Visit to a Small Planet (Criticism)

Criticism

Daniel Moron

Moran is an author and educator. His essay discusses Vidal’s facility with satire.

Gore Vidal once labeled himself America’s “current biographer,” and Visit to a Small Planet can certainly be read and enjoyed as a satirical chapter in the political and cultural biography of the United States. Satire creates its effects by mocking human behaviors and assumptions in an effort to raise a reader or viewer’s awareness of what the satirist sees as their foolishness. The satire of this play hits many “targets,” such as American attitudes toward sex, military incompetence, bureaucracy, and paranoia. It also pokes fun at the fear of “Communist infiltration” and slogan-spouting patriotism. By using an alien visitor, Vidal is able to provide a “fresh look” at what he sees as modern American issues that deserve our examination. The play’s humor derives largely from its suggestion that any such objective look at Americans would reveal them to be very silly people,“absolutely” as Kreton, the alien, observes, “wallowing in the twentieth century.”

The play’s opening scene immediately establishes its satirical tone. General Powers is complaining about his position to Roger Spelding, and his fear that other military staff members “mean to destroy” his career: he speaks of Lieutenant General Claypoole’s assigning him the investigation of a possible UFO because it is “too hot” for him to handle. He sees himself as “the innocent victim of conspiracy and intrigue” because “Claypoole has been trying to get [his] corner office with the three windows and the big waiting room.” Powers would rather spend his time on what he sees as the Army’s more “important” work — the new “Powers Mobile Laundry Unit-K” project. This is Powers’s chief concern, and the earnestness with which he describes it reveals the Army’s love of bureaucracy and emphasis on seemingly unimportant matters: “Lot of big decisions to make in that area: kind of soap to use, things like that. Decided finally on snow-chip flakes. Fine lather. Good detergent. Doesn’t harm the fabric and has bluing already built in.” The silliness of Powers’s concerns are heightened when, fearing that the United States will go to war with the U.S.S.R., he states, “if there’s one thing that destroys an army’s morale and discipline, it is a major war” because the soldiers “lose more damned sheets and pillowcases.” To General Powers, no fate is worse than discovering that “your laundry’s a wreck”; to the audience, his “militarization” of the laundry is seen as a satirical jab at the concerns of military leaders.

A second theme raised in the opening conversation is the value that we inhabitants of this “small planet” place on television and the publicity it can create. When he hears of Powers’s investigation, Roger (a newscaster) begs him for permission to “break the story,” which Powers refuses due to the “Revised Espionage Act.” However, Roger is not the only character concerned with his public image. Later in the play, Powers tells Kreton that the United States would like to “announce [his] arrival ourselves” in order to “get the best possible break, publicity-wise.” Roger, too, tells Kreton that he “would certainly like to interview” him on television while he’s “down here”; his news ratings are more important to him than the fact that his own home has become the site for an extra-terrestrial visitation — or that this visitor wants to watch humankind destroy itself. The most obvious mockery of the way that television operates is when Roger begins his broadcast — in which he plans to announce the impending war between the world’ stwosuperpowers — with “Mother-and-Father America, have you had your milk today? Pour yourself a glass of Cloverdale, the milkier milk” and then segues into the topic at hand with, “and what sort of a day has it been? Well, it’s been quite a day. Not since those dark hours before Munich has the free world been so close to the precipice of total war.” The banality with which Roger speaks of possible atomic destruction is an exaggeration of the way in which modern newscasters speak of two completely different topics (such as milk and nuclear war) in the same breath and with the same gravity (“A fire killed several hundred people today . . . and here are tonight’s winning lottery numbers!”). After interviewing Powers (who chuckles and admits that “it doesn’t look good”), Roger concludes his broadcast as he began it: after describing the upcoming war as a test of “the morale of a free people,” he smoothly asks, “Mother-and-Father-America, have you had your milk today?” Clearly, no disaster can supersede or displace the truly powerful force of American advertising.

Despite these jokes and jabs, it is Kreton, the visitor, who supplies most of the play’s satirical attacks. Dressed in the outfit of an 1860s gentleman, he enters the play hoping to witness the Civil War’s Battle of Bull Run but instead sees something more amazing: an everyday American family. Explaining that, in terms of his own planet’s evolution, civilization on earth is “just beginning,” Kreton decides to “go native” and study the “primitive” earthlings. His first observation is one that highlights the pettiness that makes up so much human interaction: “I expected to hear everybody talking about great events: battles, poets, that kind of thing, but of course you don’t. You just squabble among yourselves.” More “squabbling” ensues when Kreton attempts to learn about sex: when he is told by Ellen that his scientific interest in seeing her make love to Conrad is “disgusting,” the mind-reading alien responds, “oh? But . . . but it’s on your minds so much I simply assumed it was all quite public.” Ellen explains that earthlings are very private about their sexuality and Kreton’s response, “you pay to watch two men hit one another repeatedly, yet you make love secretly, guiltily and with remorse,” illustrates the apparent contradiction in American morality: violence is a perfectly acceptable topic (and even a form of entertainment) but sexuality (and the act of human creation) is a “primitive taboo.” Like General Powers’s emphasis on the Laundry project, Vidal is again highlighting what he sees as an odd distribution of values.

