THE TIME MACHINE, A DYSTOPIC UTOPIA

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
University of Paris Dauphine

Herbert Georges Wells (1866-1946) witnessed eighty years of our developing industrial world during which
all basic productive activities bloomed to produce our present mass consumer society based on mass production
and the industrial and agricultural, financial, services, communications, entertainment and labor mass markets.
He witnessed the growth of the two extreme ideologies produced by this industrial world, communism (or
Stalinism) and Nazism (or fascism). He also witnessed the development of biology and particularly Darwinism
and his evolution of species, the survival of the fittest, and the birth and elaboration of the theory of relativity
and the physics that emerged from it or at the same time. Finally, he witnessed, both in Europe and the USA, the
junction of the analysis of society in two antagonistic classes and their class struggle for domination, even
reduced to the American simplified approach of the rich and the poor, what he calls himself the “haves” and the
“have-nots” (53) 1 on one hand, and Darwinism on the other hand. He died in 1946 after witnessing the fall of
the extreme racist form of this social Darwinism (Nazism and fascism) but also the seemingly triumphant
expansion of the second form of it, Stalinism.
The Time Machine was published in 1895 2. We should also consider Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897). Wells
first warns us about the biological–and social–danger of our social Darwinism in The Time Machine and about
the plain criminal danger of the uncontrolled development of science in The Invisible Man. This cannot represent
a fear of the modern world since Wells was a socialist, but the sign of an independent mind in symbiosis with a
quickly changing world.
I will concentrate on the ideological message of The Time Machine along with two adaptations of this short
novel to the silver screen 3. George Pal’s (1960) shows how the book was read before 1968, the turning point
towards mass-consumerism and mass-communication 4. Simon Wells’ (2002) shows how it is read after the no-
return turning point of globalization, September 11 and the war on terror. These two adaptations deviate from the
original novella in concordance with their times. I will consider these two films in Marshall McLuhan’s
perspective that states the message is the medium, which implies the meaning of the films can only be
considered from the moment the films meet an audience. The audience gives meaning to the film that is nothing
but a hollow shell otherwise. Note this approach is similar to Kenneth Burke’s dramatist theory. This implies
that a film’s meaning will change through time along with the audience that builds meaning into the film.

I./ Opening the story

In Wells’ The Time Machine, the Time Traveller (TT) has no name, lives in London and is British. He is an
inventor with no other specification. This makes him neutral in front of the world, maybe an objective witness,
an objective beacon on the road of humanity at the end of the 19 th century, just before the 20 th. The story is told
by him on a first dinner occasion to a panel of friends: an Argumentative Person (Filby), a Psychologist, a Very
Young Man, a Provincial Mayor, a Medical Man, and the I who narrates the whole story. This first discussion
has to do with the fourth dimension, i.e. Time, as a necessary dimension to capture reality beyond the three
spatial dimensions. Time is the only dimension along which we cannot freely run up and down. TT pretends the
reverse and that he has been experimenting already. On a second dinner occasion he tells his first journey to the
future after a dramatic late arrival. The witnesses are the I-narrator and “four or five men”: the Medical Man, the
Editor of a well-known daily paper (Blank, a rather surprising name for a press editor), the Psychologist, a
certain Journalist, and a “quiet shy man with a beard” who will never say a word (12-15).
George Pal’s film (1960) has become a cult film essentially because of the time machine itself. As soon as
we adapt a science-fiction book to the silver screen, we have to create a visual and sonorous transcription of
some of the literary elements. It is a limitation since the words then only have one meaning that has been made
referential in the process. But it is also a tremendous development since the words become real objects that we
can see and hear. That’s probably why this film has become a cult film because it visualized the time machine in
an absolutely smashing way. It has remained a model for such a machine, just like Jules Verne’s submarine in
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea in the 1954 adaptation, particularly the organ scene in the submarine.
The film visualizes time, instead of speaking about it, in the whole opening sequence with the crossing of the
screen by time pieces, starting with a sundial, then an hour glass, then watches and clocks. All together thirteen
ending with Big Ben. The number 13 is ominous and Big Ben is an allusion to all the dangers it has faced in
history, particularly during WWII (one can visit the Houses of Parliament and see one of the door arches that has
been kept in its damaged state caused by the bombings). Then the title explodes amidst flashes of lightning and
thunder bolts. This visualization of time goes on with various falling elements crossing the screen to symbolize
the seasons, like falling leaves for autumn and falling snow for winter. The film opens on January 5, 1900 with
the second dinner party and George (TT in the film, the middle name of the author and the first name of the
director) arrives late in a pitiful state. His story will start with a flash back to the first party (was it a dinner party,
we don’t know) on “the last day of the year”, December 31, 1899, punctuated with “Happy New Year” and
“Happy New Century” wishes. Apart from this flashback structure the film is faithful to the book.
The characters are the same in the two meetings: the I-narrator is David Filby, a shopkeeper from across the
street dealing in women’s fashion; Dr Philip Hillyer, an MD; Anthony Bridewell and Walter Kemp who are not
socially specified. The film keeps the storytelling structure of the book. The housekeeper is also densified and
her name Mrs. Watchett is perfectly adapted to her function: to watch over George’s destiny.
Simon Wells’ film (2002) is quite different. First of all TT has a full proper name, Alexander Hartdegen. He
is a professor at Columbia University in New York. The film starts at 3:00 p.m. on a school clock and the end of
school bell. Mr. David Filby is a colleague of Alexander’s. We have thus moved from London to New York and
from the middle class (small bourgeoisie and professions) to university professors. But the main change is that
Alexander has a girl friend, Emma and on that first night in late December he is proposing to her and offering
her an engagement ring in Central Park. Unluckily they are mugged and in the struggle that ensues Emma is shot
dead by the mugger. She kept her ring but she lost her life. This seriously changes something in Alexander’s life.
He will devise his time machine to travel back in time and change the past. As his conversation with Mr. Filby
shows just a few hours before he travels back to the past:

“Mr. Filby: Nothing will ever change what happened.

The machine when it travels through time is contained in a timeless bubble and this artifact will be used
strategically and dramatically later on because everything that falls out of it is captured by time. The journey
back in time enables Alexander to get Emma away from the mugging, from Central Park, and yet there she is hit
by a car and a cart and she dies on the sidewalk. Alexander is then convinced of one thing: “Why can’t I change
[the past]? I could come back a thousand times and see her die a thousand ways.” And that is the reason why he
will travel to the future, away from the past and the present, but also with the fair intention of finding an answer
to his question.
These three beginnings, exactly Pal’s first 17 mn (to the end of the New Year’s Eve dinner) and Simon
Wells’ 22 mn (up to Emma’s second death), enable the students to identify the narrator: two in the book and in
Pal’s film, but none in Simon Wells’ film. This leads to the importance of the narrator as a distance builder and
of the camera as a narrator or as an unseen voyeur narrating what it is seeing. Thus the film is a tale in its own
technical dimension(s) (shooting and editing). Hence a discussion on the narrating techniques of a literary
narrator and of a cinema camera. The next discussion emerges directly from this one: what is the implication of
the audience, each individual viewer, in their viewing, in the story they are told? The book builds a distance.
Pal’s film builds a distance in a medium that is based on the projection of the viewer into the voyeuristically
evoked situation. Simon Wells’ film implies no direct distantiation. The subsequent discussion concerns time
and the basic difference between past/present and future and the fact that it is a purely human conceptual
construction of what is surviving for the rest of the natural world. This may lead to the Buddhist concept of
“dukkha”, the birth-life-death-rebirth cycle. Finally we come to the main character, from the nameless man to the
American university professor, and of course his human dimension and his human motivations from mere
intellectual curiosity to the desire to change the past to resuscitate his lost love. 5

