Sub-Cult 2.0 #9 Mars Attacks! (1996)
I used to look at Tim Burton’s gleefully anarchic 1996 sci-fi satire Mars Attacks as the beginning of the end for a filmmaker I once considered one of my very favorites. Then again it does help that I was between the ages of 9 and 18 during Burton’s magnificent prime.
I saw Mars Attacks! as a staggering disappointment that abruptly snapped a remarkable winning streak that included 1985’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, 1988’s Beetlejuice, 1989’s Batman, 1990’s Edward Scissorhands, 1992’s Batman Returns and finally the one-two punch of 1994’s Ed Wood and Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, which Burton did not direct, of course, but that reflects his sensibility in perhaps its purest form.
Before I learned to appreciate Mars Attacks! I mistakenly viewed it as an unfortunate turning point in Burton’s career where he stopped making deeply personal, relatively modestly-budgeted films and became an increasingly mercenary blockbuster director adapting big, safe, familiar properties like Planet of the Apes, Sleepy Hollow and Alice in Wonderland instead of pursuing his own idiosyncratic vision.
My take on Mars Attacks! is decidedly different now. From the grim vantage point of 2020, Mars Attacks! now looks less like the beginning of the end than the wonderful end of Burton’s golden age. That Burton was able to command a blockbuster budget and a once-in-a-lifetime cast for a romp this exquisitely nihilistic and unabashedly juvenile now feels incredibly subversive.
Mars Attacks! may be an adaptation, but there is a huge difference between bringing an obscure, cult, Camelot-era Topps trading card series like Mars Attacks! to the big screen and lazily crapping out another version of Alice in Wonderland because there is literally a billion dollars in it.
In Mars Attacks!, the titular martian invaders are, like countless cinematic aliens before them, a vicious, violent, unthinking force for destruction on a global scale. But they’re something else as well: fucking assholes. In Burton’s wonderfully mean-spirited romp, they’re demented children enjoying a laugh at the expense of foolish earthlings.
In other words, the Martians behave like Americans. They’re mindlessly violent and destructive, vulgar and immature, TV-addicted nihilists devoted exclusively to their own demented enjoyment. No wonder they can’t get along with our nation, or any others.
The Martians destroy for the sake of destruction but also because it’s fun. Mars Attacks! combines the adult satisfaction of sly social satire with the child-like joy of blowing shit up but good. Burton’s misunderstood masterpiece is the cross between Dr. Strangelove and Beavis & Butthead we never knew we needed.
When I saw Mars Attacks! in the theaters, I was put off by its cynicism and mean-spiritedness, by the way it reduces the near-destruction of planet earth to a nasty jokes with mountains of corpses as its grisly punchline. Now I love the film’s sadism and cruelty. It’s not too mean; it’s the perfect level of slapstick sadism.
My Alien!
Jack Nicholson leads a ridiculously star-studded cast in the lead role of the President of the United Stares and a vulgar, crass, scumbag hotel and casino magnate. In 1996, at least, those constituted two different people. We did not yet realize that a vulgar, crass, scumbag hotel and casino magnate could ALSO be the leader of the free world.
Before the Martians reveal themselves to be laser-gun-shooting, sex-addled, planet-destroying maniacs, Nicholson’s President James Dale and top brains like suave, perpetually pipe-smoking Professor Donald Kessler (a delightful Pierce Brosnan) allow themselves the dangerous, ultimately deadly delusion that the arrival of aliens could be not just positive but the single greatest gift in human history.
Because even the smartest people in Mars Attacks! are ultimately very stupid they imagine that because the Martians are a technically advanced society able to travel the cosmos they will be kind and enlightened.
This flurry of utterly myopic early optimism about the good things that can happen whe planets come together in a spirit of peace and togetherness makes the gleeful, unabashed bloodbath and brutality to follow even more hilarious.
Jonathan Gems’ fiendishly clever screenplay contains some wonderfully droll Clinton-era satire, most notably in the figure of Paul Winfield’s Colin Powell-style leader General Casey, a consummate yes-man who is rewarded for a lifetime of meekly following orders with the opportunity to be one of the very first earthlings to greet our Martian visitors.
