Order in the Universe by Robert Cumbow

Author:Robert Cumbow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Songs and Movies

Starman seems to inherit from Elvis and Christine the device of songs commenting on the action. Shortly after Starman enters Earth’s atmosphere on echoes of Voyager’s recording of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” Jenny Hayden is introduced to us looking at an old home movie of her and her husband Scott singing “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” This device effectively limns both characters for us—they are searchers whose object is out of reach. Starman’s goal eludes him because Earth turns out to be rather more hostile than Voyager had given him reason to expect; Jenny’s dream—the return of her dead husband—is beyond any reasonable reach. Yet both Starman’s dissatisfaction and Jenny’s dream will be resolved in each other.

Despite the fact that it’s the mid-Eighties, Jenny is watching a home movie, emphatically not a videotape. That gesture is typical of the Carpenter who put Forbidden Planet on a TV screen in Halloween in its proper widescreen frame ratio, and who continues to insist on his debt to a tradition of film. Starman, among the many things it is about, is yet another paean to that tradition, and it doesn’t take Jenny and Starman driving among the familiar mesas of John Ford’s Monument Valley to make us aware of it. In a way, Starman gives us life imitating art, in its purest form: Starman learns appropriate gestures and expressions from watching film, just as he learned speech from the Voyager tapes. He learns about love partly from Jenny and partly from movies he sees on the motel room TV, most visibly the beach scene of From Here to Eternity.

Of course, Voyager, with its sound tapes and visual images, has prepared the alien Starman for this kind of media-based learning experience. Voyager has done its job as a media-educator of visitors from other worlds: “I send greetings,” says Starman, trying out his newfound human voice. In reply to Jenny’s many questions, he responds in a halting tone that she misinterprets as madness: “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

Interestingly, Starman is not the only science fiction film built on a Voyager premise. Star Trek—The Motion Picture was also based on Voyager. In that film, the exploratory satellite comes back as a potential destroyer of Earth; but in both films, Voyager is emblematic of the double standard of Earth (and specifically American) society: superficially welcoming (“Please come and visit our planet”), but actually profoundly xenophobic. In both films, the resolution and redemption is achieved by uniting a human being with the alien life form.

Starman taps another standard invader-movie theme as well: Starman describes his planet: “We are very civilized, but we have lost something.” In This Island Earth and The Man Who Fell to Earth, to name only two of many examples, a dying civilization sends an emissary to Earth to try to gain something from the contact. It is typical of this subgenre that the visitor ends up giving more than he gets, and Starman will be no exception. But his

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