“Looking up, he said, ‘I see people, but they look like walking trees'” (Matthew 8.24).
This movie marks our fourth, this summer, first trip to Mars (I’m not counting Capricorn One since no one actually went there). It goes about as well as the others. It’s starting to seem like maybe going there’s not such a good idea.
The Angry Red Planet, released in 1959, tells the story of the first crewed mission to Mars. Unlike others where we’re watching the adventures and adversities unfold, this one’s told in flashback. The space organization picks up Mars Rocket 1 floating in space. All contact with the ship had been lost; so they bring the spaceship in via radio control.
Upon landing, they discover two survivors, Dr. Iris Ryan and Colonel Tom O’Bannion. The latter is injured, his arm covered in a gross-looking alien goop. Dr. Ryan is uninjured but is exhausted and traumatized by whatever has befallen this crew. So, of course, the military officers and doctors stand around her bed and ask her, repeatedly, to tell them what happened (after which, they say, they’ll let her rest).
We learn that the planet Mars is populated with life. There are strange plants (one of which attacks the crew) and even stranger creatures (like a rat/crab/bat/spider that stands about ten-feet tall). One of the crew is killed and another dies from a heart attack, leaving only Ryan and O’Bannion to return to Earth and bring with them a message from the Martians: stay away.
Supposedly this film was made for $200,000 (about $2.3 million in today’s money). It did that by using the revolutionary CineMagic process. For the scenes on the Martian surface, the film was reversed, which means in black and white the white becomes black and black becomes white. It was then tinted red. The idea, from what I read, was to make the actors look like cartoons which would, in turn, make the two-dimensional cutouts of alien flora look more realistic. It doesn’t work, least not for me. But it’s interesting to see.
Maybe the best summary of the movie comes from its writer Sidney Pink. According to Pink, he wrote the original draft at his kitchen table, handing off pages to his kids who told him what worked and what didn’t. As I kid, I would have given a thumbs up to weird hybrid creatures and carnivorous plants; so, I can see how we got the movie we did. That said, it isn’t bad. But something did annoy me.
Dr. Ryan, multiple times, stands at the spaceship’s porthole and remarks how dead the planet looks. She says this as they’re landing, a couple of times after they’ve landed, and even after they’ve made their first expedition onto the surface. A sojourn where they’re surrounded by a jungle of alien plant life, none of which looks unhealthy (one of these plants tries to eat her).
I was going to chalk this repetition up to bad writing (even if it was kid-approved). Or perhaps Pink had a different idea what the Martian surface would look like than what we eventually saw on screen. Or, since anything is possible, perhaps there’s something he was trying to say about not just these astronauts, but people in general.
Jesus’ acts of healing serve a dual purpose, often, within the Gospels. There is the obvious, literal actions that are given as examples of the Divine Love that flowed through him. Then there’s the metaphorical.
The healing of the man at Bethsaida comes just after a don’t-y’all-get-it-yet story. You know these, where Jesus says something that the disciples take too literally or else they want to do something that’s not at all in line with what Jesus’ has been teaching them. This particular story is one of the former—in response to a warning to beware the yeast of the Pharisees, everyone figures Jesus is chastising them for forgetting to buy bread.
This healing is different than so many others. Most of the time at a word or a touch a person finds themselves completely changed—the dead get up and move around, those with physical disabilities leap and dance. But here, the man’s sight comes back in stages. Jesus makes some mud out of his own saliva, smears it on this fellow’s eyes and asks what he sees. And the man responds as above. He can see, but not well. It takes Jesus putting his hands upon this fellow again before his sight is 20/20.
Blindness is a metaphor for one’s understanding in the Gospel. The difference within the metaphor is that this inability to see isn’t the result of genetics or injury, it’s a person’s own choice not to envision what’s right in front of them, spiritually speaking.
To the disciples misunderstanding prior to this story, Jesus says, don’t you get it? “I just fed a whole crowd of folks with one kid’s lunch, do you think bread’s something I’d worry about?” In other words, you looked, but you didn’t see.
The disciples were afflicted with a similar vision issues that afflicted Dr. Ryan was on Mars. looking out on the surface of this alien world saw the strange, the unfamiliar, which to her looked like a dead world. The disciples, looking at the world as they’d always perceived it, saw scarcity and want.
Which brings us back to the man from Bethsaida who could not see. And even upon coming in contact with Jesus, he still didn’t really see the world around him. In his words, it was all blurry, funny-looking, alien. It was only additional contact with the Incarnate One that he could see the world around him as it is.
It can be tempting to look out our own portholes at the world and perceive something different than what is there. Make no mistake, the world is as it is: a place of war, hunger, pain, and death. These are real things and we should see them along with the powers and principalities that rule and reign and bring suffering.
But there is also an as-is world right alongside it. It is the one Jesus saw as a reality. It’s the one where people choose love over hate, sharing over greed. It exists here, in front of us, as well. And it manifests as we make choices each day to live into this world as a means of transforming it into that other, more wonderful one.
It can be difficult to believe that such a sight, such a vision is possible. But, looking out our portholes, we have a choice to see life.
Jesus, you looked with eyes like ours and saw possibilities in our world and in us. Grant us your vision in our daily life to see as you did, and hope for a world redeemed.