Saturday, May 06, 2017
H.G. Wells, between eugenics and stalinism
Time Travel is the utmost adventure
Jacques Coulardeau & H.G. Wells at Academia.edu (21)
H.G. WELLS
THE TIME MACHINE
THE NOVEL AND THE FILM
ADAPTATIONS
Dr Jacques Coulardeau
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Université Paris Dauphine
Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne
Herbert
Georges Wells (1866-1946) witnessed eighty years of our developing industrial
world during which all basic productive activities bloomed to produce our
present mass consumer society based on mass production and the industrial and
agricultural, financial, services, communications, entertainment and labor mass
markets. He witnessed the growth of the two extreme ideologies produced by this
industrial world, communism (or Stalinism) and Nazism (or fascism). He also
witnessed the development of biology and particularly Darwinism and his
evolution of species, the survival of the fittest, and the birth and
elaboration of the theory of relativity and the physics that emerged
from it or at the same time. Finally, he witnessed, both in Europe and the USA,
the junction of the analysis of society in two antagonistic classes and their class
struggle for domination, even reduced to the American simplified approach of
the rich and the poor, what he calls himself the “haves” and the “have-nots”
(53) on one hand, and Darwinism on the other hand. He died in 1946 after
witnessing the fall of the extreme racist form of this social Darwinism
(Nazism and fascism) but also the seemingly triumphant expansion of the second
form of it, Stalinism.
The Time Machine was published in 1895.We should also consider Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897). Wells first warns
us about the biological-and-social-danger of our social Darwinism in The Time Machine and about the plain
criminal danger of the uncontrolled development of science in The Invisible Man.
I
will concentrate on the ideological message of The Time Machine along with two adaptations of this short novel to
the silver screen. George Pal’s (1960) shows how the book was read before 1968,
the turning point towards mass-consumerism and mass-communication. Simon Wells’
(2002) shows how it is read after the no-return turning point of globalization,
September 11 and the war on terror. These two adaptations deviate from the original
novella in concordance with their times. I will consider these two films in
Marshall McLuhan’s perspective that states the message is the medium, which implies
the meaning of the films can only be considered from the moment the films meet
an audience. The audience gives meaning to the film that is nothing but a hollow
shell otherwise. Note this approach is similar to Kenneth Burke’s dramatist theory.
This implies that a film’s meaning will change through time along with the
audience that builds meaning into the film.
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 12:36 PM 
