I have never been a great fan of horror movies. There are, of course, certain exceptions to this – as a kid I used to love going to bed straight after watching Christopher Lee play Dracula in a Hammer Horror film. And I didn’t sleep a wink after watching The Omen (1976). Though I remain quite partial to a good vampire movie (there not being that many good ones, these days!), horror is probably my least favourite movie genre. Why? Well, mostly just because I remain unhorrified.
It may well be, as Steve Rose claims in his article for The Guardian, that “horror is the place where we explore our mortal and societal fears”, but Edward Scissorhands on Elm Street wearing a ski mask to hide the weird possibility of the hills having eyes, wielding a Texas chainsaw while Conjuring the Blair Witch just don’t hold a candle to what I would consider one of the scariest movies of all time – 1971’s ‘The Andromeda Strain’.
Christopher Lee in his Dracula heyday was nowhere near as scary as Dr. Jeremy Stone, played pitch-perfectly by Arthur Hill. This is a man, a scientist, so soulless he likens being called away from a party by armed soldiers to lying in his wife’s arms. Stone by name and stone by nature.
Generally, the movies seem quite favourable towards science. The exceptions, of course, is the mad scientist. Science doesn’t kill, it’s the scientists!
‘The Andromeda Strain’ walks a fine line between these two positions. That Wildfire and Scoop were built for germ warfare, as Doctors Dutton and Leavitt discover to their dismay as they stare at the maps and discover they are for the purpose of “biological warfare”, is countered by the roles the facilities now play in saving the United States from that very threat – even if, as Dutton exclaims, “We did it to ourselves!”
Dutton and Leavitt are quick to accuse Dr. Jeremy Stone of being complicit in the development of these biological weapons of mass destruction. Not because they have any proof; just because he’s the type of conscienceless scientist who could do such a thing. And they know it!
This, again, is but an emphasis the film makes about science being morally-neutral. Dutton and Leavitt are scandalized; Stone, for all his protestations that he only found out about Scoop at the same time they did, just doesn’t sound convincing. It’s not the science that’s to blame, it’s the scientists.
‘The Andromeda Strain’ might appear to favour, slightly, the idea that science will save humanity – they do, after all, learn how to defeat the ‘organism’ and save the good ol’ United States. Consider, for all Stone’s inhumanity, he is counterbalanced by not one but two more human scientists – Dutton and Leavitt. For all that Stone might harp on about sticking to “established procedures”, Leavitt counters with “Establishment gonna fall down and go boom.”
No offense to Kate Reid, who plays Dr. Ruth Leavitt, but, for all her quips about bordellos and good places to grow pot, she’s hardly the poster child for the hippie movement. Indeed, Ruth Leavitt is not as she appears to be. Initially, she refuses to go when the soldiers come for her. Her experiment being at “a critical stage”, she claims she can’t just leave it. We might admire her dedication to her work, except she is putting her own personal success ahead of her country’s need. Only when the officer suggests she may not be well, that the physician could certify her unable to continue, does she suddenly decide she’ll go.
Again, one might, at first, believe she has realised the enormity of the situation and nobly, if belatedly, recognised the need to put country first. Later, we find out that she only agreed to go in order to avoid the doctor’s examination that would have made public her epilepsy – a condition that would have excluded her from Wildfire and Scoop and, as noted by Dr. Stone, in the closest he comes to a human sentiment, “Probably no top lab would have her if they knew. Insurance, prejudice, all that crap.” In other words, Dr. Ruth Leavitt, for all her counter-cultural irreverence, is not primarily motivated by a desire to save millions of lives but a selfish need to save her own career.
When the manure hits the fan, and the klaxons are blaring, and the red lights are flashing, Dr. Ruth Leavitt reveals, as we are fully aware, that her dislike of red lights has nothing to do with her years in a bordello. She is first transfixed and then goes into epileptic seizure. Fortunately, there are no direct catastrophic results stemming from Leavitt’s predicament, but would it just have been prejudice that ruled her unfit for the task?
While one might have a smattering of understanding for a woman trying to survive and succeed in the male world of science, it is difficult to feel sympathy for anyone who would willingly put the lives of millions at risk for their own personal gain, which is precisely what Dr. Ruth Leavitt does.
All the more reason for the scientifically objective and thoroughly dispassionate Dr. Jeremy Stone, the ideal man to head this team. This may well be true. What is so frightening about Dr. Stone is his complete lack of a sense of the value of life. Not even a human life, or human life generally, just life, itself, seems to be beyond his comprehension.
As Drs. Stone and Leavitt stare at the ever-greater magnification of the damaged satellite, he responds to her natural sense of wonderment at “some brand-new form of life”, with “Our best hope of cracking it is to be grindingly thorough with computer No.1” and taps Leavitt on the side of her head.
To be fair to Stone, he does give the threat to the people west of Piedmont as justification for his demand for a “712”, though it’s less about warm, fuzzy feelings for his fellow human beings and more a case of any argument that’ll get him what he wants. Throughout the movie, Stone is not motivated by an urgent need to save lives as he is by scientific curiosity for a conundrum he refuses to be defeated by.
A scientist to the core, Stone’s frequent use of the code ‘712’ and his reference to the ‘apparatus of self-destruction’ – both of which refer to the exploding of a nuclear device – are devoid of the emotion that would normally attach to the thought of the utter destruction to be wrought by either action.
It is this attitude, this complete inability – or, at least, unwillingness – to engage with life itself that makes Stone a good scientist and ‘The Andromeda Strain’ such a horrifying movie. It may be the politicians whose paranoiac fantasies dream up the need for ever-more destructive weapons, but it is the Dr. Stones of this world that make such dreams a reality. Once they have the weapon to hand, the politicians have a million reasons never to use it. The scientist has no reason not to devise it in the first place.
Watching the 1970s 