Good Airplane Movies

If you hang out with pilots for any length of time and the movies come up you’ll very likely hear the more or less unanimous opinion that Hollywood doesn’t make good movies about aviation.

I agree good aviation movies are few and far between, but it should be noted that an aviation movie is about people flying or otherwise involved with airplanes. An “aviation movie” should let the non-flying viewer glimpse what motivates otherwise normal people to learn to fly and deliberately, even eagerly, perform the unnatural act of flying.

Pilots don’t tend to talk about the faults in the story. That’s sort of secondary. They tend to focus on technical inaccuracies about the airplanes or the techniques of flying them. A particularly egregious example is a movie where a Spitfire pilot manages to break the speed of sound by “cross-controlling” – possibly a misunderstanding of the control reversal phenomenon experienced by some airplanes as they near Mach One – an event that, even at the time the film was made, was known to be not merely incorrect but something that would lead to the destruction of the aircraft and probably its pilot. Exceeding Mach One in a propeller-driven aircraft is an aerodynamic impossibility, anyway.

My personal favorite mistakes include identification of one type of airplane as another. The film “Midway” (1976) had aerial shots that identified an airplane with four engines (probably a C-130 Hercules) as a twin-engine PBY Catalina; a long shot of an aerial dogfight where the airplanes involved all appeared to have in-line engines, whereas all the airplanes at Midway had radial engines; or the scene where an American TBF torpedo bomber is identified as a Japanese “Kate” even though the white star of the US national insignia, as opposed to the red rising sun of Japan, is plainly visible.

Directors would probably argue, with some justice, that to most people an airplane is an airplane is an airplane and what the blank, they’ve all got wings, don’t they? So what difference does it make? Besides, it costs a lot of money to shoot those aerial scenes right. Look at Howard Hughes nearly going broke shooting “Hell’s Angels.”

So what’s the big deal?

Well…you don’t become a pilot unless flying means something to you beyond the ordinary, and given the vanishingly small percentage of people who actually become pilots, much less professional pilots, maybe it isn’t surprising that so few people understand why it’s important to pilots to get these “little details” right.

Because, you see, to pilots, especially professional pilots who may have lives riding on their skill and expertise, there’s no such thing as a small or unimportant detail. Little things can kill you.

So I suspect at least two reasons why pilots scowl at aviation movies. First, as noted, if overlooking details can result in damage, death, or disaster, then one can understand why pilots – the ones who tend to live longest, anyway – tend to acquire a thorough and painstaking knowledge of their craft and the airplanes they fly. It should also be understandable why pilots tend to be intolerant of mistakes and ignorance. Those can get you killed.

That seems pretty obvious, but there is a second reason, a little more subtle, and it involves the craft of writing a story. The fiction story usually requires something called “dramatic conflict” – a compelling reason, interesting to the reader, for the character or characters to be confronted with a problem to be solved. The detective story is a perfect example; the actions of the detective in solving the case carry the action of a story in a most satisfying way, if properly written.

If a pilot performs properly, aviation, from outside of the cockpit, appears uneventful, a transit between two points in varying degrees of comfort. Pilots work very hard indeed to achieve that level of apparent lack of drama.

When things go bad and pilots do what they’re supposed to do in an emergency, far more often than not dealing with the emergency, from outside the cockpit, still has that aura of the ordinary and uneventful. It’s not every day that Sully Sullenberger has to put an airliner into the Hudson, less than three minutes after departure, because both engines of his airplane ingest birds and flame out. I got a real kick out of listening to the tape of Sullenberger on the radio with the air traffic controllers. They’d ask him if he could reach this airport, or that airport, and Sully, being perhaps a tad busy, consistently replies with nothing more than “Unable.” That recording is available on YouTube. Listen to Sully’s voice. It’s the voice of a master at work.

