When Ben Peterson (James Whitmore), a New Mexico state trooper, comes across a little girl wandering around in the desert, clutching a doll to her chest in Gordon Douglas’s Them! (1954), he knows there’s something amiss. ‘Look, she’s in shock’, he says, and sure enough, she is. Her dad has just been killed and their trailer squashed like a beer can. The sides are caved in, the interior is a mess, and curiouser and curiouser, there are sugar cubes strewn about the ground, not to mention strange tracks in the sand. Pretty soon the scene of the crime is crawling with fingerprinters and police photographers, but no one can make head or tail of the sugar cubes, tracks, and above all, the peculiar high-pitched ringing sound that fills the air with a maddening throb. No money has been taken, and the whole thing ‘doesn’t make sense’, as one cop says to another. Indeed, the police procedure seems completely inappropriate. As in Twelve Angry Men and Panic in the Streets, reality defies common sense; this is clearly a job for experts, not professionals; docs, not cops.
Later, we find out that the culprits were oversized ants who have a correspondingly lusty appetite for sweets, and that the destruction of the trailer was incidental; it happened while they were rummaging around for sugar, which they love more than life itself. But what may not have been so incidental is the identity of the little girl’s dad, the ants’ first victim: he was an FBI agent on vacation. The ants, in other words, spawned in the desert of the Southwest, have struck at J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men, agents of the federal authority from the East.
Them! goes on to build this whisper of regional rivalry into a structural contrast by cutting between shots of desert locales, with the ants wreaking havoc and spilling sugar every which way, and shots of Washington, D.C. When the dry, dusty landscape of the Southwest fades away and the U.S. Capitol Building, lit up like a Christmas tree on a dark Washington night, fades in, we breathe a sigh of relief. We know that once the authorities in Washington are alerted to the danger, everything will be under control. In other words, if the threat arises in New Mexico, strikes at Washington through the death of the FBI agent, and then against Los Angeles, a major urban centre, the solution moves from the national to local. When the time comes to declare martial law, and the words we have been waiting for boom out over the loudspeakers – ‘Your personal safety and the safety of the entire city depend on your full cooperation with the military authorities’ – we know it’s true. People in the street after the curfew are subject to arrest by the MPs, but we don’t care. After all, it’s a national emergency. Them! has effectively established the legitimacy of state power.
The federal government in Washington responds to the crisis by dispatching Dr. and Pat Medford (Edmund Gwenn and Joan Weldon), a father/daughter team of ‘myrmecologists’ from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (remember the U.S. Department of Health in Panic?), a general, and an FBI agent named Robert Graham (James Arness) bringing up the rear. Although the national elite, the coalition of the centre, runs the show, it does not sweep aside local authority, but works through it, forming an alliance with Ben Peterson, the state trooper. He becomes the agent of the federal government within the local community. Federal interests are administered, mediated by local officials.
It is the scientists who have pride of place. Dr. Medford is a benign, avuncular fellow, a far cry from the demented Thorkels of yesteryear. Although he wonders what God hath wrought (‘We may be witnessing a biblical prophecy come true … The beasts will reign over the earth’), he also knows that the test tube is mightier than the cross, and that once again, if it was science (in this case nuclear testing) that had caused the problem, science would solve it too.
Them! reflects the new prestige of science by placing scientists at the centre of world-shaking events. Dr. Medford meets with the president, lectures top public officials, and is able to command the full resources of the state. In the same way that the mayor in Panic had to take orders from Dr. Reed, so here the general has to take orders from Dr. Medford. In fact, he flies Medford around in his Air Force plane like a chauffeur, and Pat Medford observes, ‘It’s like a scientist’s dream.’ Poor agent Graham complains that the scientists are keeping him in the dark and won’t tell him their theory. ‘We’re on this case, too’, he says plaintively. The cachet of science is so great that it even seems to upset the traditional hierarchy of sex roles. When the men get ready to climb down into the ants’ nest, Pat Medford wants to go along. ‘It’s no place for you or any other woman’, says agent Graham manfully, but she puts up a fight. ‘Somebody with scientific knowledge, a trained observer, has to go’, she says, and not only does she have her way, she takes over, ordering the men to torch the queen’s chamber. Far from resisting her power, agent Graham falls in love with her, raising the prospect that the alliance between science and the military, or, in this case, the law, will be ratified by marriage.
