Gendering Science Fiction Films

Invaders from the Suburbs

S. George

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137321589
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the 1950s, science fiction invasion films played a complicated part in supporting and criticizing Cold War ideologies. By reading these invasion narratives as performances of middle-class, white Americans' excitement and anxiety about social and political issues, George shows how they often played out as another round in the battle of the sexes.

C H A P T E R 1

INTRODUCTION: GENDERING SCIENCE FICTION INVASION FILMS

In The Fifties, David Halberstam writes that “in retrospect the pace of the fifties seemed slower, almost languid. Social ferment, however, was beginning just beneath this placid surface” (ix). He further notes that “few Americans doubted the essential goodness of their society. After all it was reflected back at them not only in contemporary books and magazines, but even more powerfully and with even greater influence in the new family sitcoms on television” (x). TV programs such as The Donna Reed Show and Leave It to Beaver belied any sense of turmoil or tension, yet, while these programs showed, in black-and-white simplicity, U.S. families leading idyllic lives in the suburbs, the nation was in the grip of rapid social, political, and economic changes. Besides the continuing Cold War, a wide range of other issues were contributing to the anxiety of the era including the development of atomic power for defense and the promise that it would provide unlimited energy, the Korean war, and the beginning of the civil rights and women’s movements. The apparent advances, benefits, and changes in the 1950s were met not only with excitement but also with a great deal of anxiety.

Hollywood was also affected by these changes. From the mid-1940s through most of the 1950s, a new conservatism took root in Hollywood. Still shaken from the House Committee on Un-American Activities’s (HUAC) trial of the Hollywood Ten and the “communist blacklists” that put over 300 directors, technicians, writers, and actors out of work, the new promise from Hollywood, as Eric Johnston, head of the Motion Picture Producers Association, wrote, was “We’ll have no more films that show the seamy side of American life” (qtd. in May 145). Although many Hollywood figures stood firmly against this trend, such as Arthur Miller, Paul Robeson, Lester Cole, Dalton Trumbo, and the rest of the “Ten,” others were naming names, confessing their past communist affiliations, asking for forgiveness, or adding their voices to the vanguard of conservatism that culminated with the election of Ronald Reagan as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the early 1950s. As Paul Carter notes, “Hollywood had always been chicken-hearted about social and political controversy . . . The Cold War reinforced these intrinsic tendencies” (209). Hollywood’s goal, if not to support Cold War ideologies openly, was to literally stay on the right side of controversy.

Therefore, cultural artifacts of the 1950s, including film, give a less than complete picture of the time. Wheeler Winston Dixon notes that, “mainstream films tell us what we wish to remember about the 1950s, as seen through the lens of the dominant cinema, but not what is necessarily an accurate record of the times as we lived them” (8). He further states that another difficulty with understanding the fifties has to do with the films that scholars and critics have chosen to discuss: “One of the essential problems with any canon, filmic or otherwise, is that it limits one’s scope of inquiry” (9). By focusing on “A” films, the cultural importance of low-budget B, C, and D films, including the subject of this study—science fiction—is often lost or forgotten leading to the misconception that there was one unified voice emerging from 1950s Hollywood, a voice concerned with playing it safe.

Even with pressure to produce films that supported dominant ideologies, some films—either by design or accident—resisted or were critical of hegemonic narratives and ideologies. Science fiction film is a particularly good genre for this purpose, in part because of Hollywood’s attitude toward it as mere entertainment for the young. In Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, Vivian Sobchack observes that before 1968 “most, although certainly not all, SF films [had] been made for children and teenagers” (25). I would further suggest, as Dixon has, that these marginalized films, these “phantom” films or “purely entertainment” genres, such as horror and science fiction, were often permitted a certain amount of license within the confines of Hollywood’s new conservatism (8). Their status as B-movies or worse often allowed them to slip by the censors unnoticed. The purpose here is not to try to convince people that these films are fine works of great artistic value, though some are. Quite the contrary, it is because of their strictly entertainment, low-budget, Saturday matinee status that they became one of the rare sites where cultural, political, and social issues were examined, promoted, or challenged, even in the face of loyalty oaths and the persecution of anyone outside the norm.

This is not to say that all popular genre films were critical of the politics of the time; many science fiction films, for example, supported and promoted dominant values. In This Island Earth (1955), much of the opening sequence features a Lockheed jet. The ensuing dialogue makes certain everyone is aware it is a “Lockheed” product. It also stresses the importance of continued technological research and development made possible by government contracts with private industry. It was a common policy for the military to lend or rent equipment to filmmakers as long as the subject matter of the film did not conflict with the military’s agenda (Turner 80). As Lawrence Suid notes, “The military has seen these films as a superb public relations medium” (8). Since the equipment enhanced the documentary style of many science fiction films, studios “regularly sought assistance from the armed forces in the form of technical advice, men, and hardware” (Suid 8). The arrangement not only gave an “authentic” look to the films but also provided free advertising for the military.

However, other science fiction films, particularly invasion films, were critical of the social and political status quo, often challenging narrowly defined gender roles and U.S. fears of the Other. By examining science fiction invasion films, a popular film genre that both supported and criticized Cold War ideologies, a more “accurate record of the times” emerges (Dixon 8). Moreover, the films’ “us” versus “them” nature reveals the social tensions circulating in the U.S. at the dawn of the atomic age. Therefore, working from the assumption that “invasion” films provided important visual and verbal narratives for U.S. citizens trying to understand and negotiate the social and political changes that followed the allied victory in World War II (WWII), this book focuses on Hollywood science fiction invasion films made from 1950 through 1960. In particular, it focuses on films, like The Day the Earth Stood Still, that present what Raymond Williams refers to as alternative and/or oppositional ideologies.