II./ The voyage to the future

For Wells the voyage to the future is hardly described. It is insignificant in itself. The change to the future
world is only the result of time and natural or social evolution. We are before the World Wars and cannot
consider these events as even possible. Note here Wells brings his TT back but after a trip even further in the
future showing the continuation of the prediction or prophesy.
George Pal introduces a big ideological change that reflects his time. George at first experiments the machine
on his first trip just to make sure it works and to witness the world’s development. Then he stops now and then
to check the world out. His first stop in the early 1900s is centered on the change of women’s dressing fashion as
seen in the changing garb of the manikin in Filby’s shop-window. This is used visually (a visual realization of
the passing of time, discovery for the character but memory for us viewers) all along the first phase of the trip.
The second stop is in 1917 and he meets with James Filby, David’s son, in military uniform. He learns about
WWI. His next stop is in 1940 when London is crushed by German planes and bombs. He discovers WWII. His
third stop will be in 1966 (science fiction is starting here), in the midst of an alert and ringing sirens to make
people go to shelters. It is the “mushrooms”, the “atom bomb” and this starts a volcanic eruption that nearly
burns George alive. He escapes with his machine but is trapped in a mass of rock for a long time. The film gives
an explanation to the change it is going to describe: the military nature of human society that is seen as having to
turn the Cold War into a very hot war in 1966. This is a direct reflection of the time. We are just two years
before the crisis of the Soviet missiles in Cuba and peaceful coexistence has not yet been invented. The fourth
and last stop will be in 802,701. There will be no further exploration to the future, cutting off the final vision of
the book. But TT will come back to tell his story.
In Simon Wells’ film Alexander Hartdegen travels slow at first. He starts on January 18, 1899. We see
changes in the street, cars and of course the women’s clothing shop-window across the street (with three
manikins instead of one in the previous film, shifting from London size to New York size). Then New York is
built all around the time machine, with planes, satellites and space stations in the air and stratosphere to show the
passing of time. The first stop is on May 24, 2030. He discovers the Fifth Avenue Public Library and there the
Information Unit, a virtual man, NY-114, “a compendium of all human knowledge”. He has an answer to
Alexander’s question. He cannot change the past “because one cannot travel into the past”, an ironical answer
for the viewer of the film.
He stops again in 2037. New York is being devastated and under an evacuation order because the moon is
breaking up and falling to the earth’s surface. He escapes this catastrophe. And he travels unconscious till July
16, 802,701. We have seen in the meanwhile the earth shaping and reshaping itself several times.
Now great changes appear after a black out sequence when he wakes up in the world of the future. But he
will never come back, which means the story is not told by Alexander Hartdegen to an audience. It is told to us
by the film maker directly with the go-between of an audience inside the film. This shows how the medium has
changed: today we expect to be able to project ourselves into the film completely with no rhetorical conventional
precaution. This is a direct result of two other media by far dominant in 2002: television and the Internet. Here
we meet Marshall McLuhan again. Television is an all-sensory medium and this dimension is used in films today
by “uploading” the audience into the virtual world.

III./ The Elois

In Wells’ book TT arrives in 802,701 AD and lands among a human species who call themselves the Elois.
He considers they are the future of humanity at once. Hence the description of the Elois is essential. They are
“beautiful, graceful but childlike and frail” (24). They have the “intellectual level of one of our five year old
children” (26). They are “strict vegetarians”, “frugivorous” people (29). They speak but their language has
tremendously regressed as a human language. It only has “concrete substantives and verbs” and its “sentences
[are] very simple [and only contain] two words” (43). We have to suspend our disbelief because the conclusion
he reaches in a few hours is just impossible and would require a serious knowledge of this foreign language. This
impression of being confronted to an unbelievable fact or conclusion is often present in the book, but it does not
impair the value of the book. It is a sort of ellipse, as we say in the cinema. The regression is then amplified by
the listing of all they do not have, hence they’ve lost: no sepulture, no aged people or infirms, no machinery, no
appliances, no creative tendency, no shops, no workshops, no importations (45) and no writing (70).
His first explanation is that our industrial society has produced absolute security and with science and
medicine absolute health. But this has produced a “paradisiac” (31-32) “garden” (32). It is “communism” (31),
understand a classless society beyond the socialist revolution, Marx’s dream, a “social paradise” (34) based on
selective breeding. The weak have been totally integrated. But this is the “sunset of mankind”, “humanity upon
the wane” (33). The result is the “fate of energy in security: art, eroticism, languor and decay” (35). The people
are frail. They live by picking fruit and that’s all. In other words communism by dropping any kind of insecurity
due to the end of class struggle produces a spineless and unenergetic homogenized humanity.
Yet TT includes two warnings to the listeners and readers in his tale. “Later, I was to appreciate how far it
fell short of the reality” (32) and “very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough–as most wrong
theories are!” (36) A second theory will soon appear.
This clear cut story telling, with the Elois first and the Morlocks second is not kept in the films.
George Pal intertwines the two together. George’s rough landing is in the Eloi world at the foot of a Morlock
Sphinx temple. He discovers the Elois and the Morlocks in a very faithful way and enables us to see what was
described and explained in the book. We can see how indifferent the Elois are about life and death when Weena,
a young Eloi woman, drowns. George will have to save her because of the total indifference of the other Elois.
The Elois can understand and speak English straight away. That’s quite an ellipse in the film. They have no
government, no laws. Nobody works. Food just grows. They have books but these books are crumbling to dust.
They can’t write nor read. And they are afraid of the dark. Weena though seems to have gotten attached to
George who saved her. So she knows about the value of life somehow, like the others since their fear reveals
they want to stay alive, and she is grateful, which is more than the others’ indifference. She even follows him in
the night to warn him against the Morlocks.
 George has a harsh word at this moment: “The human race has been reduced to living vegetables”. And
Weena goes even further: “There is no past. There is no future.” And George dreams of “someone to show
[them] the way out.” The film introduces history, no real explanation but Weena takes George to a place where
he can listen to speaking rings. There he learns that the nuclear war whose beginning he had witnessed in 1966
lasted 326 years. When it stopped, after the last oxygen factory was destroyed, humanity divided in two. One
part went underground to survive. They will become the Morlocks. And the other part will stay under the sun.
They will become the Elois. The Elois became the servants, the cattle of the Morlocks who have “degenerated
into the lowest form of human life, cannibalism.” Note this last word implies the two species are human, hence
that they should live in harmony.
One change is introduced then. The Sphinx temple is equipped with sirens and when they ring all Elois are
hypnotized, like the people in London were conditioned to go to a shelter in 1940 or 1966, and they walk into the
Sphinx Temple till the sirens stop and the doors close. Those taken will not come back and nobody is bothered
or bothering.
This small episode is central because the film is going to diverge from the book tremendously. George is
going to try to save the captured Elois, particularly Weena.
Simon Wells comes back to the novel’s model and we have only one world at first. Alexander Hatdegen is
taken care of by a woman, Mara, and a girl, Kalen. The Elois are hostile, speak another language except those
two woman and girl who speak English. The Elois live in an artificial habitat up on the flank of cliffs over water
and they bring up all ladders at night. In spite of that Alexander’s watch will disappear during the night, stolen
by some unidentified visitor. Alexander will have a nightmare showing some monstrous articulated skull looking
like an entrance to some underground city. It is a hint about his mind being controlled from the outside by some
vibes. There are no old people, but the Elois go down in the day time and with boats go to a plain where they
have constructed some strange wind mills that seem to be dedicated to the memory of those who have departed
because “we don’t speak of them. We remember them”. This concept of memory is interesting here since it is an
attachment to the past, which was denied in the previous film, and in the book. But they also practice some
agriculture. They also have some artifacts like lamps and they know some medicine since they take care of
Alexander. But they are still afraid of the dark and they all have bad dreams and nightmares. Hence a direct
apprehension of the Eloi fear of some mysterious unnamed living beings is built in the film.

IV./ The Morlocks

Wells introduces the second theory as suggested by the survival of “fear” (47) among these Elois. He will
understand this fear when he discovers the second species of human descendants, the Morlocks. They are the
perfect antithesis (used with its pure Marxist value) of the Elois. They live underground in total darkness. They
take care of all industrial activities. They are white and are at once described as “monsters” (50).
Then we have the second vision of the world. The Elois, the “upperworlders” (59), are the descendants of the
“capitalist” (52), and the Morlocks, the “monster” (50) who is “nauseatingly inhuman” (60), with “pale, chinless
faces, great lidless pinkish-grey eyes” (60), “inhuman and malign” (62), lives in the “underworld” (52), are the
descendants of the “labourer” (52). Then social Darwinism is injected into the Marxist class struggle vision.
Communism will not emerge from capitalism but two antagonistic human species will and history will impose
the Darwinist survival of the fitter species, turning the Elois into nothing but “fatted cattle” (68) and “meat” (67)
for the Morlocks who are carnivorous hunters. Communism is the future of the capitalist class only, whereas
Darwinism will make the labourer the dominant species. In other words this reversal of social history via biology
is Wells’ particular approach of human history, which is a political message: the vision of communism at the end

1
NOTES
?
All references will provide the page numbers in the Signet Classic edition (ISBN 0-451-52238-9).
2
Wells cannot be isolated from the rest of Europe which is a whole in spite or because of the wars on the continent, and the theme of the
society divided in two antagonistic groups is by far general at that time from Wells to Zola or Gorki, and many others.
3
As for audio-visual adaptations there is a lot less choice than we may think. IMDb.com (Internet Movie Data-base) only gives two films
(the two we are going to consider) plus two TV films (1978 by Henning Schellerup, and 1949 by Robert Barr) and one video that has nothing
to do with H.G. Wells. Then IMDb gives 19 results with “the time machine” in their titles that are expansions of the original title. Most of
them have nothing to do with H.G. Wells.
4
In 1969 the US federal government launched a research program for a new communications medium joining the telephone and the
computer, the future Internet.
5
I am interested in the status of the narrator and, in the film, of the camera as voyeur and narrator in clear reference to Marshall McLuhan
and Kenneth Burke. It generally leads to a widening of the interest and to other films like Clive Barker's early student films, particularly his
Faust or Salome, or Andy Warhol's Flesh (the beginning again), or Metropolis and many others. We then identify the various levels of
narration in a film from the purely semantic (linguistic) meaning to the symbolic syntax of what we see and hear or the syntax of both
shooting and editing. These two films are a perfect starter in that direction because they shift from a double narrator to none at all, hence to
wondering where the narrator is. If we consider the endings then it is obvious the character has to stay in that future in Simon Wells' film
since there is no present day narrator, no possible natural return, and vice versa the ending determine the absence of a narrator.
of the 19th century is absurd in its paradisiac Marxist approach and justified, though for all the wrong reasons, in
the apocalyptic bourgeois vision.
To finally prove his point Wells shows how the Morlocks use the Time Machine they had taken away at the
beginning as some bait in a trap to attract TT and capture him to become some exotic and tastier meat. They are
hunters for sure.
George Pal did not follow the model as for his presentation of the Morlocks, as we have seen. His
presentation is a lot more dynamic. So George goes down into the underworld through one of the shafts and
there he plays liberator, fights against the Morlocks with his fists and a torch, finally gets some responsive
support from the captured Elois and a couple actually start fighting: they are human beings and can resist a
situation dangerous for their own survival. It is contradictory because they recover their survival instinct and
hence become like wild animals again after having been domesticated into cattle. But this human revival–is it
really human?–is through violence, which is what caused the very destruction of humanity and its degeneracy, so
that we can wonder about the final morality of the tale.
The film also introduces another twist. George sets the underworld on fire. It explodes and caves in, just after
all the Elois have been able to escape. But then the doors of the Sphinx temple opens and the time machine is
there visible. George will rush to it and he will find out it is a trap. In other words the Morlocks are not destroyed
and they are ready to fight and they have identified the main leader. So we wonder what can come out of this.
Anyway George manages to recapture his machine and escape. He slowly goes forward so that we can see the
Morlock he has knocked out slowly decay and decompose. But then he goes backward and is back in London, on
January 5, 1900, with his friends.
Simon Wells goes slightly further. The Morlocks attack in the day time when a horn is blown and hunt the
Elois down till the horn is blown again. The Elois don’t fight back. Alexander tries to move them. With the help
of the girl he goes to the place where ghosts are, the Fifth Avenue Public Library where Alexander meets NY-
114 again. He gets some answers. After the moon broke down “what was once one race is now two. One above
and one below. Two distinct species that have evolved.” Those below survive by hunting those above like game.
It is possible because those above have “no knowledge of the past, no ambition for the future,” which is in
contradiction with the remembering we have already spoken of. He is also given some indication how to get
down below: “just follow the breathing”.
Here we can see a contradiction between this faithful vision of the Elois as submissive and the rather
advanced level of civilization they have reached by themselves. There is no reference to any Marxist or social
Darwinist explanation. It is the result of “800,000 years of evolution”, dixit the Über-Morlock, the chief of the
Morlocks who has a name sounding like that of some SS officer.
We discover the underworld. Entirely dedicated to industrial work, it is a mine and a furnace at the same
time. The Morlocks are carnivorous and the Elois are their cattle or game.
After many fights, he is made a prisoner and brought to the Über-Morlock. The Morlock leader’s power is
based on the moderating control he has developed over their minds: “without that control they would exhaust the
food supply in a matter of months.” Mara is there too and seems to be some kind of sexual necessity for the
reproduction of the Über-Morlock.
He demonstrates his power by showing to Alexander what his future would have been if Emma had not been
killed: a happy family with the time machine buried at the bottom of a drawer 6. The Über-Morlock’s conclusion
is: “If she had lived [the time machine] would never have existed. So how could you use your machine to go
back to save her? You are the inescapable result of your tragedy. Just like I. I am the inescapable result of you.”
With this answer Alexander is ordered back to his time with his time machine.
The ideology is clearly not political but ethical or even logical: Emma’s death makes Alexander build the
time machine and he goes back in time to save her not understanding that without her being dead the time
machine is no longer possible, and his trip back would no longer even be feasible. Yet the time machine would
be necessary for her to survive her own death. This contradiction in the very existence of the time machine is
going to kill her over and over again if necessary. Then Morlocks and Elois, the result of a cosmic catastrophe,
are here explained as the result of the illogical human mind. It is this lack of logic that lets the gate open to the
worst possible evolutions against which humans are unable to prepare themselves, which are unpreventable.
Human nature contains both the Eloi and the Morlock (Eros and Thanatos, libido and death instinct) and any
catastrophe is going to liberate the two, eventually in two separate species, thanks to biological evolution.
That’s when the film departs completely from the book.