Often, in films like Them!, the military was not able to use its big guns because it was fighting on its own turf. Even the army, eager to bomb the ants in the desert, hesitated to nuke Los Angeles, so that the search for the appropriate weapon, more discriminating and selective than the H-bomb, became a major theme in corporate-liberal sci-fi, a distant echo of the fight within the defense establishment over big bombs or tactical nuclear weapons. The search for a flexible, limited response to the alien threat reflected corporate liberals’ uneasiness with the all-or-nothing strategy of massive retaliation championed by conservatives like Dulles. In Them!, the appropriate weapon is gas, not guns; in The Beginning of the End, it is sound, not bombs, a sonar imitation of the grasshoppers’ mating call, that lures them to a watery death in Lake Michigan.
While the scientists and soldiers were quarreling among themselves over the appropriate weapon, another group of scientists and soldiers was having its own troubles up north, in Howard Hawks’s The Thing (1951). This film was based on a 1938 novella called Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell. Like Them!, The Thing is not only preoccupied with hierarchies of authority, the authority of groups, and groups in conflict, but also with the struggle between science and the military, and the nature of aliens. The Thing, however, is a conservative film, and so the outcome of these conflicts is somewhat different.
When Air Force Capt. Pat Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) arrives in a remote Arctic outpost of scientists to help them investigate a strange item buried in the ice, he finds an enormous object apparently shaped like a frying pan. His men fan out around it and quickly find that they have made a circle. ‘We found a flying saucer’, someone shouts, and indeed they have. ‘This isn’t any metal I know’, says another, examining a fin protruding from the ice.
But Hendry’s problems are just beginning, because it seems that the passenger aboard the saucer has survived; it is the Thing-from-Another-World, as the ads put it, and it lives on blood. As if this weren’t bad enough, Hendry discovers that the head scientist at the base, Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite), is almost as dangerous as the Thing, much as Wyatt Earp in Clementine discovers that he has to deal with Doc Holliday before he can face the Clantons. We’re tipped off right away by his goatee (facial hair in the 1950s was about as popular as bad breath) and his Russian-style fur hat. When he’s not wearing that, he’s attired in a dressing gown and ascot, a thinking man’s David Niven, out of place among the rough-and-tumble soldiers.
Carrington is no Medford. He’s a borderline-mad scientist, and in The Thing the tension between science and the military that was latent in Them! not only becomes much more pronounced, it is resolved in favour of the military. FBI agent Bob Graham complained in Them! that he couldn’t understand the Medfords because they used too many big words (‘Why don’t we all talk English?’ he says testily), but Graham was something of a clod anyway, and if he couldn’t make out their technical lingo, it was probably his own fault. But when Captain Hendry asks a question and gets only mumbo jumbo in return, it’s another matter. ‘You lost me’, he says, and this time it’s the scientists’ fault, a symptom of technocratic arrogance. In Them!, Medford’s admiration for the ‘wonderful and intricate engineering’ of the ants’ nest is reasonable, not unseemly or unpatriotic. But in The Thing, Dr. Carrington’s scientific curiosity is given a sinister twist. He develops an altogether unhealthy interest in the Thing. ‘It’s wiser than we are’, he says. ‘If only we could communicate with it, we could learn secrets hidden from mankind.’ Whereas Medford merely restrains the military because he wants to find out if the queen is dead, Carrington betrays it, defecting to the Other side. He helps the Thing reproduce itself, finds a nice warm spot in the greenhouse for it to lay its spores, and even sabotages Hendry’s attempts to kill it.
