With great power comes great invisibility!
Or so this film would make us believe. It has a literary antecedent in the form of a novel by H.G. Wells. In both the novel and the film, the IM is not a very nice guy. We get more of his back story in a few LONG chapters in the book, but they still don’t really explain how or why he’s such a commanding, entitled jerk. All in all he’s my least favorite of the Universal Monsters. Still lurv ya, Claude Rains.
Not liking the main character does not equal bad movie, though. It’s a pretty amazing movie for its day what with all the invisibility special effects. Even though this film explores the power of invisibility, for me the heart is about how isolated the IM really is. It’s no wonder he has no friends – he’s kind of a tool! But being invisible, though akin to a superpower, would definitely be an isolating situation.
Mr. Rains............don't worry...we get tolove you in Casablanca! The literary term I’d like to talk about is Parabasis. That’s at the end of a Greek play when the chorus take off their masks and talk to the audience usually delivering the moral or main message the playwright wants you to leave with. In The Invisible Man, the mask removal is when he dies in the end he becomes visible again. He speaks his final words, “I failed. I meddled in things man must leave alone” then he passes away and reappears in the flesh. It’s a subtle parabasis, but an effective one nonetheless, even though the film ending where the IM is shot is far less violent than the book ending where Griffin (the IM’s name) is beaten and kicked to death. A fitting end for a tool, I should think!
Score ten bonus points if you know where this is from:
Michael Rennie was ill the day the earth stood still
But he told us where we stand
And Flash Gordon was there in silver underwear
Claude Raines was the invisible man
Then something went wrong for Fay Wray and King Kong
They got caught in a celluloid jam
Then at a deadly pace it came from outer space
And this is how the message ran...
Michael Rennie was ill the day the earth stood still
But he told us where we stand
And Flash Gordon was there in silver underwear
Claude Raines was the invisible man
Then something went wrong for Fay Wray and King Kong
They got caught in a celluloid jam
Then at a deadly pace it came from outer space
And this is how the message ran...
HERE'S YOUR HINT!
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