Japan monster history reading assignment

. Susan Sontag

The typical science fiction film has a form as predictable as a Western, and is made up of elements which, to a practiced eye, are as classic as the saloon brawl, the blonqe schoolteacher from the East, and the gun· duel on the deserted main street.

One model scenario proceeds through five phases. (1) The arrival of the thing. (Emergence of the monsters, land-

ing of the alien spaceship, etc.) This is usually witnessed or sus- pected by just one person, a young scientist on a field trip. Nobody, neither his neighbors nor his colleagues, will believe him for some time. 1he hero is not married, but has a sympathetic though also incredulous girl friend.

(2) Confirmation of the hero's report by a host of witnesses to a great act of destruction. (If the invaders are beings from another planet, a fruitless attempt to parley with them· and get them to leave peacefully.) The local police are summoned to deal with the situation and are massacred.

(3) In the capital of the country, conferen~es between scientists and the military take place, with the hero lecturing before a chart, map, or blackboard. A national emergency .is declared. Reports of further destruction. Authorities from other countries arrive in black limousines. All international tensions are suspended in view of the planetary emergency. This stage often includes a rapid montage of news broadcasts in various languages, a meeting at the UN, and more conferences between the military and the scientists. Plans are made for destroying the enemy.

(4) Further atrocities. At some point the hero's girl friend is in grave danger. Massive counter-attacks by international forces, ' ' with brilliant displays of rocketry, rays, and other advanced weapons, are all unsuccessful. Enormous military casualties, usually by incineration. Cities are destroyed and/or evacuated. There is an obligatory scene here of panicked crowds stampeding

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The Imagination of Disaster

along a highway or a big bridge, being waved on by numerous policemen who, if the film is Japanese, are immaculately white- gloved, preternaturally calm, and call out in dubbed English: 'Keep moving. There is no need to be alarmed.'

(5) More conferences, whose motif is: 'They must be vulnerable to something.' Throughout the hero has been working in his lab to this end. The final strategy, upon which all hopes depend, is drawn up; the ultimate weapon - often a super-powerful, often electrical in nature, as yet untested, nuclear device - is mounted. Countdown. Final repulse of the monster or invaders. Mutual congratulations, while the hero and girl friend embrace cheek to cheek and scan the skies sturdily. 'But have we seen the last of them?'

The film I have just described should be in Technicolor and on a wide screen. Another typical scenario, which follows, is simpler and suited to black-and-white films with a lower budget. It has four phases.

(1) The hero (usually, but not always, a scientist) and his girl friend, or his wife and two children, are disporting themselves in some innocent ultra-normal middle-class surroundings - their house, in a small town, or on vacation (camping, boating). Sud- denly, someone starts behaving strangely; or some innocent form of vegetation becomes monstrously enlarged and ambulatory. If a character is pictured driving an automobile, something gruesome looms up in the middle of the road. If it is night, strange lights hurtle across the sky.

(2) After following the thing's tracks, or determining that It is radioactive, or poking around a huge crater - in short, conducting some sort of crude investigation - the hero tries to warn the local authorities, without effect; nobody believes anything is amiss. The hero knows better. If the thing is tangible, the house is elaborately barricaded. If the invading alien is an invisible parasite, a doctor or friend is called in, who is himself rather quickly killed or 'taken possession of' by the thing.

(3) The advice of whoever further is consulted proves useless. Meanwhile, It continues to claim other victims in the town, which remains implausibly isolated from the rest of the world. General helplessness.

(4)' One of two possibilities. Either the hero prepares to do battle alone, accidentally discovers the thing's one vulnerable point, and destroys it. Or, he somehow manages to get out of

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town and1suc<:eeds in laying his case before competent authorities. ;Theyi~albrig\£the lines of the first script but abridged, deploy a ' complex technology which (after initial setbacks) finally prevails again~~ the invade.rs. .'.·: Another version of the second script opens with the scientist- hera~in .. his laboratory, which is located in the basement or on the·:grounds of his tasteful, prosperous house. Through his experi- ments,· he ·unwittingly causes a frightful metamorphosis in some class "of: plants ·or animals which turn carnivorous and go on a rampage.· Or else, his experiments have caused him to be injured (sometimes irrevocably) or 'invaded' himself Perhaps he has been experimenting with radiation, or has built a machine to communi- cate with beings from other planets or transport him to other places.or times.

