Music? Yes, and I don’t mean Ramón Raquello and Bobby Millette or any of the configurations into which Bernard Herrmann managed to corral the CBS studio orchestra – though note how, as the events become steadily clearer, the music gradually and subtly slows down from lively to mid-tempo to a solitary piano. Nor do I particularly mean the famous first half of the broadcast, the one which ensured that a lot of listeners didn’t hang around to catch the second half; the initial, half-bluff, half-blind complacency of Professor Pierson (“Why must I always be challenged on these matters?” was a frequent rebuff used by Welles towards his recalcitrant actors in later times), the increasingly scrambled attempts to pretend that business is as normal and the dreadful rapidity of the horror with microphone cutouts, charred reporters’ bodies, fifty feet, services in the cathedral, this is the end and the radio ham trying to locate a Mayday. We know about Welles’ complete familiarity with and inbuilt suspicion of the power of the media to distort and frighten, we can probably guess that he timed the urgency of the bulletins to coincide with the moment when impatient Charlie McCarthy fans would do a radio channel scan as soon as Nelson Eddy came on to do his song, we know about the panic that arose and the absence of real casualties but also the career-building controversy, and maybe of the approaching horror of 1938/9 in general.
But hardly anyone knows that second half, after the forlorn “2X2L”s and the Styx-bound ship foghorns, and after the CBS announcement of a commercial break, except those astute enough to know a Welles con when they heard it, or those who quickly flipped back through the dial to be reassured by the utterly unscathed tones of Edgar Bergen and Don Ameche – and although the broadcast has survived, nobody talks of that second half hour.
The sequence largely consists of a monologue, narrated by Professor Pierson, who against all odds has survived the Martian onslaught – savour that quiet but terrible joy in Welles’ grave voice at the prospect of Orson Welles being the last, or only, man on Earth – and wanders away from Grover’s Mill, eventually coming through Newark, after several days of walking and Martian-avoiding, and finally arriving in New York. In Newark his meditation is interrupted by the Artilleryman who crouches in doorway with knife, already half-mad, slavering over the prospect of rebuilding humanity with a view to fascism. He makes his excuses (“Where are you going?” “Not to your world…goodbye, stranger…”) and proceeds to New York . The story turns out as the original novel does.
What I find compelling, however, is not so much the story but the way in which Welles is telling it. His voice gently - and with symphonic symmetry (his discourse is structured almost exactly as an adagio) unleashes a hypnosis every bit as potent as the Martians’ black smoke; it is tempting almost to forget the invasion and focus on his solitary psychogeographic procedural, attempting to make sense of what he now sees as measured against what he once recognised – “buildings strangely dwarfed and levelled off, as if a giant hand sliced off its highest towers with a capricious sweep of his hand.” Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remember that he’s not reminiscing about Glasgow circa 1980. In the end he skirts the wild dogs with their strange mouthfuls of brown meat, finds the Martians dead in Central Park and, in tandem with the incongruence of the narrative’s timespan - like the protagonists of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, Pierson is apt to travel huge distances in practically no time – we get the impression of Pierson, falling asleep under his Princeton telescope, waking up, seeing the trees, the people, and it’s all been a dream, a dream of obliteration, a warning or a desire. But surely not a prophecy; just a redder disc floating in a bluer sea?
But hardly anyone knows that second half, after the forlorn “2X2L”s and the Styx-bound ship foghorns, and after the CBS announcement of a commercial break, except those astute enough to know a Welles con when they heard it, or those who quickly flipped back through the dial to be reassured by the utterly unscathed tones of Edgar Bergen and Don Ameche – and although the broadcast has survived, nobody talks of that second half hour.
The sequence largely consists of a monologue, narrated by Professor Pierson, who against all odds has survived the Martian onslaught – savour that quiet but terrible joy in Welles’ grave voice at the prospect of Orson Welles being the last, or only, man on Earth – and wanders away from Grover’s Mill, eventually coming through Newark, after several days of walking and Martian-avoiding, and finally arriving in New York. In Newark his meditation is interrupted by the Artilleryman who crouches in doorway with knife, already half-mad, slavering over the prospect of rebuilding humanity with a view to fascism. He makes his excuses (“Where are you going?” “Not to your world…goodbye, stranger…”) and proceeds to New York . The story turns out as the original novel does.
What I find compelling, however, is not so much the story but the way in which Welles is telling it. His voice gently - and with symphonic symmetry (his discourse is structured almost exactly as an adagio) unleashes a hypnosis every bit as potent as the Martians’ black smoke; it is tempting almost to forget the invasion and focus on his solitary psychogeographic procedural, attempting to make sense of what he now sees as measured against what he once recognised – “buildings strangely dwarfed and levelled off, as if a giant hand sliced off its highest towers with a capricious sweep of his hand.” Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remember that he’s not reminiscing about Glasgow circa 1980. In the end he skirts the wild dogs with their strange mouthfuls of brown meat, finds the Martians dead in Central Park and, in tandem with the incongruence of the narrative’s timespan - like the protagonists of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, Pierson is apt to travel huge distances in practically no time – we get the impression of Pierson, falling asleep under his Princeton telescope, waking up, seeing the trees, the people, and it’s all been a dream, a dream of obliteration, a warning or a desire. But surely not a prophecy; just a redder disc floating in a bluer sea?
