Movie diary: I was watching snippets from The Deadly Mantis on Svengoolie recently—it was your typical prehistoric giant praying mantis on the loose leaving behind a trail of death and destruction kind of movie. It had a handful of well-done, low budget effects, like when a soldier squirts a jet of fire from a flame thrower onto the mantis. Mostly, though, it was forgettable.
But then the mantis took flight. I didn’t even know mantises could fly, but some do. This one did. But it wasn’t the visual effects that impressed. It was the sound, that when it settled into a lower register resembled the full-throated singing of a monotone men’s choir. It was like hearing the crude seeds for the mysterious, haunting monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There is much that makes Kubrick’s monolith alien, seemingly beyond human comprehension. Its perfect, hard-edged, rectilinear shape, its sleek blackness, are wholly unnatural, especially in contrast with the imagery that precedes it, the organic, sun-blasted landscape of a desert plain on which early hominids struggle, at times with other beasts and at others among themselves, to survive. What audiences first experience in that initial encounter with the monolith, though, is a sound, an otherworldly, ethereal, shimmering dissonance of human voices, not delineating a melody but surging with intensity. We hear that sound—onscreen the cautious, fearful curiosity of the hominids are seemingly aroused by it—before actually seeing the monolith.
Once we see the monolith, it becomes unclear: were the hominids reacting to the sound or the spectacle of the monolith? When I first saw 2001 back (way back) in high school, I couldn’t figure out what the sound was. Did the monolith make it, and could the hominids hear it? Or was it only on the soundtrack? I’m not sure if I initially thought it was music; I’d certainly never heard music like it before, not in Little Chute, WI. But music or not, if it was non-diegetic, it intimated the implacable otherness of the monolith and the hypnotic power it seemed to have over the hominids.
The indeterminate location of the music—in all its thrillingly dynamic stillness—is its genius, suggesting as it does, something in this world that is not of this world that’s wholly out of this world. It presages Dave Bowman at the end of the film watching himself age and die and fade into emptiness, where, as Zen master Shunryu Suzuki tells us, the “great self appears,” as it does in that beautiful, cryptic closing shot to one of the greatest science fiction films ever made.
Crooked Eclipses 