Another version of the first script involves the discovery of some fundamental· alteration in the conditions of existence of our planet, brought about . by nuclear testing, which will lead to the extinction in a few months of all human life. For example: the temperature of the earth is becoming too high or too low to support life, or the earth is cracking in two, or it is gradually being blanketed by lethal fallout.

A third script, somewhat but not altogether different from the first two, concerns a journey through space - to the moon, or some other planet. What the space-voyagers discover commonly is that the alien terrain is in a state of dire emergency, itself threatened by extra-planetary invaders or nearing extinction through the practice of nuclear warfare. The terminal dramas of the first and second scripts are played out there, to which is added the problem of getting away from the doomed and/or hostile planet and back to Earth.

I am aware, of course, that there are thousands of science fiction novels (their heyday was the late 1940s), not to mention the transcriptions of science fiction themes which, more and more, provide the principal subject matter of comic books. But I pro- pose to discuss science fiction films (the present period began in 1950 and continues, considerably abated, to this day) as an independent sub-genre, without reference to the novels from which, in many ca'.ses, they were adapted. For while novel and

\ , film may share the same plot, the fundamental difference between

the resources of the novel and the film makes them quite dis- similar.

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The Imagination of Disaster

Certainly, compared with the science fiction novels, their film counterparts have unique strengths, one of which is the immediate representation of the extraordinary: physical deformity and mutation, missile and rocket combat, toppling skyscrapers. The movies are, naturally, weak just where the science fiction novels (some of them) are strong - on science. But in place of an intellectual workout, they can supply something the novels can ,...., never provide - sensuous elaboration. In the films it i~_Er_~~~s / ~ s , of i~es~~s, not W.Qrds_.t_h~t_1!8:'.'e to be translated_by \ 1.,:~, the imagination, that one can participate in the fantasy ()f living ' ~4

through .. ~11~'.s '?_~ .. ?ea~ alf.nd more, the death of c~ties, the I ;« ~,:,, ,J.,.:_ destruction ofliuniamty 1tse _) , . ·

Scierice ficffon films .. ·a:re · not about science. They are about ' , ·: ;;: ~ disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. In science ' · s : . fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always 'i'r,'..'.;_' ; .• ; expensive. It is a matter of quantity and ingenuity. If you will, it · ,.-,.i~ ~.,; is a question of scale. But the scale, particularly in the wide- screen Technicolor films (of which the ones by the Japanese director lnoshiro Honda and the American director George Pal are technically the most convincing and visually the most exciting) does raise the matter to another level.

Thus, the science fiction film (like that of a very different contemporary genre, the Happening) is concerned with the aes- « >>

\ thetic~ of destruction,. with the peculiar ?e~ut!es to ~e found in "1.' '" ,'. i 1 \wreakmg havoc, makmg a mess. And 1t 1s m the imagery of ... 1 r'"c., destruction that the core of a good science fiction film lies. Hence, ··· ',. "' .~· ·" the disadvantage of the cheap film - in which the monster appears "· ·' · · ' or the rocket lands in a small dull-looking town. (Hollywood·, budget needs usually dictate that the town be in the Arizona or California desert. In The Thing From Another World (1951) the . rather sleazy and confined set is supposed to be an encampment .... ·· · ·· near the North Pole.) Still, good black-and-white science fiction· ·" -- ·' ''. films have been made. But a bigger budget, which usually means J _ Technicolor, allows a much greater play back and forth among t':'" .. · ~ several model environments. There is the populous city. There is 1 · 1 ·.~_." the lavish but ascetic interior of the spaceship - either the "' invaders' or ours - replete with streamlined chromium fixtures ' ·' and dials and machines whose complexity is indicated by the · · · number of colored lights they flash and strange noises they emit. ';'-~. -~ ... There is the laboratory crowded with formidable boxes and scien- ., · ' tific apparatus. There is a comparatively old-fashioned-looking

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conference room where the scientists unfurl charts to explain the dbsperate ;.state of things to the military. And each. of these stan- dard locales' or backgrounds is subject to two modalities - intact arid· destroyed. We may, if we are lucky, be treated to a panorama of·melting: .tanks, flying bodies, crashing walls, awesome craters arid fissures in the earth, plummeting spacecraft, colorful deadly rays; 1and to •a symphony of screams, weird electronic signals, the moisiest military hardware going, and the leaden tones of the laconic denizens of alien planets. and their subjugated earthlings.

