The Death of the Curate in Wells’ War of the Worlds and its 1953 Adaptation

Linda Hutcheon notes that when a narrative text is adapted, there is “almost always […] an accompanying shift in the political valence” (A Theory of Adaptation, 2006, p. 141). The story might be the same in its essentials, but in small narrative choices made, lines of dialogue , elements of character, etc., much food for reflection on differing ideological underpinnings, assumptions, morals, values, etc. is found. Where to locate this difference, then? In the author? The writer had a different intellectual and moral make-up to the director (assuming we can name the director as auteur). Or in the culture? Who writes a book, and an adaptation? An individual, or a culture? Considering many modern screen products, they appear to be written as much as anything by generic tropes. But are prevailing generic tropes themselves written by a culture? Surely they have a signifying purpose beyond mere cultural filler, which has enabled them to thrive in the meme pool? Perhaps the first point to be made before getting into these difficult questions is that a story doesn’t mean in the abstract. The narrative may remain the same between source and adaptation, but if the mode of narration changes, the narrative may mean, in an ideological sense, something quite different in both manifestations of the same story. If the story itself is not too saturated with evident ideological functions, just a few small changes can wholly shift the political valence. A few small crucial unargued assumptions may seem to convey a wholly different mode of considering the political.

An example, one that struck me recently: H.G. Wells’ classic sci-fi novel The War of the Worlds (1898) and its 1953 Hollywood adaptation. One ideologically loaded figure: the curate. Wells’ novel doesn’t give names to the characters. There’s the narrator (who never formally introduces himself) his brother, his wife, the curate, etc. Maybe it’s Wells deliberately depersonalizing humans just to hammer home his point about how insignificant we are, or would be to a hypothetical intellectually superior race. This is the point he makes in the book’s tremendous opening paragraphs, when he imagines a great race exterminating humanity, and then adds:

[B]efore we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? (Bk. I, Ch. I)

The general reader doesn’t necessarily realize how harsh and cynical Wells is at times in his early sci-fi novels (especially The Island of Dr Moreau – the best of them in my opinion), but this passage sums up how determined he is to get people to question the notion and status of humanity. It’s a post-Darwinian, maybe post-Nietzschean outlook, and it’s not pretty.

It is predictable that given such a mood, curates are not going to be let off lightly, and Wells is unrelenting in his denigration of this character. The Curate is introduced as follows:

His face was a fair weakness, his chin retreated, and his hair lay in crisp, almost flaxen curls on his low forehead; his eyes were rather large, pale blue, and blankly staring. He spoke abruptly, looking vacantly away from me.

“What does it mean?” he said. “What do these things mean?”

I stared at him and made no answer.

He extended a thin white hand and spoke in almost a complaining tone.

“Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then–fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work—- What are these Martians?”

“What are we?” I answered, clearing my throat. (Bk. I, Ch. 13)

Physical appearance is the first indice of character here: “His face was a fair weakness”; his eyes stared blankly. And then his tone of voice confirms it: it is, already, “almost a complaining tone”. As for the content of his speech: he can only regurgitate formulas from the Bible, with increasing hysteria as the book develops, demonstrating at every appearance an absolute inability to apply his intelligence to the situation, or even to face it in its empirical realities. Note, here, as well, that classically Wellsian response to the question “What are these Martians?” – “What are we?”. This is the question that resounds through his early science-fiction novels, less often in a tone of curiosity than in one of savage contempt.

The Curate does not improve on acquaintance and, ultimately, when he begins jabbering loudly and nonsensically about the Martians’ attack being a judgement from God, doing so when the Martians are just outside and thus endangering himself and the narrator, our narrator bashes him on the head with the butt of a meat-cleaver. It is unclear whether this stuns or kills him, but he is afterwards dragged away by the Martians, to die if he has not done so already. This chapter is actually called “The Death of the Curate”, but Wells seems to deliberately leave some ambiguity as to how that death came about.

But what is clear in this chapter is the contempt with which the Curate and “his vacant sham of God’s service” is viewed. In Brian Aldiss’ introduction to the book, he notes that “Wells’ curate is there to express the helplessness of organized religion when faced with the invaders” (Penguin, 2005, xviii). Not for Wells the old adage about no atheists in foxholes. Religion, he posits, is not of the least use in a foxhole, but rather a hindrance to clear thought.

So much for Wells. In the 1953 adaptation of the book, the figure of the Curate is retained, now called Pastor Dr Matthew Collins, according to IMDb. A pastor and a doctor. A man of science and a man of God. After the early establishing shots of Mars, Earth, and falling Martian rockets, Pastor Collins is present in the very first shot, and is centrally involved in the community reaction to the rockets. First, he is shown as the lone voice of community-mindedness among all the greedy businessmen who want to turn the smoking rocket into a tourist attraction. He engages in discussion of the Martians with the scientist, and later he tries to dissuade the military from shooting on the Martians without first trying to talk to them. When the military show no interest in this approach, the intrepid Pastor Matthew goes out alone to talk to the aliens.

Pastor Matthew and Sylvia, one of the film’s romantic leads.

Oddly enough, though his rationale is that no attempt has been made to communicate with the Martians, his attempts to speak to them on approach are limited to quoting the Bible: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”, etc, simultaneously holding up a Bible. They obliterate him, unsurprisingly.