Even more, it’s not every day that a flight crew is confronted with engine failure combined with hydraulic failure resulting in inoperative controls, a condition highly likely to lead to a catastrophic departure from controlled flight, as nearly happened to United Flight 232 on July 19, 1989. That crew, aided by a United Airlines training check airman who was aboard, gave new meaning to cliches like “used every trick in the book” and “snatched victory from the jaws of death.” Victory in this case meant most of the passengers survived the crash landing, when casualties could easily have been 100%. They survived because the members of the flight crew were consummate practitioners of their craft.

In aviation, dramatic conflict usually means death or the danger thereof. That’s how most people see it, anyway. Maybe that’s why pilots don’t like aviation movies. No one likes to be reminded of how things can go to pieces and leave you to pick up the mess, if you can. Especially when the blank-blank details are wrong. Some fool kid might think it was right, go try it, and end up in a smoking hole at the scene of the accident.

All of that being said I’m going to recommend the following five movies as good aviation films, maybe not always spot-on with details, but true at least in spirit. These films, to me, show something very close to what it means to be a pilot. Feel free to agree or disagree with my choices, and by all means make other recommendations.

“Spirit of St. Louis” (1957)

“Dawn Patrol” (1938)

“Only Angels Have Wings” (1939)

“The Bridges at Toko-Ri” (1954)

“I Wanted Wings” (1941)

Airplanes In My Novels: the Curtiss P-40

Curtiss P-40E pursuits peel off after a target below. USAF photo in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Jack Davis flies the Curtiss P-40E in both Everything We Had and the second novel in the series, A Snowball’s Chance, under production as I write this post.

The Curtiss P-40 was America’s front-line pursuit airplane in 1941. It wasn’t as fast or glamorous as the RAF’s Supermarine Spitfire or the Luftwaffe’s Bf-109E. Development of those two airplanes kept them operationally viable through 1945, but the P-40’s performance remained more or less the same from the P-40B through the P-40N. Even changing the Allison V-1710 engine for the Rolls-Royce Merlin in the P-40F didn’t improve that performance. A nearly complete redesign of the P-40, the P-40Q, resulted in an airplane with a top speed of 400 mph, but by then the war was nearly over and the other pursuit types in USAAF service – the P-38, P-47 and P-51, not to mention the first generation of jet fighters like the Lockheed P-80A Shooting Star – were superior in almost every way.

Curtiss P-40B pursuits of the 20th Pursuit Squadron at Nichols Field in the Philippines before the beginning of the war. USAF photo in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The P-40 had two major virtues for a pursuit airplane in 1941 and 1942: first, it was competitive with the Japanese Zero, and second, maybe more important, it was what we had in quantity to equip our own pursuit groups and send overseas to our Allies. In North Africa, the P-40 was used extensively and successfully as a fighter-bomber. In China, the record of the American Volunteer Group (better known as the Flying Tigers) was compiled using a handful of obsolescent P-40B models, the same airplane that equipped the 20th Pursuit Squadron in the Philippines.

The P-40E equipped most of the USAAF pursuit squadrons sent to the Southwest Pacific in 1941 and 1942. For fighting Zeros it was adequate, being as fast as the Zero in level flight and able to break off combat with the Zero by diving away. The Zero wasn’t known for being sturdy, and would come apart under punishment that the P-40, or any other American combat airplane, would simply shrug off.

At the time of Everything We Had, the P-38 was only beginning to become available, and was still overcoming problems associated with compressibility issues at high speeds. The P-38 was the first airplane to encounter Mach buffet, a phenomenon poorly understood in 1941 or for some years afterward. The Republic P-47 Thunderbolt was in development but wouldn’t be available in any numbers until 1943. The P-51 Mustang was originally designed for the RAF as a substitute for the P-40, and was also still in development.

So the P-40 was the only pursuit, other than the Bell P-39 Airacobra, available in any numbers to equip the USAAF. As for the P-39, stay tuned. I’ll talk about that airplane sometime before Christmas, when Boxcar Red Leader, the third book in the series, comes out.