Certain of the primitive gratifications of science fiction films - fot instance, the depiction of urban disaster on a colossally magni- fied scale - are shared with other types of films. Visually there is little difference between mass havoc as represented in the old horror and monster films and what we find in science fiction films, except (again} scale. In the old monster films, the monster always headed for the great city, where he had to do a fair bit of rampaging, hurling buses off bridges, crumpling trains in his bare hands, toppling buildings, and so forth. The archetype is King Kong, in Schoedsack's great film of 1933, running amok, first in the African village (trampling babies, a bit of footage exci~ed from most prints), then in New York. This is really no different in spirit from the scene in Inoshiro Honda's Rodan (1957) in which two giant reptiles - with a wingspan of 500 feet and super- sonic speeds - by flapping their wings whip up a cyclone that blows most of Tokyo to smithereens. Or the destruction of half of Japan by the gigantic robot with the great incinerating ray that shoots f9rth from his eyes, at the beginning of Honda's The Mysterians (1959). Or, the devastation by the rays from a fleet of flying saucers of New York, Paris, and Tokyo, in Battle in Outer Space (1960). Or, the inundation of New York in When Worlds Collide (1951). Or, the end of London, in 1966 depicted in George Pal's The Time Machine (1960). Neither do these sequences differ in aesthetic intention from the destruction scenes in the big sword, sandal, and orgy color spectaculars set in Biblical and Roman times - the end of Sodom in Aldrich's Sodom and Gomorrah, of Gaza in DeMille's Samson and Delilah, of Rhodes in The Col- ossus of Rhodes, and of Rome in a dozen Nero movies. Griffith began it with the Babylon sequence in Intolerance, and to this day there is nothing like the thrill of watching all those expensive sets come tumbling down.

In other respects as well, the science fiction films of the 1950s

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The Imagination of Disaster

take up familiar themes. The famous 1930s movie serials and comics of the adventures of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, as well as the more recent spate of comic book super-heroes with extraterrestrial origins (the most famous is Superman, a foundling from the planet Krypton, currently described as having been exploded by a nuclear blast), share motifs with more recent science fiction movies. But there is an important difference. The old science fiction films, and most of the comics, still have an essentially innocent relation to disaster. Mainly they offer new versions of the oldest romance of all - of the strong, invulnerable hero with a mysterious lineage come to do battle on behalf of good and against evil. Recent science fiction films have a decided grimness, bolstered by their much greater degree of visual credi- bility, which contrasts strongly with the older films. Modem his':.·,: torical. _reality has greatly enlarged the imagination of disaster i and the pr~~&<?_i:rlsts - perhaps by the very nature of what is\\ visited upon them - no longer seem wholly innocent. /

The lure of such generalizecf'Clisaster"'asifantasy is that iv' releases one from normal obligations. The trump card of the end- of-the-world movies - like The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1962) - is that great scene with New York or London or Tokyo dis- covered empty, its entire population annihilated. Or, as in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1957), the whole movie can be devoted to the fantasy of occupying the deserted metropolis and starting all over again, a world Robinson Crusoe.

Another kind of satisfaction these films supply is extreme moral simplification - that is .to say, a morally acceptable fantasy where one can give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings. In this respect, science fiction films partly overlap with horror films. This is the undeniable pleasure we derive from looking at freaks, beings excluded from the category of the human. The sense of superiority over the freak conjoined in varying proportions with the titillation of fear and aversion makes it possible for moral scruples to be lifted, for cruelty to be enjoyed. The same thing happens in science fiction films. In the figure of the monster from outer space, the freakish, the ugly, and the predatory all converge - and provide a fantasy target for righteous bellicosity to dis- charge itself, and for the aesthetic enjoyment of suffering and disaster. Science fiction films are O!le of_ the purevoims ·of s~~cle; that is, we are rarely inside anyone's feelings. (An

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exception is Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)). W~ are merely spectators; we watch. -

But in science fiction films, unlike horror films, there is not much horror. Suspense, shocks, surprises are mostly abjured in favor of . a steady, inexorable plot. Science fiction films invite a ,dispassionate, aesthetic view of destruction and violence - a

c--1echni5logicatV1eV!J Things, objects, machinery play a major role ·- jn thes~ films. A gr~ter range of ethical values is embodied in

th~ decor of these films than in the people. ~ rather than the \ helpless humans, are the locus of v~lue~e~~~~--~e ~-~erience \ them, rather than people, as the sources orpower. According to science fiction films, man is naked without his artifacts. They stand· for different values, they are potent,, they are what gets destroyed, and they are the indispensable tools for the repulse of the alien invaders or the repair of the damaged environment. ,,. The science fiction films are strongly moralistic. The standard

