Forbidden Planet is a virtual compendium of pulp science fiction themes from the 1950s. It features space travel, an alien planet, a mad scientist, numerous high-tech devices (including a remarkable robot), and an advanced (but extinct) alien race. Filmed in brilliant color and widescreen Cinemascope, it provides some of the most memorable science fiction images of the decade, from the dazzling green sky of the planet Altaira IV; to the marvelous high-tech residence of the mad scientist Morbius; to the lovable, but formidable, Robby the Robot, one of the first major examples of an artificially intelligent robot in science fiction film. In addition, the film’s ambivalence about technology nicely captures the combination of fascination and anxiety with which American society regarded the scientific and technological advances of the time. However, based partly on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the film has literary aspirations that set it apart from most of the run-of-the-mill SF films of its era.
Forbidden Planet begins with a brief future history of space exploration, informing us that the conquest of space began with the first manned mission to the moon in the last decade of the twenty-first century. This history places the action of the film in the twenty-third century, when the discovery of “hyper-drive” technology has allowed interstellar travel, which has clearly by the time of the action of the film become routine. In this case, the United Planets cruiser C57D (a basic flying saucer design), commanded by Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) is on a relief mission to the planet Altair IV, where another expedition (aboard the spaceship Bellerophon) landed twenty years earlier, never to be heard from again. As the new ship approaches the planet, Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), a philologist attached to the earlier expedition, greets them by radio and urges them to turn back, assuring them that he needs no relief and that he cannot answer for their safety if they land on the planet.
Their curiosity piqued, they land anyway, and are immediately greeted by the remarkable Robby the Robot, who turns out to have the principal responsibilities for carrying out the bidding of Morbius, his creator—just as Ariel does Prospero’s bidding in The Tempest. The robot takes Adams, Lt. “Doc” Ostrow (the ship’s doctor, played by Warren Stevens), and Lt. Jerry Farman (the ship’s first officer, played by Jack Kelly) aboard his high-speed vehicle to Morbius’s residence. Morbius then introduces the visitors to the considerable capabilities of Robby (a creation he nevertheless dismisses as “child’s play”) and the other accoutrements of his high-tech home. He describes these technological wonders as “parlor magic,” providing one of many links between himself and Shakespeare’s Prospero. Though he is by training a specialist in languages, not science, he also links himself to a variety of science fiction predecessors when he assures his visitors that, because of safeguards built into the robot’s programming, he could not convince Robby to harm them even if he were “the mad scientist of the taped thrillers.”
Morbius explains that, within the first year of their arrival on the planet, all members of the Bellerophon expedition except himself and his wife were killed by some sort of strange “force” indigenous to the planet. Many of them were torn limb from limb, though the last three of them were killed when the Bellerophon was vaporized when it attempted to lift off to return to earth. Soon afterward, Morbius’s wife died of “natural causes.” However, Morbius is now accompanied by his beautiful nineteen-year-old daughter, Altaira (generally referred to in the film as Alta, played by Anne Francis), who is most impressed when she meets the visitors, the only men other than her father she has ever seen, In this, she echoes Prospero’s daughter Miranda from The Tempest, who is much impressed by the new arrivals on their island. Morbius, on the other hand, seems anxious to get rid of the newcomers, presumably because he fears that they will meet the same sad fate as the other members of the crew of the Bellerophon. Adams, however, decides that, given that fate, he must contact earth (not an easy matter at these interstellar distances) for instructions on how to proceed.
Robby helps the visitors as they construct a transmitter with which to contact earth, meanwhile meeting up with the ship’s cook (Earl Holliman), a comic character for whom Robby fabricates a large supply of bourbon in the kind of comic subplot often found in science fiction films of the time. In this case, however, the subplot inevitably recalls the comic subplot of The Tempest, in which the lowly Trinculo and Stephano are also much given to drink. Over Morbius’s objections, Alta continues to fraternize with the newcomers, her scanty costumes stirring the hormones of the young all-male crew, who haven’t seen a woman for over a year while in space. Farman, a notorious womanizer, undertakes to teach the totally naïve girl the joys of sex, but is interrupted by an angry Adams, who orders him to stay away from her.
As work proceeds on the transmitter, something or someone sneaks into the compound set up around cruiser C57D and sabotages some crucial components. Informed of the sabotage, Morbius explains that strange things happen on this planet. He tells Adams and Ostrow about the mysterious Krel, an ancient advanced race that had formerly inhabited the planet but that was suddenly wiped out 200,000 years earlier. It is, in fact, leftover Krel technology that has allowed Morbius to build Robby and the other devices in his futuristic house. He takes Adams and Ostrow into a secret laboratory, where he works to decipher Krel texts and thus recover their astounding knowledge.
Morbius shows the visitors some of the leftover Krel devices. He also explains that, in the final days before their annihilation, the Krel were devoting all of their resources to a new project that would have allowed them to boost their already considerable brain power to the point of freeing them from dependence on other physical technology by allowing them to produce all they needed by the sheer power of their minds—giving new meaning to the notion of artificial intelligence. Morbius takes Adams and Ostrow for a tour of the vast underground complex of machinery that the Krels had developed in conjunction with this final project, though Morbius himself remains unaware of the exact function of this complex.
Meanwhile, back at the compound, an invisible creature breaks through the electronic barriers that have been set up to prevent further sabotage. Chief Engineer Quinn (Richard Anderson) is killed in this second attack, after which Morbius again warns the visitors that if they remain on the planet, they will all be killed, repeating the fate of the crew of the Bellerophon. Adams takes this warning as a threat and begins to suspect that Morbius is involved in the attacks on his compound. Adams and his men beef up security and manage to repel a third attack, though not before three more crewmen, including Farman, are killed.
Still suspicious that Morbius is involved, Adams and Ostrow go back to Morbius’s lab to investigate. Ostrow hooks himself up to the Krel mind boosting device and thereby learns that, in addition to materializing conscious mental projections it can also project subconscious desires, thus unleashing “monsters from the id” (which vaguely correspond to Caliban in The Tempest). Ostrow dies as a result of the mental overload from using the machine but is able to relay his discovery to Adams before he dies. Soon Adams realizes that the creature attacking the visitors is precisely one of these id monsters, a product of Morbius subconscious mind brought into physical being by Krel technology, though Morbius himself had been unaware of this fact. The Krel, he now realizes, must have been destroyed by the monstrous power unleashed from the savage forces at work in their own subconscious minds. “The beast,” muses Morbius in a moment of sudden understanding, “the mindless primitive—even the Krel must have evolved from that beginning.”
At this point, the monster that had been attacking the compound approaches Morbius’s house and begins to break through the near impenetrable barriers that surround it. Morbius realizes that Alta, having pledged her love to Adams and decided to return to earth with him (just as Miranda decides to marry Prince Ferdinand in The Tempest), is no longer immune to the monster. “We’re all part monsters in our subconscious,” says Adams, explaining that Morbius unconsciously sent his id-monster out to kill the crew members of the Bellerophon after they had voted to return to earth. As the monster breaks through the barrier guarding the secret laboratory, where they have taken refuge, Morbius confronts it and manages to makes it go away. He then dies, but not before activating an unstoppable chain reaction that will destroy the Krel machinery and the entire planet on which it resides.
Adams and his remaining crew, along with Alta and Robby, take off in their ship and watch the destruction of the planet from outer space. Robby, a quick learner, now serves as the ship’s pilot, replacing the dead Farman. Attempting to comfort Alta, Adams muses that humans, in a million years or so, will have reached the point earlier reached by the Krel, when her father’s experience will serve as a warning that “we are not God,” thus preventing a repetition of the Krel disaster.
Forbidden Planet was the only science fiction film by director Wilcox, who is best known for the series of “Lassie” films (beginning with the 1943 classic Lassie Come Home) that he directed in the 1940s. Indeed, he directed relatively few films overall—and only one more (the 1960 B-picture I Passed for White) after Forbidden Planet. Most of Wilcox’s films are routine B-pictures, yet several, including Lassie Come Home, the children’s film The Secret Garden (1949), and the noir thriller Shadow in the Sky (1952) are well crafted gems of their kind. Forbidden Planet is certainly in this category, and its combination of style and technique made it one of the standout films of its era, often considered the Golden Age of science fiction cinema.
Buoyed by the largest budget of any science fiction film that had yet been made, Forbidden Planet is itself a demonstration of advanced technology of precisely the kind that makes film in general an especially interesting medium for science fiction: such films not only tell stories about the technological future but push film technology itself beyond the bounds of the present. Thus, even though the film is centrally concerned with the danger posed by technologies so advanced that they get out of human control, this technological anxiety is tempered by an almost loving fascination with the marvelous possibilities offered by advanced technology harnessed in the service of humanity.
The futuristic look of Forbidden Planet is greatly supplemented by its high-tech sound, produced by the groundbreaking all-electronic soundtrack. Created by Bebe and Louis Barron, this soundtrack does a great deal to create an otherworldly aura for the film, somewhat in the manner of the theremin music from The Day the Earth Stood Still. The electronic music of Forbidden Planet is much more extensive, however, providing background atmospherics for the entire film. The music was produced on an advanced homemade synthesizer that the Barrons built themselves (employing insights from the new science of cybernetics) and that had a range of expressive capabilities well beyond that of the theremin. The soundtrack to the film (still available on CD) is considered an historic landmark in the development of electronic music, especially for use in film.
Forbidden Planet won no Academy Awards, but it did get an Oscar nomination for best special effects. The special effects of the film are indeed impressive for the time, partly because MGM Studios provided an unusually large budge that allowed for the construction of large, elaborate sets and complex devices such as Robby the Robot. For example, space cruiser C57D is a significantly more complex effect than the flying saucer of The Day the Earth Stood Still, using animation and a miniature model to produce lights and moving parts as the ship swoops in over Altair IV for its landing. And this model was effective enough to be repeatedly used in later MGM productions, particularly in several episodes of The Twilight Zone.
Robby the Robot, though, is surely the most memorable effect in Forbidden Planet. Designed by Robert Kinoshita, Robby was, at the time, one of the most complex and expensive (he reportedly cost $125,000 to make) devices ever created for the movies. Actually, the “robot” was played by an actor (officially Frankie Darrow, though prop-man Frankie Carpenter stood in for Darrow in many of the scenes) inside a costume made of vacuum-formed plastic. However, this plastic was itself an advanced material, and the costume included a number of high-tech flourishes, including the spinning antennae outside and the whirling mechanisms inside its see-through head, as well as a system of electrical motors that allowed various parts of the body to be manipulated from an exterior control panel, independent of the actor inside. Robby was also given a genuine personality of its own and, as voiced by announcer Marvin Miller, had some of the funniest lines in the entire film. For example, when the newly arrived astronauts marvel at the high oxygen content of the atmosphere of Altair IV, Robby replies, “I rarely use it myself, sir. It promotes rust.” Robby’s convincing high-tech look combined with his winning personality to make him an immediate hit with audiences, so much so that MGM brought him back the following year to play a leading role in The Invisible Boy. Indeed, the Robby character (though played by different actors and, ultimately, replaced by a facsimile of the original)became something of a star in its own right, appearing in such later films as Gremlins (1984), Cherry 2000 (1987), and Earth Girls Are Easy (1989). It also made numerous appearances on television, including guest roles on The Twilight Zone, Wonder Woman, Mork and Mindy, and Lost in Space. In the latter case, he even demonstrated his range as an actor, playing a villainous robot that does battle against the lovable robot of that series (a robot that was, incidentally, also designed by Kinoshita—and was basically just a low-budget version of Robby).Finally, in one of the first examples of successful movie-related merchandising, Robby has also, over the years, been the model for a variety of children’s toys and even expensive full-scale replicas on sale to collectors.
Other important visual effects in Forbidden Planet include the various planetscapes (created via large scale studio sets) that help to provide a reasonably believable sense of being on an alien world. The scene in which the invisible monster from the id tries to break though the security field around space cruiser C57D, allowing us to see its electronic outline (produced by the animators at Disney Studios), is also impressive. A particularly important visual aspect of the film is Morbius’s residence and the elaborate Krel facility that lies beneath it. Along with Robby, it is this residence that contains the film’s central positive images of advanced technology, images that are treated with an almost loving fascination, despite the film’s overall anxiety about the dangers of technological progress.
The vast Krel facility seems intended primarily to give viewers a visual suggestion of the incredibly advanced nature of Krel technology. However, from the perspective of our later digital age, this technology (which still includes a number of analog devices such as dials and switches) seems oddly clunky. The huge size of the complex is clearly meant to indicate its vast power, but it also indicates that the film was made before the later age of miniaturization tended to make smaller devices seem more advanced. Even the amazing Robby seems unimpressive compared to the human-like androids of later science fiction films. Indeed, it seems rather surprising that the crew of the C57D find Robby so astonishing: one would think that a twenty-third-century earth so technologically advanced as to have made interstellar travel routine should have developed robots at least as capable as Robby. Then again, Forbidden Planet is often rather conservative in its estimation of the capabilities of earth technology, as in its assumption that travel to the moon would not be accomplished until the last decade of the twenty-first century.
