Welles and the end of civilization

[Wellesnet]

As we struggle through the tough and unprecedented times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I've begun thinking about the fact that Orson Welles seems to have had a fascination with death and decay and the end of the world as we know it. Not really that surprising since the "War of the Worlds" broadcast was what turned him into an international star, but there several other examples throughout his career as well.

Other examples include the subtly post-apocalyptic tone that many critics and film historians have noted in his 1948 film version of "Macbeth", made just three years after the start of the Atomic Age. That same tone was noted in Welles's 1956 stage production of "King Lear", and his 1962 film of "The Trial" has an ending that suggests an atomic explosion.

The year before Macbeth was made, the George Grisby character, played by Glenn Anders, had said this in "The Lady From Shanghai": "I don't want to be around this or any other city when they stop dropping those bombs."

In his 1945-46 "Orson Welles Commentaries" series, available to listen to at the Indiana University website devoted to Welles's radio work (https://orsonwelles.indiana.edu/collections/show/9), Welles makes several references to the looming threat of nuclear proliferation, as in this program from 3/17/46: https://orsonwelles.indiana.edu/items/show/2142

In 1960, Welles directed Laurence Olivier in a stage production of Ionesco's "Rhinocerous", about the collapse of a democratic society in favor of fascism.

Welles also narrated, late in life, two documentaries dealing with the subject of prophecy and doom: "The Late, Great Planet Earth" and "The Man Who Saw Tomorrow". Welles also implies the collapse of civilizations in the great Chartres cathedral scene from "F For Fake", which concerns the transitoriness of all things.

There are also those films that Welles wanted to make but couldn't. For example, "Earth Abides" is a 1949 post-apocalyptic novel by George R. Stewart about a pandemic that destroys civilization. In the late 1950s, Orson Welles and Charlton Heston wanted to make a film of it as a follow up to Touch of Evil, but they could not find the financing. Heston did eventually make "The Omega Man" in 1971, based on the similarly themed "I am Legend" by Richard Matheson. That 1954 book has had three films made from it while the Stewart novel was never filmed. There was, however, a radio adaptation of it in 1950 from the "Escape" series, starring John Dehner. That broadcast survives in excellent sound and is on YouTube, uploaded by Kim Kommando, who created the excellent "Mercury Theater on the Air" website.

Earth Abides Pt. 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7uLJeU4UcE

Earth Abides Pt. 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlmMO-2hKJk

[Wellesnet]

"As the spaces in which men and women are expected to make relationships work keep getting smaller and smaller, you're going to see more and more people rushing out into the street, killing everyone they can find."
- Orson Welles, Someone to Love (1985)

"I take a terribly dim view of man's future because there are too many of us, and because we are sick, and we now have weapons that we're not grown up enough to handle."
- Orson Welles on the Tomorrow Show, 1975

"Fall of the City" by Archibald Macleish, 1937 broadcast, narrated by Welles, also concerns the collapse of a democratic society ("The city of masterless men will take a master!":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hms-Zb7KV3w


"Tomorrow", 1956 radio broadcast, narrated by Welles, written by Milton Geiger. A shocking program dramatizing the United States under nuclear attack:

[Wellesnet]

President Trump on scaling back steps to constrain the spread of the coronavirus in the next week or two (against the advice of health officials) because of concerns that the impact on the economy has become too severe:

"We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”

Scott McMillan, California lawyer, and owner of Method, a "World of Warcraft" guild:

The fundamental problem is whether we are going to tank the entire economy to save 2.5% of the population which is (1) generally expensive to maintain, and (2) not productive.

From Wellesnet Twitter:

Harry Lime wasn't a sociopath. He was just born seven decades too early: "If I offered you twenty-thousand pounds for every dot that stopped moving, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? "

Gen Z and Millennials have adopted the term "OK boomer" to dismiss views more popular among older than younger people, including global warming minimization. Some have started referring to COVID-19 as the "Boomer Remover", even though the average age of people dying from the disease is a pre-Baby Boom 81.

[Wellesnet]

"Culling the herd" scene from Executive Action, a 1973 film about the assassination of JFK, co-written by Donald Freed, who later worked with Welles on the screenplay to "The Assassin", about the assassination of RFK:
https://youtu.be/hevxAt0sUfg

*

From George Conway...

