Bernard Quatermass - Themes

Themes

Nigel Kneale explained in a 1990s interview the background that had led him to formulate Quatermass and the other characters of the original serial in 1953. "I wanted to write some strong characters, but I didn't want them to be like those horrible people in those awful American science fiction films, chewing gum and stating the obvious. Not that I wanted to do something terribly 'British', but I didn't like all the flag-waving you got in those films. I tried to get real human interest in the stories, and some good humour."

Writing in 2005, the television history lecturer Dr Catherine Johnson felt that in the original three 1950s serials, Quatermass as a character represented the championing of science and rationality over the supernatural and the fantastic. "As a leading scientific innovator, Quatermass is invested with scientific and moral authority. Over the three serials, this authority is tested and undermined ... Despite this, the narrative structure of all three serials works to reinforce the authority invested in Quatermass and in science. Although scientific enterprise is responsible for disastrous consequences in the first two Quatermass serials, it is only through science that the alien invasions are overcome ... He is invested with the narrative authority to understand and explain the fantastic events depicted."

The writer and critic Kim Newman went further, explaining in a 2003 television documentary on Nigel Kneale's career that he believed Quatermass to be not only a representation of science but of humanity itself. Referring to the conclusion of The Quatermass Experiment, he commented that: "It almost boils down to an editorial speech by Quatermass representing humanity, or the humane aspects of humanity. He talks to the monster, and so the monster is defeated by an intellectual argument or an emotional appeal." Like Kneale, he contrasted this to American science-fiction productions, where the alien adversary would be defeated by "it being blown up or electrocuted, or having the entire firepower of the army turned against it." Hammer had altered their film version of the story so that the creature is in fact killed by being electrocuted.

In contrast to Newman's idea of Quatermass as the embodiment of humanity, writer and lecturer Peter Hutchings in his essay "We are the Martians" sees Quatermass as an isolated character. "In the 1950s Quatermass stories, Quatermass himself is someone who, while working to protect the nation, remains a curiously isolated figure, bereft of anything resembling a meaningful relationship. (In the 1979 Quatermass, he has acquired a granddaughter; possibly connected with this is the fact that here he seems a much weaker figure who can only defeat the aliens through the sacrifice of the lives of both himself and his granddaughter)." Hutchings also compared this to American productions of the era: "The standard, if not clichéd, figures of the clean-cut square-jawed hero and his girl, which are present in some form or other in most US sf films of this period ... are absent."