Similarly, while Morbius’s residence is a marvel from the perspective of the 1950s, it seems odd that the twenty-third-century earthlings of the film are so impressed by it. Then again, the film is appropriately viewed from the perspective of the 1950s, not the 2200s, and the house is best seen as an example of the kind of future home that was the object of much fascination in the American 1950s. With household technology, in the form of appliances and other conveniences, advancing at an unprecedented pace in the decade, Americans in general looked to a future when their homes would become more and more streamlined and automated. When the Disneyland theme park opened in 1955 (the year before the release of Forbidden Planet), one of its four main thematic areas was “Tomorrowland,” which featured visions of future space technology, future cities, and (perhaps most importantly) future homes. A central display was the Monsanto House of the Future, though this display did not open until 1957. Surrounded by a lush garden, the house, inspired by the abstract, futuristic contemporary architecture known as “Googie,” looked something like a flying saucer in its own right.[1] The house and its furnishings were made largely of plastic (a crucial product of its sponsor, the Monsanto corporation), and in this the house was typical of the 1950s celebration of plastic as the material of the future. Plastic tupperware figured prominently in the kitchen, which was, in fact, the focal point of the entire house. Special emphasis was placed on kitchen appliances (supplied by the General Electric Corporation), a key interest of American consumers at the time. The high-tech, largely push-button, kitchen included such items as ultrasonic dishwashers, microwave ovens, atomic food preservation, high-tech garbage disposal, and plastic sinks with adjustable heights. Other innovations included an advanced climate control system, sophisticated lighting, insulated glass walls, picture telephones, plastic chairs, speaker phones, and electric toothbrushes.
Morbius’s home in Forbidden Planet clearly embodies many of the same future expectations as the Monsanto House of the Future, which to a viewer in the twenty-first century gives it almost a retro, 1950s feel. Though we see only a brief view of the green exterior, the home is round, surrounded by gardens. The interior is elaborately decorated (as opposed to the minimalist views of the future seen in many SF films of the 1950s), though not necessarily with high-tech devices. Most of the décor is provided by scattered art objects and flowers, as well as a variety of modernistic pieces of furniture. Given the mild climate of Altair IV, much of the house is open to the out of doors, though it can be quickly enclosed by steel security shutters. There is also a special emphasis on advanced kitchen technology. On their first visit to the house, the newcomers are treated to lunch at a futuristic semi-circular counter; the food, produced by Robby, is composed of synthetic copies of earth food, using a process that seems similar to that employed by the replicators of television’s Star Trek. Cleanup is then achieved by zapping the leftovers in a household disintegrator.
Among other things, the technology in Morbius’s Krel laboratory contains a “plastic educator” that allows one to exercise one’s mental abilities and that can, apparently, lead to vast improvements in intellectual power. On the other hand, this device is extremely dangerous to mere humans, who lack, by and large, the brainpower to handle this machine. Morbius, with an IQ of 183, barely survived his own first exposure to the machine, but that exposure has also led to a doubling of his intellectual capacity, giving him the intelligence to be able to understand some of the Krel technology, though his intelligence quotient remains, by Krel standards, that of a “low-grade moron.” This technological boost to Morbius’s intellect enacts a typical science fiction fantasy. Unfortunately, it also gives Morbius the mind power to tap into the vast underground Krel power grid, causing the monster from the id to materialize as a projection of his own subconscious desires.
In this double vision of technology as both wondrous and dangerous, Forbidden Planet has predecessors that go back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first published in 1818. Indeed, Adams’s final reminder that human beings are not gods links Forbidden Planet to warnings against human hubris that go back as far as the Old Testament story of the tower of Babel or to any number of stories from Greek mythology, that of Prometheus being the most obvious and direct predecessor to the story of the film. (Frankenstein, we should remember, was subtitled, The Modern Prometheus.)
Despite such predecessors, Forbidden Planet is very much a work of its time. If Americans of the 1950s were fascinated by the prospects of a better future through technology, they were also all too painfully aware that some of the most important technological advances of the decade were in nuclear weaponry, to the point that humanity for the first time literally had the power to wipe itself off the face of the planet, just as the Krel of Forbidden Planet had done on Altair IV. The warning seems clear: if the Krel, described as a million years more advanced than humans, “ethically, as well as technologically,” can be destroyed by extending their technology into realms better left alone, then primitive humans—of the 1950s or even the 2200s—are surely in danger of a similar fate.