East to the Dawn — A Review

Usually I don’t read biographies. I made an exception for Susan Butler’s East to the Dawn – the Life of Amelia Earhart because of, well, Amelia Earhart.

Amelia has always been a favorite of mine. I remember reading her chapter in a book by Robert S. Owen, They Flew to Fame, when I was nine or ten years old. It was the chapter just after Lindbergh’s which, in retrospect, seems fitting.

I confess I found the story of Amelia’s early life a little slow. That’s not Ms. Butler’s fault; a person’s life moves at its own pace, and even Amelia’s was no exception. There were still interesting things to be found in the first half of the book; I knew Amelia had been a social worker, but I had no idea at ten what a “social worker” was (except for the reference in a song from “West Side Story”) or the fact that in the mid-20s it was considered a cutting-edge career for women. I also didn’t know about the misfortunes of Amelia’s early family life, which I won’t go in to — read the book yourself.

I’m also not quite sure at what point I became enthralled with the book. It was probably when Ms. Butler pointed out that once Amelia made a success of herself as a social worker at the Denison House she could have had a brilliant career in that field, possibly living to a respected and accomplished old age. I simply hadn’t thought of that, and that point, the idea that an historical figure actually had choices, is not something that one sees brought out in biographies very often, because they are nearly always about people who are famous for doing something we already know about. For that reason choices made often seem the only ones possible; set in stone, or predestined, if you will. Ms. Butler avoids that, and her work is all the better for it.

From that point on the biography, already well done, became in my opinion inspired, and I began to consider what Ms. Butler had to put in to the writing.

I asked myself what caused the author to undertake the task of this book? Writing a fresh biography of a figure like Amelia Earhart, famous and well-known in her own time, the subject of many other biographies, is surely a daunting undertaking. Ms. Butler seems to have approached the task with a will. The level of effort employed is to be appreciated only by looking at the extensive notes and bibliography.

That level of effort involved many interviews with people still living who knew Amelia; a search through previously unpublished contemporary records, such as diaries, journals and letters, the mere ferreting out of which in itself had to be a monumental task; searching through records official and unofficial. Merely compiling the data alone is a task involving years of focus, discipline and purpose.

One might say such an effort has elements of obsession, but I see obsession as a negative quality, and there is nothing of the negative in the quality of Ms. Butler’s work. It is rather a work of love, undertaken in the spirit of a duty one sometimes finds oneself selected to bear, the duty of bringing witness to greatness.

No one can write words that put us inside the skin of another, and if they could that still might not be the greatest artistry. The great writer, in whatever form, through words creates a platform of the imagination which strikes in the mind and soul of the reader sparks of sympathy, empathy and compassion, a light in that darkness surrounding our souls that permits us a glimpse, a trembling glimpse across an awful void, to where the soul of another may be discerned.

So it is with this biography.

Quite aside from anything else, as an aviation enthusiast I found Ms. Butler’s anecdotes of the aviation community of the 1920s and 1930s to be fascinating and informative. Her account of Amelia’s last flight, particularly the last legs from Java and New Guinea to remote Howland Island, was poignant, the last line of that chapter heart-wrenching for anyone who has ever flown.

Need I add that I thoroughly recommend this work?

Captain America is My Hero

He’s a character from a comic book, the genre that epitomizes simplified plots and uncomplicated dialog. Yet Captain America may tap into something truly and uniquely American, the spirit we as a nation found during World War II, the spirit that enabled us to come together, to fight, to win. Maybe that’s a little much to put on a comic book character who has become, in turn, an action-movie icon. Maybe, but let’s study on it a little.

Cap started out as a young man named Steve Rogers. Steve was 4F, a Selective Service classification meaning physically unfit for service. He was also the quintessential “98-pound weakling.” Steve got into fights he couldn’t win, with opponents bigger, tougher, faster; he got knocked down, but he kept getting up and returning to the fight. He also kept going back to the draft board, hoping he could finagle his way into the service, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t be rejected. Steve had a big heart, and that heart wanted to serve his country in time of need.

