In Georges Méliès’s masterpiece, A Trip to the Moon, one of the first spectacles that the astronomer-adventurers encounter is the sight of Earth rising above the lunar horizon. The fact that Earth’s appearance in the lunar sky is the first major piece of stagecraft the explorers come across indicates its importance as a kind of master-image for their new status as inhabitants of this other world. As any post-Apollo audience can immediately observe, the scene in Méliès’s 1902 fantasy film is an uncanny foreshadow of two of the most famous photographs in human history, Earthrise, taken from the window of the Apollo 8 capsule in 1968, and Blue Marble, taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972.

Méliès’s anachronistic evocation of Earthrise is evident in the way Earth literally rises from the middle to the top of the frame, a movement that is suggested in the name of the 1968 photograph, which appears to show Earth rising above the Moon’s horizon. In fact, the appearance of an “earthrise” in the photograph resulted not from Earth actually rising from a point of view on the Moon’s surface, but from the fact that the orbiting capsule was coming around the edge of the Moon, bringing Earth into view. In the version of this photograph that became famous, the image has been rotated 90 degrees from the original, in which the lunar surface occupies a vertical band on the right-hand side of the frame. The altered spatial orientation translates the original photo’s sense of coming around the side of an enormous object into a more terrestrial lunar horizon that provides a “ground” for the apparently “rising” Earth. A similar kind of stagecraft operates in the scene in Méliès’s film. Not only does a theatrical backdrop show Earth rising above the craggy lunar landscape, but the mountains in the distance drop down at the same pace, as if to indicate that the spherical body the explorers are standing on is rotating backwards to reveal this sight, paralleling the manner in which a “sunrise” is really an effect of Earth’s rotation. In fact, since the Moon is tidally locked with the earth, earthrises are very rare on the Moon’s surface (although they can be seen happening very slowly on some parts of the Moon due to the fact that the Moon librates slightly). But in both A Trip to the Moon and the Earthrise photograph, visual effects elide this astronomical detail in favor of the more profound implications of blending the familiar sight of the rising of the Sun and Moon as seen from Earth with the uncanny reversal that Earth itself has been cast into the role of a celestial body, an alien world. Likewise, Méliès seems to plagiarize the space-age future by showing a rising earth that looks like a deliberate reference to Earth as seen in Blue Marble, a photograph renowned for being one of the most reproduced images in human history. As in Blue Marble, Méliès depicts a “full Earth,” without any shadow (unlike in Earthrise, which shows a gibbous Earth). Additionally, both images show the surface of Earth from an angle that centers Northern Africa. The horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula are the most visible landmarks in both representations. It is impossible to escape the irrational impression that Méliès is somehow alluding to these iconic images of the second half of the twentieth century from his perspective in 1902.

Indeed, the illusion of this impossible anachronism may rank as the most astonishing magic trick in A Trip to the Moon. For post-Apollo audiences, the shock of this time-traveling effect may parallel the shock that the film’s original audiences felt upon seeing the uncanny sight of Earth poised in space as a celestial body, another “substitution-splice” effect swapping out the Moon for Earth, a shock which the Apollo photos would inflict on a global audience decades later. This is one sense in which Tom Hanks is correct when, in the 2011 documentary The Extraordinary Voyage, he identifies A Trip to the Moon as “the first draft of the Apollo space program.” The image of Earth from space is bound up in a cultural question of what it means to consider human existence on a planetary scale, a question that, while it has run through human thinking since Eratosthenes originally theorized the spherical earth in ancient Greece, began to take a newly urgent form in Méliès’s time, amid the emergence of a globalized world of intercontinental travel and communication, imperial rivalries, and world wars. A Trip to the Moon uses proto-cinematic language to address a very contemporary problem: What it means to consider Earth from a planetary perspective.

Of course, these days, it is common knowledge that Earth is a planet, that is orbits the sun accompanied by other planets, and that it is a speck of micro-dust in the vast but not infinite envelope of the universe. The matter-of-factness of this knowledge, however, sits alongside a counter-awareness that it may actually be impossible to fully comprehend this planetary dimension. Human beings are evolved to inhabit human-scale territory, a dozen square miles, maybe, and tribal communities with an upward limit of 100 members or so. Technology has allowed human beings to cover much more territory and to interact with many more people, but imaginatively encompassing the global expanse of the earth, its oceans, its deserts, it poles, mountains, etc. certainly overwhelms the frame of reference that humans can intuitively feel familiar with. Indeed, this is certainly one of the reasons why images of the earth from space have such a powerful resonance. They give us the impression that the planetary scale can be comprehended, viewed synoptically, and even transcended, that we can achieve a complete view of the planetary and understand ourselves and our cosmic circumstances more entirely. As Kelly Oliver points out in her analysis of the Apollo photographs, however, any such feeling we get of planetary totality from viewing these images is both illusory and impossible. It is illusory because, as any phenomenologist will tell you, the “Apollonian” view of Earth is not complete. Even when it is fully lit-up, as in Blue Marble, the earth can only be seen one hemisphere at a time. The illusion of completeness masks an ontological fact about planets and any three-dimensional objects – that they elude perceptual completeness. In the case of Earth, the incompleteness of our view of the planet constitutes a poignant reminder of the sense in which we can never understand the planetary scale, that it is permanently beyond our ken, and therefore we are doomed to live in a perpetual state of partial knowledge with regard to our identity as planetary beings. Moreover, the Apollonian view of earth is impossible, since “in order to shoot those images, astronauts were propelled into inhospitable space in an unsustainable and precarious environment where their very survival was uncertain.”¹ The Earth can only be seen from a vantage point that is incompatible with human life, underscoring its untenability as a ground for any kind of human self-understanding. At the same time that these photographs communicate a profound meaning to us about the nature of our existence, they are also inflected by a kind of intrinsic denial of any such revelation. Borrowing a term from Derrida, Oliver calls this an “autoimmune logic”² implicit in these images, and it epitomizes a theme of internal contradiction inherent in what Lisa Messeri calls “the planetary imagination.”³

Images of Earth from space, Oliver argues, express an inherent paradox that “in order to ‘see’ ourselves whole, we must split our perspective and take up what we imagine to be the perspective of another. That is to say, we fragment ourselves to see ourselves whole.”⁴ The perception of this kind of ambivalence runs throughout philosophical commentary on the planetary imagination. In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Ursula K. Heise negotiates the tension between whether thinking about Earth from a planetary perspective promotes a positive ecological and humanitarian perspective, or whether it constitutes an imperialist form of erasure and oppression.⁵ Lisa Messeri notes the tension between conceptualizing Earth as a “scientific” object or a “cultural” object, and identifies planets, particularly the planet Earth, as operating simultaneously in both categories. Since we happen to live on a planet, our imagination of the planetary is “both quotidian and scientific.”⁶ Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak positions inherent alterity at the center of what she calls “planet-thought”: “The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan. … If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects … alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it pushes us away.”⁷ To reckon with the planetary scale is to confront the ontological structure of radical alterity, a paradoxical condition of interiorized otherness, externalized self-identity. Of the “planet,” Spivak writes, “Its alterity, determining experience, is mysterious and discontinuous – an experience of the impossible.”⁸

Spivak examines Freud’s analysis of the uncanny as a way of thinking about how planet-thought blends familiarity and alienness into an ontologically and affectively charged encounter with inner alterity, and Jennifer Fay, in her analysis of cinema and the Anthropocene, considers how this sense of the uncanny dimension of the planetary imagination has become even more pronounced in the age of climate crisis, a time when Earth seems to have become an uncanny doppelganger of itself. At the same time, her historical perspective situates this sense of the uncanny at the dawn of cinema, in Maxim Gorky’s response to the 1896 exhibition of Lumière films. Fay argues that it is an inherent feature of cinematic imagery that “it makes the familiar world strange to us by transcribing the dimensionalities of experience into celluloid, transforming and temporarily transporting humans and the natural world into an unhomely image.”⁹ Cinema is the art of representing the world through an uncanny simulacrum of itself, which may make it a particularly apt medium for capturing the ambivalent and paradoxical alterity that defines the ontology of the planetary imagination. Representing this kind of self-othering sensibility – reproducing Spivak’s “experience of the impossible” – is a job for surrealists, magicians, and illusionists. This may explain why the visionary pageant of A Trip to the Moon has provided subsequent filmmakers with such an influential template for representing visions of the planetary imagination. Méliès’s surreal juxtapositions and reversals, his delight in substitutions splices that play with the relationship between literal and figurative imagery, animate and inanimate beings, presence and absence, scale and perspective, emblematize the ontological vertigo that characterizes post-Apollo planetary thinking. Moreover, Méliès’s blend of theatrical and cinematic elements and of spectacular and narrative formulas, tensions that have been exhaustively catalogued in critical discussions of the film, lend themselves to the representation of the kind of inherent alterity that philosophers have associated with “planet-thought,” which may explain why A Trip to the Moon, out of all of Méliès’s surviving films, has resonated so uniquely with audiences and has had such a marked impact on future cinematic visions of planetarity. Indeed, whereas critical analyses of A Trip to the Moon have foregrounded debates about genre and technique (Is it theatrical or cinematic? Is it a story or a spectacle?), considering the film as an example of what Benjamin Lazier calls “astroneotics” – “the age-old tradition of contemplative reflection upon the cosmos” (620)¹⁰ – emphasizes the visionary subject matter of the film itself, while also suggesting points of continuity between Méliès’s cinematic depiction of planetarity and the impact of scientific-photographic representations of Earth from space.

The radical alterity implicit in planet-thinking means that the voyage to another planet (or planet-like body such as a moon) is always simultaneously a voyage inward to Earth’s own planetary identity. In the same way that the most enduring legacy of the Apollo moon missions has been the images of Earth from space, Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon also articulates a vision of earthly life that emphasizes its planetary dimension, not only literally, as in the “earthrise” scene discussed above, but throughout the texture of the film itself. Tracing the nuances of how Méliès’s film represents planetarity enables a recontextualization of A Trip to the Moon, rescuing it from its status as a film-historical museum piece and mining it for “astronoetic” insights about the very contemporary problematics of planetary thought. From this perspective, A Trip to the Moon can be read as an exploration of the theoretical question of planetarity, an undertaking that also encompasses a critique of the colonial imagination as it informed the politics of Méliès’s time and as it continues to haunt us in our fully globalized 21^st century.

The film’s representation of the manner in which space exploration reconfigures our perception of our own terrestrial existence is introduced in the very first scene. The first tableau opens on a roomful of astronomy students awaiting the arrival of Professor Barbenfouillis and his team of astronomers. The crowd of students stands on risers to fill up the center of the image, three female stenographers sit to their left, an old wizard sits to their right, and the bustling and gesticulating of these human figures animates most of the tableau with movement. In stark contrast is the rectangular blackboard to the right, showing a representation of Earth as a sphere gridded with lines of latitude and longitude, and, in the upper left, a blank circle representing the Moon. An orrery and a globe positioned on the other side of the frame multiply the imagery of model-Earths, meaning that we are already visualizing the earth from an Apollonian standpoint in at least three ways before the lunar-voyage narrative even gets started. The scene itself constitutes a third representation of the “Earth” as a busy jumble of discrepant elements and filmic movement. At the same time, the drawing of the Moon in the upper right corner of the chalkboard is mirrored by an image of the “real” Moon, which is visible through the arch of a tall window at the vanishing point of the composition. A line of telescopes, a big one pointing upward out the window and a smaller one lower down aligned at the same diagonal, echo and extend the angle between the chalkboard Earth and the chalkboard Moon, causing this compositional line to stretch beyond the chalkboard frame and into the “real” sky and toward the “real” Moon. Of course, the Moon on the backdrop, while imaginatively distinguished as “real” in contrast to the “fake” drawing on the chalkboard, is also, on another level of reality, clearly an image painted on a backdrop. The contrast between the “fake” Moon and the “real” Moon, therefore, also reveals a more fundamental similarity. The mise-en-scène of this opening tableau establishes the impression that the project of traveling from the Earth to the Moon brings Earth’s own status as a planet to the thematic forefront in a way that influences our perception of the nature of our own reality, even before the voyage begins.

The telescope at the top of the frame, pointed up and outward to the Moon and tinted bronze to set it apart from its monochrome surroundings, presides over the whole scene, gesturing toward the object of the astronomers’ debate and pulling the viewer’s eye up and outward into the night, inviting us to visually anticipate the physical voyage that will result from the astronomers’ conference. The magical quality of the telescope as a charmed object is explicitly evinced in the first substitution splice of the whole film, when the astronomers hold up their telescopes and they are magically transformed into stools on which they sit to hear Barbenfouillis’s proposal. This special effect draws our attention to the telescope as an object embodying a kind of “reversibility,” since a vision-machine designed to project disembodied sight into the abstract realms of outer space suddenly transforms into a very homely device for supporting the astronomers’ backsides within the weight of an earth-bound gravitational field. The joke of the splice is that the astronomers’ celestial pretensions are abruptly undercut by a reference to their terrestrial condition. While the optical experience of looking through a telescope does indeed project vision out into remote areas of outer space, this kind of vision also implicates the human seer as an inhabitant of this vast and empty space. Looking at another planet or the Moon through a telescope provides a vision of the planetary that implicitly redounds on the planetary nature of Earth itself. Méliès was very sensitive to this uncanny “reversibility” of the telescopic gaze, and it provides the basis for a gag in 1898’s The Astronomer’s Dream, when the astronomer holds a telescope up to his eye to look at the moon, but instead of extending the telescope outward toward the moon, he extends the eyepiece inward toward his eye, causing him to punch himself in the face. In the next scene, the astronomer is menaced by a giant Moon: instead of projecting his gaze outward toward the Moon, the Moon has projected itself inward into the astronomer’s chamber, where it attempts to devour him. The joke at the end of The Eclipse (1907) shows an astronomer’s attempts to look through a telescope from an upper-story window result in his undignified tumble out the window to land upside down in a barrel. In all these cases, Méliès dramatizes the ambiguity of the telescope as an instrument of perception; that, while it projects vision outward, simultaneously “backfires” by revealing a humbling truth about the bodily and earthbound nature of human reality. As if to literally illustrate this surreal reversibility of the telescopic gaze, when Barbenfouillis draws a picture of the cannon that will launch the explorers to the moon, the drawing parallels the angle of the telescopes at the top of the frame, about 45 degrees upward and to the right, but with a strange reversal: the rectangular segments of the cannon are larger toward the earth end and taper off into smaller segments along its upward length, a kind of mirror-image reversal of the telescopes, which grow larger from the smaller eyepiece segment to the wider “objective” lens. The visual suggestion is that the cannon is the opposite of the telescope – a telescope in reverse. When the “real” cannon is built from Barbenfouillis’s sketch, it assumes this reverse-telescope structure. Whereas the telescope projects human vision into space and leaves the body untouched, the cannon launches the body into space, with a correspondingly revolutionary effect on vision, echoing the “reversal” whereby the Apollo moon mission became a revelation of the planetary nature of Earth. Indeed, when the astronomers observe the casting of the cannon, the enormous foundry occupies a sweeping terrestrial landscape that has been made unearthly by the massive engineering project underway, and one of the astronomers uses his telescope to survey this strange new world that has revealed itself in the age of spaceflight – not the Moon, but a transformed Earth.

Following the launch of the capsule, Méliès stages an “experience of the impossible” that has become one of the most iconic moments of early cinema, and perhaps of all cinema. From the perspective of Barbenfoullis’s speeding projectile, we see the full moon from a distance, the pattern of light and shadows on its surface indicating the familiar eyes and mouth of “the man in the moon” as it is seen from earth, an impressionistic anthropomorphic suggestion. But slowly, suspensefully, as the projectile/camera/viewer hurtles closer, a substitution splice “resolves” the image so that we can see it more clearly – a literal face emerging from the surface of the moon. The otherworldly figure of the moon has suddenly become more familiar and more strange at the same time, more familiar because we find a human presence mapped onto its surface, but also much stranger, since the image is so bizarre, blending human and geological features in a way that uncannily fuses living and nonliving qualities. The Moon has a human face, but it is an impossible, otherworldly human face. Moreover, the Moon has Barbenfoullis’s face, since both the Moon and Barbenfoullis are played by Méliès himself. The impossible face of the Moon belongs to our human protagonist, a parallel that also reflects the grotesque makeup that Barbenfoullis and the other astronomers wear, which makes them seem like otherworldly humanoid entities rather than familiar humans. Barbenfouillis’s trip to the Moon confronts him with his mirror image, even as it distorts that mirror image into an unrecognizable and impossible other, magically suspended between reality and illusion, between science and dream, between self and other. The ambiguous dynamics of this condition are visually reinforced by the relativity of Méliès’s camera technique, staging “the illusion of a dolly shot,”¹¹ in which the image of the moonface moving toward the camera is perceived as the movement of the camera toward the moonface. Just like the astronomer who gets eaten by an enormous moon in The Astronomer’s Dream, we find our sense of ontological stability disrupted by the technologies of lenticularity – telescope and film. Are we the travelers moving toward the Moon, or is the Moon traveling toward us? This relativistic condition both foreshadows the Einsteinian dynamics of space travel while also demonstrating the ability of film spectacles to stage representations of perceptual ambiguity itself, throwing into question assumptions about whether we travel out into the world or whether the world travels into us.

Seconds later, these abstract speculations are violently interrupted by the grotesque image of the capsule suddenly appearing embedded in the moon-man’s eye, an iconic image that has become a visual representation of film itself as a medium. One of the features of the Moon that has always made it a favorite object of filmmakers is its ability to focalize perception, like an iris shot or a spotlight. Backlit by a full moon, any human activity suddenly becomes more dramatic, and that effect certainly accounts in part for the cultural impact of Méliès’s image of the moon-man with a bullet-like capsule slammed directly into its eye. The composition uses the Moon’s natural shape to suggest an image that is both theatrical and cinematic, as if the Moon itself were the perfect object to symbolize imaginative representation. The capsule in the moon’s eye, moreover, looks like it could be the eyepiece of either a telescope or a movie camera, suggesting a pun on the fact that the Moon’s face is also Méliès’s and Barbefouillis’s, revealing the triangular intercorrespondences among filmmaker, scientist, and the object of vision. At the same time, due to the fact that the image indicates the successful accomplishment of both Barbenfouillis’s crazy scheme and the narrative premise of Méliès’s film, the scene also constitutes an icon of successful imaginative accomplishment achieving its goal, which may explain why the image lends itself to illustrating triumphal film studies textbook chapters and documentaries about the birth of narrative filmmaking. The image is also jarringly violent. The extent of the violence of this image became clear when a colorized print of A Trip to the Moon was restored in 2010, showing bright red blood gushing from the moon-man’s wounded eye. The same image that celebrates the achievements of film and science and of visual culture as such also attacks the very eyeball that is the imaginative center of this optical regime, as if the eyepiece of the telescope/movie camera had become a knife that gouges into the scientist/filmmaker’s organ of sight. The fact that it is Barbenfouillis’s and Méliès’s face that is thusly attacked conveys a sense of the “autoimmune” effect that Oliver associated with the Apollo photos. The image of the moon-man with a capsule in his eye articulates an expression of technological/cinematic supremacy while simultaneously expressing the failure of this enterprise, insinuating that, in our attempt to conquer space and reality itself, we have shot ourselves in the eye. This tension between mastery and self-destruction certainly accounts for the strange power of this image, and it parallels a similar tension between salvific and apocalyptic dimensions of our sense of planetarity, the sense in which, as Oliver says, “the mushroom cloud and Blue Marble are two sides of the same coin.”¹²

When the explorers emerge from the capsule, the strangeness of the moonscape – its weird mountains and its unpredictable tectonic and volcanic activity – appears in surreal juxtaposition with its familiarity – the mountains of the moon are slightly exaggerated versions of the dramatic mountainscape visible in the distance during the launch sequence and, of course, the explorers are outfitted in their cartoonish Victorian travel clothes, as if their trip to the Moon were the equivalent of a visit to the countryside. The breathable air and earth-like gravity also contribute to establishing the familiarity of this alien world. This effect is comically enhanced when, after the rigors of their voyage, the travelers settle in for a quick nap. This sequence represents the first time that the surface of another planetary body has been depicted in film, and it epitomizes a dynamic that would characterize all such representations in the future. In a movie, another planet needs to be odd enough to convey the sense of “otherness” that communicates its alienness, but it also has to be familiar and inhabitable enough to provide a location for characters to enact a dramatic situation. In this sense, a representation of another planet is always already a sidewise representation of Earth, since our earthling experience establishes the frame of reference that we use to understand the concept of planetarity. But, at the same time, the projection of earth-ness onto an alien planet also projects alienness onto the surface of the Earth. The representation of another planet in a narrative film exerts this bidirectional planet-izing effect that, in the same stroke with which it dramatizes alien worlds, also reveals the planetarity of the Earth. Méliès seems to dramatize this effect rather explicitly when he makes the Earthrise effect the first astonishing sight to confront the explorers. The conceit that the Moon is basically a warped mirror-reflection of Earth (and vice versa), informs the drollery of the explorers’ clothes and umbrellas, the consistency of their clownish behavior between the Earth scenes and the Moon scenes, and the caprice of their post-landing powernap.

The comically quotidian act of taking a nap, however, opens out into a cosmic vision of profound ontological ambiguity. As the explorers sleep, hatches in seven stylized stars outlining the shape of the Big Dipper open to reveal women’s faces, a scene that dissolves into a tableau of two twins representing the constellation Gemini, the goddess Phoebe astride a crescent moon, and Saturn, both the planet and the god. The explorers sleep fitfully at the bottom of the frame throughout the vision, leaving the audience with mixed impressions regarding the nature of the scene. On the one hand, the fact that this vision appears over their heads as they sleep suggests that the film is giving us privileged access into distant mysteries of the cosmos that are hidden from the explorers’ vision or understanding. They may have pierced the eye of the male face of the moon, harpooning it to the familiar phallocentric architecture of the nineteenth-century earthscape, but the female face of the Moon, the seductive Phoebe, sits unmolested and even unseen beyond their ken. This image insinuates that there is a moon “beyond the Moon,” and that the Moon the explorers think they have conquered is only an extension of an Earth that they never really left. The cosmic mysteries sit seductively outside the reach of these failed explorers, who are too buffoonish to bear witness to genuine transcendence. At the same time, the mise-en-scène also authorizes a reading of the image as the astronomers’ collective dream. Indeed, the vision’s utilization of theatrical, mythological, and sexual tropes makes it exactly the kind of cosmic vision that Barbenfouillis’s Victorian retinue would be likely to dream about. This interpretation flips the ontology of the image into reverse; instead of a telescopic lens into the cosmos, the image constitutes an endoscopic representation of the explorers’ assumptions, conventions, and cultural narratives. The magical atmosphere of Méliès’s moonscape, its undefined chronotope, makes both of these readings of the scene simultaneously plausible, situating us in an impossible reality where reality becomes a dream (in the sense that it retreats from the explorers’ perception) and in which dreams become real (in the sense that their subconscious iconography manifests itself on the film screen). This ambiguity is emphasized by the tension between the sense in which the allegorical figures represent a classical, traditional conception of the cosmos and the film’s otherwise science-fictional futuristic premise. When Phoebe waves her arm to drop real lunar snow onto the sleeping party, the cinematic effect serves to uncannily bring together both parts of the composition, the sleeping explorers and the cosmic entities, in a way that situates both irreconcilable ontological registers in the same phantastic space.

This same blend of alien otherness and intimate subjectivity also characterizes the representation of the Selenites. As space aliens would go on to do throughout the future history of sci-fi cinema, the Selenites embody both the conventional alterity of personifying “the other” as well as the radical alterity of personifying an otherness that is inflected with a mirror-like ability to reveal a new perspective on the “self” of human identity. In the same way that seeing Earth from space shoots us off into a distant vacuum while simultaneously showing us to ourselves, encounters with aliens open out unimagined new possibilities for life while also relativizing our own self-understanding. In her description of the moonshot sequence, Elizabeth Ezra describes “a literal shift in perspective that locates a gazing subject outside of earth” and a “Copernican revolution in visual perception,”¹³ and this language equally describes the explorers’ encounter with the Selenites, the movies’ foundational representation of human-alien relations. At the same time that the Selenites present the explorers with a figuration of “otherness,” this otherness eventually redounds to color the representation of the explorers themselves. At the same time, the encounter provides an “othered” representation of the encounter with “otherness” itself. Because it reproduces familiar cultural signposts in the “upside-down” Wonderland of the Moon, the familiar narrative of European colonialism plays out in Méliès’s film as a satirical farce that implicitly implicates the earthling viewer.

Like the Moon itself, the Selenites encompass a blend of familiar and unfamiliar elements. Selenites are clearly humanoid and mostly bipedal, but the first Selenite to appear moves in an acrobatic manner that sets it apart from the clumsy shuffling of the human explorers. The Selenite’s outlandish appearance blends its humanoid body plan with insectoid and lobster-like features, making this being, for all its strangeness, vaguely categorizable as an “animal.” In this way, the Selenite’s strangeness is contained in a familiar frame of reference, and this definition empowers Barbenfouillis to respond to it according to the script of human-animal relations that he has carried with him from Earth: Barbenfouillis greets the Selenite as he would a stray dog that seems like it might be threatening, whacking it with his umbrella. The surreal fragility of the moon creatures, which burst into smoke upon the slightest impact, while providing one of the movie’s strangest and most astonishing effects, serves as confirmation of the explorers’ own superiority, affirming the anthropocentric pattern of thinking that nineteenth-century earth people take for granted in their relations with non-human animals. Once they are captured, however, the explorers discover a new perspective of Selenite society that had not been evident in their first encounter. The Selenites are not wild animals after all; they have a leader, they have architecture, they have an army of bipedal sentries, and they apparently have a language, with which the leader attempts to address Barbenfouillis and his party. While the explorers used the “animal” frame of reference to determine their initial response to the Selenites, another “familiar other” template now comes into focus: the Selenites can now be defined as non-Western, vaguely Muslim, colonial subject-types. The architecture of the throne room clearly parodies Islamic and Moorish styles, the spears carried by the guards refer to similar weapons associated in the Victorian imagination with African tribal populations, and the crescent-moon motif adorning the Selenite King’s throne and visible elsewhere in the throne room explicitly mirrors the crescent moon symbol that has historically been associated with the Muslim faith (although, for the Selenites, the icon may represent a crescent Earth). These clues signal to the audience that this voyage to the Moon has actually been a voyage into the imagery of conflicts associated with control of the terrestrial surface, while they signal to Barbenfouillis that the appropriate stance to take in the face of this “familiar other” is murderous hostility. Indeed, A Trip to the Moon was produced in the same year, 1902, as the Cottenest Expedition, in which a French Lieutenant led a raid against a tribe of reclusive Taureg in the Hoggar mountains. This contemporary episode reflects certain parallels to the plot of Méliès’s film: a band of Europeans travel into an otherworldly landscape to exert their military supremacy over a band of mysterious “others.” The presence of Earth floating in the sky above the Selenite throne room conveys a bitter irony: the explorers have come so far from their home planet only to discover a parodic reflection of the terrestrial politics they have left behind.

At the same time, however, other clues suggest that Barbenfouillis, and perhaps the audience, are projecting their terrestrial prejudices onto a situation that is much more alien than they recognize. While they imagine themselves as heroic conquerors imperiled by a horde of bloodthirsty savages, it is Barbenfouillis and his company who are guilty of “first blood” (or smoke). The Selenites are justified in binding their hands and bringing them in for questioning, and there is no clear indication that the Selenite King’s address to the captives is unreasonably threatening. The Selenite King is also shown sitting in the company of five (human) “star maidens,” who surround him in a composition that seems to rise into the heavens, culminating in an “apex” maiden whose face is surrounded by a wide corona. During the “dream” sequence, these star maidens emblematized the oneiric mystery and uncanny unfathomability of the universe, and the fact that the Selenite King is enthroned among them, that they seem to endorse his royal status and bathe him in their radiance, suggests that the Selenites are on familiar terms with cosmic reality, while the earthling explorers are mere bumblers and neophytes. Barbenfouillis and his party clearly don’t take time to reason through the implications of this, and, relying on their colonial narratives of white supremacy and anthropocentrism, they assassinate the Selenite King and make their clownish escape from the heart of the mystery that they had aspired to penetrate.

In this way, the alien species that we encounter most vividly in Méliès’s cinematic trip to the Moon is – in a reversal that would become a trope of sci-fi cinema – none but ourselves. It has frequently been noted that A Trip to the Moon is legible as an anti-colonialist statement, and even that the statue of Barbefouillis in the final celebration scene mimics the style and echoes the sentiments expressed in the anti-Boulangist political cartoons that Méliès had drawn earlier in his career mocking the militant European nationalism fueling colonial ambitions in Africa.¹⁴ While Méliès’s anti-colonial politics are difficult to discern in his other surviving films, the othering/mirroring effect enabled by the lunar-voyage device allows the comical plot of A Trip to the Moon to operate as a commentary on human reality by imagining it on a planetary scale. After the explorers make their escape from the Selenite King’s throne room, we see a scene that shows their panicky flight across a lunar landscape in the bottom of the frame, while the upper zone of the image shows a starry sky featuring a full, glowing earth and two other planets, possibly Venus and Mars. The Earth is conventionally situated to clearly show Eurasia in the upper hemisphere and Africa in the lower. The presence of this image of Earth in the background lends a global perspective to Barbenfouillis’s conflict with the Selenites, sharpening the sense in which this conflict appears as an extension of terrestrial geopolitics. The presence of the other planets in the sky, meanwhile, suggests that Venus and Mars provide further worlds for earthlings to disturb with their murderous, bumbling escapades. The composition of the scene combines the “Apollo” effect of seeing the earth from space – its evocation of the human condition as such – with the perspective of the relationship between the human characters and the lunar indigenes in a way that positions Barbenfouillis’s behavior as emblematic of European history on a global scale. The interplanetary perspective stages an encounter with otherness in a way that encourages the audience to see the dynamics of this encounter itself from an “other” perspective, opening a space for critique and self-awareness.

When, in the explorers’ final escape from the Selenites, the capsule tilts off a ledge and falls back to earth, the spatial impression suggests a hierarchical relationship between the Earth and the Moon, as if the moon is not just another world, but is “higher” than the earth in an ethical and even ontological kind of way. As the capsule is tugged back to land, the moon once again appears in the sky, just as it had in the first act of the film, only, this time, it does not appear framed as an object of study or targeted by telescopes and cannons; it appears in its romantic, ethereal, guise, pristine and undisturbed, shining a sparkling trail of brilliance down on the water. This is the moon returned to its celestial perfection – a moon that Barbenfouillis’s crew never penetrated. Although the final “celebration” tableaux of the film take place during the day, with no Moon in the sky, the vision of human reality they present is illuminated by this lunar perspective, contributing an ironic counterpoint to the ceremonial events displayed on the screen. In the first of the two celebration tableaux, the mise-en-scène echoes that of the scene in the Selenite throne room, with its identical configuration of assembled dignitaries, the “chief” sitting to the left, and Barbenfouillis’s party entering from the right. When he stands up to address Barbenfouillis, this official even gesticulates in ways that parallel the gesticulations of the Selenite king. The gaudy decorations strung across the sky offer a pale imitation of the celestial bodies (Earth among them) in the Selenite’s throne room, however, and the cartoonish officials who populate the dais alongside the chief are certainly degraded travesties of the star maidens who had lent their cosmic authority to the Selenite King. The oversized moon-medals bestowed on the explorers are tawdry substitutes for the Selenites’ communion with celestial bodies, and, most conspicuously, the graceless capering of Barbenfouillis’s party and the other revelers contrasts markedly with the discipline and poise of the attendants in the Selenite throne room. Moreover, whereas the Selenites had restrained their unpredictable human captives, they did not humiliate them, as the earthlings do the captured Selenite. This display of human sadism was considered scathing enough that was tactfully reimagined in Pathe’s otherwise slavishly faithful authorized remake of the film (1908’s Excursion to the Moon, in which the Selenite who returns to Earth is a princess absconding with her earthling lover) and edited out of Martin Scorsese’s sentimental abridgement of A Trip to the Moon in his 2011 film Hugo. While all of A Trip to the Moon has a gently comic satirical quality, the scene in which the Selenite captive is paraded has a uniquely blistering intensity, at least some of which derives from the sense of contrast between this scene and the scene in the Selenite King’s throne room in particular, and by the travelers’ interplanetary experience in general. The lunar frame of reference provides a point of contrast, an extraterrestrial perspective, from which to observe human behavior, both in its profound insignificance and its terrifying power. In the film’s final scene, the absurd statue of Barbenfouillis in a conquering pose with the Moon underfoot is feted as the final statement on the nature of his accomplishment. The Moon in the statue is the “iconic” Méliès Moon, with a bullet lodged in the eye of its indignant face, reflecting the same sadistic stance toward the Moon that the explorers and revelers had shown to the moon-dwellers, and the engravings on the statue’s pedestal, “LABOR OMNIA VINCIT” and “SCIENCE,” suggest that his attitude exemplifies the quintessence of human labor and knowledge in general. Rather than just representing comic types, Barbenfouillis and his party become exemplars of the human condition, whose buffoonish violence implicates the species as a planetary whole.

The planetary frame of reference implicit in the premise of the movie’s narrative invites an audience to launch themselves into an alien space, while simultaneously re-identifying themselves as “earthlings.” Oliver, Messeri, Fay, and Spivak all describe the paradox of being both self and other, involving the othering of the self and identification with the other, as a critical part of “planet thought.” Conceptualizing the planetary scale involves both generalizing from what we know of our part of the planet to the rest of the planet and to other planets, as well as defamiliarizing the everyday solidity of ground and sky by recognizing them as being borne along on a rocky sphere spinning through space. This sense of planetarity also encompasses our relations with other earthlings – both human beings from other cultures and the animals and other lifeforms that share this designation with us. Oliver, applying Kant’s philosophical principles to her interpretation of the Apollo photographs, concludes, “Thus, only from an alien perspective can we truly see ourselves.”¹⁵ For Spivak, however, the principle of alterity implicit in the planetary imagination involves a more radical reorganization of consciousness. Rather than simply allowing is to see ourselves as we “truly” are, planetarity confronts us with the impossible knowledge that “what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with us as it is not, indeed, discontinuous.”¹⁶ Spivak proposes this vision of planeterity as a style of thinking that can help to undo the Eurocentric legacy of socio-economic globalization. She calls this style of thinking, “necessary yet impossible,”¹⁷ insisting that planetarity constitutes “an experience of the impossible,”¹⁸ so perhaps it makes sense that Méliès, with his unique penchant for staging impossible situations, and cinema in general, with its reality-distortion effects, are uniquely suited to exploring the radical alterity of “the planetary imagination.”

Author Bio:

Randy Laist is a professor of English at the University of Bridgeport, where he chairs the English Department and the Film, Television, and Digital Media program. He is the author of several book, including Cinema of Simulation: Hyperreal Hollywood in the Long 1990s and The Twin Towers in Film: A Cinematic History of the World Trade Center.

Notes

1. Mary Oliver, Earth and World: Philosophy after the Apollo Missions (NY: Columbia University Press, 2015), 19. ⮭
2. Ibid., 19. ⮭
3. Ibid., 12. ⮭
4. Ibid., 38. ⮭
5. Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford Univerasity Press, 2008), 4–8. ⮭
6. Lisa Messeri, Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 9. ⮭
7. Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (NY: Columbia University Press, 2003), 72–73. ⮭
8. Ibid., 102. ⮭
9. Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3. ⮭
10. Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture.” The American Historical Review, 116(3), 2011, 602–630. ⮭
11. Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998), 63. ⮭
12. Oliver, Earth and World, 12. ⮭
13. Elizabeth Ezra, Georges Méliès (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 124. ⮭
14. Matthew Solomon, “Introduction,” in Solomon, Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination (NY: State University of New York Press, 2011), 11–12. ⮭
15. Oliver, Earth and World, 68. ⮭
16. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 73. ⮭
17. Ibid., 92. ⮭
18. Ibid., 102. ⮭