Lifeforce
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Buy this!(Good luck)
The Space Vampires, by Colin Wilson
In the early 21st century, the spaceship Hermes discovers a derelict craft floating in the void- measuring over fifty miles in length, the vessel is pockmarked with the scars of a thousand meteor collisions. Under the direction of commander Olaf Carlsen, the crew explores the ship and discovers, among other things, a number of naked humanoids lying in a state of suspended animation. The Hermes returns to Earth with three of the beings, one woman and two men. Later, Carlsen witnesses the woman-alien suck the life out of a young man, killing him and aging his body decades in a few seconds. When Carlsen confronts the creature, he barely escapes with his life. The woman flees, only to have her body turn up dead in a nearby park hours later. The bodies of the two alien men are destroyed, and the government believes the threat is over; the Prime Minister wishes to bring the ship and its cargo of space vampires back to earth. Carlsen is uncertain, and Dr. Fallada, an expert in vampirism and human lambda fields, believes the idea to be an immensely dangerous one. The two men investigate the history of vampirism on earth, in the process learning that the woman alien may not be as dead as they thought…
With a title like Space Vampires, Colin Wilson sets up certain expectations. For a while, these expectations are largely met: we have the creepy, vaguely Lovecraftian space vessel; the shockingly beautiful aliens in their glass tombs; and finally the first attack, where a man looking for a quick necrophiliac grope gets his just deserts and beyond. Carlsen’s initial encounter with the newly conscious female is the usual sort of thing, with him struggling to ward off her utterly perfect sexual attractiveness.
(An aside: A nice idea here is that the female can’t force herself on him; he has to surrender to her, be willing to give up his life in order for her to be able to feed off of him. This is something often implied in vampire literature. In addition to the lore that a vampire must be invited into a house before it can entire, victims are almost always stricken by some sort of trance when attacked; after all, sucking someone’s entire blood supply takes time, and you can’t expect somebody to just stand there and let you do it unless you’ve made a pretty strong case for yourself. Carlsen’s battle here is explicit rather than implicit, and because of that, quite striking.
Odd, though. Because it is stressed that Carlsen’s resistance is based entirely on his “masculine training.” As if his idea of gentleman-hood is the only thing which keeps him from ripping of his clothes and jumping her. It’s an old-fashioned thread in a supposedly new-fashioned novel; I mention it here mainly because it soon becomes very obvious that Wilson puts a lot of faith in his conception the essential differences between masculine and feminine. The central concept of the novel rests on it.)
Anyway. The first thirty pages play exactly like you’d imagine they would, and after the female escapes from the lab, leaving Carlsen reeling and a dead body or two behind her, I thought I had a good idea of where the rest of the novel would go. The female would establish some sort of lair in the city, and use her beauty to draw victims in, who would become vampires themselves in turn, and the circle would grow wider, while Carlsen and Scotland Yard struggled to find the source of the contamination before it spread too far.
There might be variations on the above, enough to keep me reading, but there’s a basic structure at work here, a structure refined through a century’s worth of sci-fi horror novels. I was confident I knew the shape of things to come.
I was very wrong.
After the female leaves, Dr. Fallada enters the story, and brings with him a whole host of weirdness. And then, when Fallada and Carlsen fly off to spend some time with Dr. Geijerstam, things get seriously strange.
Shortly after Carlsen has his brush with (an extremely hot) death, the body of a woman is discovered in a nearby park; it’s identified as the female alien who recently escaped the lab. She was sexually molested and strangled to death; the fingerprints on her throat are quickly identified as those of a semi-famous race car driver. Carlsen is relieved, if baffled, that a sex maniac has apparently taken the entire problem off their hands. He returns to his house and the ministrations of his wife, only to be wakened the next morning by Dr. Fallada, who requests his presence at the doctor’s research lab.
Fallada suspects something is not quite right. After all, as he explains to the astronaut, wouldn’t the creature have been more than capable of defending herself against any human foe, especially one interested in the very thing she used to lure her prey in? Fallada then demonstrates to Carlsen his theory of lambda fields and the relationships between predator and prey- and that’s when the novel stops being typical genre escapism and enters the world of Serious Philosophy.
Seriously Goofy Philosophy, at any rate.
Okay, okay, that was a trifle harsh. Lemme see if I can explain this: basically, human beings have a basic energy, or lifeforce, that is with them at all times. It can be measured electronically as a “lambda field,” which is essentially a sort of container for the life force energy. If the field is damaged, the life force drains at an fatally high rate, which is how the space vampires kill their victims.
This also relates back to the essential passive/active nature of the vampire/victim relationship. By measuring the lambda levels of pairs of animals during both mating and hunter/prey rituals, Fallada has discovered that the fields essentially even out between the two creatures. When, say, two rabbits mate, their respective fields co-mingle, with each rabbit taking some measure of energy from the other and giving of their own energy in return. The hunter/prey transference is far starker: during the hunt, the prey receives energy from the hunter, only to give that energy (and its life) entirely back when it is caught and devoured. What all this points to is that all living creatures are, on some level or another, vampires; it is only when the amount of energy consumed is greater than the energy given out, thus doing permanent damage to the lambda field, that a human becomes unnatural and dangerous.
Or, to put it simply, the love you take must be equal to the love you make.
The concept isn’t a completely outlandish one. The importance of balance in life is something you hear about in awful lot, and the idea that that balance is more than just some granola, “Love Mother Earth” thing isn’t completely ridiculous. Personally, my suspension of disbelief (damn, second review in a row I’ve mentioned that, time to buy a new thesaurus) was strained, but not abnormally so.
An extension of the above theory is that, with time and the correct sort of exposure, a human being can learn to directly control his manipulation of the lambda field, and his transference of energy to and from other individuals. When Fallada and Carlsen visit Geijerstam, they find the seventy year old to be in surprisingly good health. They also find three young, beautiful women staying with the doctor, and soon learn they are the ones responsible for his good health. Geijerstam has taught them to use their life force as a healing energy, and in return they have kept him young by giving him some of their, I dunno, extraneous power.
Read that again. Seem a little odd to you? The doc is just living with some hotties in the name of science. Nothing sexual involved, and it’s a completely equal partnership. Except, of course, that there are three of them to one of him, and for the life of me I can’t understand what the women are getting out of the “relationship.” Knowledge, perhaps, but it doesn’t seem to be a knowledge they are planning to use on any terms other than under the doctor’s supervision.
It’s at this point that I began having a hard time going along with the story, and not only because the implausibility factor was rising. Lip service is paid to “feminine energy” being the equal of “masculine energy,” but if you read carefully, you’ll get a different story entirely. The roles women get to play are sparse: Olafsen’s wife, who appears in one or two scenes, offers support to her husband and is roundly betrayed by him for it; the Doc’s three “nurses” resemble nothing more than a Bond villain’s harem, relegated to either having sex with Our Hero or making maternal gestures in the direction of their ward, who of course they have no identity apart from; a nurse keeps the truth from the hero because she’s a masochist, and wants him to beat it out of her; and the female vampire, who does have some sort of power, even if it is evil- but then it’s soon revealed that the “she” is not applicable, and that the aliens don’t really have a sex.
Bleah. I say it again: bleah. In a regular genre novel, I wouldn’t mind so much. Genre fiction is escapist entertainment, and in the hands of mediocre writers, its shortcomings are limited to its own narrative. But Wilson is trying to create a new way of looking at life here. When he gets in deep, the novel reads like some sort of Dali-esque self-help book, and because it demands you view it on a semi-realistic level, it’s markedly sexist ideas make it impossible to swallow.
Besides, it doesn’t work all that well as escapism. For one thing, the bad guys disappear for three-quarters of the book; for another, the ending is about as deus ex machina as you can get. Once past the boffo opening section, the plot falls apart. I spent the last hundred pages thinking, “Okay, I get it, life-force is an energy that can be manipulated when one is pure of mind, etc, etc, can we please get back to the friggin space vampires?” It was irritating to go through endless scenes of fuzzy build-up that never truly resolve.
So, not a whole lot of suspense or tension. This could have been made up for by the stab Wilson makes at serious philosophy, but that stab is entirely undone by the author’s complete dismissal of a full fifty percent of the population. (How seriously can you take someone whose conception of ideal womanhood is a mystical Pussy Galore?) All that’s left is the writing, the male characters, and the few bits of story that hang around once we go all freaky; and, to give credit where credit is due, while the plusses here don’t outweigh the minuses, the writing is good, the characters are distinctive, and, aside from the afore mentioned deus ex machina and the disappearance of the aliens for the middle third of the novel, the plot isn’t too bad. There’s just no real pay-off, and the final coda, well-
Let’s just say it wants to be far more meaningful than it actually is. Like we’re saying “Huh?” when we should be saying “Wowwww.”.