Just before the historic event, Casey excitedly tells his wife, “Didn't I always tell you honey, if I just stayed in place and never spoke up, good things are bound to happen!”
In the world of Mars Attacks!, however, good things do not happen. Casey is rewarded for those many, many decades of staying in place and never speaking up by getting to be one of the very first human beings to be incinerated by a laser gun.
Burton originally wanted the Martians to be Ray Harryhausen-style stop-motion animation. That proved prohibitively expensive. I can’t help but mourn the amazing alternate version of Mars Attacks! using stop-motion animation instead of early CGI but the film’s computer animation works spectacularly well because it is so intentionally cheesy and retro, not despite being a glorious artifact of our kitschy distant past.
The character design of the malevolent alien marauders is so inspired and weirdly perfect that it doesn’t matter that with some very prominent exceptions like the Martian ambassador and Lisa Marie’s disconcertingly sexy Martian Girl, all the aliens look pretty much the same, with skinny, Christmas green bodies, eyes perpetually agog with malice and spongy external brains.
The studio understandably wanted the aliens’ dialogue to be subtitled to make the aliens more distinguishable and distinctive. To his perverse credit, Burton fought them. Not only do the aliens all look and act the same: all they say is “Ack!” In an endless variety of agitated and inexplicably apoplectic fashions.
We don’t learn need to know what the aliens are saying or thinking. They don’t need ANY characterization at all. It’s enough for them to be pure mayhem, pure anarchy, pure, violent, untamed craziness. They are rampaging ids enjoying a deadly laugh at the sum of humanity. They don’t have to have layers or complexity to be hilarious and magnetic: they just have to be the biggest assholes in the universe.
If Mars Attacks! were made in 2020, these intergalactic jerks would undoubtedly be taking selfies and live-Tweeting the earth’s destruction.
Being intergalactic douche-nozzles, the Martians make a point of fucking relentlessly with humanity and their hopes, dreams and delusions, pretty much just for the fun of it. When the Martian’s arrival is greeted by a friendly crowd, General Casey’s aggressively unthreatening, even soothing presence and a dove, the martians roast the unfortunate bird of peace, and General Casey and a whole bunch of other motherfuckers while they’re at it.
Yet Earth’s leaders still cling to the increasingly impossible notion that these outer space delinquents come in peace and that they only started shooting people with laser guns due to a “cultural misunderstanding” possibly due to the dove being a sign of war for them rather than a sign of peace.
The earthlings keep giving the martians chances and the martians invariably repay that generosity with death and destruction. Mars Attacks! takes its cues from the disaster movies of the 1970s, as a broad cross-section of American life deal with a crisis unlike any other, including Byron Williams (Jim Brown), a retired boxer who gets his unlikely moment of glory when he climactically boxes a whole bunch of martians successfully, Press Secretary Jerry Ross (Martin Short), a sleazy, sex-crazed political advisor clearly modeled on George Stephanopoulos, a poor, patriotic family led by patriarch Glenn Norris (Joe Don Baker) and an opportunistic lawyer (Danny DeVito, who is very prominently billed for the role of “Rude Gambler”) who quickly joins the ranks of the laser-zapped.
Considering how vulnerable senior citizens are to the current extinction-level threat, coronavirus, there’s something wonderfully subversive about the answer to the Martian threat here coming not from scientists, or politicians, or the military, but rather from a senile old woman in a nursing home.
Sylvia Sidney reunites with her Beetlejuice director as a poor old woman with nothing left to lose, including her mind, so she sees the probable end of the world as a fun spectacle, nothing more. Yet a woman her own trailer-dwelling family are eager to write off ends up accidentally coming up with a cure for the Martian plague when it is revealed, climactically, that the music of Slim Whitman kills Martians instantly.
Now I am not saying that Slim Whitman’s yodel-intensive brand of country music would destroy the coronavirus but it’s certainly worth a shot.
With this timely re-watch my opinion of Mars Attacks! skyrocketed. It’s gone from being one of my least favorite Tim Burton movies to one of my favorites, from bottom five to top five.
There has paradoxically never been a better time to laugh at the dumbass armageddon of Mars Attacks! than now. It sure beats the alternative, which is weeping uncontrollably about our impending doom.
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