A Film Canon

The Day The Earth Stood Still condenses Christ, Lincoln and the ideals of the United Nations into Klaatu (Michael Rennie), an interstellar spokesman for the "mutual protection of all planets and complete elimination of aggression" and, in doing so, renders them alien, disassociating them from any discourse of American military, political and moral supremacy; or, at least, clarifying that the latter only exists insofar as it is prepared to efface itself in the name of global co-operation and conciliation - generally, by curbing a media-driven hysteria that is as endemic to its character as suspicion (supposedly) is to the Russians; specifically, by leading the way in reversing the atomic misuse that has motivated Klaatu's descent to Washington D.C., and which is pointedly contrasted with the engine of his prototypical flying saucer. That said, this salvational potential is left unfulfilled - most explicitly in the concluding address to the audience ("The future rests with you"), but most poetically in a narrative turn that sees Klaatu - in the guise of a human - wander among the Washington populus and, eventually, find himself taken in by an open-minded widow (Patricia Neal) and her little boy. Not only does this explicate the oscillation between domestic and cosmic registers that informs the rise of 1950s melodrama, but it provides an extraordinary evocation of their corollaries, the Communist witch-hunts - and, more specifically, the hysterical fear of invisibility, of aliens among us - culminating with the moment at which the police arrive, in the middle of the night, to escort Klaatu into an ether as vague and imposing as the Universe itself. From this perspective, the final note struck is of an impending, if ambiguous - and possibly mitigatable, if not entirely reversible - apocalypse, encapsulated in Klaatu's recourse to a series of increasingly extreme threats - sinking the rock of Gibraltar, levelling New York City, destroying the entire planet - as well as his compromise: shutting off the world's electric supply for an hour, producing a series of exquisite, vertiginous images; the nations united on a precariously poised roller coaster.