SCREEN:
Buy this!
Lifeforce, directed by Tobe Hooper
On a joint American/British mission to investigate Halley’s Comet, the Churchill discovers a fifty mile long ship floating in the comet’s tail. Inside, the crew finds the bodies of a number of naked men and women- Colonel Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback) is particularly struck by one woman(Mathilda May) and her nearly supernatural beauty. The crew takes three of the bodies and their glass coffins onto their own ship; unable to contact Mission Control with news of their findings, they set a course for home. Two months later, when the ship arrives back on Earth, the entire crew is dead and the insides of the vessel are scarred by a terrible fire. The three alien bodies are intact, however, and the London government removes them for study. Soon the female wakes, draining some sort of energy out of her guard and blasting her way out of the complex. During the autopsy of the desiccated guard’s corpse, the body comes back to life and devours the energy of one of the attending doctors, restoring himself to full health. The scientists soon discover that anyone drained by one of the aliens (or one of the aliens’ victims) regains consciousness in two hours, but breaks apart almost immediately if unable to consume the life force of a fully healthy human being. Prof. Fallada (Frank Finlay) and Colonel Colin Caine (Peter Firth) realize they have a plague of near limitless destructive potential at loose in the city, but are at a loss on how to proceed. Fortunately, an escape pod from the Churchill has been discovered in the countryside; in it is the still living Carlsen. He is quickly flown to London and questioned at length- the investigators soon discover that Carlsen may have a connection to the female alien that could be of great use to them…
If you haven’t seen it, there’s probably two things you know about Lifeforce:
1. It’s weird.
2. Mathilda May is naked. A lot.
Just to start off on the track of every reviewer before me, both of those things are true. Unfortunately there’s a bit more to say, or else I could knock off early. (Yeah, like I have anything better to do.)
I’m not a big fan of Tobe Hooper. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was terrific, I’ll grant you, and Poltergeist was cool (although it seems more like a Spielberg product than anything else), but the other stuff of his I’ve tried has left me cold. I’ve made my feelings on TCM part 2 abundantly clear elsewhere, and although I tried, I wasn’t able to even get through an entire showing of Invaders from Mars. It wasn’t awful, but it was dull, which is not something that can be said for most movies featuring body snatching giant brains from the planet Mars. I’d heard mixed reactions to Lifeforce; most people seemed to agree that it was an interesting experiment, but a failure overall. So lets just say, I had a few beers at the ready when I popped this one into the DVD player.
Well, Lifeforce certainly isn’t dull. Within the first twenty minutes, we get an alien spacecraft, a super hot nekkid Space Girl, a guy that goes from healthy to hollow in three seconds, a few evil-ish light shows, three living corpses, and lots of dead Brits. Most movies would slow down at this point; a super-fast opening act is one way of grabbing your audience’s attention, but keep it up for too long and they’re likely to get whiplash.
Our movie throws caution (and pretty much everything else) to the wind, and chucks enough at you to populate about a hundred regular horror/sci-fi films. For one low introductory price you get a whole lot more snazzy special effects, some truly insane dialogue, more nekkid Mathilda than you can shake a stick at, some Steve Railsback-kissing-Captain-Picard action, London overrun by thousands of zombies- oh sure, they’re technically vamps, but I know a zombie when I see it- and an ending the just barely manages to not explain anything that’s come before it, as well as adding a few new wrinkles to make your head hurt even more.
There’s this line you hear a lot when you first start writing: “Kill your darlings.” Whenever you set out to tell a story, there are a thousand things you think of that don’t make it to the page. Of the hundreds that do, only about ten or so are actually worth the readers time- everything else needs to get edited out. If it doesn’t, you run the very real risk of information overload; cram something too full of bright, shiny things and people’s eyes glaze over.
