"A Long Time Ago in Princeton":
Orson Welles' War of the Worlds

March 5, 2006

I stumbled recently onto a wonderful website that makes available most of the original radio broadcasts by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre. Naturally we started with his notorious War of the Worlds.

The entire broadcast—from October 30, 1938—lasts just less than 60 minutes. Of that time almost 40 minutes is spent on the fake broadcast sequence, which is the only part which would have stirred up fears. At the beginning, and then again for the final 20 minutes, Orson Welles, as professor Pierson of Princeton University, recounts his own actions and thoughts.

Far too much happens in the course of the 40 minute fake broadcast sequence for this to be mistaken for a real broadcast by any careful listener. Time is condensed and we are taken from vague radio mention of explosions on Mars—40 million miles away from us—to the final dramatic on-air gassing of the live radio announcers in New York, watching as the cloud of gas comes closer. In between we get the scene of terror as the metallic creatures emerge from their dark casings, sending out heat rays and annihilating an over-confident military detachment.. even airplanes get thrown at them, and we hear a broadcast from inside a cockpit. That would indeed be an eventful 40 minutes, all carried live on the radio. We can only assume that the listeners who were frightened did not pay too close attention before running into the street.. or whatever they did.

The fake broadcast sequence is really quite clever. I particularly loved the way the exchanges sent out misdirections. The experts keep coming on and insisting nothing is wrong.. the strange explosions on Mars are part a slight atmospheric disturbance, nothing to be worried about. But that information is contradicted by what we are hearing from eye-witnesses. The listener is encouraged to actively disagree with the "experts" and form his or her own opinion about the events.. which, of course, plays right into the hands of the dramatists.

Orson Welles seems to me to be the master of a popular lyricism. He delivers fast-paced drama, which I can easily imagine attracting average listeners to sit a little closer to their console radio, but then Welles allows for moments of real lyricism. Too much of that, and a listener might call his production "high falutin", but the lyricism comes and goes so quickly that it never becomes the dominant element. In his movies, too, camera and words are busy doing their practical jobs, but at the same time they allow for moments that serve only an aesthetic purpose.

At the end Welles, as professor Pierson, thinks for a few minutes about the utter change to the world. He recalls his life "a long time ago in Princeton." Even at the end, after the terrible machines have been destroyed by some virus, and they are displayed in a museum, like dark futuristic dinosaurs in some un-natural history museum, something remains changed in the world. There is something standing between professor Pierson and the past.

I think I catch there the Wellesian theme of change and destruction of the past. Again, from his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich in This is Orson Welles:

OW: Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive of such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit. That the imagination of man is capable of creating the myth of a more open, more generous time is not a sign of our folly. Every country has its "Merrie England," a season of innocence, a dew-bright morning of the world. Shakespeare sings of that lost Maytime in many of his plays, and Falstaff—that pot-ridden old rogue—is its perfect embodiment...
PB: One critic, Andrew Sarris, pointed out that there is more in common between you and Ford then one would think at first glance—because both of you have a great respect and love for the past.
OW: Well, we're hooked on different pasts, of course. I'm interested really in the myth of the past, as a myth. Jack Ford is one of the myth-makers.

So this theme of change is one that recurs often in Welles, although in this case with a particularly dramatic break. With the conflict that would become World War II beginning to darken on the world's horizon (Welles even makes reference to it in the lead-up to the fake broadcast sequence), it is hard not to see those metal monsters displayed in a museum as a precursor to our own Holocaust Museums, and the consciousness of professor Pierson.. the sense that the world cannot be the same again.. is perhaps part of our own mental inheritance from that war. This was a War of the Worlds keyed to coming events.