~cf.fmessage is the one about the~ or humane, use of science, t'\~tD . ,,,'I'- versus the mad, obsessional use of science.-Tuis m~e the

. ofi1;,...,. science fiction films share in common with the classic horror films

. I• ~' ~ 0Y- of the 1930s, like Frankenstein, The Mummy, Island of Lost Souls, I '\ .,/ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (George Franju's brilliant Les Yeux Sans I (v'·\I~\ Visage (1959), called here The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus, i t- ./· J is a more recent example.) In the horror films, we have the mad

o'':) or obsessed or misguided scientist who pursues his experiments J.. "7 against good advice to the contrary, creates a monster or

' ~<"'~,;<II) J ~onsters, and i~ hin:i-self destroyed - often recognizing h~s folly 'l"'i "'\<'-'} himself, and dymg m the successful effort to destroy his own ~" ~r1~ creation. One science fiction equivalent of this is the ~dentist, . N"'J( usually a member of a team, who defects to the planetary mvaders

.;.-~ _ ·"i because 'their' science is more advanced than ours. ~v1·.\11 ' lj;.P"1' This is the. case in The Mysterians, and true to form, the ren- Y~ ~ k , egade sees his error in the end, and from within the Mysterian

J; ":-- ,., space ship destroys it and himself In This Island Earth (1955), ,..-<t,.;·"\ the inhabitants of the beleaguered planet Metaluna propose to

\t'' conquer earth, but their project is foiled by a Metalunan scientist >0'\. ,, _ _., , named Exeter, who, having lived on earth a while and learned to

·'"""\ love Mozart, cannot abide such viciousness. Exeter plunges his spaceship into the ocean after returning a glamorous pair (male and female) of American physicists to earth. Metaluna dies. In The Fly (1958), the hero, engrossed in his basement-laboratory experiments on a matter-transmitting machine, uses himself as a

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The Imagination of Disaster

subject, exchanges head and one arm with a housefly which had accidentally gotten into the machine, becomes a monster, and with his last shred of human will destroys his laboratory and orders his wife to kill him. His discovery, for the good of mankind, is lost.

Being a clearly labeled species of intellectual, scientists in science fiction films are a~~~X~li~_!>!~_!() _crack up or go off the ~~£end. In Conquest of Space (1955), the scl.eniis~coiiifilander of an-l:nternational expedition to Mars suddenly acquires scruples about the blasphemy involved in the undertaking, and begins reading the Bible mid-journey instead of attending to his duties. The commander's son, who is his junior officer and always addresses his father as 'General,' is forced to kill the old man when he tries to prevent the ship from landing on Mars. In this film, both sides of the ambivalence toward scientists are given voice. Generally, for a scientific enterprise to be treated entirely sympathetically in these films, it needs the certificate of utility. Science, viewed without ambivalence, means an efficacious response to danger. Disinterested intellectual curiosity rarely appears in any form other than caricature, as a maniacal dementia that cuts one off from normal human relations. But this suspicion is usually directed at the scientist rather than his work. The creative scientist may become a martyr to his own discovery, through an accident or by pushing things too far. But the impli- cation remains that other men, less imaginative - in short, tech- nicians - could have administered the same discovery better and more safely. The most ingrained contemporary mistrust of the intellect is visited, in these movies, upon the scientist-as-intel- lectual. . The message that the scientist is one who releases forces which:\ ~ not controlled for good, could destroy man himself seems j innocuous enough. One of the oldest images of the scientist is Shakespeare's Prospero, the overdetached scholar forcibly retired from society to a desert island, only partly in control of the magic forces in which he dabbles. Equally classic is the figure of the scientist as satanist (Doctor Faustus, and stories of Poe and Hawthorne). Science is magic, and man has always known that there is black magic as well as white. But it is not enough to remark that contemporary attitudes - as reflected in science fiction films - remain ambivalent, that the scientist is treated as both satanist and savior. The proportions have changed, because of the new context in which the old admiration and fear of the

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scientistar~ located. For his sphere of influence is no longer local, himself or his immediate community. It is planetary, cosmic.

1. ' "One gets the feeling, particularly in the Japanese films but not ! ~ only there, . that a ~b uaumi)exists over the use of nuclear '. . 11 weapons and the poss1 ility of future nuclear wars. Most of the ~.1 .. 1 ~ v >!" ... science fiction films bear witness to this trauma, and, in a way, i' t-r~ . attempt to exorcise it. · _ The .a~idental awakening of the su~r-destructive monster,

who has slepTilrtlieeiirtli since prehistory, is, often, an obvious metaphor fotl the Ifomb)But there are many explicit references as wen:-m--The Mysterians, a probe ship from the planet Mysteroid has landed on earth, near Tokyo. Nuclear warfare having been practised on Mysteroid for centuries (their civilization is 'more advanced than ours'), ninety percent of those now born on the planet have to be destroyed at birth, because of defects caused by the huge amounts of Strontium 90 in their diet. The Mysterians have come to earth to marry earth women, and possibly to take over our relatively uncontaminated planet . . . In The Incredible Shrinking Man, the John Doe hero is the victim of a gust of radiation which blows over the water, while he is out boating with his wife; the radiation causes him to grow smaller and smal- ler, until at the end of the movie he steps through the fine mesh of a window screen to become 'the infinitely small.' ... In Rodan, a horde of monstrous carnivorous prehistoric insects, and finally a pair of giant flying reptiles (the prehistoric Archeopteryx), are hatched from dormant eggs in the depths of a mine shaft by the impact of nuclear test explosions, and go on to destroy a good part of the world before they are felled by the molten lava of a volcanic eruption . . . In the English film, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, two simultaneous hydrogen-bomb tests by the United States and Russia change by 11 degrees the tilt of the earth on its axis and alter the earth's orbit so that it begins to approach the sun. ".Bad~~§>- ultimately, the conception of the whole

wo~~-ll~-~-~asuli!_ty __ ~~--1lJ!clear-·testing-and...n11cl~are - is

( tbe most ominous of all the notions with which science fiction films deal. Universes become expendable. Worlds become con- taminated, burnt out, exhausted, obsolete. In Rocketship X-M (1950) explorers from the earth land on Mars where they learn that atomic warfare has destroyed Martian civilization. In George Pal's The War of the Worlds (1953), reddish spindly alligator-

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skinned creatures from Mars invade the earth because their planet is becoming too cold to be inhabitable. In This Island Earth, also American, the planet Metaluna, whose population has long ago been driven underground by warfare, is dying under the missile attacks of an enemy planet. Stocks of uranium, which power the force field shielding Metaluna, have been used up; and an unsuccessful expedition is sent to earth to enlist earth scientists to devise new sources for nuclear power. In Joseph Losey's The Damned (1961), . nine icy-cold radioactive children are being reared by a fanatical scientist in a dark cave on the English coast to be the only survivors of the inevitable nuclear Armageddon.

There is a vast amount of wishful thinking in science fiction films, some of it touching, some of it depressing. Again and again, one detects the hunger for a 'good war' which poses no moral problems, admits of no moral qualifications. The imagery of science fiction films will satisfy the most bellicose addict of war films, for a lot of the satisfactions of war films pass, untrans- formed, into science fiction films. Examples: the dogfights between earth 'fighter rockets' and alien spacecraft in the Battle of Outer Space (1959); the escalating firepower in the successive assaults upon the invaders in The Mysterians, which Dan Talbot correctly describes as a non-stop holocaust; the spectacular bom- bardment of the underground fortress of Metaluna in This Island Earth.

Yet at the same time the bellicosity of science fiction films is neatly channeled into the yearning for peace, or for at least peaceful coexistence. Some scientist generally takes sententious note of the fact that it took the planetary invasion to make the wai:nng nations. of the earth come to their senses and suspend their own conflicts. One of the main themes of many science fiction films - the color ones usually, because they have the budget and resources to develop the military spectacle - is this UN fantasy, a fantasy of united warfare. (The same wishful UN theme cropped up in a recent spectacular which is not science fiction, Fifty-Five Days in Peking (1963). There, topically enough, the Chinese, the Boxers, play the role of Martian invaders who unite the earthmen, in this case the United States, England, Russia, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.) A great enough disaster can- cels all enmities and calls upon the utmost concentration of earth resources.

Science - technology - is conceived of as the ·great Un.ilier:\

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'"\ 0' \) 'J)lus the science fiction films also project a Utopian fantasy. ln~1the classic models of Utopian thinking - Plato's Republic, Campanella's City of the Sun, More's Utopia, Swift's land of the H()uyhnhnms, Voltaire's Eldorado - society had worked out a perfect consensus. In these societies reasonableness had achieved an unbreakable supremacy over the emotions. Since no disagree- ment or sdcial conflict was intellectually plausible, none was possi- ble. As in Melville's Typee, 'they all think the same.' The universal rule of reason meant uni~!:_sal agreement. It is interesting, too,

ct,._'>ff" that societies in which(feasolliwas pictured as totally ascendant 0""" were also traditionally pierured as having an ascetic or materially ~ frugal and economically simple mode of life. But in the Utopian ~;« "\, world community projected by science fiction films, totally paci-

V""" 'o4'·" fied and ruled by scientific consensus, the demand for simplicity ~ f', ~ , of material existence would be absurd. ~..,~- '& Yet alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and \""' c•' international unity embodied in the science fiction fiJms lurk the v1 ,\""\deepest anxieties about contemporary existence. I don't mean

"'\er .;,· only the very real trauma of the Bomb - that it has been used, f''.,., that there are enough now to kill everyone on earth many times

{;, over, that those new bombs may very well be used. Besides these , q ~ ",,_,; new anxieties about physical disaster, the prospect of universal

( If"' mutilation and even annihilation, the science fiS!!Q!!_Jil.ms,_r~fl~ct powerful anxieties about the conditiQ!!~of_the_fodividual psy~~

For science fiction films may also be described as a popular mythology for the contemporary negative imagination about the impersonal. The other-world creatures that seek to take 'us' over are an 'it,' not a 'they.' The planetary invaders are usually zombie- like. Their movements are either cool, mechanical, or lumbering, blobby. But it amounts to the same thing. If they are non-human in form, they proceed with an absolutely regular, unalterable movement (unalterable save by destruction). If they are human in form - dressed in space suits, etc. - then they obey the most rigid military discipline, and display no personal characteristics whatsoever. And it is this regime of emotionless, of impersonality, of regimentation, which they will impose on the earth if they are successful. 'No more love, no more beauty, no more pain,' boasts a conv~rted earthling, in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). The half-earthling, half-alien children in The Children of the Damned (1960) are absolutely emotionless, move as a group and understand each other's thoughts, and are all prodigious

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intellects. They are the wave of the future, man in his next stage of development.

These alien invaders practice a crime which is worse than murder. They do not simply kill the person. They obliterate him. In The War of the Worlds, the ray which issues from the rocket ship disintegrates all persons and objects in its path, leaving no trace of them but a light ash. In Honda's The H-Man (1959), the creeping blob melts all flesh with which it comes in contact. If the blob, which looks like a huge hunk of red Jello and can crawl across floors and up and down walls, so much as touches your bare foot, all that is left of you is a heap of clothes on the floor. (A more articulated, size-multiplying blob is the villain in the English film The Creeping Unknown (1956).) In another version of this fantasy, the body is preserved but the person is entirely reconstituted as the automatized servant or agent of the alien powers. This is, of course, the vampire fantasy in new dress. The person is really dead, but he doesn't know it. He is 'undead,' he has become an 'unperson.' It happens to a whole California town in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to several earth scien- tists in This Island Earth, and to assorted innocents in It Came from Outer Space, Attack of the Puppet People (1958), and The Brain Eaters (1958). As the victim always backs away from the vampire's horrifying embrace, so in science fiction films the person always fights being 'taken over'; he wants to retain his humanity. But once the deed has been done, the victim is emi- nently satisfied with his condition. He has not been converted from human amiability to monstrous 'animal' bloodlust (a meta- phoric exaggeration of sexual desire), as in the old vampire fan- tasy. No, he has simply become far more efficient- the very model of technocratic man, purged of emotions, volitionless, tranquil, obedient to all orders. (The dark secret behind human nature used to be the upsurge of the animal - as in King Kong. The threat to man, his availability to dehumanization, lay in his own animality. Now the danger is understood as residing in man's ability to be turned into a machine.) ( 10 ~' 'i

The rule, of course, is that this horrible and irremediable form of murder can strike anyone in the film except the hero. The hero and his family, while greatly threatened, always escape this fate and by the end of the film the invaders have been repulsed or destroyed. I know of only one exception, The Day That Mars Invaded Earth (1963), in which after all the standard struggles

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1tl,iescientist-hero, his wife, and their two children are 'taken over' ··by; the alien invaders - and that's that. (The last minutes of the ··film·showcthem being incinerated by the Martians' rays and their ash' silhouettes flushed down their empty swimming pool, while their simulacra drive off in the family car.) Another variant but upbeat switch in the rule occurs in The Creation of the Humanoids (1964), where the hero discovers at the end of the film that he, ifoo,:has been turned into a metal robot, ?complete with highly ·efficient and virtually indestructible mechanical insides, although he· didn't know it and detected no difference in himselt He learns, however, that. he will shortly be upgraded into a 'humanoid' having all the properties of a real man.

