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LOOK TO THE SKIES! 1950s SCIENCE FICTION INVASION NARRATIVES |
Taken as a whole, 1950s US and British science fiction films are often argued to represent a collective paranoia that existed in American and British society during this time. These seemingly flimsy, low-budget B-movie texts, with hysterical titles such as I Married A Monster From Outer Space, are meant to be both a product of a post-war crisis in confidence and the amplifying agent for such cultural psychosis as it manifested itself in wider discourses and discursive practices of the time. One is able to read these films, then, through the filter of myth, metaphor and allegory, and by so doing one gets close(r) to being able to read the malaise at the core of society. The question that academics have wrestled with and contested is what this paranoia is centrally about. A number of distinct and sometimes contradictory answers have been given.
First, the Invasion Narratives are argued to be conduits for playing out the ideological battle that emerges from the Cold War between American and other Western Nation States, including Britain, during this period. In this reading alien invasion is seen as merely a code for soviet aggression and the imagined threat of nuclear, territorial and geographical domination. The in-(non-)human aliens are cold, pathological and demonstrate a crowd/herd instinct as they seek and destroy all human life in their wake. These murderous clones or simulacra, without individual personal freedoms to speak of, are here seen to embody the Soviet political system, and it is this embodiment that gets narratively transposed onto a vulnerable/weak Western society precisely because ordinary people fail to recognise or resist the alien threat – until it is nearly too late, that is. The message that ordinary people must be ever vigilant and ever conscious of the communist Other is ever present in these Invasion Narrative texts.
Second, the Invasion Narratives are argued to symbolically foreground the importance of the new power elites to post-war decision making. At a time when the power bases in Western society were being reformulated to privilege the military, scientists and a new breed of technical experts, science fiction is credited with placing them in crises scenarios that required them to work together. In fact, it is argued that the defeat of the aliens is only achieved through military-scientific ‘co-operation’ and through military-scientific, rationalist means – often with the development of new weaponry or a new invention that requires the input of both agencies. However, it is also argued that the Invasion Narratives also highlighted the contest between these power elites with science/scientists often placed in direct opposition to the might of the military machine.
Third, Invasion Narratives are argued to be fundamentally about dislocating transformations in Western society brought about by the rise of these new power elites. In this critical reading Invasion Narratives become a critique of a modern world increasingly regulated, routinised and controlled by rationalist and technological procedures and ‘mass produced’ leisure practices. This is played out in the science fiction film through conformity and cloning and the emptying out of human emotions, rendering people docile and automaton-like. In this representational framework, science and scientists are particularly represented as Frankenstein like, creating things (monsters, bacteria, radiation, the atom etc.) that they cannot control, things that are destructive, and things that they ultimately come to admire more than humanity itself. Here science is imagined to be a destructive force and one that needs to be reigned in.
Finally, Invasion Narratives are argued to be texts where a growing post-war crisis of masculinity and femininity is played out. Those monsters and aliens that are marked by rationality and linked to the purest of scientific forms are often encoded as hyper-masculine and it is this rationalised and hard masculinity that poses a threat to the natural order of things. Women, by contrast, often personify those values and actions which are under threat from such regulatory masculinity – they show emotion, demonstrate intuition, and are totally family centred. In short, in these 1950s Invasion Narratives an ideological battle takes place over what it means to be masculine and feminine in an increasingly rationalised and pluralized 1950s Western world.
Peter Biskind examines Them! and The Thing through a number of the tropes outlined above. While Biskind argues that Them! ‘reflects the new prestige of science by placing scientists at the centre of world-shaking events’ it also locates the fear of invasion in terms of Soviet metaphors and imagery. Biskind suggests that the dronelike giant ants who wreak havoc in the film fit within a general discourse about Soviet people because ‘those humans that Americans regarded as antlike … were, of course, Communists … Reds, in other words, were monsters from the id’. However, Biskind also suggests that the ants in the film work as an ‘attack on women in a man’s world … the ant society is, after all, a matriarchy presided over by a despotic queen’.
Mark Jancovich’s re-examination of the 1950s Invasion Narratives takes issue, in part, with Biskind’s position. Jancovich argues that these films often demonstrate a profound unease about science, masculinity, the rise of the new power elites within American (Western) society, and an increasing sense that everyday life was becoming more routinised, standardised and bureaucratic. In this context the cooperation that takes place to defeat the alien aggressor is often ‘the co-operation of an interactive community threatened by Fordist rationalisation and domination’.
Peter Hutchings examination of British Invasion Narratives from the 1950s and 1960s locates the trappings of paranoia to a set of distinctly British fears and concerns that emerged post-war. Hutchings suggests that these films produce a rather despairing mood of the nation as national identity and national unity, elements of tradition, and normative gender roles are all shown to be fragmented and unstable in these films. As Hutchings argues, ‘it seems from these films that Britain has lost its centre and become fragmented, its population scattered in isolated groups and its institutions and hierarchies no longer as efficacious as they once were … It is as if Britain, displaced from an imperial history and the glories of the Second World War and caught up in a series of bewildering changes, is more open to self-doubts and an accompanying acknowledgement of its own limits.’