Carrington’s scientific disinterest, which reflects the value-free pragmatism of the corporate liberals, is regarded as appeasement. ‘There are no enemies in science, only phenomena to be studied’, he says, but he’s wrong. There are no neutrals. When he rushes up to the Thing, alien groupie that he is, crying, ‘I’m your friend’, it swats him aside like a fly. The enemy is remorseless and cruel; negotiations with it are useless, and those who try are self-deceiving at best. Carrington is an unreliable element – private, moody, reclusive. He’s soft on aliens, a Thing-symp, the J. Robert Oppenheimer of the Arctic base. The genial scientist and expert of Them! is transformed into an extremist ‘egghead’, a head-over-heart zealot, a man who can’t be trusted because ‘he doesn’t think like we do’, a man who has contempt for the average and is therefore dangerous. Unlike Dr. Medford, Carrington is derided as a genius or superman. ‘These geniuses’, says Hendry with contempt. ‘They’re just like nine-year-olds playing with a new fire engine.’ Carrington’s behaviour justifies the soldiers’ mistrust of science, even turns them against the Bomb itself. ‘Knowledge is more important than life. We split the atom’, Carrington shouts in a transport of enthusiasm. ‘That sure made everybody happy’, comes the sour reply from one of Hendry’s men.
But even here, science is by no means rejected wholesale. There are good scientists as well as bad, Tellers as well as Oppenheimers, and the difference between them is that the good scientists side with and defer to Hendry, instead of Carrington. Carrington’s real crime, that is to say, worse than consorting with the enemy, is setting his own authority against that of the military. As in Panic, it is a question of turf. Hendry’s appearance at the base signals a change in command like the ones in Twelve O’Clock High and Flying Leathernecks, and the figurative one in Clementine. When he first arrives, he is warned that he is treading on alien territory. ‘Dr. Carrington is in charge here’, says one of the scientists. Hendry’s job is to seize control of the base and assert the authority of the soldiers over the scientists. Eventually confined to his quarters, Carrington shouts, echoing the mayor and reporter in Panic, ‘You have no authority here’, but when one of Hendry’s men pokes a revolver in his face, Carrington learns that power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
And what about the people, the average Joes and plain Janes who are neither scientists nor soldiers? In Them!, it seems that they are almost as much of a problem as the ants themselves. They spend most of their time in films like this fleeing for their lives, obstructing the best efforts of the government to save them from themselves. Occasionally they pause long enough to riot, destroying valuable scientific equipment or medical supplies. Since the people are helpless to help themselves, the war against the ants has to be carried on by experts behind closed doors. In one scene, pilot Fess Parker, who has seen a queen in flight winging her way west to Los Angeles, has been thrown into a loony bin. The doctors and the local authorities, who have been kept in the dark by the scientists and soldiers, think he’s crazy. When agent Graham questions him, it becomes clear that he isn’t nuts – the pilot did see the flying queen – but nevertheless, he is not vindicated, as he would be in a radical film. On the contrary, Graham tells the doctors to keep him locked up in the hospital, his therapeutic prison: ‘Your government would appreciate it if you kept him here.’ Reporters, as in Panic, threaten official secrecy. Like their readers, they have to be kept in the dark. ‘Do you think all this hush-hush is necessary?’ someone asks Dr. Medford. ‘I certainly do’, he replies. ‘I don’t think there’s a police force in the world that could handle the panic of the people if they found out what the situation is.’ When it’s no longer possible to cover up the facts, and the ants are strolling down Sunset Boulevard, the mayor of Los Angeles finally calls a press conference, but ‘there is no time for questions’.
There is bad blood between the authorities and the press in The Thing too, but this conflict is resolved differently than it is in Them! A nosy reporter named Scotty (Douglas Spencer) realises there’s a big story afoot, and he wants to tag along. ‘This is Air Force information’, says Hendry, refusing to let Scotty near the saucer. ‘The whole world wants to know’, replies Scotty, sketching in the Big Picture for Hendry. But here, Big Picture-ism fails. ‘I work for the Air Force, not the world’, snaps Hendry, voicing the conservative preference for the concrete and local over the abstract and general. But instead of the reporter being thrown in jail, an amiable arrangement is reached. Scotty is allowed to accompany Hendry to the Arctic base in exchange for agreeing to withhold the story until he gets permission from the authorities to release it. And at the end of the film, when he does tell part of the story in a broadcast to the world, he is allowed to speak for everyone, Hendry and Carrington, the soldiers and the scientists. As the voice of the centre, he goes out of his way to pay special tribute to Carrington (who by this time has learned his lesson), papering over the differences that factionalised the group, as Fonda does in Twelve Angry Men and York does in Fort Apache. Once again, the centre closes ranks before the world.
Scotty can be accommodated more easily than the reporters in Panic and Them!, because The Thing is more populist. Within the community of soldiers and scientists at the base, relationships are more egalitarian than they are in similar communities in corporate-liberal films. When Tex, one of Hendry’s men, enters a room and sees the group mobilising against the Thing, he quips, ‘What’s up? It looks like a lynching party.’ In corporate-liberal films that regard people acting on their own as mobs or would-be vigilantes, it would be; here, it’s not. Hendry may give the orders, but a number of ideas bearing on the disposal of the Thing originate with others, are adopted by Hendry, and ultimately work. Even the best lines of what for sci-fi is an unusually talky script (by Charles Lederer) are democratically distributed among the officers, noncoms, civilians, and (one) woman alike. There is a good deal of overlapping dialogue; people continually interrupt one another with wisecracks and good-natured insults. There is a real sense of community, of people engaged in a common effort, which nevertheless doesn’t prevent them from expressing their individuality.
If people in Them! obstruct authority, authority in The Thing frustrates people. The conflict between soldiers and scientists is complemented by another, this one between Hendry, his superior officer General Fogarty in Anchorage, and the brass back in Washington. Hendry begins his odyssey as the perfect Air Force organisation man. He can’t blow his nose without clearing it first with headquarters. Not only won’t he allow Scotty to wire his paper without authorisation from Fogarty, but Fogarty himself has to refer back to Washington. ‘That’s what I like about the Air Force’, quips Scotty, ‘smart all the way to the top.’
The critique of bureaucracy, an obligatory preoccupation of conservative films, is given some new twists in science fiction. The absurdity of ‘going by the book’, the limitations of ‘standard operating procedure’, are never more apparent than when you’re dealing with flying saucers and little green men. When Hendry goes by the book, it’s a recipe for disaster. Using standard operating procedure to free the saucer from the ice, he accidentally blows it up with thermite. The film is filled with jokes about military bureaucracy. As the men stare at the frozen saucer, someone recalls that the Air Force dismissed UFOs as ‘a mild form of mass hysteria’, but in The Thing, the masses aren’t hysterical. On the contrary, the problem is the brass. Red tape, finally, immobilises Hendry altogether. ‘Until I receive my instructions from my superior officers about what to do’, he says, ‘we’ll have to mark time.’
When the orders finally do come, they are worthless. Although the Thing has been making Bloody Marys out of the boys at the base, Fogarty instructs Hendry to ‘avoid harming the alien at all costs’. Like York in Fort Apache and Sergeant Warden in From Here to Eternity, Hendry is forced to disobey orders, even at the risk of court-martial. He can’t go too far, like Carrington, but he has to do something, because the organisation is out of touch with reality. And reality here is not national and abstract, but local and concrete. The problem has to be resolved on the spot. Like most conservative films, The Thing ultimately deals with the problem without calling in the federal government. The Thing is dispatched by means of a do-it-yourself electric chair, improvised out of the materials at hand. But what keeps this from being a right-wing execution is that although the men at the base do it themselves, they are still soldiers employed by the government, working ultimately in its interests. By this kind of sleight of hand, conservative films avoided having to make the either/or choice Whyte presented to his organisation man. For all the ambivalence The Thing expresses toward the Air Force, Hendry’s rebellion, like York’s in Fort Apache and Warden’s in From Here to Eternity, is confined to the parameters of the organisation. He remains an Air Force man to the last.
What about the Thing itself, and the ants? What do they ‘represent’? First, on a level so obvious that it is usually ignored, the ants represent an attack by nature on culture. Nature, for all mankind’s technological expertise, is still a threat, red in tooth and claw. But the anthropomorphic gravity of American films is so strong that they have difficulty dramatising genuine otherness. Aliens, no matter how seemingly strange and exotic, end up resembling humans in one way or another. It would be hard to imagine anything more Other than, say, giant ants, until Dr. Medford explains that ‘ants are savage, ruthless and courageous fighters. They are the only creatures on Earth aside from man who make war. Ants campaign, they are chronic aggressors, they make slaves of those they can’t kill.’ In other words, the humans of Them! find that their adversaries are very much like Us.
