriller - The Phantom Empire - in 12 delirious episodes. My dreams and waking fantasies were coloured by this Gene Autry spectacular, by the rousing martial music, by the lost world of Murania, 20,000 feet below the Earth's surface and powered by vast seams of radium, by the shining robots, by the malignant Queen, and by Betsy King Ross and the Thunder Riders.

And then came the Word

The words of Science Fiction insinuated themselves slowly into my life, and again through the comics: but these were British comics - Hotspur, Rover, Wizard, Adventure, Champion - and images were sparse indeed for the comics were prose stories. A few fell under the rubric of SF, and these, of course, were the highlights. Even the staid Boy's Own Paper (a magazine not a paper) occasionally published science fiction. In the years that followed, magazines devoted entirely to SF appeared, but these were few indeed, and the stories and prose were quite execrable - the paradigm of these bottom of the barrel scrapings was Thrills Incorporated - but no matter how bad the writing (and at the age of ten to fourteen I was bereft of absolutely any sense of criticism whatsoever), I still devoured them and they still fueled my imagination. Some years later, I discovered real SF in Astounding, Thrilling Wonder, Startling Stories, Planet (a great favourite, for I have a weakness for Space Opera), Galaxy, Fantasy & Science Fiction...

The word became dominant, but the image was always there, having receded because I was too old (so I thought) for comics, and because films of science fiction, or even fantasy, were very sparse indeed, and horrifyingly bad. I was beginning to develop some critical faculty.

Image vs. the Word

The differences between the word and the image were beginning to become clearer.

A novel is read at one's own pace - some are read quickly and require little thought, while others are rich in detail or deal with more complex plots and ideas, and so require a more contemplative, thoughtful approach. Some present images which need to be nurtured in one's imagination and allowed to grow. Some have prose which demands rereading for the sheer pleasure of the words and the sounds they create in the mind's ear - though such writing is regrettably rare in SF, indeed in literature as a whole - works such as Jack Vance's The Moon Moth, for example, or Delany's Neveryon books, or, setting the way-back machine almost a century ago, some of Clark Ashton Smith, or Lovecraft's The Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath.

In short, novels appeal to the mind and to cerebration much more than to sensory affects - their actions, their ideas, their resonances are all interior processes. While these may be emotionally stimulating, the emotions must be self-generated, and different individuals will have, may have, different responses.

Film, on the other hand proceeds at its own, ineluctable pace - one second per second, twenty-four frames worth in each unit of time. There is little, or no, time to pause, to reflect, to contemplate - all of which must be done once the film is ended. But, nonetheless, some films demand that images be retained in the mind's eye and recalled at a later time as the movie unfolds, words may need to remembered, actions, even colours or camera movements... As with the word, though, some films demand none of this, they are an accompaniment to the popcorn or the cola, and exist solely for the pleasure they give - which may be substantial even if ephemeral. Film is more than image, more than the visual - it also is accompanied by sound, and often the action is inextricably linked to music - the music may in fact at times be more important than the image. Film, as a whole, is thus a visceral experience, it appeals to the emotions and the senses much more directly than to the mind, the cerebral. Though, of course, exceptions abound. Some films demand attention to both the visual and the intellectual - Mulholland Drive, for example - others are satisfied with an appeal, even an assault, on the emotions or the senses.

Now the above are generalisations, and the better novels and films will always give these the lie - quality cannot be so rigidly constrained into either the heart or the head - but I believe that the word and the image are not always compatible or translatable one into the other.

The Word and not the Image

As an example, consider an early Ditmar winner - Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. Here is a collection of stories all of which begin with a quote from a scientific paper or book before the story proper begins, and all are told by an entity, Qfwfq who has existed since before time began. Some of the stories are fantasies, some are science fiction, some are metaphysical musings, but all are wildly surreal, and all force one to think and to try to embrace new concepts. For example in the story A Sign in Space, the quote is: "Situated in the external zone of the Milky Way, the Sun takes about two hundred million years to make a complete revolution of the Galaxy", and the story follows:

Right, that's how long it takes, not a day less,-Qfwfq said,- once, as I went past, I drew a sign at a point in space, just so I could find it again two hundred million years later, when we went by the next time around. What sort of sign? It's hard to explain...

It seems mad, but, then, how would you make the very first sign in space when space is all the same - a void - and signs are not yet conceptualised? How is a new thought formulated? How is a new thought made real? How can potentiality become entelechy?

Another story begins with a quote that points out that Hubble's data show the Universe is expanding, and so, some billions of years in the past, the matter of the Universe must have been concentrated at one point, and when Qfwfq begins his narration, it's something like: "You have no idea how crowded conditions were at that time..."

