The Black Hole (1979)

George Lucas once said that movies are binary, ones or zeros, they either work or they don’t… Obviously this quote was early in his career before his own films became a displaycase for a line of toys and merchandising tie-ins, but he makes a good point: you walk away from a film either liking it or hating it.

However, there are things in this world that defy simple explanation, that hover in a twilight between heaven and hell, Möbius loops and unresolvable equations that warp the very fabric of spacetime itself…. There is Disney Studios’ The Black Hole!

Although it’s generally dismissed as a muddled StarWars rip-off with overly cute robots, by the time of that film’s release Disney was already unrolling a top secret property called Space Probe One, a script that had cost the Studio over 3.6 million dollars in rewrites and artistic revisions before shooting ever began! It would herald a number of technical innovations: the longest CGI animation in any film to date would grace the opening credits, its hauntingly repetitive score by John Barry would be the first soundtrack to be digitally recorded, and when Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic became unreasonable about renting their Dykstraflex system to a rival studio, Disney was forced to invent their own computer controlled camera. Disney’s superior A.C.E.S. (Automated Camera Effects System) had the ability to scan a matte painting with the same camera motions used to shoot miniatures. And they needed it. With production design by legendary matte artist Peter Ellenshaw, The Black Hole would showcase an unprecedented number of effects shots and matte paintings — more than were used in StarWars and Empire Strikes Back combined.

Set in the 22nd century, the showpiece of the film is the U.S.S. Cygnus a lost half-mile colony ship from an earlier emperialist generation that is discovered mysteriously perched at the yawning mouth of a black hole. Drawing from his experience working on Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (where the proto-steampunk submarine Nautilus played an essential design role) Ellenshaw envisions the Cygnus as a Victorian Crystal Palace, a luminous chandelier against the cold blue of deep space. Inside this elegant haunted mansion resides a Nemo-esque mad scientist Hans Reinhardt, who entertains guests with a candle lit dinner before condemning them to become mindless zombies, and his Ahab-like desire to plunge his ship defiantly down the throat of the beast!

Twenty years after the Cygnus is lost, a much humbled crew on the same mission (to find “habitable life” in deep space) stumble across the Cygnus when the black hole pulls them off course. The Palomino is a cramped tin can with a mere two scientists, two flight crew, and a single civilian reporter — Earth apparently no longer places much importance on finding new worlds. Disappointed and disillusioned by a fruitless eighteen month journey, they delight at the prospect of exploring a ghost ship. The heroic captain intends to look for survivors; for the brash young pilot it’s a chance for adventure; to the aging reporter it could be the story of the decade! But for the two scientists the Cygnus represents conflicting feelings of hope and dread. Alex Durant seeks a way to salvage his mission and his career, while Kate McCrae reveals her father had been aboard. Only their lecturing robot Vincent thinks this is a bad idea.

Vincent

R2D2 was a just a rip off of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, the three waddling unspeaking robots from Silent Running, but Vincent is pretty original for 1979. Sure he’s just a goofy aluminum puppet with button eyes, but there are a lot of interesting things about him design-wise. He’s a very Japanese example of “Kawaii” (cute) technology — pretty early for American audiences. With his rollers retracted he looks like a teddy bear and that might be why the Palomino crew think the Reinhardt’s humanoid “robots” are so strange. If their familiar robots are designed to look cuddly and friendly, Reinhardt’s anthropomorphic servants are eerie and creepy — too human — at the very least in bad taste!

As a kid I thought Vincent was pretentious with all his esoteric sayings, but it could be that his AI has been programmed to observe his current circumstances in metaphore. At one point a crewmember tells him to go enjoy himself and Vincent counters with “All sunshine makes a desert, the Arabs say…”, suggesting his grasp of the situation is not as flippant or naive. Almost every conversation with a human crew member is either skeptical or related in metaphore (or both). Humans rarely say what they really mean and processing everything through metaphores might allow him to see a person’s truer hidden motives — perhaps even to remind the crew of a possible perspective to which they may be unaware or in denial. He also uses metaphores to draw experience. When he is almost lost after his tether breaks he tells Kate “There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots”. His point of reference is a quote describing postal airmen who did their duty despite danger.

Vincent also serves as a gyroscope or gravity orientor. It may be that his ability to float is one dimensional and he can only push against gravity. When the Palomino is first pulled in by the black hole and starts to roll, Vincent floats oriented to the external gravity, not the ship. This would be a useful reference to the other crewmembers who could become disoriented. Later in the film Vincent’s robot nemesis Maximilian orients himself upside-down as the elevator descends from the control tower. Although the humans see this as an odd confrontational display he is aligning himself against the inertia of the elevator. Nice touch!

Gay and Sexist subtext

Practically ALL robots and computers from the ’70s were patterned after the butlers and asexual man servants from movies of the ’30s-40s — C3PO is the best example. Today, we see this out-dated stereotype and attach a modern sexual identity to it: a fussy, often ridiculous gay man. Vincent is voiced by gay actor Roddy McDowall who adds an edge of Edward Everette Horton to his lecturing. The interesting thing about Vincent is although he plays this familiar role of manservant to the human crew, he sees himself as the swashbuckler of the piece. Intellectually superior, he is also morally superior and brings up an uncomfortable history where humans had sent his kind into black holes in unsuccessful experiments. Upon finding old Bob, Vincent is the first to unravel the Cygnus’ dark mystery. He saves the crew and stands alone in a fight against the one real horror of the piece: Maximilian.

Max is everything Vincent is not. Silent. Menacing. Violent. If Vincent is the chatty over-educated gay robot, Maximilian is the brooding psychopathic gay robot with bad table manners. He murders Durant in what seems to be a jealous rage when Reinhardt gives a little too much fatherly attention to the vulnerable scientist. At the climax of the film Reinhardt and Max embrace front to front with Max mounting on top before they merge bodies.

What is interesting is that even though the gay subtext is deliberately worked, the sexist thing is stunningly defacto. Kate McCrae seems to be girlfriend to Holland only by default of his being alpha male and her being the only female in the film. She barely notices him since she is so busy looking for her long lost father (a subplot that goes nowhere), and Reinhardt refers to her as “Miss Kate”. I don’t think it gets any more patronizing than than calling a 38 year old scientist “Miss Kate” (although it could be an attempt to make Reinhardt seem Victorian and genteel). Basically she is rescued and rescued again (at least she doesn’t fall and twist her ankle while running from a meteor).

Even her ESP is an unexplained elevation of women’s intuition or empathy, like Diana Troi from StarTrek:NG. Only she is able to communicate with the “gay” robot — no doubt they shop together to maintain their psychic bond that straight males cannot understand. Everyone refers to her as “the girl” or “the young Miss”. Either the role was written for a MUCH younger woman or society has reverted to the dark ages where unmarried females are the property of their father until a virile man has saved them enough times.

A divided studio

In the wake of StarWars, Disney ramped up production. Their vision was to appeal to older kids and teenagers. They wanted to do serious films, “dark” films that would lead to Something Wicked This Way Comes and Return to Oz. The Black Hole started something that would eventually split the studio in two and spin off Touchstone from their kiddy market. It was rated PG.

There was another schism working against the film. Disney was paranoid that they would be scooped by a last minute copycat. With so many sci-fi projects being funded at the time, another black hole in a movie or tv could undermine their title, they didn’t want to be scooped by an inferior project with a cheaper budget so everything became top secret. With $20,000,000 at stake, the highest the studio had ever spent on a film, the special effects department became a closed studio separate from production, and communication between the two was kept to a minimum.

This doesn’t entirely explain what sabotaged the film, but dozens of control issues resulted. Vincent was originally planned to have mechanically pixellated eyes that would emote a range of looks but the technology failed on the first day of shooting. Black buttons were glued on instead so the actors wouldn’t have to wait. Later, the fx department had no recourse when actors refused to wear space suits they thought looked silly. Rather than lose time resolving the issue, the scene was filmed without any space suits at all!

In fear of alienating the kiddy audience, Old Bob is trotted out and killed, not unlike Bambi’s mother and Old Yeller. Most people cringe at Old Bob, a battered robot whose helmet is bashed in to look like an old prospector’s hat. Slim Pickens supplies the voice of the hokey Houston with a thick drawl and protruding wires. Even his crooked eyeballs yearn for a hug. Somehow he fits in with a cringe-worthy Western element threaded throughout the film that features a flashy sharpshooter robot named Star who has to waggle his laser pistols before holstering them to mimic a wild west gunslinger. It’s awful. Just awful.

Scientific dialog is often flubbed or just wrong. Reinhardt’s energy source that allows him to defy the hole’s gravity looks suspiciously like outtakes from http://www.wetcircuit.com/2006/10/24/forbidden-planet/. The black hole itself is represented as a big swirling drain that leads into hell. Science is thrown out the window, and the laws of physics vary from one scene to the next. Between laser shootouts with myopic sentry drones, the heroes make their way across a catwalk while a giant rolling meteor bares down on them. At the climax of the film the actors make their way across the exterior of the ship (without space suits), a the Cygnus has turned into a set of flacid rubber girders and window panels made of painted fabric that flap in the breeze….

The End

As if to illustrate the textbook way NOT to make a movie, the ending was so top secret that it hadn’t even been written yet! They knew they wanted something that would be seen as deep when you finally travel down the black hole. Trippy. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey but not so atheist. Reality bends as they zoom down the black hole in a spinning barrel and their minds echo with dialog from the film, meanwhile Reinhardt finds himself in Dante’s Inferno surrounded by a hell of burning brimstone…. This is an improvement over the first ending which was shot in Rome and had the surviving characters merge in a sort of unified gestalt-entity linked together by Kate’s ESP as she discovers she is back on Earth looking up at her own image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — possibly she had become God in a parallel universe….

Dramatic and pretentious, the ending is a complete failure leaving half the audience scratching its head, and the other half laughing at the emperor’s new clothes. So many continuity errors had crept into the production that Disney’s most expensive film was B-movie stuff, and beneath any serious discussion by critics or sci-fi fans. Although hailed as a design triumph (Ellenshaw was nominated for an Oscar for special effects) it was a financial flop. A cult following has emerged consisting almost entirely of the generation of young children who saw it on its initial release and were scarred for life by the image of Maximilian gutting Durant with rotating blades.

The final killer, the thing that even paranoid resourceful Disney Studios couldn’t anticipate, was that a mere two weeks before The Black Hole hit theaters Paramount Studios would dust off a trite old tv show that had originally been produced by Lucille Ball. The film would launch a juggernaut franchise that would span the next two decades with 9 films and 4 television series and even lead to the creation of a Paramount television network: Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek The Motion Picture.