"For Trump supporters, let me make one thing VERY clear!

For the record NO ONE is blaming the President for the virus. Let me repeat. Coronavirus is not Trump’s fault.
Here’s a detailed list of what we are blaming him for:

* Trump declined to use the World Health Organization’s test like other nations. Back in January, over a month before the first Co-vid19 case, the Chinese posted a new mysterious virus and within a week, Berlin virologists had produced the first diagnostic test. By the end of February, the WHO had shipped out tests to 60 countries. Oh, but not our government. We declined the test even as a temporary bridge until the CDC could create its own test. The question is why? We don’t know but what to look for is which pharmaceutical company eventually manufactures the test and who owns the stock. Keep tuned.

* In 2018 Trump fired Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossart, whose job was to coordinate a response to global pandemics. He was not replaced.

* In 2018 Dr. Luciana Borio, the NSC director for medical and bio-defense preparedness left the job. Trump did not replace Dr. Borio.

* In 2019 the NSC’s Senior Director for Global Health Security and bio-defense, Tim Ziemer, left the position and Trump did not replace the Rear Admiral.

* Trump shut down the entire Global Health Security and Bio-defense agency. Yes, he did.

* Amid the explosive worldwide outbreak of the virus Trump proposed a 19% cut to the budget of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention plus a 10% cut to Public Health Services and a 7% cut to Global Health Services. Those happen to be the organizations that respond to public health threats.

* In 2018, at Trump’s direction, the CDC stopped funding epidemic prevention activities in 39 out of 49 countries including China.

* Trump didn’t appoint a doctor to oversee the US response to the pandemic. He appointed Mike Pence.

* Trump has on multiple occasions sowed doubt about the severity of the virus even using the word hoax at events and rallies. He even did it at an event where the virus was being spread. Trump has put out zero useful information concerning the health risks of the virus.

* Trump pretended the virus had been contained.

* Trump left a cruise ship at sea for days, denying them proper hospital care, rather than increase his numbers in America.
Repeat. We do not blame Trump for the virus. We blame him for gutting the nation’s preparations to deal with it. We blame him for bungling testing and allowing it to spread uninhibited. We blame him for wasting taxpayer money on applause lines at his rallies (like The Wall). We blame him for putting his own political life over American human life. I hope this clears things up."
This is why the U.S. has the highest number of cases on the planet!!

[Wellesnet]

Welles, from "Someone to Love" (1985), speaking about women's lib:

"With the emancipation of women, we are freeing the last of our slaves. Every civilization for the last 20,000 years has been maintained through slavery. It is only in the last 200 years or so that anyone thought slavery was wrong. As far as the future of this final emancipation (of women) goes, there are several options: one, it can fail, as most revolutions do. Two, it can succeed, in which case who is to say that women will not enslave us. Or, perhaps men and women will both be enslaved to a conglomerated world run by computers in which this issue is so peripheral to the state of human misery that none of this even matters."

[Wellesnet]

FROM ORSON WELLES'S SCREENPLAY, THE BIG BRASS RING:

MENAKER'S VOICE: ...As a science, economics is on the level of phrenology - the hope is for a tiny boom. But then we'll all be waiting for the giant bust.

BRANDINI: Then enter Pellarin on a white horse?

MENAKER: God knows who'll be on that horse, Brandini - but he'll be somebody Blake will have to run against...Plus a coalition of bible thumpers and survivalists.

BRANDINI: Survivalists?

MENAKER: Surely you've heard of them: the stockpilers of machine guns and canned food, all ready to repel the hungries and the commie hordes. They're digging hidey-holes up in the high hills and practicing how to fight off the Apocalypse...There'll be a lot of those, and none of them vote for Blake (democrat). Not if the cities start to burn.

BRANDINI: Then what hope is there for him?

MENAKER: The world is full of liars and fools. Quite often they're the ones in charge. Like the rest of us, when that happens, all that a president can do is buy a ticket for the show.

BRANDINI: And the alternative?

MENAKER: The president takes charge.

BRANDINI: On his white horse.

(Menaker laughs)

Welles gets both biblical and apocalyptic in this Commentary program from June 16th, 1946, two days after the birth of Donald Johann Drumpf.
https://orsonwelles.indiana.edu/items/show/2158

[Wellesnet]

'Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced...but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.' - F For Fake

[Wellesnet]

"And when the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” Then I looked and saw a pale horse. Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed close behind. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill by sword, by famine, by plague, and by the beasts of the earth." - Revelations 6:8

“Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Birds

[Le Chiffre]

Noam Chomsky: “We will overcome the coronavirus crisis, but we have more serious crises ahead of us”:
https://www.pressenza.com/2020/03/noam- ... ead-of-us/

According to Chomsky, it is shocking that in this crucial moment Donald Trump is in the lead, whom he describes as a sociopath buffoon. “The coronavirus is serious enough, but it’s worth recalling that there are two much greater threats approaching, far worse than anything that’s happened in human history: One is the growing threat of a nuclear war and the other of course is the growing threat of global warming. Coronavirus is horrible and can have terrifying consequences, but there will be recovery, while the others won’t be recovered; it’s finished.”

'It's positively alpine!' Disbelief in big cities as air pollution falls:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/it ... B06mvNiAQU

It is a lockdown silver lining being repeated across the world, as toxic megacities such as Bangkok, Beijing, São Paulo and Bogotá, where varying coronavirus restrictions have been imposed, all reported an unprecedented decline in pollution. Yet it is countered with one cruel irony: with most residents of these cities strictly confined to their homes, few have any way to appreciate this newly fresh air, except through an open window or during a speedy trip to the supermarket.

In Delhi, air quality index (AQI) levels are usually a severe 200 on a good day (anything above 25 is deemed unsafe by World Health Organization). During peak pollution periods last year they soared well into a life-threatening 900 and sometimes off the measurable scale. But as Delhi’s 11m registered cars were taken off the roads and factories and construction were ground to a halt, AQI levels have regularly fallen below 20. The skies are suddenly a rare, piercing blue. Even the birdsong seems louder.

While India’s powerful car lobby has long disputed that cars are a major cause of Delhi’s pollution, Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment, said the lockdown and resulting rapid drop in pollution showed once and for all just what a polluting role vehicles had in the city.

"I'm not sure George is wrong about automobiles. With all their speed forward, they may be a step backward in civilization. It may be that they won't add to the beauty of the world or the life of men's souls. I'm not sure. But automobiles have come. And almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They're going to alter war and they're going to alter peace. And I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles. And it may be that George is right. It may be that in ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine but would have to agree with George: that automobiles had no business to be invented."
- The Magnificent Ambersons

[Wellesnet]

”In the twentieth century, the main product of human endeavour is waste…in two centuries there will be a great mountain of garbage. It’s up to you and me to see that we’re standing on top of it rather then under it”. That line recurs in a subversive commercial filmed by his acolyte, over images of corpses being shoveled into a trench at a concentration camp.

[Black Irish]

I'll never forget Whats his Nmae

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND
Strange that arrival of a storied, unfinished masterpiece by the notoriously talented Orson Welles—a director whose unmade films are just as legendary as the ones he did make—should feel like it came and went with barely any notice, except among critics and hardcore cinephiles. Yet that seems to be the fate of The Other Side of the Wind,

It stars Hollywood maverick John Huston as, well, a Hollywood maverick—but one at the tail end of his career, at the tail end of his life, actually, when his reputation is flailing. His chief apprentice (played by Peter Bogdanovich) is shooting past him in success and importance; his final film project is an embattled mess. the gaudy, riotous movie-within-a-movie (a wink at the work of Michelango Antonioni) to the a not-remotely-subtle forays into the daddy issues of it all—doubles as a send-up of Hollywood at large and as playful self-excoriation.

Netflix didn't do a very good job of promoting the film, which suggests that, after all the money they heroically put into completing it, the final product may have left them cold. The Netflix debut of Wind was supposed to open up a whole new audience for Welles's work. Sadly, that doesn't appear to have happened. One Spanish language review of the film I read not long ago liked the film, but considered the possibility that its chief sin was an overdose of subtext. One couldn't expect Netflix's normal audience to be into analyzing that sort of thing. Most of them probably don't have a clue who Antonioni is.