Finally Steve gets his chance. It seems there was a scientist who developed a miraculous serum that was the basis of a process that would rewire the young man’s brain and rebuild his body. The serum turned Steve Rogers into what an earlier time would have called a demi-god, investing him with superior strength, agility, reflexes, endurance and durability.

Steve Rogers got his wish, and more. He became a super soldier.

He was supposed to be the first of many, but Dr. Erskine, the scientist who developed the serum, was assassinated, the project laboratory destroyed. Steve Rogers, the first super soldier, would now be the only one of his kind.

This is the origin of Captain America, the 98-pound weakling who becomes a super-soldier. What can we make of that in terms of symbolism?

Maybe we could look at the real US of A in 1940. In truth, in many ways, our country was a 98-pound weakling on the international stage. In 1940, we had the 19th largest army in the world — after Yugoslavia. We had a good Navy, but our Air Force was still called the Air Corps. In 1940, indeed, through 1941, it couldn’t have matched the Nazi Luftwaffe or Britain’s RAF. When war came in December of 1941, our Air Corps, undertrained and poorly equipped, tried valiantly to oppose the Japanese. But at that time we were a 98-pound weakling, and like the weak everywhere, we got our butts kicked. Sure, we had the potential. We had the best workers, the best brains (look at the Manhattan Project!) and the most money. But the US was still way, way behind.

The US was Steve Rogers, before the serum.

The country’s “special serum” was Pearl Harbor. Few events in history have mobilized a nation the way the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor did. Every World War II veteran I’ve ever spoken with mentioned that as a factor in wanting to join up.

We’re looking at symbolism, though, so let’s stay with Cap.

What about the “Super Soldier Program”? I contend one might see this as a metaphor for that ancient rite of passage called “basic training.” It takes time and a tough drill sergeant to turn civilians into soldiers. Lots of civilians went through this during World War II. Maybe there weren’t “super soldiers.” Sure as hell they were the next best thing.

That silly, gaudy costume Cap wore. Think of Captain America as the action-hero version of a symbol that’s been around for a long time: Uncle Sam. Then think of every recruiting poster from World War II, especially those of the Marine Corps if they showed Marines in their dress blues. A lot of those recruiting posters might remind you of Captain America.

A symbol has to be a little more universal in its appeal. Not just to future Marines, but to all of us. That’s Cap.

In our cynical times we tend to see Cap as a little too much of a Boy Scout. People like that, we think, are suckers, easily deceived and taken advantage of. Just what are those qualities, though? A Scout, as I recall, is trustworthy, loyal, brave, courteous, reverent, truthful, and someother qualities I’d have to look up in my Boy Scout Handbook to remember. What’s wrong with being trustworthy, courteous and truthful?  It’s worth remembering now that those qualities were pretty much taken for granted as a standard for behavior in the 1930s and 1940s. Even the bad guys acknowledged that was what the “good guys” stood for, even if the bad guys – gangsters, Nazis or whomever – laughed at them for it. Cap is straightforward, unsubtle and uncomplicated: what you see is what you get. That made Cap vulnerable to deception, since fundamentally honest and uncomplicated people have to learn by bitter experience about the capacity for deception in others. Then they have to learn something even harder: the fact that, in deceiving others, regardless of purity of motive, you run the risk of deceiving yourself and becoming the thing you fight. Deceiving yourself renders you more and not less vulnerable to deception by others, especially when those others know your self-deceptions. In deceiving yourself, you lose sight of something precious: who you really are.

If you don’t believe that, watch some of the cowboy movies that came out of Hollywood in the 1930s. Better yet, read the novels of Zane Grey. Zane Grey also understood the American psyche. His cowboy and gunfighter heroes would have known Cap as a kindred spirit immediately. They probably would have joshed him about the costume, though: “Pard Cap, why don’t yuh just wear a white hat? At least it’d keep the sun out of yore eyes.”

