56
Popular Culture Review
Mexican Man: Maybe these are not men, not like us.
White Man #1: Everything human doesn’t have to look like
you and me.
White Man #2: If it’s men from Mars, we ought to let ’em
know we’re friendly.
MM:
Don’t fool around with something when you
don’t know what it i s. . . .
[advancing on “meteor” together]
MM:
How they going to understand us?
WM #2:
We’ll talk in sign language.
WM #1:
They’ll understand us, all right.
MM:
Sure, sure. Everybody understands, when
you wave the white flag you want to be friends.
The nervous chuckling that underscores the Mexican’s final line and the
immediate response to this “flag-waving” (a fatal zap from the Martian ship)
betrays not only the Mexican’s misgivings about the truth of his statement, but the
film’s own critique of U.S. assumptions that the rest of world would “speak
English when we got there”—would accommodate itself to western semiotic
systems of communication and peace-making as it combated the communist
threat on nultiple international fronts. Thus, at this moment, the film appears to
endorse a sympathetic, “metaphoric,” view of the “red menace,” presenting the
Martians as hostile and unreceptive, yet suggesting that it is not they but those
approaching them with the wrong message who are to blame for the bad relations
between them.
Interestingly, the layers of embodiment of the Martians themselves
reinforce the mixed-mindedness of the film’s take on what the Martians are: while
they crash to earth in a clumsy, mess-making blob which embeds itself in the
desert landscape and is mistaken at first for a harmless meteor (the metaphoric),
the second layer of its revelation partakes deeply of the metonymic—metallic,
cool, long, and narrow, streamlined as a laser in its ability to locate its enemy and
destroy it. Yet even this “Ford Fairlane” make and model of Martian
manifestation is not its core formation but a second powerful means of transport,
defense, and destruction. The final form the Martian takes, to be discussed
shortly, reconstructs it once more, not as foreign and machine-like but as
practically identical to originary “American” (earthly) life forms—slimy,
slippery, amphibious, and viral, recalling once more the metaphoric, the shared
structure and permeable boundaries that enable the conditions of both contagion
and cure.16
In contrast to this initial ambassadorial encounter between the Martians
and three townsmen is a later episode in which the Martians are once again
approached and turn their beams of destruction on the hapless diplomat. In a