Of all the standard motifs of science fiction films, this theme of dehumanization is perhaps the most fascinating. For, as I have indicated, it is scarcely a black-and-white situation, as in the old vampire films. The attitude of the science fiction films toward depersonalization is mixed. On the one hand, they deplore it as the ultimate horror. On the other hand, certain characteristics of the dehumanized invaders, modulated and disguised - such as

· the ascendancy o!reason over feelings, the idealization of team- . I ~ work and the consensus-creating activities of science, a marked

< ,/, ~;;. degree of moral simplification - are precisely traits of the savior- ') t"' scientist. It is interesting that when the scientist in these liliiiSiS (, v' \ treiifed negatively, it is usually done through the portrayal of an

'\ 1 individual scientist who holes up in his laboratory and neglects ~.t . ' " his fiancee or his loving wife and children, obsessed by his daring · and dangerous experiments. The scientist as a loyal member of a . team, and therefore considerably less ·individualized, is treated

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vsY1-'', ' ' ' quite respectfull . . . . . . . .c"".f/' .. There absolutely no social cnticism, f even the most implicit

S0'>,1 w· ,,.,•, · kind, in scienCeliaiOnmiiis. No criticism, for example, of the ~i•< ·~·" v,. conditions of our society which create the impersonality and "' · I' ,,,v ~ dehumanization which science fiction fantasies displace onto the c;r-t" •.. lJ'- @uence of an alien It. Also, the notion of science as a social ~.,Ir'!,:) activity, interlocking with social and political interests, is unac- ~ 6 ·. • knowledged. Science is simply either adventure (for good or evil)

( '' ·) _ r a technical response to danger. And, typically, when the fear . ~ .j of science is paramount - when science is conceived of as black

magic rather than white - the evil has no attribution beyond that of the perverse will of an individual scientist. In science fiction

~~- , films the antithesis of black magic and white is drawn as a split .'•

_ .. - ...... -~----

' '< "" ~ ,• ;, ~ \..\...;... ' ·- ! .. ',.,· 'r( ,,./ ··'1? ~-.t,,. ,~./""--a ~r.. , , 1 • .-~ __ 0 _ \...,,.. :s lvv Y ~ .~t" ~ , ... J~c.r- ,.,•"'" (<:r,_c~i.l..J"""""-l<;"'""f""' ~"' ~

~.·.,·~·ye '<,I.>~:, '.:J' ~:·:. -::f .~ The Imagination _of Disasterw,:; ~:~;. •r --;.••HfJ~~!lf"'.# ~.>t """'.._... .._, 1 • .....- /<;av!/ r"" ~~

between technology, which is beneficent, and the errant individual ,_ .. ;',, will of a lone intellectual. ... .. 1-,..._.., . ~ ~'}:~tj

Thus, science fiction ~s can be looked at as ~ematically h .. /')I central allegory, replete with standard modem attitudes. The · !":'~ theme of depersonalization (being 'taken over') which I have ·~:J been talking about is a new allegory reflecting the age-old aware- :~·;; ness of man that, sane, he is always perilously close to insanity ;&;; and unreason. But there is something more here than just a <·~~! recent, popular image which expresses man's perennial, but , '.;.~.·~1···· largely unconscious, anxiety about his sanity. The image derives ' ::;~ most of its power from a supplementary and historical anxiety, ~j~· also not experienced consciously by most people, about the deper- sonalizing conditions of modem urban life. Similarly, it is not :!~ enough to note that science fiction allegories are one of the myths ·····~ about - that is, one of the ways of accommodating to and negating ·. ;~ - the perennial human anxiety about death. (Myths of heaven :~ and hell, and of ghosts, had the same function.) For, again, there · .f is a historically specifiable twist which intensifies the anxiety. I--, mean, the trauma suffered by everyone in the middle of the twentieth century when it became clear that, from now on to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life under the threat not only of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost insupportable psychologically - collective incineration and extinction which could come at any time, vir- tually without warning.