The organization Hydra and its leader, the Red Skull, are masters at the art of deception. They hide their true nature like the Red Skull uses a mask to hide his own misshapen appearance. Of course, if we knew who he really was, would we go anywhere near him? But that ugly red skull is itself symbolic, conveying the true nature of the Nazis, or, perhaps, the Soviets, or whatever enemy is hiding and betraying in our midst at the present time.

So what have we got? Steve Rogers and Captain America are part of the American psyche, and still have the power to resonate within us. Hopefully they remind us about what is best in America and warn us about what could destroy that spirit. If we become our enemies, by adopting their deceptions and tactics as our own, who wins? The motto of Hydra, after all, is “Cut off one head, two spring up in its place.”

It was a mythological hero who slew the Hydra. Maybe my hero Captain America taps into something of that same ancient force. I’d like to think so.

 

 

Women: Tough as Hell

Recently the writers group I belong to discussed the issue of creating strong female characters in atypical female roles.  I have a character, a female police officer, that’s been giving me fits for years.  She just feels like cardboard to me, and I know I’m missing something in the way I write about her.  And of course that night our female members were not in attendance.  Alas.  Men talking about women can be a one-dimensional experience.

As a coincidence, though, this last week I came across a blog by Carey Lohrenz.  Ms. Lohrenz was the second female naval aviator “accepted” into the F-14 fighter community.  Here’s a chance to look into the issue, I thought, and for those of you who are interested, here’s the URL for the blog:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-d-lohrenz/military-women-pilots-veterans_b_1516021.html#es_share_ended.

Thinking about Lt. Lohrenz’s career problems made me remember another excellent female pilot community, the WASPs of World War II.  The RAF had a similar outfit that did the same job: ferrying aircraft from the factory to embarkation points or airbases, maintenance test flights, all the aviation drudge work that would free up male pilots for the “stress of combat” that supposedly women just can’t handle.  Women, in both the US and England, were forbidden to go into combat; it was simply too tough for them, and they’d never stand up to it.  In fact, in the US, male civilian pilots lobbied successfully to have the WASPs disbanded even before the end of World War II.  Too much (successful) competition, I guess.

Mm.  Wonder what a pioneer wife in the Arizona territory, say about 1870 during an Apache raid, would have said to women not being tough?

Thinking about the WASPs called up another memory.  General Charles “Chuck” Yeager was a fighter pilot in World War II and had twelve kills.  There were not that many male pilots who flew fighters that achieved even a single kill, much less the coveted five kills that made you an ace in the USAAF or the RAF.  (The Luftwaffe required ten kills.)  The tradition of five kills making an ace goes back to World War I, but that’s another story.

There was another pilot in World War II with twelve kills who deserves mention: Senior Lieutenant Lilya Litvyak of the V-VS, the Soviet Air Force.  Litvyak was first a member of the all-female 73^rd Guards Fighter Regiment and was later transferred to a male unit.  She was wounded three times in the service of her country.  She received numerous awards for valor, including the Order of the Red Banner.  I’m no expert on Soviet military awards, but Wikipedia says it was the “highest award given by…the Soviet Union.”  That makes it at least the equivalent of the Distinguished Service Cross in this country; our Medal of Honor seems more the equivalent of the accolade “Hero of the Soviet Union,” which Litvyak received posthumously, like so many of our own Medal of Honor winners.  In Litvyak’s final fight, jumped by eight ME-109s, she was finally shot down and killed.

Litvyak’s best friend, Katya Budanova, was also an ace, with eleven kills, and like Litvyak was killed in action.

The Soviets had a number of female combat pilots.  One, Olga Yamshchikova, was credited with 17 kills.  Others flew the famed Il-2 Sturmovik attack aircraft.  The Sturmovik was essentially a piston-engined A-10 and flew the same sort of incredibly dangerous mission, low-level ground support.  One Soviet female pilot, Anna Yegorova, flew these missions in the Sturmovik throughout the war and was decorated three times for valor.

In World War II, the USAAF and the RAF decided that the effectiveness of aircrew decreased if they were required to simply keep going until the war ended or they were killed.  That was the reason for limiting the number of missions or combat hours a pilot was required to fly.  It was based on lessons learned by both air forces in World War One.  In the US Eighth Air Force, when losses were heavy at the beginning of the war, crews were required to fly 25 missions, and the survivors were often in bad shape.  Later, as the effective opposition of the Luftwaffe decreased, that mission total was increased to 35.  I’ve spoken with some of the survivors of these missions.  In their 80s, that experience is just as vivid and emotionally wrenching as it was in their 20s for many of them.

In the Soviet Air Force there wasn’t any such thing as a tour of duty.  You were there for the duration.  Surviving pilots, male and female, could have as many as 1000 missions in their logbooks.  There were plenty of women in the Soviet Air Force who could claim that distinction.  Those ladies must have been tough as hell.

What was it like, then, for those that were required to just keep flying?  What kept them going?  Because it would seem that we aren’t talking about male or female qualities here, but simply human qualities.  Why, then, should it be so important to deny that women have those qualities?

Nothing here should be construed as saying that the Russians are tougher than the Americans, or that women are necessarily tougher than men, but it amazes me that easily available history like this is ignored.  Facts, it would seem, are far less important than ideology.  Lt. Lohrenz’s career came to an end due to political chicanery by those whose agenda required women to be “kept in their place.”

The point is that we have no cultural referents that aid us, as writers, when we depict strong female characters in non-traditional roles.  Women who try to create such roles in real life and are too visible, like Lt. Lohrenz, become targets in no-holds-barred political dominance games.

History shows that our cultural stereotypes have nothing to do with truth or facts.  This being said, why do those stereotypes continue to exist?

Are men actually afraid of women?  That might be a question for all of us, male and female alike, to ponder.

As the title of this essay suggests, I believe women, potentially and often in fact, really are tough as hell.  That’s the first thing to remember, but darned if I can figure out what the second thing should be, or the third, to come up with a better idea for female characters.

“John Carter of Mars”

Or, A Hero, Literally, of the Past

Disney’s remake of the Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure story A Princess of Mars flopped at the box office, losing about $200 million, reported as perhaps the largest all-time loss on a single movie.  See Michael White’s article at:  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-20/walt-disney-film-chief-ross-steps-down-after-john-carter-loss.html.

The article also cites one analyst who attributes the flop to the film being over-budget and “poorly marketed.”  I’m not sure what “poorly marketed” means, exactly, in this context; maybe it was.  Let’s be sure we understand something: for a film to flop as badly as did “John Carter of Mars,” then there’s probably something more to it than just poor marketing.  So perhaps poor marketing was a factor in the film’s failure, but a contributory rather than a decisive one.

Other than the marketing, then, what other causes might one find for the film to flop?

I’d like to share with you what I saw unfold on the screen, but be aware that I’m not a screenwriter nor in any way connected to Hollywood.  I can only write this as someone who enjoys a movie.

“John Carter of Mars” has a lot of things in its favor.

The cast was excellent – of course, I’m a big fan of Ciaran Hinds and James Purefoy – Lynn Collins, cast as Princess Dejah Thoris, was creditable and delectable – and if I don’t name anyone else it’s just because those three are the standouts.  So I don’t believe that lack of acting talent was at fault.

Whatever else it might be I found the film a stunning visual spectacle, at least as far as the recreation of Barsoom goes.  The six-limbed green Martian fighting men, the Tharks, were superbly conceived and the CGI behind them was awesome.  In short, Tars Tarkas lived and breathed on the silver screen, and so did all his green-skinned brethren.  Likewise, the sets and miniatures were seamlessly believable and beautifully constructed.  I was particularly impressed with the way features like mesas (from the Arizona desert, perhaps?) were skillfully reworked into the ruins of Martian cities.  That was well enough done that it actually made me wonder if some of those mesas were the remnants of long-lost civilizations.

In general, the artistic quality of creatures, sets, models, costumes, weapons, artifacts, were all well-thought-out and first rate, Academy Award quality, in my humble and admittedly flyover-country opinion.  Given the reported production cost of $250 million, however, it shouldn’t be surprising that the film has fantastic production values.  Nonetheless, I think they captured the spirit of Burroughs’ vision quite well.  In fact, I rather think Burroughs would have thought that in some regards, the various artists involved in this film had read his mind.

With that deliberate reference we segue to the remaining element of the film: screenplay, or story.

Before I get to the screenplay maybe we should look at the story in A Princess of Mars, as written by Burroughs.  I’m not going to recap the plot.  If you want to know, read it for yourself.

Consider this: it may not be possible to get away with things as a writer in 2012 that one could take for granted as a writer in 1912.  I’d never read the Mars stories, but I thought I’d read them before watching the movie.  One of the things that struck me the most about Princess was the positive lushness of Burroughs’ description of Mars, its cities, people, creatures and terrain.  In some respects the book is more of a travelogue than a story, more Gulliver’s Travels than Lord of the Rings.  Of course, everyone on Mars goes naked – quite a stimulating thought for readers in 1912, before Hollywood really took off, before television was available, even before commercial radio.  I’m sure imagining the lissome Dejah Thoris, clad only in jewels that glittered in the reflected light of the hurtling moons of Barsoom, was quite a pleasant task for the male readers of 1912!  I didn’t find it unduly burdensome, either, a hundred years later.

Consider also that in 1912 the only mass market entertainment was the pulp fiction serial – the format in which A Princess of Mars was first published.  In fact, that’s how the book reads, like a serial, going from cliffhanger to cliffhanger, and even ending on a cliffhanger – i.e., will John Carter make it back to Barsoom and his beloved Dejah Thoris and their unhatched son?

As for us here on Earth, though, that hundred years between 1912 and the present carries a lot more baggage than the rise of mass media.  Let’s not forget the effect that two horrendous world wars, innumerable “brush wars” and “police actions” and “wars against terror” and “Cold Wars” have had on our psychological and cultural perceptions of the heroic as well, not to mention such non-romantic things as “shell shock,” “combat fatigue” and “PTSD.”

Then too, John Carter survives his adventures because, in essence, he has super powers on Mars, as a result of which he not only whips up on the bad guys but wins the hand of the Princess of Helium.  If all you have to do to solve most of your problems is lay about you with your trusty sword in a fashion that even Conan the Barbarian might envy, then where’s the conflict for the protagonist?

That, however, may be the problem.  I wouldn’t say that the audience of 2012 is necessarily more sophisticated than that of 1912, but the point is that by the present day any one of us over the age of twenty has seen this idea – on the screen, at least – I don’t know how many times, but certainly a lot.

In this respect think of the various incarnations and variations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that have appeared over those same years, both in film and in print.  I’ve often wondered what it might have been like to sit in the audience in a theater in 1931 when the film version with Bela Lugosi first came out, back when the horror film genre hadn’t been done to death – or undeath, all things considered.

A hint of what that might have been like came to me a few years ago while I was watching Toho’s “Godzilla” (1956).  As the monster moves through downtown Tokyo, smashing buildings and setting the city on fire with his gamma-ray breath, it occurred to me to think about the Tokyo audience that would have sat in a theater in 1956 to watch this film.  I mean, it’s fairly obvious that “Godzilla” is just a guy in a rubber suit smashing up model houses and buildings on a stage miniature set.  How is this even remotely scary?  Here’s where understanding historical context comes in handy:  I suddenly realized that not one person in that audience less than twelve or thirteen years old could fail to be aware, from personal experience, that the city of Tokyo, like many Japanese cities, had been leveled in fire-storms (just like the one being produced on screen) caused by American bombing raids, with enormous suffering and loss of life and property.  In fact, more people were killed in the Tokyo raid of March 6, 1945, than were killed by the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  So imagine, if you will, what a Japanese survivor of the Tokyo fire raids in 1945 might have felt, watching the monster Godzilla march across the screen.

