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Acknowledgements
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(1909–1987). American writer, director, and producer.
Wrote, directed, and produced: Five (1951); The
Twonky (1953); The Bubble [The Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth]
(1967).
Produced: Lights Out (tv series) (1949-52).
Oboler's first and truest love was radio, surely the
form of popular entertainment best suited to provide instant feedback on
current events, and an apprenticeship of churning out innumerable (and now, it
appears, virtually untraceable) scripts for radio dramas brought one peculiar
advantage: he came to film writing with absolutely no sense of the genre's
typical patterns and conventions. As a result, whatever their flaws and
virtues, every Oboler film is one of a kind; one can justifiably apply many
derogatory adjectives to his work, but "predictable" is not one of them. Yet
his radio background also made Oboler overly reliant on words rather than
images to drive home his points, a tendency that he gradually but imperfectly
outgrew.
Oboler's probing exegeses of modern civilization began with Bewitched,
one of the many films (Spellbound, The Snake Pit, etc.)
that reflect the postwar American discovery of mental illness. Yet
a film that depicts the problem of split personality in terms of a
woman's "good self" being periodically taken over by her "evil self"
could hardly be taken seriously, even at the time. The Strange
Holiday offers an hysterical, even hallucinogenic defense of imperilled
democracy in its tale of a man who returns from a trip to discover
that America has suddenly been transformed into a totalitarian dictatorship.
In sharp contrast, Oboler's most famous film, Five, is preternaturally
subdued in presenting the extended conversations of the only five
people who survive a global nuclear holocaust; while more sophisticated
than Fredric GADETTE's This Is Not a Test,
Five analogously has an eerie, evocative power that stems more
from its creator's inability to grapple with the enormity of the imagined
situation than from his artistry in portraying it. Another sharp contrast
is next provided by The Twonky, Oboler's far-from-subtle comedic
analysis of the evil effects of television on American society. (Despite
his experience in producing the television series Lights Out,
Oboler developed a visceral dislike for the medium when he saw that
it was destroying radio drama.) In this film, Oboler sought for the
first time to emphasize his argument in visual terms by displaying
a malevolent television set that invades a man's home, marches around
his house, and shoots destructive rays at opponents; yet as even a
summary suggests, the story's concept and presentation are much too
silly to be persuasive.
If The Twonky could not ridicule television out
of existence, Oboler dreamed that 3-D films might challenge their growing
dominance, leading to his production of the first 3-D film, the routine African
adventure Bwana Devil (1953). Although 3-D films quickly went out of
fashion, Oboler remained interested in the technique and eventually made another
3-D film, The Bubble, which qualifies as the one genuine puzzle in the
Oboler filmography. The political and social ideas that inspired and infuse the
four films already discussed are so diagrammatically obvious that any critic
with a brain on autopilot could easily churn out pages of scholarly analysis
learnedly restating what Oboler has already plastered across the screen; yet it
is difficult indeed to say precisely what The Bubble is all about.
Apparently, alien invaders create a force field around a small town, placing it
in suspended animation and turning its residents into zombies of sorts. Such a
story might serve as a parable about anything ranging from the dangers of
conformity to the stultifying restraints of the Hollywood film industry, but
none of the characters are given any speeches to communicate such a message,
and the absence of an ending suggests that Oboler himself didn't quite know how
to interpret what was going on. Perhaps Oboler finally decided to turn his back
on his background in radio and make a motion picture in the truest sense of the
world—a series of striking, three-dimensional visuals unaccompanied by verbal
explanations—only to flounder artistically when he left himself without
anything to say.
Other filmmakers may be fruitfully enigmatic, then,
but Arch Oboler needed to send a message in order to stimulate his creative
talents, such as they were. Yet if all you are doing is sending a message,
people will soon stop listening to you, even if your message arrives with some
quirky, original trappings. The best and most enduring science fiction films of
the 1950s, despite critical posterings to the contrary, thankfully had broader
goals in mind.
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