Orson Welles

Mercury Theatre - BBC - audiostories > The War of the Worlds (30-10-1938)

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In the First World War, radio and all its frequencies were solely used for communications concerning the war. After the war, the army wasn’t to keen on giving back the frequencies to ‘the people’, so to prevent this the state came up with the idea of ‘broadcasting’. This meant sending info over radio frequencies in the form of ‘one to many’ instead of overall two way trafficking, and so the British Broadcasting Company was founded. In 1929, the BBC became a government institution and a ‘public service’. The BBC adopted a paternalistic way of broadcasting, which ‘ensured’ the people ‘responsible and truthful’ information and was supposed to ‘build the nation’. They became an example for other countries and little by little the listeners got used to trusting the radio and its possibilities.[1] Terms like liveness and immediacy weren’t common sense, because, besides Vaudeville, there was little to counterpart these terms.

After being one of the few media of having survived the Depression which started in 1929 as well, radio became quite a booming business. In the U.S.A. the commercial model appeared to be the most natural, but the split the Depression provoked between pro- and anti-radio forces caused a development which from 1932 on worth inserted news in radio broadcasting.[2] Because of the newness of this quickly developing medium, listeners hadn’t yet developed listening conventions, which would have helped them to separate truth and fantasy… and Orson Welles didn’t exactly assist. (p.e. Welles 1938, p. 13.)

When plays like The War of the Worlds (by H.G. Wells, broadcasted October 30, 1938) were broadcasted in the Mercury Theatre, the listeners didn’t know how to categorize it. The play caused quite a rouse; some people got fooled by the means the play incorporated for the sake of liveness. Even though forerunners, like The Jack Benny Program, used a format in which the attention was drawn to the position of radio itself which could have caused the public to immerse less in what they were hearing, instead caused the public to forsake an active responsibility in listening, which made them believe anything they were hearing.[3] Wells, and Welles, and Koch, played well with the power of expectation on perception.[4] This provoked a feeling of liveness and immediacy, which Orson Welles clearly intended in this broadcasting, as can be heard/read in his quite provocative preface speech. (p.e. Welles 1938, p. 1.)

The means used to emphasize liveness and immediacy, like strong and intense parts in the narrative (p.e. Welles 1938, p. 10.) and well used sound and montage (p.e. Welles 1938, p. 19.), are enforced by the use of a sort of self-reflexivity; the show is pretended to be a musical radio show which is being interrupted to bring world breaking news (p.e. Welles 1938, p. 2.), the invasion of the Martians. The use of different and famous announcers, the switching between ‘different locations’ (p.e. Welles 1938, p. 15.), including references to real places, buildings, highways and streets, and musical and news parts, brought an extraordinary sense of immediacy. This mixture of fiction and ‘reality’ was, by this time, not that new anymore, but still worked very well to stir the lives of the listeners. (p.e. Welles 1938, p. 20). In some cases quite literary: for many of the in tuning listeners, it wasn’t clear whether they were listening to a real news bulletin or to a play, and they fled their homes to run from the invasion.[5]

The methods used caused ‘moral panic’(p.e. Welles 1938, p. 15), a concept that in this case offers more understanding about the reception then about the understanding of the broadcast itself.[6] Unless Wells intentionally wanted to stir the social scale.. (p.e. Welles 1938, p. 20).[7] Since the concept is founded on the reception of this particular play (and thus hadn’t influenced the maker), it can in this case be applied to understand the reaction of the listeners. This reaction can in hindsight be fully understood; the world had of course just been through WW I and was entering WW II, so the concept of being invaded wasn’t very far fetched, albeit by Martians. To top off the confusion, Welles lets Koch introduce some philosophical questions on live itself by letting Prof. Pierson ponder on his existence. (p.e. Welles 1938, p. 21). It is a play that balances between the reliability of perception and the trust in ones own world; as has been discussed by Bartholomew, a well known effect of being subjected to stress and uncertainty.[8]

Discussing The War of the Worlds it becomes clear that the reception of the play is indissolubly interweaved with the technical development of the radio, and radio conventions. One can see that Orson Welles was quite innovative in producing the play by making the most effective use of the technological and overall possibilities of radio the way he did. So innovative even that it proved to be a foundation for the development of radio conventions, of (new) media reception theory and a social shock all over the world. Welles choose the right medium, the right time and the right method to shock some people into a moral panic.

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[1] Bartholomew, R.E., 1998, p. 5.

[2] Hilmes, M., 2006, p. 94.

[3] Hilmes, M., 2006, p. 98.; World of Sound, BBC documentary, part II: it is said that ‘via microphone’ one can hear if one is honest, angry, drunk etc., this means believing ones own interpretation, as listeners. This was a widely presumed assumption, in the new world of listening to audio at home.

[4] Bartholomew, R.E., 1998, p. 1.

[5] Hilmes 2006, p. 104.

[6] Stanley Cohen defined the concept of moral panic in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972).

[7] Goode 2000, p. 2.

[8] Bartholomew 1998, p. 2.