Admittedly, there are writers that can manage to shove an entire world’s worth of topics into a narrative, and still have it work; Neal Stephenson springs to mind, as does his more esoteric literary cousin, Thomas Pynchon. But it takes a special kind of talent to pull something like Cryptonomicon or Gravity’s Rainbow off, and even then, you’re virtually ensuring that your work will only appeal to a limited group. Let’s face it, most people don’t want to be assaulted by information in their reading- they’d rather have ideas marching single file in easy to digest tablets.
Hooper isn’t as talented a storyteller as Pynchon or Stephenson. Even though they work in different mediums, it’s not a hard call to make. While the story richness of a Pynchon novel gives you the feeling of reading a book that’s far smarter, far more complete than anything you’ve ever encountered before, Lifeforce’s galloping plot just makes you dizzy, and yearn for an editor with a stronger sense of self-control. Most folks will walk away from the movie disappointed, and you can’t blame them for it. There’s nothing here that has any real emotional impact- you’re too busy trying to figure out what the hell is going on to actually feel anything.
That caveat aside, I liked it. Really. Quite a bit, in fact, and much more than I expected I would. It helps that I’m a big fan of the authors mentioned above- I like overstuffed narratives. But it’s more than that; there is a wild, zany energy on display in this film that manages to carry you over the strange spots through sheer brute effort. You don’t like what’s happening right now? Just wait thirty or so seconds, there’ll be something else along to distract you.
This same sort of energy was on display in TCM 2, but there it didn’t wow me; something about the juxtaposition of brutally realistic gore and goofy slapstick irritated me. (I loved Dead Alive though. Damn, looks like another movie I have to risk again…) Here there’s absolutely no connection to reality, and what little gore we do see is more comic than anything else. A perfect example of this is the wonderful “resurrection” sequence, when Fallada and Caine walk past a series of newly created vampires which come to life, then fall to pieces almost instantly. I’m not sure how intentionally funny this is supposed to be, but it’s a kick to watch- the utter seriousness of the men, how they see the effect happen three times in a row and are apparently equally horrified each time, is hilarious.
The cast as a whole should be commended for being clearly committed to such a wild script. Steve Railsback plays the newly Anglicized Carlsen like a man thiiiis close to a nervous breakdown; admittedly, that’s the way he’s been in every movie I’ve seen him in, but here, as in The Stunt Man, he’s got a pretty damn good reason for being nuts. He gets by the, shall we say, more implausible aspects of his character by attacking everything with a great deal of gusto. The rest of the primarily British cast takes the opposite tack, delivering absolutely insane lines with that clipped, no-nonsense tone that only the English can pull off.
And then there’s Mathilda May. As a heterosexual male, I gotta say: I wish I had an address to send the lady flowers, because she deserves some sort of thanks from me and every other straight guy who’s ever seen the movie. She’s also a surprisingly good actress- there’s an otherworldly quality to her work that’s striking even once you discount her, ahem, other contributions. I’d be interested to hear from someone who is less susceptible to her more obvious charms, but she gets an A for performance and an A+ for appearance from me. (Well, there goes my claims to feminism…)
Lifeforce is not scary, and it moves so fast as to mostly void any chance at being a serious piece of science fiction, but as a unique way of spending a couple hours, it works pretty damn well. Suffice to say, I had a blast with it, and I will most likely be returning to it again in the near future.
COMPARE/CONTRAST:
(Note: this section is more spoiler heavy than usual, so be warned.)
That Lifeforce is as close to its source as it is is a wonder; not only does Hooper (and, of course, screenwriters Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby) keep the tailor-made-to-film opening, he stuffs the rest of the movie as close to bursting as possible with the novel’s far more esoteric plot elements, which one would expect to be the first things to go. While the idea of “life energy” and its transference is never explicitly explained on screen, it’s hinted at in numerous place; one fantasy/dream/psychic link sequence between Carlsen and the Space Girl has Carlsen yelling repeatedly, “You’re taking too much from me,” implying an exchange where the two can give and receive energy without being completely destructive.
The entire sequence at Dr. Geijerstam’s is omitted, but oddly enough some of the discoveries made in that sequence remain, with far less context to explain them. Out of seemingly nowhere, Carlsen reveals that he can now read people’s minds by touching them- this is vaguely connected to his relationship with the alien, but it still feels like a pretty big jump to happen without any real effort to justify or back it up. In the novel, Carlsen begins developing certain abilities because his near-death experience with the space vampire opens up new doors in his mind. Here, it comes perilously close to being a convenient plot device: we need to get information out of certain characters who don’t want to give it, so why not give our hero some ESP to mess with? (For the record, if I ever developed the power to read minds by touch and knew that there was a deadly alien around who liked to hop into other people’s bodies, I’d be damn sure to touch anybody who came within five miles of me, whoever they were.)
I also thought the connection between the Space Girl and the space man was slighted in the movie- but to give credit where credit is due, there’s a reason for that omission. The screenplay was a step ahead of me, because closer to the end of the picture, Carlsen reveals he wasn’t entirely truthful about what happened on the Churchill. While his new tale isn’t completely satisfactory, it’s a hell of a lot better than his first one. Besides, it’s always a fun experience when a movie takes an apparent plot deficiency and exploits it in a way that surprises you.
One other major change in the first half of the story is the fate of the spaceship and its crew. In the novel, the Hermes arrives back on Earth with little or no problems- it’s only when the female is awakened by a horny reporter that the real trouble begins. In the movie, after the crew load the alien beings aboard their ship, we jump two months ahead to when the ship arrives home, with its crew dead and only the aliens still completely intact. While the novel version works fine in its own right, the movie’s serves as a neat way of increasing the mystery right off the bat- we know something bad went down, we suspect it has to do with the aliens, but nothing is certain, which makes us pay much closer attention.
The creatures themselves are dealt with slightly differently in each version. In the novel, once the female alien leaves her original body, she never returns to it; in the movie, although she jumps from person to person trying to spread her influence, she still retains her original form. For obvious reasons, I think; if you have someone as striking as Mathilda May is, you don’t want to get rid of her thirty minutes into your picture. Also, more of a connection is made between the aliens and the vampire myths of old in the movie, from the idea of the aliens’ murdered victims rising from the dead as sort of lesser vampires themselves, to the method used to kill the aliens themselves. The infected undead are cool, but the “stake in the gut is their weakness!” idea is thrown at us so fast it’s hard to register it.
Other than these differences, and a number of minor edits and sequences, the first hour and a half of the movie plays remarkably straight with its source- it’s only after Carlsen and Caine leave the asylum that the movie becomes entirely its own. Hooper tries something here that’s as impressive in its scope as it is implausible in its execution. (The aliens manage to take over the entire city of London in the three or four hours that our heroes are away, without anyone making any attempt to contact Caine or warn him of the situation.) And the denouement is completely insane. Having just read the book, I understood a lot of the references made earlier in the movie, but once Carlsen tracks down the Space Girl to her hiding, I was lost. My chin hit my chest at the alien’s last line to Carlsen- and keep in mind, the two them are embracing naked in a swirl of blue light shooting up to the heavens: “You are one of us.”
To which I can only say- Er. Yeah.
Still, as nonsensical as it is, it’s still miles above the deflating conclusion of the book. At least in the movie you know something truly immense is happening, even if you’re not quite sure what any of it means.
Clearly, I preferred the movie to the book. Neither is exactly a classic, but the movie is at least honest in its desire to entertain us; there are some increasingly surreal moments where you get the impression Hooper was trying for something more complex than what he ended up with, but these are surrounded by enough energetic lunacy that they don’t come off as pretentious. Also, while the movie’s female characters are mostly correspondent to the novel’s, there isn’t that irritating veneer of sexism on everything. I’m not sure why- it might be because the women here are played by actual actresses, who can give them a fuller sense of life than their origins had. Or maybe it’s because it’s next to impossible to take the movie with a straight face, something the novel insists upon.
Or maybe it’s just that I like nekkid Space Girls. Who knows.
I’m not sure if I’m quite ready to reevaluate Tobe Hooper’s work, but I’m adding Lifeforce to the short list of his movies that I enjoyed. Both it and The Space Vampires are too ambitious for their own good, but while there’s more than enough explosions, gore, and madness in Hooper’s film to make you forgive it’s shortcomings, Wilson’s novel drops the energy in it’s desire to be deep, ensuring it’s ultimate forgettability.
You know what? These two would make more sense if they switched titles; The Space Vampires sets you up for the wild, logic-be-damned ride that the movie delivers, while Lifeforce promises all sorts of vauge, pseudo-religious meanderings which the novel, sadly, is full of.
SOURCE: QQ
SCREEN: QQ.5
Did I mention Mathilda May is hot?