These stories may be read simply as surreal japes, or at a deeper level as criticisms of Science which, when it omits the human element, is arid, cold and lifeless - or, as many would pejoratively put it, "academic". Yet again, the stories may read at an even deeper and richer level as saying that while Science without humanity is lifeless, when it involves the human, the combination becomes something greater than the sum of its parts - science and emotion (the head and the heart) meld synergistically. But the stories are fundamentally elaborations of ideas, metaphysical themes, manifestations of the absurd in everyday existence, I can not see how they could be transformed into a visual medium. Perhaps into animation, but so much of the intellectual content would be lost that the translation would be pointless.

The stories of Jorge Luis Borges are cut from the same cloth as Cosmicomics - metaphysical musings and mostly untransformable. In his story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius the events are presented as a dry, scientific report, like most of Borges' tales. It is found that two copies of the same edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica differ in that one has a reference to Uqbar and the other does not. In the following years, as more discrepancies arise, the customs and morés of the mythical world begin to take over our "real" world.

The story could be read as mass hysteria, or as how reality is determined by what we collectively believe, or as a parable of the way in which Science works (the Earth is flat - then round; it is the centre of the Solar System - then not; atoms do not exist - then they do; quanta are not real, just a stop-gap concept - then they are real... as more people believe in these ideas, they become real, and realer). Perhaps this story could be made into a film, but how would it be done? and how would it hold the interest? The story is only a few pages long, and its brevity is part of, a major part of, its impact.

Novel and Film

But there are, of course, many novels which may be made into films, even if the basic nature of the novel (its appeal to the head) is not that of the film (its appeal to the heart).

My favorite SF novel is Henry Kuttner's Fury, which first appeared in Astounding (Nov & Dec 1949) under the by-line of Lawrence O'Donnell. Kuttner's novel is complex and multi-layered and discusses the many strata of society in his imaginary world with marvellous economy. The differences of his future are given often in throwaway snippets of background behaviour or customs or even items of clothing. The world he envisions has humanity dying - in luxury and hedonism - in "keeps" (giant bubble-enclosed cities) deep within another planet's ocean. The land surface above is violently inimical to humans, populated by savage creatures with bizarre attributes and powers. Into this system of layers of society and layers of environments - reflecting the layers of the psyches of the protagonists - comes an antihero, tragically stripped of his birthright, who becomes the villain-hero, the tainted saviour who rekindles Mankind's hope and redeems them.

The novel is extremely visual in its description of the world above and the world below, it has incidental piled on incidental (and incident on incident), and has a multitude of characters from the bizarre to the aristocratically elegant. It is also well written. This is one novel which I wish would be made into a movie - and this could be done without losing anything of importance.

Film and Novel

Just as some stories are untranslatable into another medium, so some films are not capable of being transformed into novels without losing what makes them so powerful. Here, a very recent example is Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. This may have had its genesis in a Dick story, but so much in the film is quintessentially visual, so much of the story, and especially the background society is given us as image, that it transcends the original word and becomes its own self - virtually sui generis.

To see Tom Cruise use the computer as though he were conducting an orchestra tells us more in a few brief frames of film than pages of words, and the "spiders" seeking out eyes to identify in their few minutes reveal much of the high technology, and the loss of personal freedom, and the terror they invoke - much more emotionally than a description in words.

Dark City, too, was an example of the visual having preference and a more immediate impact over the word. The eerie quality of the Dark City milieu could be described, but direct apprehension of it through the image is much more effective. The revelation towards the end of the film as to what the Dark City actually is, with the camera pulling slowly back and revealing the secret of Shell Beach - that there is no, can be no, such beach, because of the nature of the City itself - is so visceral and emotionally involving that "mere words could not do it justice".

Perhaps the only paradox-free time-travel movie I have seen is 12 Monkeys, another film which could be a novel, but which would lose in the translation - especially for the music. A few frames of film as Cole looks up and sees the roof of the emporium change from past to present, wholeness to ruin, says more in a few seconds, and has more impact, than hundreds of words, because it tells us so economically of the changes wrought by the plague, of the loss of hope, and the death of humanity, and does it so emotionally.

The Image and the Word

While the word and the image may speak to different components of any individual, they are not antagonistic, but complementary - two facets of that specifically modern branch of entertainment and thought known as Science Fiction. We, as humans, need, and respond to, both the intellectual and the emotional, the heart and the head. We cannot deny either, but must embrace both...