If the ants are like humans, which humans are they like? In 1954, when Them! was made, those humans that Americans regarded as antlike, which is to say, behaved like a mass, loved war, and made slaves, were, of course, Communists, both the Yellow Hordes that had just swamped GIs with their human waves in Korea, and the Soviets, with their notorious slave-labour camps. Sci-fi films that presented Communists directly, like Invasion U.S.A. and Red Planet Mars, were rare. The analogy was usually oblique, but so close to the surface (in The Naked Jungle, also released in 1954, the ants that climbed all over Charlton Heston were actually red, and attacked private property to boot) as to be just below the level of consciousness. Presenting Reds as ants or aliens served to establish their Otherness. As Gerhart Niemeyer of Notre Dame put it, the Red mind ‘shares neither truth nor logic nor morality with the rest of mankind’. They were not just like Us.
To corporate liberals, Russians in turn stood for the eruption of primitive aggressive behavior. Reds, in other words, were monsters from the id. If we press Them! a little further, it quickly becomes apparent that the ants are not only Reds, they’re females. Them! has as much to do with the sex war as it does the cold war. The film’s attack on extremism becomes an attack on women in a man’s world.
Centrist films feared the eruption of nature within culture and were therefore afraid of sex and mistrusted women, particularly sexual women. In Forbidden Planet, we recall that the Skipper made Alta exchange her skimpy tennis dress for a long gown and put an end to her promiscuous kissing. The monster from the id, nature within, was provoked by Alta’s burgeoning sexuality. Like Natalie Wood in Bombers B-52, she had become ‘restless’.
Them! balances somewhat contradictory attitudes toward sex and sex roles. On the one hand, as we have seen, it explicitly presents an independent woman scientist, whose strong will prevails over agent Graham’s this-is-no-place-for-a-woman conservatism. On the other hand, it implicitly presents, in slightly disguised form, a paranoid fantasy of a world dominated by predatory females. The ant society is, after all, a matriarchy presided over by a despotic queen. The queen, it seems, strikes only at patriarchy. Not only does she kill the male drones, but all her human victims are male (one man’s phallic shotgun is bent like a paper clip), including two fathers. When the ants are finally cornered, they take cover in Los Angeles’s womblike storm drains that conceal the queen’s ‘egg chamber’. ‘Burn’em out’, is the verdict of the male scientists and soldiers at the end of the film, as they perform a hysterectomy by flamethrower.
Them! examines on a fantasy level and on an apocalyptic scale what it leaves unexamined on the ‘realistic’ level: the conflict between Pat Medford’s independence and the chauvinism of the men. It conveys two complementary cautionary messages. To men the moral is: Better give an inch than lose a mile, better let Pat Medford assert herself, or face a far more serious challenge to male power in the future. To women: Don’t be too assertive or you’ll be punished for it. Centrist films often defined and negated the extremes, the limits of behavior, leaving it to the audience to negotiate an acceptable compromise within those limits.
Like Them!, The Thing in its most abstract aspect depicts nature’s inhuman assault on civilisation. The vast, bleak Arctic wastes play the same role here that the desert plays in Them! The film’s final lines, the celebrated injunction to ‘watch the skies’, ask us not only to fear that which comes from space, but space itself, absence, emptiness, the negation of culture. Like the expanse of ice, the sky is an image of Otherness, and that which is not-culture is dystopian. By contrast, enclosures, manufactured spaces, mean safety. The tiny Arctic base does not feel claustrophobic, nor is it experienced as a prison; rather it becomes a fortress of human warmth, albeit a fragile one, easily destroyed, like the trailer in Them!
