8/19/2023 0 Comments Verne nemo![]() ![]() Verne's long didactic passages explaining scientific concepts are almost entirely removed. But one of the most significant things that happens in this transformation-and one that sets the stage for most of the others-is that Hollywood converted Verne's scientific fiction, a work that is full of didacticism, into a work of science fiction, one which “utilizes science for purely fictional purposes” (Evans “Science Fiction” 1). The transformation that I wish to trace here, from novel to film, across almost a century of history, and from France to the United States, is more complex than can be thoroughly dealt with in this short space. Peter Filene suggests that the last century comprised a continuous development of men's struggle to redefine masculinity within a culture where “work involved brain more than brawn individualism melted into corporate bureaucracy” (341). Technical man is set into competition with more muscular heroic models-that of the warrior, the sports-hero, the rugged individualist, the superhero, and others. In their dealings both with Nemo and with each other, they serve to highlight and to bring into focus a number of salient features of this new social order: in particular, its competing models of masculinity. Confronting Nemo and suddenly complicating the interpersonal dynamics aboard the Nautilus is the typically Vernian triad of scientist/servant/common man-Professor Aronnax, Conseil, and the harpooner Ned Land. But he also has a “dark” side that is unpredictable, autocratic, obsessed, and vengeful. As a scientist, inventor, and engineer of uncommon genius, he occupies the apex of the new social pyramid and, in one sense, might be said to represent the Saint-Simonian philosopher-king. ![]() Captain Nemo is a kind of aristocratic version of the rebel without a cause: he is both a symbol of, yet strangely alienated from, that technocratic world. The social tensions that marked the transition from the old regime to this brave new world are clearly mapped in Verne's characters: four men set in competition and cooperation with each other, vying in complex ways for each other's love and loyalty within a new social hierarchy. One source of its strong appeal was in its vision of a new world ordered by technical meritocracy (Evans, Jules Verne 41-50). Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was not only a novel about technical advancement. Nautilus, Disney was bringing to life the namesake of the Nautilus in Captain Nemo's electric submarine boat and subtly altering its ideological texture to fit a new age.ġ. As Americans looked forward with excitement to the 1954 launching of Hyman Rickover's “Atom Sub” significantly called the U.S.S. The age of the Industrial Revolution was taken up and used as a metaphor for the electronic and atomic revolutions that followed World War II. But this nostalgia seems to have served a purpose for technological propaganda, a kind of Icarian or Promethean mythos of early engineering genius that foretold the present day's technical wonders. They all evoked a nostalgia for the Victorian world, with its class distinctions and colonial wealth. I slowly came to realize that several of these Cold War era films translated Verne's novels into their own cultural codes by shifting their emphases and changing their characters. Enthralled by how much was the same, and so visually rich, I had never noticed how much was radically different. Often praised at its release as a faithful homage to the novel, Disney's Leagues surprised me when I began to compare it to the book. Recently, while writing about Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I returned to the Disney film version that had so enchanted me as a boy. Those marvelous technicolor and Cinemascope movies of Around the World in 80 Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Five Weeks in a Balloon, From the Earth to the Moon, Master of the World, and others introduced a large segment of the American population to Verne's novels and to the genre of science fiction. It has been nearly a half-century since this last happened, during the 1950s and 60s when a spate of American film adaptations of his novels made Verne a household word, a name equated with the adventure of science and its uncanny progress over the last century. Jules Verne's Paris au XXe Siècle, which made news in the past year, has once again raised aloft the bearded profile of its author as an icon of scientific prophecy. Between Jules Verne and Walt Disney: Brains, Brawn, and Masculine Desire in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ![]()
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