From a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another. But from a political and moral point of view, it does. The expectation of the apocalypse may be the occasion for a radical disaffiliation from society, as when thousands of Eastern European Jews in the seventeenth century, hearing that Sabbatai Zevi had been proclaimed the Messiah and that the end of the world was immi- nent, gave up their homes and businesses and began the trek to Palestine. But people take the news of their doom in diverse( ways. It is reported that in 1945 the populace of Berlin received without great agitation the news that Hitler had decided to kill them all, before the Allies arrived, because they had not been worthy enough to win the war. We are, alas, more in the position \ of the Berliners of 1945 than of the Jews of seventeenth-century Eastern Europe; and our response is closer to theirs, too. What I am suggesting is that the imagery of disaster in science fiction

W~I·· ,\ ·, 51 \ ~, ' '

... ,.:( ::

"

Hibakusha Cinema

. iis abo~·;u-·th~ e~bl~~ ~fan inad;;;;;,t~-;esp~-Y,se. I don't mean .io.be~SforthiS;- ves are only a '~ariipling, stripped of sophistication, of the inadequacy of most people's. response to the unassimilable terrors that infect their conscfousness. The interest of the rums, aside from their consider- able amount of cinematic charm, consists in this intersection between a naive and largely debased commercial art product and . the most profound dilemmas of the contemporary situation.

Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but ~eemingly opposed, destinies:

! ([jfremttting-bmlalicy ana1ncoiiceivable terro~~ It is fantasy, served I • out miarge rafionir15fThelJOpiitatfil"ts;whtch allows most people

I . ~ r ~o cop~ with these twin specters. For one job that fanta~y can do \~ ~s to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum and to distract us · . from terrors - real or anticipated - by an escape into exotic,

l'J\1 \11'Ci"i, angero.us situat·i·o···n· s ··w··· hi .... ·ch .. h. a.ve .. la. s .. t.-mm··· · ute happy endings. But : 1 p"" l ~t;:r .. of~the,J4ing~_ !Pl'!!_~an.ta.§y can_QQ_is.to normalize what is

~ ps~lt.9lc:>.gis.~l!Y-Y1iJ2~1:1:rable, ther~by inuring us to ft. In one case, (J.lCJO ,.l,~,,,..~_fantasy beautifies the work[ In the other, it neut.r.alizes it. 'i' 0.t'.~_./-6 · _.Th~~a~y in science fiction films doe.s both jobs. Tue films ·' ,,-- ~fleet world-Wide anxieties, and they serve to allay them. They

\\I))'\ . mcutcatea-sltange apathy· concemirig the"piocessein'.>f radiation, ~"'"~ ~ . ) conta~iHttion;-·an~·destructiurrw~h·Tfor one find haun1iiig and

il~~ Ldepressmg. The naive level of the films neatly tempers the sense ,,,..v.-:·1 ~ of otherness, of alienness, with the grossly familiar. In particular, ~,rr \ the dialogue of most science fiction films, which is of a monumen-

tal but often touching banality, makes them wonderfully, uninten- tionally funny. Lines like 'Come quickly, there's a monster in my bathtub,' 'We must do something about this,' 'Wait, Professor, there's someone on the telephone,' 'But that's incredible,' and the old American standby; 'I hope it works!' are hilarious in the context of picturesque and deafening holocaust. Yet the films also contain something that is painful and in deadly earnest.

c '"" . , There is a sense in which all t}J.ese _1!1-ovies are in complicity ~>""" -~~ ,Y''' W~-~e-~l:J~Ox:!:(!nt. They neutralize it, asl.liave-said~-"ft is no ( 6""·~ more, perhaps, than the way all art draws its audience into a ·· j.r' J , circle of complicity with the thing represented. But in these films

. ,,;.<-'· we have to do with things which are (quite literally) unthinkable. c j~iv Here, 'thinking about the unthinkable' - not in the way of ..t

Herman Kahn, as a subject for calculation, but as a subject for fantasy - becomes, however inadvertently, itself a somewhat ques-

The Imagination of Disaster

tionable act from a moral point of view. The films perpetuate cliches about identity, volition, . power, knowledge, happiness, s~l CQJ!~sus, guilt, responsibility. which are, to. say .the least, \.~ot serviceab~JE ouu>resent extrermty. But collechv~ mghtmares •crumofoe6a-mshed by demonstrating that they are, mtellectually ' and morally, fallacious. This nightmare - the one reflected, in

various registers, in the science fiction film - is too close to our \ reality .

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