Let’s stipulate that Silent Running was not Joan Baez’ best single. I’m not a Baez fan—that era of folksy music isn’t my thing, but somehow Silent Running and its B-side Rejoice in the Sun manage to be even more shrill and more silly than usual. Which isn’t all that odd, when you consider the songwriter was Peter Schickele. For those who haven’t gotten the joke yet, Schickele’s main career was under the stage name “P.D.Q. Bach,” the Weird Al Yankovic of classical music.
But wait… why did the producers hire a musical satirist to write the score to a serious SF drama? Well, it seems a few years back, Baez’ producers were ginning up a Joan Baez Christmas album and wanted her to sing one in the style of an 18th century carol, and based on P.D.Q. Bach’s expert musical parodies figured he was the guy to fake an old timey carol. The makers of Silent Running saw his name on the album credits and didn’t do any follow-up research before signing him on.
Which is exemplary of the kind of gloriously half-assed creative decision making that colored the 1971 eco-thriller in space Silent Running. By equal measures benefitting from serendipity and faltering over oddball missteps, this is a film that exemplifies what can happen when you don’t bother to follow anything through and just go with the flow. It is a completely singular sort of thing, and almost critic-proof because too much of it seems accidental.
If most filmmaking is the perfect crime, this one is manslaughter—an effect devoid of intent, caused only by reckless circumstance.
Set in the fabled “not too distant future” (and yes, I’m using those specific words with full knowledge that Joel Hodgson created Mystery Science Theater 3000 inspired by this film), Silent Running tells the tale of the last forest in the world. Except it’s no longer on the world—Earth having been deforested long ago. The Parks Department has archived some forests in biodomes floating in space, but times are tough and who wants to spend tax money on National Parks in space? So, the day has come when the biodomes will be blown up with nuclear bombs and their staffs sent home.
None of this sits well with Freeman Lowell, a botanist and eco-warrior determined that the trees will not die on his watch. If that means a bunch of people will die on his watch instead, well, them’s the breaks.
He nukes his co-workers instead of the forest, and then sends his ship out into deep space on the claim of a mechanical failure, figuring he can live out his days tending to the forest on the far side of Saturn, with no one the wiser.
The flaws in his plan concern how hard it is to grown plants on the far side of Saturn (more on this anon) and his underestimating the tenacity of his former employers, who just might trek out to Saturn themselves to take a looksee of their own.
In other words, the simplest way of describing Silent Running is that it is an SF parable about an eco-terrorist standing tall against the evil corporations who are prepared to blow up the last flowers in the universe for a quick buck. But right away, the contradictions start piling up. It’s not like the most fanatical back-to-Earth hippie types who would be the natural audience for this Joan Baez-flavored tale had been clamoring for a movie about spaceships and cute robots. So the tonal mix is weird right from the start.
And then, it’s not as if the filmmakers actually set out to make a Mother Gaia fable in the first place.
Douglas Trumbull had made his name helping Stanley Kubrick on the special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey. And if he didn’t do those groundbreaking effects solo, the press and industry seemed to think he did, so he had a career cachet to leverage. That and handling the effects for Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain for a budget of pocket change won him even more goodwill in Hollywood.
Trumbull had a story outline to sell—something that would give him plenty of opportunity to make models of spaceships and film them against starfields. But it wasn’t a story about the last forest so much as it was a story about a grumpy oldtimer unwilling to be forcibly retired, so he steals a spaceship and runs off to Saturn to live as a space pioneer. He has to tend his garden to keep himself alive, but the thrust of the story was about his determined stance for individualism, not a stance for conservationism.
Along the way towards convincing Hollywood to not only make his movie, but to let him make his movie, some of the edges got sanded down—like a subplot about mankind’s first contact with aliens being completed by the sole surviving maintenance drone, instead of Lowell.
Oh yeah, the maintenance drones. That’s the other memorable aspect of this film, along with Trumbull’s admittedly wondrous space vistas and the whole hippies-in-space vibe. When I first saw it on TV with no knowledge of the release date, I wrongly assumed it had cropped up in the wake of Star Wars when every SF film felt the need to have an R2 D2 cute robot knockoff—but in fact this predates Star Wars by 6 years. (In 1979, the lawyers for Battlestar Galactica gleefully made a similar argument in court, fighting charges that they had plagiarized Star Wars by pointing out Star Wars could be accused of plagiarizing Silent Running).