Then again, in Forbidden Planet,humans of the 2200s seem to have advanced very little socially or ethically over humans of the 1950s. We learn essentially nothing about the political organization of the future, though the fact that the crew of the cruiser C57D represents the “United Planets” suggests an interplanetary political organization perhaps somewhat along the lines of the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek. On the other hand, the crew of the cruiser in Forbidden Planet is decidedly all-white, all-male, and (for that matter) all-American, with absolutely no suggestion of the diversity that marks the crew of Star Trek’s starship Enterprise. Forbidden Planet, in its failure to imagine advanced social, political, and economic structures that might overcome the present-day problems of the society in which it was produced,thus lacks an important utopian dimension of Star Trek and of much of the best science fiction.
In this sense, Forbidden Planet is again a representative work of 1950s science fiction, which, especially in film, tends to be short on utopian imagery, partly because the film industry was under intense pressure in the midst of an anticommunist political climate in which Hollywood was often suspected of left-leaning tendencies. In this climate, the film industry had to tread rather cautiously, though it is also the case that science fiction film (because it was considered unrealistic and not regarded as “serious”) could sometimes get away with more extensive political commentary than could more mainstream films. Indeed, even the veiled and indirect warnings in Forbidden Planet against the unrestrained development of more and more advanced nuclear weapons went well beyond most American films of its time as a political statement.
In addition to the fear that any criticism of American society might be taken as an indication of pro-Soviet sympathies, American science fiction films were a bit hesitant to project dramatically different futures because 1950s American society, in the throes of burgeoning social changes that would erupt in the sometimes violent protests of the 1960s, was in the grip of such rapid changes that it had a kind of social vertigo. Long standing social attitudes and practices, particularly with regard to race and gender relations, were under intense pressure, leading to widespread insecurity. American audiences turned to films not for images that change was possible but for reassurances that some things might, after all, remain the same.
Forbidden Planet does not address the issue of race at all, other than to suggest, via the makeup of the crew of the C57D that whites would maintain their elite status in American society well into the twenty-third century. Gender, however, is treated more directly, if equally unimaginatively. Alta, the only female character in the film, is represented as young, blonde, beautiful, and sexually pliant. Importantly, though, her obvious sexual accessibility arises not from any arrant erotic desires on her own part; it comes from her total innocence and ignorance of sexuality, which not only makes her easily impressed by virtually any man who comes along but also leaves that man in a position of complete mastery, able to tutor his innocent young conquest and to mold her to fit his own sexual style. Alta is, in short, the quintessential 1950s-style sexual object—and a far cry from the intelligent, sophisticated, and independent Helen Benson of The Day the Earth Stood Still.
When Alta makes her first entrance as Morbius is entertaining Adams, Farman, and Ostrow, the wolfish Farman immediately identifies her as an easy mark, quickly seeking to ingratiate himself with her—and meanwhile warning her that the commander is a danger to any woman who lets herself be caught alone with him. The next day, when Alta visits the compound where the crew of the C57D is building their transmitter to contact earth, Farman takes her aside to a private spot. Attempting to introduce her to the practice of kissing, he explains to her that the activity is an indispensable part of the social practices of all advanced civilizations and that it is also extremely good for one’s basic health. He then “selflessly” volunteers to show her how it is done, for which she seems entirely grateful, though he is a bit perturbed to discover that she does not find his initial kisses particularly stimulating. Nevertheless, he keeps at it, and it is quite clear that, despite her lack of response, the innocent Alta would be perfectly willing to try whatever other activities he might recommend as salubrious.
Luckily, Adams arrives at this point and sends Farman packing, at the same time making it clear both that he wants Alta for himself and that, as a responsible commander, he is far too principled to take advantage of the girl’s innocence in the way Farman had been more than happy to do. He thus berates Alta for her behavior with Farman and for running around in such skimpy costumes, a practice that he warns her might lead to dire consequences given that he is in command of eighteen sex-starved “super-perfect physical specimens with an average age of 24.6.” Alta rushes away, hurt by his attitude, which she clearly doesn’t understand.
On the other hand, the young woman is obviously smitten with Adams and immediately sets about attempting to construct (with Robby’s help) a new wardrobe that will better meet with his approval: she tells the robot to construct something that will cover her completely, yet still “fit in all the right places.” In her next tantalizing appearance in the film, Alta swims nude in a pool and innocently asks Adams to join her when he approaches. When he declines (and demurely turns his back), she emerges from the water and puts on the fetching new long dress that Robby has made for her. Adams says she looks lovely, to which she responds, “Then why don’t you kiss me like everybody else does?” After a quick conversation in which Adams attempts to discern the level of her education in “biology,” they finally do kiss. This time she responds passionately—at which point her normally docile her pet tiger appears and attempts to attack them, only to be blown out of existence by Adams’s handy blaster.
By the end of the film, it becomes retroactively clear that the tiger is itself a projection of Morbius’s subconscious mind, harmless to Alta as long as she does nothing that would conflict with her father’s basic desires. In other words, this is the moment in the film when her basic allegiance switches from her father to Adams, enacting the ideal 1950s narrative of the loyal virgin daughter who nevertheless gives herself without reservation to her husband once the right one comes along. Granted, she displays the appropriate hesitation, arguing that she can’t leave her father alone on the planet when Adams first asks her to leave with him. Yet when Morbius appears soon afterward (in the wake of Ostrow’s final discovery and death), she announces to her father that she has chosen to go with Adams. Soon afterward, the id monster appears and attacks the residence, leading to Morbius’s death. Alta is then free to go with Adams without conflict, melting into his arms for comfort after they watch from space as Altaira IV is destroyed in a fiery planetary explosion.
If there is something vaguely Freudian about the Morbius-Alta-Adams triangle, then the basic monsters-from-the-id premise of the film is even more Freudian. Of course, Freudian psychoanalysis was an object of widespread fascination in America in the 1950s, so much so that Freud became a key element of the popular culture of the decade. Any number of works of the decade incorporated elements from the popular conception of Freudianism. Forbidden Planet, while suggesting that Freudian terminology will be obsolete by the twenty-third century (Morbius has to explain the archaic term “id” to Adams at one point), nevertheless adopts Freud’s vision of the id as a subconscious realm of dark, seething, savagedesires. And, while Freud has often been accused of excessive universalism in believing that the basic structure of the human psyche is the same across cultures and historical periods, the film goes even further, attributing a basically Freudian psychic structure even to the alien (and immensely advanced) Krel.
Perhaps even more tellingly, Forbidden Planet employs an evolutionary version of Freudianism in which the id is seen as the site of primitive desires dating back to the dawn of mankind, as opposed to the conscious mind, which is the site of more “civilized” thoughts. In its anxiety that the primitive forces of the id might somehow be reactivated, the film shows a concern that thousands of years of evolution have not eradicated humanity’s most primitive tendencies but have merely coated them with a thin and fragile veneer of civilization and refinement. In short, the film shows a concern that all those centuries of evolution might suddenly be reversed, causing a reversion to the primitive. This fear of “degeneration” to a primitive state was particularly widespread in the United States in the 1950s, indicating only one of many ways in which the characteristic concerns of an America faced with stepping into the shoes of the British Empire as a global standard-bearer of Western values resembled those of America’s European imperial predecessors.
Degeneration was, in fact, one of the central anxieties that occupied the European popular imagination in the late nineteenth century, fueled by a popular fascination with the then-new Darwinian theory of evolution and by fears of the dark forces that might be encountered as Europeans went about the rapid colonization of Africa in the last decades of the century. Perhaps the central expression of this anxiety was Max Nordau’s 1895 book Degeneration, an enormously popular work that helped to fuel the widespread fascination with the concept of degeneration. Late Victorian British literature is filled with tales of degeneration, of which Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is perhaps the classic example. The same can be said for American science fiction in the 1950s, especially in film. Vaguely aware that evolution was driven by mutation and that mutation could be caused by radiation, Americans in the 1950s put two and two together and concluded that radiation could cause evolution, or (more probably, given the negative resonances of radiation in the decade) degeneration. Thus, in its concern with the possibility of degeneration (as with its concern about the dangers of runaway technology and its fascination with the Freudian subconscious) Forbidden Planet is a classic case of the way in which science fiction often looks to the future but in ways that are thoroughly embedded in the concerns of the present.
Note
[1] On the Googie style, popular in bowling alleys and coffeeshops of the 1950s, see Alan Hess’s book Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture.