Ray Bradbury Theater '89: A Sound of Thunder (aka Don't Go Thair)

Ray Bradbury and members of the anthropod kingdom make an exceedingly good combination. At the very least, the Bradbury works that have struck the deepest, most personal chords with myself tend to involve creepy-crawlies to some capacity. This includes the story featuring arguably the most notorious bug in Bradbury's canon, this one not a raving, humanoid lunatic who likes terrorising innocent leisure seekers with prophecies of genetic evil, but an unassuming, ostensibly passive creature whose true significance does not become apparent until the very end, having spent most of the story being upstaged by a larger, more commanding beast. I speak of course of "A Sound of Thunder", Bradbury's cautionary fable about the perils of undervaluing the smaller specimens of the animal kingdom and (for my money, anyway) the greatest story ever written on the subject of time travel. First published in Collier's magazine in 1952, "A Sound of Thunder" was later included in Bradbury's 1953 anthology The Golden Apples of The Sun, and on August 11th 1989 received its long overdue televisual treatment as part of the anthology series The Ray Bradbury Theater, directed by Costa Bones and taken from a script adapted by Bradbury himself.

Despite being one of Bradbury's most well-known and celebrated tales, it took until the third season of Ray Bradbury Theater for "A Sound of Thunder" to be realised on screen, possibly because it is a challenging story to stage. It requires a dinosaur, and a sufficiently intimidating one at that (it was not, strangely enough, the first episode of Ray Bradbury Theater to involve a T-Rex, although the titular animal in "Tyrannosaurus Rex" was a stop-motion creation in context, and could get away with looking a little fake). We need only look to The Twilight Zone episode "The Elevator" (also penned by Bradbury) for an example of a decent enough concept that was hampered by the limitations of its execution. By comparison, I think "A Sound of Thunder" copes pretty admirably with its own constraints. It goes without saying that, for a television budget in 1989, you're not going to get something that compares favourably with Jurassic Park. The T-Rex here is a jerky, rubbery creation (all the same, I could tell straight away that it was meant to be a T-Rex, which puts it well above the vaguely spider-shaped menace from "The Elevator"), and our protagonist's observation ("It could reach up and grab the moon!") seems more than little hyperbolic (more so than it would have done with a technical sophistication akin to Jurassic Park). But if you accept that as inevitable, then "A Sound of Thunder" is quite a rewarding piece of television - a whole lot of fun, and with a closing sting as deliciously, affectingly bitter as one would hope from such a classic - and powerful - twist.

 

"A Sound of Thunder" begins in the year 2055, following a presidential election in which an aspiring fascist dictator, Deutscher, was defeated by his democracy-upholding opponent, Keith. (We do not meet Deutscher first-hand in either version, but in the original story he is described by one character as "an anti-everything man...a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual". Uncanny, that.) A game hunter, Eckels (Kiel Martin, who sadly died the following year), has arrived at the offices of Time Safari Inc, a time travel service that enables patrons to visit prehistoric times and bag extinct animals. Eckels claims to have conquered every living animal species, and now wishes to travel to the Late Cretaceous period for the privilege of killing a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the largest predator to have walked the planet. He is warned by his safari guide, Travis (John Bach), to avoid interaction with the past environment, for even the most seemingly minor of alterations could have a catastrophic effect on the future. Time Safari carefully selects its targets, so as to only kill animals that would have died imminently anyway, and participants are required to stay upon a levitating path so as to avoid contact with the local terrain. Travis explains the gravitas of the situation to an incredulous Eckels, in a slightly abridged version of his speech in the original story:

 

"Step on a mouse, you annihilate one, a thousand, a million possible mice...For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of a fox, a lion starves. For want of a lion, infinite billions of lifeforms cease to exists. A caveman goes hunting, but you, friend, have stepped on all his lions. The caveman starves. From his loins might have sprung ten sons, from theirs a hundred. Kill this one man, you destroy a race of people, an entire history of life. Europe remains forever a dark forest. Step on a mouse, you leave your print like a grand canyon across eternity. SO STAY ON THE PATH!"

 

The safari ventures along the path, but when confronted by their pre-selected prey, a Tyrannosaurus Rex due to be crushed by a falling tree, Eckels, intimidated by the size of the creature, loses his nerve and backs away, accidentally straying from the path and trampling the grass below. In his stead, Travis and his men manage to bring down the T-Rex, which is finished off by the falling tree. Angered at Eckels both for endangering the group with his hesitation and wandering from the path, Travis forces him to physically remove the bullets from the T-Rex carcass before allowing him back onto the time machine. Eckels complies, and the group returns to 2055, but it's clearly not the same 2055 they departed from. Something feels distinctly off...

"A Sound of Thunder" is, for the most part, a faithful recreation of the original story, the most obvious alteration being that this particular version of Eckels is markedly more odious than his literary counterpart. The adaptation includes a scene, not present in the source material, where Travis surveys examples from Eckels' hunting repertoire and challenges him on having illegally killed an elephant - a scene likely incorporated to reflect the general decrease in sympathies toward trophy hunting between 1952 and 1989. When confronted with a T-Rex in the flesh, both versions of Eckels whimper that they are not used to feeling that they are in genuine danger, but TV Eckels goes a notch further, betraying that he was possibly not as skilled a hunter as he made out ("I always won...somebody'd get me out..."). I would hesitate to describe Eckels, as portrayed in the story, sympathetic (he does, after all, go back an awfully long way to murder a dinosaur, for no other purpose than to feed his own ego), but there he's imbued with a stronger sense of humanity - he discusses the outcome of the election amiably with the agent behind the desk (their exchange in the TV version is a lot more curt), and since we experience the story from his point of view, we end up identifying with his dismay at having blundered into a situation that he was totally ill-prepared for. In the adaptation, that dismay is still very evident, but Martin portrays with him a kind of smirking, borderline cartoonish buffoonery that seems intent on keeping the viewer at bay. Whatever pity we might feel for his vulnerability stems squarely from his patheticness, which is in spades. In both cases, Eckels is a victim of his own hubris, yet the outcome, while technically identical, seems to suit different ends. In the story, he's a tragically naive figure who bites off more than he can chew and lives to regret it (albeit not for long), while in the TV adaptation, his demise comes across as more obviously karmic in nature, a trigger-happy ninny with a superiority complex finally discovering how it feels being on the other end of a gun. TV Eckels is presented as so dense, in fact, that it's not altogether clear if he ever pieces together what he has done. Whereas in the story it is Eckels himself who makes the bombshell discovery - they have returned to a dystopian future where Deutscher is now in power - and locates the terrible root cause of this -  there's a dead butterfly stuck to his boot! - in the TV adaptation this is all accomplished by Travis, possibly as an indication of our shift in allegiances.

On that note, the elephant exchange is also useful in establishing the fundamental difference between Eckels' and Travis' respective outlooks on the venture. Travis is a rigidly conscientious man who understands and respects the complexities of nature and humankind's dependency on thus, and who endeavors to observe and abide by the responsibilities of time travel, whereas Eckels sees the world as his personal playground and has clearly never considered the impact of his actions beyond his own immediate gratification. But it does further call to mind the really pressing underlying question of Bradbury's story - namely, if Travis was really so conscientious, then surely he wouldn't be doing this in the first place? Time travel is clearly a risky business, for reasons he well understands, and the purpose of Time Safari Inc - to escort the obscenely wealthy to pre-history so that they can gun down a few long-extinct specimens at their leisure - seems way too frivolous to justify that risk. Which may well be the whole point. Travis explains to Eckels that the government feels uneasy about the practices of Time Safari (as it turns out, rightfully so), and that the franchise's continued existence is all down to its willingness to pay the grafts. By bringing those with more money than sense into the equation, the company was always begging for something, somewhere, to go spectacularly wrong. The bullet Travis puts in Eckels at the very end might signify the karmic retribution of a universe gnarled hopelessly out of whack, yet it seems to me that Travis is ultimately too complicit in the outcome for it not to also represent misplaced anger at his own enablement. What can I say, Travis and Eckels both deserve one another.

What is unsettling about the world the hunting party returns to is that it has not been warped beyond all recognition (a la the distorted timeline described in the cited warning from Travis), but instead plays like an eerie mirror version of the world they left behind. In the translation from page to screen, we inevitably lose the more subtle means through which Eckels detects that things are not quite right: "Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His body screamed silence in return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk...lay an entire world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind." Human history has followed a similar enough trajectory for the people and the buildings they left to still be there, in some form, but the butterfly-shaped hole has left its mark on a deeper, more emotional level, one permeating the very core of human nature, so that they are plainly not the same. This is confirmed when Eckels notices the signage for Time Safari Inc (or Tyme Safari Inc, as it is now called), and registers that the English language has undergone a slight mutation. Same words, same alphabet, different spellings. The sign has the queasy contradiction of being perfectly readable, yet disconcertingly alien. In the TV episode, the sign is transplanted (mostly) faithfully from Bradbury's story, but there are other, more flagrant visual clues as to the disturbed nature of the present - not least the fascist iconography and the heavily armed guards who now patrol the offices. In the story, Eckels frantically addresses the same agent to whom he spoke at the beginning and learns that Deutscher has won the election (in contrast to his earlier sentiments, the agent seems ecstatic with this outcome, denouncing Keith as a weakling). In the TV episode, the implication is that Deutscher was already in charge and democracy has long been obliterated. Travis asks the agent (Michael McLeod) who won the election and receives the response, "What election? Deutscher is president. Leader of the fifteenth rule." The outcome is the same, but in the story there is a greater sense of the butterfly's destruction having created a domino effect whose full repercussions were only now being felt, on the day in the history that Eckels had originally left. The denizens of this new, revised 2055 still had the choice between Keith and Deutscher, but chose the latter. The notion that the untimely demise of a single butterfly could determine the outcome of something so far removed in the future seems unthinkable, yet Bradbury presents the scenario with such sombre conviction that it is immediately chilling. This feeling is successfully carried over into the adaptation, where the imagery of the inert butterfly spiralling downward from Travis' hold, all of the flight drained out of it, becomes the perfect visual metaphor for Travis and Eckels' respective futures, and for the darker prospects of the human race.

What perhaps doesn't translate so well is the significance of the title, which comes up twice in the story - the sound of thunder is first used to describe the noise made by the rampaging T-Rex, and then finally the last thing Eckels hears as Travis fires his gun at him. Since a roaring T-Rex and a firing gun do not, in the more literal world of the TV adaptation, sound anything alike, if you hadn't read the story then would you have made the thematic connection? The implication being that the dual sounds represent some kind of terrible echo across time, a further reinforcement of the interconnectivity of the two moments, and a grim, tyrannical announcement that actions beget consequences, sometimes in the form of monstrous chain reactions.

In spite of the obvious technical limitations, I consider this a successful adaptation. The prehistoric jungle and animatronic T-Rex look distinctly artificial, and yet they have the kind of pleasing, tangible presence that's all but gone extinct in the CGI era. And the searing, poetic power of Bradbury's story remains fundamentally intact. We have the haunting contrast between the two pivotal animal species - the ferocious, hulking beast that Eckels travelled to the past with the expressed intention of destroying, and the tiny, delicate and entirely benign insect he accidentally ends up making his prey. The butterfly may have been the incidental casualty, so small that its presence is not even registered until the very end of the story, yet it was the being upon whom the course of so much ecological and human development depended. "A Sound of Thunder" is foremost a cautionary tale about the importance of respecting all forms of life, no matter how seemingly insignificant, for they all have their role to play in the grander web of existence. Bradbury asserts that since everything is interconnected, nothing is to be underestimated, and that a single disrupted thread will result in reverberations felt far across the web. The fragility of life, in all its forms, is evoked at several points, in the imagery of the mighty T-Rex slowly expiring beneath the felled tree, the crushed butterfly falling lifelessly to the office floor, and finally Eckels' implied death at the hands of Travis. In addition to the ecological implications, it is a sobering reminder that absolutely nothing about our own being, either individually or as a culture, is to be taken for granted, for how much this had, at one time or another, hung completely within the balance, dependent on incidental factors that could so easily have gone the other way?

 Spot the inconsistency? Hard to say if it's intentional or not.

On a final note, "A Sound of Thunder" was later adapted into a theatrical feature film in 2005, directed by Peter Hyams. I have not seen it, and since I haven't heard a single positive thing about the film it will likely stay that way. On the one hand, I can see why somebody might be interested in bringing the story to the big screen - those prehistoric sequences would look great with a theatrical budget, particularly in the post-Jurassic Park age. But I do have this one strong, lingering doubt - as with a lot of short-form fiction, "A Sound of Thunder" succeeds, in part, due to its elegant brevity. Bradbury makes his point beautifully and succinctly, in less than eleven pages. Half-hour television anthologies are the ideal avenue for such adaptations, even if it means working with a smaller budget. I'm not sure what a feature film could add to extend the story - unless, contrary to the mechanics of the original, you have Eckels go back in time in an effort to fix his mistake, and continue to make a complete haemorrhage of human history. In which case...I think The Simpsons had already mined that scenario to its greatest potential when they did their own take on the Bradbury story in the "Time and Punishment" segment of "Treehouse of Horror V" (where Homer assumes the role of Eckels, kills a prehistoric mosquito, and returns to a dictatorship run by Ned Flanders). The Simpsons accomplished it all in roughly six minutes at that.