6
This is an important characteristic of films as a medium. The very structure of this flash-forward to an alternative ending has been used by
other directors and a good cinema audience is able to connect such correspondences on which any director plays: inner mediatic anaphora for
the director or cultural kataphora for the audience. Here Simon Wells uses the same “figure of shooting or editing” as in The Last Temptation
of Christ and the vision Christ has of what his family life could have been with Mary Magdalene if he had not been crucified. The Über-
Morlock is then an embodiment of the devil himself. Then the underworld is hell with a reference to Dante’s Inferno and the progressive
descent from one circle to the next, a very common reference in 20 th century culture and arts, particularly the cinema. Cf. Rachel Falconer,
Hell in Contemporary Literature, Western Descent Narratives Since 1945, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2005.
V./ The end

Wells adds an important episode to his story. After the narrow escape from capture by the Morlocks, TT
jumps “millions of days”, “thousands of millions” (90) of days forward and discovers the Earth in a more
advanced state. “The earth has come to rest with one face to the sun” (91). He can see two colors: “a harsh
reddish colour” (91) and “intensely green”, “rich green” (91). This green is identified as “forest moss” or
“lichen” (91), then a “greenish incrustation-like” vegetation on the red beings he thought at first were rocks but
are “a monstrous crab-like creature”: “the many palps of its complicated mouth… the antenna of another
monster crab… its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks… its vast ungainly claws, smeared with an algae
slime…” (92-93). He realizes this after seeing “far away… a huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering up
into the sky…” (92). The upperworlders have become butterflies and the underworlders have become crabs. Life
is still there but history and historical time were lost in a regression back to biological, geological and cosmic
times. Life is eternal but human life is only transient and on a very small time scale.
TT can come back, tell his story and then go back to the future again and, like all prophets or messiahs, never
come back to our world any more. No one will believe him except the I-narrator, but with a twist:

“But to me the future is still black and blank [remember the name of the Press Editor]–is a vast ignorance,
lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange
white flowers–shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle–to witness that even when mind and
strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.” (102-103)