Like the ants, the Thing bears multiple meanings. The Russians immediately come to mind. Hendry actually speculates early on that the puzzling occurrences in the Arctic ‘could be the Russians – they’re all over the pole like flies’. But Hendry finds out that the problem is not the Russians, but the Thing – or does he? What is the Thing? Despite the fact that it is apparently part of the natural world, more vegetable than mineral, the Thing is a robot. Some films rendered the distinction between nature and culture as one between animals and vegetables, where vegetables take on the characteristics usually associated with machines: they don’t feel pain, have no emotions, and aren’t retarded by moral scruples. In Invasion of the Brain Eaters (1958), for example, once the plantlike parasites have taken over, people become ‘like robots – machines taking orders’. But the Thing, like the ants in Them! – like most film symbols – ‘depends on associations, not a consistent code’ as critic Raymond Durgnat puts it. It slips and slides from one meaning to another. Although the Thing is supposed to be an entirely alien form of life, it looks like nothing more unusual than a large man. Which man is it like? Carrington, of course, the Thing’s pal, the cold, unfeeling genius who is as superior to his colleagues as the Thing is smarter than garden-variety humans, and whose development has not been, as someone says of the Thing, ‘handicapped by emotional or sexual factors’. (In one version of the script, Carrington is actually killed by the Thing, and Scotty says, ‘Both monsters are dead.’) Carrington, as we have seen, is a pluralist mad scientist, but with his beard and Soviet-style fur hat, he is also a Russian, so we have come full circle. This film attacks pluralists by equating them with Reds. And if a film like Them!, through its linkage of nature, ants, women and Russians, imagines Reds as monsters from the id, conservatives imagined them as emotionless veggies or robots, repressive, not eruptive. They represented reason run amok; they were monsters from the superego.
Finally, however, conservative films fell in line behind their corporate-liberal allies in time for the final fade-out. In The Thing, this means that although the blood-sucking carrot from another world is a head-over-heart veggie robot Red monster from the superego one minute, it is an extremist heart-over-head monster from the id the next.
When Hendry arrives at the Arctic base, before introducing himself to Carrington or investigating the strange ‘disturbances’, he makes straight for the only woman, Nikki Nicholson (Margaret Sheridan). First things first. It seems that the two are romantically involved, although Nikki is piqued because, on their last date, Hendry got drunk and took liberties. ‘You had moments of making like an octopus’, she tells him. ‘I’ve never seen so many hands in all my life.’ If the head can get out of hand, hands can lose their heads, and Hendry has to learn to keep his to himself. ‘You can tie my hands, if you want to’, he suggests, and in a bizarre scene, she does just that. As he sits in a chair, his hands safely tied behind his back, she pours a drink down his throat and then kisses him on the lips. In other words, she has to emasculate and infantilise him before he can become a safe and acceptable suitor. But the joke is on her. His hands aren’t tied after all; he’s just pretending, and at the end of the scene, he flings off the ropes and grabs her. Cut directly to a large block of ice bound with rope, just like Hendry. Inside the ice is the Thing, just as inside Hendry is the id. The ice accidentally melts, and the Thing gets loose, in the same way that Hendry escapes Nikki’s bonds. At the end of the film, when the Thing is destroyed, the monster from Hendry’s id is symbolically subdued, clearing the way for the union of Hendry and Nikki. The extremes of head (Carrington) and heart (Hendry’s id), culture and nature, both represented by the Thing, have given way, once again, to the golden mean. But the dénouement is a characteristically conservative one. As in Forbidden Planet, force, not therapy, is the solution to the problems of the self.
This confusing plurality of meanings is at least in part an expression of the centre’s inclination to reconcile contradictions, to be all things to all people. Conservative films, as we have seen, were torn between extremists on their right and corporate liberals on their left. They fought against and borrowed from both in an attempt to achieve their own distinctive equilibrium. Both Them! and The Thing want soldiers and scientists to work together. The differences between the two films are those of emphasis. Each, in a slightly different way, equated the cold war with the sex war, politics with personality, the Russians with the id or superego on both. Each implied that not only did the Soviets pose an external threat and, worse, an internal one through unreliable, wrong-thinking elements like Carrington, but worst of all, they penetrated our very selves. We were all potentially extremists inside. As Schlesinger put it, ‘There is a Hitler, a Stalin in every breast.’