The Morbius Endgame

Forbidden Planet is one of my favorite science fiction films - for my money, one of the most important ever made. I continually find myself struck by how many passing details it gets right - more so than many a more recent work. Look at the way Ostrow appeals to principles of Darwinian selection to argue that the prints left by the boojum stalking the crew can’t be the result of an ordinary biological phenomenon. One searches in vain for anything remotely close in a mess like Prometheus. And there is Robby: one of my favorite AIs in all of fiction. And of course this was the Star Trek before there was Star Trek: the influences on Rodenberry are unmistakable. To be sure, there are things not to love: Walter Pigeon’s phoned-in performance as Morbius, the lily-white, unigendered crew, and the sometimes-archaic, not to say atavistic, sexual mores. But they are superseded by the ideas that the film engages.

Lately I’ve been reading the film novelization by Philip Macdonald (under the pen name of W.J. Stuart), which is good, too - at any rate, better than the hack job that Anthony Boucher accused it of being in the June, 1956 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Among other things, it clears up a few points that confound in the movie (news flash: the tiger and other Earth animals were Morbius’ conjurations, too). The connection, here, that gives me pause: the author was the grandson of late Victorian fantasist George Macdonald. Now I’m finding myself wondering if Philip M. may have had some influence on the construction of the original screenplay by Irving Block, Allen Adler, and Cyril Hume, and on whether or not some seeming-echoes of his grandfather’s works - the lurking presence of the Shadow in Lilith as compared with Morbius bette noire , for instance - are really there, or are mere pareidolia on my part.

It’s true that Macdonald-the-younger does take the end of the story in a much more explicitly theological direction than the movie ever does: the Krell Machine’s ability to fabricate material constructs from energy is interpreted as being sufficiently close to creation ex nihilo as to usurp the power of the Creator, and the fate of Morbius and the Krell is seen explicitly in terms of divine punishment for this Promethean effrontery. This supernaturalism is as unnecessary as it is distressing. One of the great things about the movie (as opposed to the novelization) is the subtlety with which it interweaves repeated recourse to Darwinism with a steadfast naturalistic deism that interprets Morbius’ and the Krell’s respective falls in terms of the working out of a kind of karmic natural causality, stemming from their hubristic failure to take the implications of their evolutionary origins into account in what they are doing.

The question may be whether that causality is something we can altogether afford to ignore, as our own individualized manufacturing capabilities accelerate towards the historical horizon that marks the end of scarcity. It might seem too fantastic, but I think the risk has been in some degree underplayed: it is at least as plausible a peril as the much-ballyhooed Singularity of Kurzweil and company. On the one hand, internet-side marketing technologies are becoming ever more efficient in sussing out and responding to subconscious behavioral tells and use-patterns that users cannot consciously pre-empt amid increasing talk of keeping record of such tells for security features. On the other, we have the advent of automated application authoring based on gestural indication coupled with the individually tailored 3-d superfabrication capabilities implicit in the so-called Internet of Things. Couple these factors, and they seem to me a recipe for Trouble, vis-a-vis the prospect that personally targeted and overly solicitous pattern detectors might end up fabricating applications and constructs that served the subject’s appetites (or, indeed, the subject’s rational self-interests) in personally dangerous and generally anti-social ways. And like the Krell malady, this is the sort of thing that could easily overtake and surprise a society not especially sensitized to the danger of it. When confronted with technology that promises to supply your heart’s desire, best retain the option to be careful what you wish for (a lesson George Macdonald would have readily appreciated).