The twist transforms the novella into a warning to us. We have to both get out of the dichotomous society of
the Capitalist and the Labourer but without losing the energy that can only come from a certain dose of
insecurity. How can we balance security and insecurity, comfort for all and competition? This is an absolutely
post modern question, social justice, and it is probably the answer to the death of extreme utopias like Nazism
and Stalinism and to the absolute necessity to share all commodities and wealth without throwing the
competition-baby away with the antagonistic-social-dichotomy-water of the bath.
George Pal is in the same line. George will go away because no one believes him really. He will drag his
time machine back inside, that is to say outside the Sphinx temple, take three unidentified books and disappear.
David Filby will give the concluding morality: “It is not like George to return empty-handed to try to rebuild a
civilization without a plan. He must have taken something with him.” But the objective is clear: “Help the Elois
build a new world.”
The main change is that the Elois are able to learn how to resist and fight and it will only take one cultivated
person and three books for these Elois to rebuild a whole civilization. We have become tremendously optimistic
about the human race, at least the Elois, though we must not forget the survival of the Morlocks and their need to
go on hunting. Wells got lost along the way but the film had to have some kind of positive ending in 1960.
Never, even in the deepest crisis of the Cold War, the Soviet Missiles in Cuba, had the world, at least the
Western world, at least the little French section I knew at the time (Khrushchev visited France in 1960, invited
by de Gaulle) lost faith in the possible solution of any crisis of this type, in the peaceful future of humanity,
peaceful coexistence. This resilient hope is reflected in the film too. Human beings can resist anything and
rebuild their human civilization even against the worst odds possible. We could see–at the time it was quite
obvious–the Morlocks as being the Soviets and the Elois as being the West, but today this narrow meaning is
definitely passé.
Quite different is Simon Wells’ film. The meaning of the film is not the meaning the director intended to put
in the film, at times one or two years before the film came out, but the meaning the audience is going to see or
project into the film, according to Marshall McLuhan’s approach of mass-communication or Kenneth Burke’s
dramatist hypothesis.
First Alexander uses the machine to kill the Über-Morlock by attracting him into the timeless bubble and
then getting most of his body out of it for it to be disintegrated. Then he turns the time machine into a time
bomb. He blocks the mechanism with his watch and set it to run fast into the future. Then he saves Mara and he
escapes from the underworld. The time machine and its timeless bubble explode projecting the bubble of
timelessness and virtual future time into the underground city that is utterly destroyed, all the Morlocks along
with it, a complete genocide. The previous film introduced this idea of destroying the Morlocks though some had
survived. Here the genocide is successful. The accusation of cannibalism in the previous film against the
Morlocks is matched here by a far worse hypothesis but on the side of Alexander: the complete genocidal
destruction of the hostile human species as opposed to the good human species. At this moment the film reveals
a pretty deep derangement in the film industry: how can a film incite people into thinking as acceptable, even in
a virtual situation, the complete destruction of a human species seen as hostile? How can we state that, because a
human group or species is aggressive, we, as a human group or species who are their preys, have the right to
destroy the predators in a genocidal sacrifice? It is morally unacceptable. Even after September 11 and within the
frame of the war on terror. It is a resurgence, in a morally justified context, of the deep aggressive death instinct
residing in our psyche that civilization is supposed to curb down.
The end of the film transforms Wells’ pessimistic warning dystopia into a utopia founded on a genocide:
Alexander starts a school with NY-114 to rebuild human civilization among the Elois. In a word it furthers the
idea introduced by George Pal, an idea that is not present in the book. If George Pal’s hypothesis could be seen
as the result of the Cold War, we have to wonder how Simon Wells can have come to his radical furthering of
this hypothesis, since the scenario was written probably a long time before September 11. He envisaged such a
genocide in a situation that was more or less normal after the end of the Cold War.

Conclusion

To remain post-modern is very difficult. It is quite easy to show the connection of each work, the book and
the films, with the periods in which they were produced. From a purely ideological point of view they are
straightforward products of their times. If we were to examine the three works from an artistic point of view, we
would probably come to the idea that Wells’ dystopia has the form of that type of novel at the end of the 19 th
century and has aged: double indirect narration. The first film is very well done and acted but is rather simplistic
in the visual worlds it creates. We definitely see the zipper in the back of the Morlocks, and the clear cut division
of the world in two antagonistic visual universes is too simple though it is acceptable as a dream, a vision, hence
a simplified discourse because it is richly incrusted in a 19 th century world. The same remark applies to the
second film. But the special effects are extremely good and the visual effects are perfect. But this time there is a
discourse that cannot be considered as a simplified dreamlike vision because we do not come back to 19 th
century New York: we stay in 802,701. Hence this future world is entirely accepted as morally, ideologically,
historically and even materialistically possible. The final scene makes it even more difficult for one to distantiate
oneself from the virtual universe because it is connected to and justified by love and saving both Mara, the
woman Alexander loves, and Kalen, the child this woman loves, along with the Eloi community. In the same
way any distantiation is difficult because of the progressive discourse on education and re-building civilization
that Alexander is assuming in this world in which he has trapped himself. That’s where Wells’ warning is
completely lost. There is no warning at all, except that we have to get ready to totally destroy our human
enemies.

Bibliography
Burke, Kenneth, A Grammar of Motives, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1969
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man, Routledge, London, 1997 (1964)
Pal, George, The Time Machine, 1960, Warner Home Video DVD, 2002
Verne, Jules, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, 20 000 lieues sous la mer, 1870
Wells, Herbert George, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, Signet Classic, New York, 1984
Wells Simon, The Time Machine, 2002, Warner Home Video DVD, 2002
Zola, Emile, Germinal, 1985

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