Pastor Matthew comes to a similar end to Wells’ Curate, but that’s where the similarity ends. The Curate is whiny and utterly lacking in self-possession; Matthew is soft-spoken, intelligent, compassionate, and, obviously, brave. He is right at the centre of the communal effort to tackle the catastrophe. But to fully understand the religious undertones that emerge in the adaptation, one would have to take other elements beyond this character into account. Most of all, there is the climactic scene, which takes place in, of course, a church.

Wells’ story, then, proved very easily amenable to being turned to ideological purposes other than his own. Quite the reverse of his own, perhaps. This may well be because Wells’ curate is such an ideologically loaded character – he’s not essential to the plot, only to his own small section of it. He has no other characteristics beyond those that relate to the political valence of the movie. So it’s easy to change these elements without having any knock-on effect on the story as a whole. This is the irony of such a simply political approach to character. Had the Curate been a more complex character, and/or more integrated into the plot, it would have been difficult to change him without it jarring notably with other elements of the narrative. As it is, the story in the adaptation moves along quite smoothly, and the death of the Curate does not seem to be in any way out of keeping with it. A single story can, very easily with just a few simple moves, turned into an ideological opposite of itself.

The Other Bleak House: The BBC 1985 Serial

The BBC serial adaptation of Bleak House broadcast in 2005 came in for a great deal of praise both from critics and from the general public. Indeed, a perusal of the Amazon.co.uk reviews shows that general approbation has been almost universal: 99 reviews (as of 4 August 2012), avg. 4.8 (out of 5): 87×5 star, 9×4 star and one each of 3, 2, and 1 stars. And even the one star review insists on the merits of the series, giving one star solely on the basis of the DVD release policy (deluxe edition with extras only 9 months after initial release). So this blog is somewhat in the minority in not enjoying the serial.

In technical terms Bleak House was undoubtedly something of a departure for the classic serial. Quick scenes, lots of sound effects, kinetic camerawork. Everything to give the impression of ceaseless movement, a plot rushing towards revelation and resolution. It was interesting also that the DVD cover claimed the serial was Bleak House “stripped of its sentimentality”, certainly a departure from the aesthetic of fidelity that has been presumed to be paramount in classic serials. Bleak House was not to be faithful, rather it was to distance itself from Dickens’ sentimentality. Yet ultimately, shorn of its sonic and visual innovations, Bleak House was more conventional than intended. The script, by the patron saint of adapters Andrew Davies, did not escape sentimentality, and, despite making interesting comments about his reworking of Esther Summerson’s character (in an interview in Cartmell and Whelehan, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen (CUP, 2007), she remained what G.B. Shaw called Dickens’ Esther, “a maddening prig“, humourless and quietly but immovably judgemental. It’s not so easy to strip Bleak House of its sentimentality, because the whole plot revolves around Esther’s loveability: Jarndyce loves her, Woodcourt loves her, Guppy loves her, Caddy loves her, Ada loves her, everybody loves her! A perhaps impossible challenge for the adapter is to render Esther as likeable to the reader as she is to everyone in the diegetic world, or at least to make it plausible that she would generate such extreme affection; making the other characters recognize that she’s actually “a maddening prig” won’t work, because the love of these characters for Esther operates on the development of the plot – no love for Esther, very little plot.

In the 1985 BBC Bleak House, now unfairly overshadowed by its successor, the problem of Esther isn’t really solved either, but we do have a quieter Esther, who stays in the background as much as is feasible given her large role in the plot. She is silent where Dickens’ Esther is disingenuously self-denigrating and Anna Maxwell-Martin’s Esther in the 2005 version is (I think) too assertive, too secure in her judgements. Silence is, frankly, about the best that can be done with Esther.

Suzanne Burden as Esther Summerson, Bleak House (BBC 1985)

The 1985 Bleak House is very much in the mould of the classic serial: no 24-style zooming lenses here, just long scenes, static camera, and often only the dialogue and the actors’ faces to concentrate on. The obligatory orchestral score is relatively understated, often giving way to the dialogue. There are some very effective long scenes, a 10-minute scene in Lady Dedlock’s drawing room with Lady D and Guppy springs to mind. With the almost total absence of non-diegetic sound and the long, still close-ups of the two actors, it’s almost theatrical, and it works wonderfully. Diana Rigg is an excellent Lady Dedlock, all told.

Diana Rigg as Lady Dedlock

Of course, there’s difficulty with the plotting: Lady D.’s death is dealt with in episode 7 (of 8, 50 minutes each), so the final episode is given over almost totally to Richard’s experience in Chancery -a terrible scripting decision: all the other strands are already gathered together, so there’s an inessential feel to the episode; it feels more like a long afterword than a properly integrated episode, certainly not a climactic final episode. Other plot lines are just dropped: as far as I remember, George is last seen or heard of in prison in the penultimate episode, and his release is not dealt with. Overall, though, despite this serious caveat, this Bleak House copes admirably with the difficulties of the adaptation and seems to my judgement to be a better bet than its successor, with a more sympathetic and nuanced (if less well structured) script, and more understated but effective performances.