Culture Briefs

Martian tales

“Percival Lowell’s greatest achievement was to popularize the idea of life on Mars. Astronomers had speculated about that possibility for centuries, but it was Lowell who implanted in the minds of earthlings, once and for all, the idea that we are not alone in the universe —

“Accordingly, in the decades after Lowell’s death, the science-fiction genre flourished. Novels, pulp magazines, and the new media of radio, film, and TV kept Lowell’s basic concept of Martian life alive, even if that fictional life was not quite the kind he would have approved of.

“The public adored these speculative fictions — and sometimes believed them. On the night of October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre company appeared in a radio production of ’The War of the Worlds,’ updated to suburban New Jersey. … Panic ensued; Welles was thrilled at his success. The lesson was that two decades after Lowell’s death, people were prepared to acknowledge that life existed beyond earth — and that it could come here with hostile intent.”

— Nancy Zaroulis, writing on “The Man Who Invented Mars” in the April 27 issue of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine

Muslim tales

“During World War II, Hollywood churned out scores of films that served the war effort, but today’s movies and TV shows, with very few exceptions, either tiptoe around Islam or whitewash it. In the whitewash category were two sitcoms that debuted in 2007, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s ’Little Mosque on the Prairie’ and CW’s ’Aliens in America.’ Both shows are about Muslims confronting anti-Muslim bigotry; both take it for granted that there’s no fundamentalist Islam problem in the West, but only an anti-Islam problem …

“Fox’s popular series ’24,’ after Muslims complained about a story line depicting Islamic terrorists, ran cringe-worthy public-service announcements emphasizing how nonviolent Islam was. Earlier this year, Iranian-Danish actor Farshad Kholghi noted that, despite the cartoon controversy’s overwhelming impact on Denmark, ’not a single movie has been made about the crisis, not a single play, not a single stand-up monologue.’ Which, of course, is exactly what the cartoon jihadists wanted.”

— Bruce Bawer, writing on “An Anatomy of Surrender,” in the spring issue of the City Journal

Fairy tales

“At first glance, most famous fairy tales seem so implausible and irrelevant to contemporary life that their survival is hard to understand. The story of ’Rapunzel’ involves a heroine with hair at least twenty feet long, and ’Hansel and Gretel’ asks us to believe that two children abandoned by their parents in the forest will find a house made of gingerbread.

“But these and other tales live on because they are dramatic metaphors of real life. ’Hansel and Gretel,’ for instance, represents the two greatest fears of children — that they will be abandoned and that they will be imprisoned. Many adults, if they think back, will remember one or both of these fears, though usually in a less extreme version. We occasionally felt neglected, disregarded, unsupported — unloved. Or we felt overprotected, overindulged, intruded upon — loved, but in a very possessive, almost scary way.”

— Alison Lurie, writing on “The Girl in the Tower” in the May 1 issue of the New York Review of Books