In order to realize the robots, Trumbull had a clever idea—he hired Mark Persons, Larry Whisenhunt, Steve Brown, and Cheryl Sparks to play the ‘bots. See, these four people were veterans who’d had all had their legs amputated, so their bodies ended at their torsos. Trumbull had the robot costumes custom made for each performer, who walked around on their hands inside the suit. The result was remarkably cost-effective while also creating robot characters who did not immediately look like actors in suits.
This is one of those ideas that somehow cuts in different directions at once. If you want to make your movie an anti-authoritarian screed, then how better to enhance your points than have a bunch of Vietnam veterans walking around on their hands as a reminder of the human cost of war? But that only makes sense if you knew how the robot effects were done, and even that doesn’t land any particular antiwar message so much as it illustrates how even amputees can have happy productive lives playing cute robots.
Because seriously, those robots are really endearing! Lowell names them Huey, Dewey, and Louie after Donald Duck’s nephews, but even aside from that they are full of personality. There’s one beautiful moment where one of the drones quietly and unobtrusively pats another drone on the leg, a silent reminder of common bonds.
But it’s not at all clear we were supposed to become so attached to the robots. Lowell’s naming them after Donald Duck characters was meant to show his mental deterioration after long periods of isolation—he lacks human company and so starts anthropomorphizing his tools, like Tom Hanks and a beach ball on a desert island. The script doesn’t seem geared to accept the robots as actual characters with whom we might have sympathy—and as the film leads into its finale some of the things that happen to the robots become so upsetting to those of us who do sympathize with them that it threatens to overwhelm the rest of the story.
Which only loops up back to the question of what we are meant to make of the main character, Freeman Lowell? I mean, casting Bruce Dern was a savvy move, since he’s naturally a charming locus of audience sympathy. But then having him parade around in flowing Jesus robes, named “Freeman” for gosh sakes, insufferably announcing his moral superiority does tend to strain that sympathy and impede the charm.
I can forgive him nuking his crew—needs must and all that—but why does he have to be such a prick? Ironically, his callous attitude toward his robots costs him more sympathy than anything else he does, which only reinforces my questions whether the robots were meant to be so endearing.
But once we start questioning Lowell’s behavior, the whole movie threatens to unravel.
You see, this guy—in his sanctimonious attire and holier than thou attitude—believed himself to be in line for promotion to head of the Parks Department. He continues to believe himself to be the savior of Earth’s flora. His job on the spaceship was specifically to care for the forest.
Yet somehow it never occurs to him that plants need light?
He flies off to Saturn only to be perplexed when the forest starts dying. He only realizes the problem more or less by accident. My son Max watched this with me and he was generally OK with the lackadaisical 70s pacing, he even downloaded Joan Baez’ theme song and made it his ringtone for a while, just to annoy me. But when this “twist” came up, Max practically threw something at the screen. Any schoolkid would know the plants need sunlight. How can this idiot not manage something so basic?
Of course, we know it’s because this is a relic of the older script, in which Lowell wasn’t a botanist and didn’t know what he was doing, but how did all the people involved in bringing this to the screen let that slide without quibble?
It could be because they were mostly focused on the effects—which are quite fine. Maybe not 2001-quality, but at a tenth of the cost you can’t say they’re that far off the mark. On the serendipity side of things, Trumbull decided to save money by hiring college kids to do his model-building for him—one of his interns was a young John Dykstra, a few years before he got properly paid making models for Star Wars.
In another serendipitous coincidence, the producers sought product placement money and so got some of their budget in exchange for putting logos for the likes of Dow Chemical and Coca-Cola all over things on the spaceship, while describing the ship not as a NASA vehicle but an American Airlines one. The effect of all this was to substantially enhance the underlying themes and to presciently anticipate the corporatization of American life. Weirdly, though, neither the corporations happily whoring out their logos nor the filmmakers grudgingly stenciling them onto the spaceship models ever seemed to recognize the negative publicity that would result from suggesting these businesses would destroy the forests.
Why bother thinking anything through when you can just do it and see what happens?