A disproportionate number of our extraterrestrial fantasies have revolved around Mars,the Red Planet. If there is life out there,or ever was,we earthlings seem to have convinced ourselves that Mars is the obvious first choice to begin our investigation. So when NASAs rover Curiosity,which has been traversing that dusty landscape for months now,confirmed earlier in March that Mars was once capable of sustaining life well,it only fuelled the stories our movies and conspiracy theorists have been peddling for years. Little green men,as typified by Mars Attacks! (admittedly a farce,but no less sharp for it),is only the most common and least interesting myth developed about the fourth rock from the sun in our popular culture.
In the decades that we have been dreaming of Mars,or planets that bear a close resemblance to it (such as Vulcan in the Star Trek universe),we have discovered dying worlds populated by aliens (John Carter),advanced civilisations (Total Recall,Mission to Mars) and lands arid but terraformable (Mission to Mars,Red Planet). In these fantasies,Mars has been the exotic,mysterious other; exercising,perhaps,the same magnetic pull on our imaginations as the Orient once did for Western explorers. Disneys epic (failure) John Carter last year,for instance,saw 12-foot aliens and princesses in need of rescuing,as well as a faux-science explanation for the titular characters superhuman feats. Skills bestowed by differences in gravity come in handy during Carters heroic exploits on Mars; for all practical purposes,his quest is an expression of his white mans burden (in Rudyard Kiplings words: Send forth the best ye breed… To serve your captives need).
Mars lacks the splendour and sensuality of plenty that marks most Romantic imaginings of the Orient; instead,it is alluring because,in its pristine landscape,it promises the luxury of a new beginning. In this,Mars is the fulcrum of modern anxieties about resource exhaustion or climate change,though as in the past,this journey also ends in colonisation. And,like other things so deeply coveted,the voyage and process of transforming the remote climes of the red rock into a welcoming abode for an entire planet is an exercise fraught with disease and danger,wrapped in darkness and silence (One characters pithily eloquent description of space in Star Trek XI). Humanitys Mars fixation is twinned with its attraction for deus ex machina,whereby planetary engineering is depicted as a more desirable alternative to our excesses than behavioural change.
That the planet has a more sinister face is not lost on our storytellers and myth-makers,any more than the Orients sundry moral and ethical shortcomings were. If the Orient in William Beckfords fantastic vision was a place where passions were unbound by rules and opulence matched by grotesquerie,the civilisation found by stranded astronaut Kit Draper on Mars in the 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars is just as cruel and almost as alien. Even where Mars is an outpost for an advanced human civilisation that managed to not destroy its home planet as in 2005s Doom,it is misadventure incarnate; home to unspeakable and unnatural horrors that humankind is damned to unearth because of its insatiable curiosity.
Even more explicit apprehensions about indigenous Martians and their intentions play out in films like War of the Worlds and Independence Day (though the home planet for the latters aliens is never identified). Our stories suggest that the Martian method of initiating first contact would be to simply bomb us into extinction,or worse,cooperation. Total annihilation of the species,as envisaged in all versions of War of the Worlds,is tied up in the uniqueness of Earth,and in some ways alludes to retribution for all our sins,an indictment of British imperialism as well as punishment for crimes against nature. In its most terrifying interpretation,the invasion of Earth is occasioned by no more than a whiff of imperialist fancy. It is also,of course,a mirror to our marauding forays to Mars just as the movies portray our interest in it to be driven by the depletion of Earths life-force,the Martians,too,are motivated by their desire to find a new home,or at
least a new source of life-sustaining minerals.
The good news is that Curiositys discoveries so far bear out few of these nightmares or,for that matter,fantasies. But who knows the shape of things to come?
yamini.lohia@expressindia.com