But historical context also requires us to ask this question: would an American audience of 1956 feel the same thing that the Japanese audience felt?

For either country, by now, Tokyo has been destroyed by so many monsters on screen over the years that one has to wonder what’s left of that frisson of fear I imagine swept over the Japanese audience of 1956.

Were the screenwriters aware of this problem?  That question, for now, is rhetorical.  It would be interesting to learn what was said in the writer’s conferences as the script took shape, though.  Deducing anything from the script by comparing it to the events of the books is a process unlikely to produce valid results, and runs the risk of being wise after the fact, but let’s look briefly at what was done.

The screenwriters altered the beginning of the story a little, but not materially.  Instead of being a simple prospector with a partner killed by the Apaches, John Carter is wanted by the US government for some unspecified service, evidently because he’s a “Virginia cavalryman.”  Being from the South, knowing a little about the War Between the States, and having lived in Virginia where those cavalry regiments were raised, I understand the reference, but how many people in a modern audience will?  Could we say that this part of the script is intended to promote a certain understanding of John Carter as a war hero who just wants to be left alone to look for his cave of gold?  Then, when John Carter is beaten and thrown in jail by the US Cavalry troopers, perhaps the intention is to cast John Carter as something of an underdog, promoting sympathy for his character?  While he is in jail, the script produces a flashback of a domestic scene which was nowhere part of the original books; John Carter’s only wife was Dejah Thoris.  So, John Carter now has a certain mystery, a past hinted at but no more than that; a past, perhaps, that drives him.  Then the writers threw in an element that Burroughs introduces in the second novel, The Gods of Mars, i.e., the infiltration of Barsoomian society by the evil, secretive Therns – in the movie, the Therns are depicted as near-immortal super-scientists (lacking only the overgrown, bulging foreheads) who reminded me almost irresistibly of an Oriental society preserving ancient secrets, so beloved of pulp fictioneers back in the 1920s and 1930s.  I don’t remember if Sax Rohmer’s character, Fu Manchu, was one, but that character is archetypical of the sort of menace I’m describing.  The point would seem to be to create a menace whose super-powers, so to speak, are sufficient to counter-balance those of John Carter.

So in the screenplay one finds an attempt to create a past for John Carter much different from the one in the book, presumably in an effort to create depth for the character.  In the long run, though, the story isn’t about what happened to John Carter in the past, nor even how that past might affect his actions on Barsoom.  The story is about John Carter saving Helium – this time.

I see the real problem is something a little more fundamental, and I think it is that, in both the screen and print versions of the story, the characters of John Carter and Dejah Thoris come across as two-dimensional.  In a male-dominated society, or an audience dominated by men, a beautiful naked woman to be desired and possessed might not need much depth, at least in 1912.  She is what she is; how much depth does Helen of Troy have, or need, in the Iliad?  But the story in the book, and to a lesser but still significant degree, in the film, is told from the point of view of John Carter.  He has to be more than tall, dark, handsome, and handy with a sword.

Is it fair of me to say this?  That’s it’s as simple as poor characterization?  Maybe not, but that’s my impression; it’s what I got from watching the movie.  Perhaps the question might be this: did anyone else, watching the movie, have that same lack of engagement with the main characters?

If we don’t really care about the two main characters, how can we care about the story?  One can’t help but wonder how a different script might have changed things.  The problem is that I have no idea how I would make a character like John Carter come to life, much less a woman like Dejah Thoris.  I think the screenwriters were largely faithful to Burroughs’ vision, and that may be the problem, since I see that same lack of characterization as a flaw in the original stories.

If you don’t see that, ask yourself this.  If you were going to write your own story involving the characters of King Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere, how would you give them life in words?  When so much has been written about them over the years?  To me, the problem is largely the same.