The values of Conrad, Ellen’s boyfriend and a confirmed pacifist, are also placed under scrutiny. One of Vidal’s “set-pieces” in the play is Kreton’s attempt to evoke Conrad’s “primitive” side through the mention of patriotic slogans and the singing of patriotic songs; he believes that “all primitives can be lashed to fever-pitch by selected major chords” and that even a “peace-loving man who grows English walnuts” can be made to embrace the idea of total war. Kreton begins by singing a few verses of “There’s No Place Like Home”; when this fails, he switches to “Yankee Doodle,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and the World War II andiem, “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer.” Vidal’s satire here is aimed against the “patriotism” found in such songs, which, when sung by the alien, seem hollow and silly: as the unmoved Conrad says after Kreton tells him, “it’s for Mother,” “Then let Mother go fight.” However, Kreton does discover a way to incite Conrad: by broadcasting the thoughts of a soldier guarding the house — who desires Ellen — Conrad starts a fistfight which Kreton finds thrilling. Conrad is then characterized by Kreton as “a pacifist with a hard right, a stealthy left jab and a sly knee to the groin.” Even the most staunch pacifist can display “blood lust,” and the human tendency to resort to violence (described by Kreton as “complete reversion to type”) is offered to the audience as a topic worthy of mockery and humor.

Despite his apparent perfection, however, Kreton possesses a major fault that serves as Vidal’s final word on the play’s issues. When talking to Ellen, Kreton says that, on his planet, the inhabitants can control time with their minds, communicate tele-pathically, and have rid themselves of every disease (including the common cold). But they have also wiped out “the great killer itself: passion,” in an effort to eradicate “love-nest slayings, bad temper” and “world wars.” The effects of this destruction of passion are described in Kreton’s remark, “and now . . . we feel noming. We do nothing. We are perfect.” Perfect as they may seem, the inhabitants of Kreton’s planet also find life “terribly dull” — which inspires Kreton to travel to earth and begin a world war in the first place. In one of his conversations with Rosemary, the Speldings’s cat, Kreton explains that he “dotes on people” because of their “primitive addiction to violence” and “because they seethe with emotions” which he finds “bracing and intoxicating.” His desire to “wallow shamelessly in their steaming emotions” reveals Vidal’s attitude toward his characters and their values: despite the fact that they may behave in ridiculous ways and engage in irrational fighting, at least human beings have emotional lives that, at the very least, make life interesting. At the end of the play when Kreton is retrieved by his superior, Delton 4, he tells the Speldings, “oh, how I envy you. . . . For being so violent . . . so loving . . . so beautifully imperfect. And so much happier than you know.” Even a “Laundry Project” coordinator or a bumbling broadcaster has a more fulfilling existence than the most “perfect” of aliens. Despite all of the jokes at humanity’s expense, it is Vidal’s fondness for humanity as a whole that prevents the satire from ever becoming too bitter or the faults he points out from being seen as irredeemable.

Source: Daniel Moran, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible presents the chaos of a Salem witch trial as a way to explore the effects of McCarthyism on the lives of Americans.
• Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s suspense novel, Fail-Safe, was an incredible success when published, largely because of its theoretical look at what would happen if an accident caused six American atomic bombers to attack the U.S.S.R. without the chance of being recalled.
• Julian is Vidal’s 1965 novel that made him a celebrity. This is the first of his historical fiction works; in it, readers follow the exploits of the fourth-century Roman Emperor who tried to abolish Christianity.
• Vidal’s “Washington D.C.(1967) is a historical novel that spans the eras of the New Deal and McCarthyism.
• The Best Man: A Play of Politics is Vidal’s 1960 play (revised in 1977) that looks at a campaign race for political office and those affected by it.
• Live from Golgotha, Vidal’s 1992 satire of the television industry in which he imagines modern “coverage” of Christ’s crucifixion.
• Rita Kleinfelder’s When We Were Young: A Baby Boomer Yearbook (1993) contains interesting information about the political, social, and cultural lives of mid-twentieth-century Americans.
• Jeff Kisseloff’s The Box: An Oral History of Television (1995) presents the history of the medium in a conversational, easy-to-follow format.
• Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel, offers (like Visit to a Small Planet) a top-down satirical look at American politics, government, and sexual mores.