Silent Towns story
A man is stranded on Mars during an evacuation, and desperately seeks out someone, anyone, else who may still remain. Directed by: Lee Tamahori. Story by: Ray Bradbury.
8 total · 2 choice · 2 major · 4 minor
| Theme | Level | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| loneliness | choice | Walter desperately sought out human contact after discovering himself to be all alone on Mars. Genevieve was equally lonely. In the end, Walter decided he'd rather be alone than spend his days with Genevieve. |
| what if I were all alone in the world | choice | When Walter returned to town from working in the mountains, he realized that he was likely the only person on Mars who missed the sudden mass evacuation to Earth. He eventually managed to establish telephone contact with a woman who had stayed behind. But upon meeting her in person, he was so utterly repulsed by her personality and physical appearance that he chose to make a break for it and spend his remaining days in solitude. |
| romantic courtship | major | Genevieve made plain to Walter her desire to marry him. She prepared a romantic candlelit dinner among other things. |
| unrequited love | major | Genevieve saw in Walter her future husband. Walter, by contrast, saw in Genevieve an obnoxious blob of a woman. |
| colonization of Mars | minor | The story is set in a couple frontier town on the Red Planet. |
| coping with romantic rejection | minor | Genevieve was left agog, aghast and, one may conjecture, heartbroken when her presumptive fiancée, Walter, hightailed it despite the fact that she was most likely the last woman on the whole planet. |
| creative writing | minor | In the introduction, Ray Bradbury shared with the viewer the wellsprings of creativity that inspire his writing. |
| the nature of creativity | minor | In his introduction, Ray Bradbury gave his viewers an intimate window into his writing room, and some of the self-professed sources of creativity that lay about within it. |