Sometimes lines or moments from movies, TV shows or books get stuck in my head, and keep coming to mind at the weirdest times. Right now what I have wedged in there is that final scene from The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, in which the human family has settled on dead Mars just as humanity destroys itself back on Earth. After many earlier encounters between Earthlings and Martians, which didn't go well at all, the native life has been wiped out on the fourth planet out from the sun, except for a few immigrants from the third planet. The children in the family keep asking when they'll get to see the Martians, and the father finally tells them he'll show them.
He takes them down to a reconstituted canal, flowing with water for the first time in ages, and tells them to look down into it. "There they are," he says, as they stare down at their own reflections. It's a sad and yet somehow hopeful ending to a very depressing story of conflict, ignorance and intolerance. It's not one of Bradbury's best written stories - by any stretch! - and yet that final image, and the bittersweet message it holds, has always remained with me. I can still remember seeing the TV mini-series version with Rock Hudson, when I a teenager, and that's who I always picture as the dad in that sequence, even though I'd read the book years before that.
Perfect moments like that in fiction are what keep me coming back for more.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment