Word Made Flesh: Adapting Secret Fear

Religious parallels subtly background Harry Bates’ “Farewell to the Master,” evoking elements of the Christ story overlain with a secular scientific morality play. Edmund H. North’s screenplay adaptation for The Day the Earth Stood Still also echoes these themes while purposely sidestepping a direct correspondence to the Jesus myth. Alternatively we experience the secular political philosophy of peace enforced by the threat of annihilation, reflecting the Cold War’s emerging deterrent: assured mutual nuclear destruction.

Both stories posit that human aggression be reined in, thwarted from spreading beyond Earth. The prewar text founds this suppression on global self-restraint reinforced by an elegiac deception; the postwar script and film embody hard-line coercion in the form of a retributive sentry. What I find most curious is how the former and latter narratives play upon New and Old Testament sensibilities, respectively.

Ultimately a personal first contact story from a single narrative viewpoint, Bates’ cautionary tale leaves Cliff Sutherland compelled to maintain the façade that Klaatu masters Gnut. Cliff’s transformation of awareness, understanding that the “giant robot” eminently emerges as the superior being, affects only the reporter’s sensibility. The rest of mankind believes a white lie as Cliff shields them from this truth with the partial knowledge he controls.

Cliff’s character arc takes him from sensationalist to investigative reporter to sole witness, finally burdened with the secret of resurrection. Kept for the good of human protection from alien retribution, Cliff’s secret conceals the fundamental boundary between human technology and divine omnipotence. He feels constrained by conscience to preserve mankind’s contrition, even if that constraint means perpetuating the white lie that Klaatu’s death is final.

This deception induces mankind to deter its aggressive tendencies, although manifest in the act of a lone fanatic, and then collectively subsumed out of guilt, desperation and fear of retribution. When North writes the adaptation, enforced pacifism replaces internal restraint with an external intervention. The adaptation eliminates most of Bates’ resurrection subplot, a backstory illustrating Gnut’s ability to reconstitute a gorilla, mockingbird and humanoid emissary from sound waves. Instead, viewers experience a direct threat to global aggression in the form of an intergalactic police sentinel, the foundational work’s essential theme altered as a result of a decade’s heated mass destruction transitioned to cold war.

Gnut’s revelatory emergence as master over life and death prefigures artificial intelligence, holodeck technology, and perhaps cloning. As scientific rationalism’s final frontier between the provinces of man and god, the ability to create, recreate and resurrect encroaches upon divine providence. The pulp science fiction author implies that mankind must form a self-imposed covenant with superior beings (or Supreme Being) to limit our capacity to function in the domain of the Creator. Humanity may kill (individually or institutionally) or procreate biologically, but not bring life to the once dead.

Devoid of direct religious references (neither God nor Christ is mentioned) the story twist reverses expectation between god and man as well as master and slave. Bates’ 1940 narrative reflects a greater willingness than the film to accept mastery over life and death as an achievable extraterrestrial power, yet posits human complicity in this achievement. Gnut’s final revelation offers mankind hope for retribution, as Cliff conceives a solution to Klaatu’s short-lived rebirth. Telling “only part of his story,” the reporter delimits his own calling, mobilizing global resources to meet the giant’s demand to obtain a more perfect recording apparatus of Klaatu’s voice. Here we see the reflexive supersession of technology over myth-making, both of which make the word flesh; note how only the narrator truly understands this fact, while the general population prefers the myth.

Klaatu’s double gets passed from Gnut to Cliff (in a Michelangelo-esque homage), and the narrator comments, “It seemed to be the parting.” When Cliff assumes there is a “master yet to come” greater than Gnut, Klaatu’s fate remains obscured, superseded by the giant’s pronouncement of supreme mastery. Gnut’s final words cause the reporter to reflect: “Never, never was he to disclose them til the day he came to die.” This reversal, the revelation that transforms Cliff’s allegiance from humanoid messenger to robotic savior, becomes secreted by a single initiate, a sole keeper of the flame.

Cliff’s singularity contrasts Michael Rennie’s broad warning to the assembled crowd meant to be spread worldwide: that a deadly robot police force would deter the spread of human xenophobia beyond our solar system. Gort remains the vigilant sentinel—willing to thwart human aggression with a death threat—whose superiority of force substitutes for contrition. While Bates’ pulp fiction more closely parallels the emotional core found in the Jesus mythos, North’s screenplay purposely backs away from imbuing its aliens with divine power. Instead, the screenplay places global fear and its forced subjugation as the central emotion of the film, trading off one man’s mastery of fear for the more prevalent overtones of “Red Scare!” paranoia. With the triumph of coercion true Christian principles become lost in adaptation.