In “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” Williams notes that alternative values and meanings exist within the dominant culture—hegemony is never complete. Williams suggests that “we have to recognize the alternative meanings and values, the alternative opinions and attitudes, even some alternative senses of the world, which can be accommodated and tolerated within a particular effective and dominant culture” (10). Besides alternative values existing within the dominant culture, Williams notes that oppositional values and meanings also exist. Although Williams notes that the line between them is thin, “There is a simple theoretical distinction between alternative and oppositional, that is to say between someone who simply finds a different way to live and wishes to be left alone with it, and someone who finds a different way to live and wants to change society in its light” (11). Science fiction films as a genre frequently contain both alternative and oppositional values and meanings.

Some film theorists say that finding genre films that resist dominate ideologies is a difficult task at best since genre films “serve the interests of the ruling class by assisting in the maintenance of the status quo, and they throw a sop to oppressed groups who, because they are unorganized and therefore afraid to act, eagerly accept the genre film’s absurd solutions to economic and social conflicts” (Hess Wright 41). However, the narrative conventions of the genre film can also criticize and question dominant values. As Jean-Loup Bourget notes:

Genre conventions can be either used as an alibi (the implicit meaning is to be found elsewhere in the film) or turned upside down (irony underlies the conventionality of the convention). The implicit subtext for genre films makes it possible for the director to ask the inevitable (but unanswerable) question: Must American society be like this? Must the Hollywood system function like this? (57)

Therefore, while this book looks at some films and characters that clearly support the status quo, it is primarily concerned with those that break, twist, or exploit the invasion film’s narrative conventions thereby creating tension, ambiguity, and ambivalence (Bourget’s irony) regarding hegemonic narratives and values.

Despite their marginalized status in the industry and society, most serious scholarship on 1950s science fiction films acknowledge that these films are socially and politically charged and deal either directly or indirectly with concerns of the period that spawned them. For example, Bill Warren notes that take-over or alien possession films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Invaders from Mars have been interpreted as both thinly disguised allegories for communist infiltration and also as critiques of the conformity that the McCarthy era ushered in indicating “that those standing on one side of the political spectrum can all too easily view those on the furthest reaches of the other side as being almost literally inhuman, an idea as frightening as anything in the movie” (287). In The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the trouble begins when the military and civilian scientists join together in the Arctic for an atomic bomb test. The explosion somehow reanimates a dinosaur that not only wreaks havoc along the eastern seaboard but also carries a deadly disease in its blood. This narrative construction displaces the concerns surrounding atomic testing as well as fear about the invisible killer, radioactivity. Still, the atom, in this case the radioactive isotope, is a two-edged technological sword, for it also cures the problem in the film: it will not only kill the creature but also cleanse its diseased tissue and stop any further contamination. The film traded on the hope offered by the “medical applications of radioactive isotopes in the treatment of cancer and other human ills” as well as the “deepening atomic gloom” that fell over society regarding the atom (Boyer 119). Therefore, only by examining these films intertextually can their cultural meanings become clear. As Walter Metz notes, “In intertextuality criticism, the relationship between a text and other texts and discourses takes precedence over the relationship between the text and its author or between a text and some stable reality which it merely serves to reinforce” (44). So, by comparing these 1950s invasion films with each other, with political discourses and with books and articles from the 1950s, the tensions of the decade are made evident.

However, film does more cultural work than just serving as a space where contemporary values and ideologies are contested and worked through. Film functions as a modern site for the tradition of storytelling. If, as Harold Schechter suggests in The Bosom Serpent: Folklore and Popular Art, we think of popular works of art, like film and television, “not as a primitive, rudimentary form of ‘real art’ . . . but as part of an age-old tradition of popular or communal storytelling, a form of fiction which . . . actually bears a much closer resemblance to folklore,” then, we can begin to discover how it affects and relates to our daily lives (9). Although it would be an overstatement to say that the outpouring of mass media and its large-scale consumption forms a complete or comprehensive U.S. mythos, the media do, as Richard Slotkin observes, provide “pervasive means for canvassing the world of events and the spectrum of public concerns, for recalling historical precedents, and for translating them into the various story-genres that constitute a public mythology” (8). I agree with Schechter and Slotkin that there is a reciprocal relationship between narrative and the world around us. This relationship informs how we view not only other films of the same genre, but also “helps produce the fabric of everyday life” helping people to “forge their identities” (Kellner 1).

Consequently, these films function as modern myth and folklore, and how they invoke, update, and incorporate other mythic and folkloric narrative themes is a significant factor in how they tell their stories. In Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, Will Wright notes how groups of specialists replaced the lone western hero in the 1950s just as more U.S. workers were finding themselves working in bureaucratic jobs rather than manufacturing and the archetypal rugged individualist was giving way to the team player. Tracing the way a myth, such as the Frontier Myth, becomes outdated and is then reworked and updated to fit the nation’s changing needs reveals the contradictions and ambivalence contained in the films and circulating in society. Therefore, this book examines the way these science fiction invasion films, these very public, mass-mediated mythic narratives transform these myths and yet retain, for better or worse, much of the basic ideology contained within them.

In Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, Slotkin provides a concise summary of the various stages of the Frontier Myth (what he calls “the Myth of the Frontier”). According to Slotkin there are four main aspects of the Frontier Myth—regression, conflict, progress, and savage war. In the myth’s early stages the frontier settler, or more precisely the frontiersman, believes he needs to separate himself from his European and metropolitan roots. The white frontier hunter, intrigued by the Indian’s ways, wants to imitate their hunting rituals. Early on then the frontier hero/hunter’s journey is similar to that of the Indian hunter’s initiation rite. The frontiersman feels he must regress to “a more primitive or ‘natural’ state” in order to understand and tame an unfamiliar natural environment and conquer the new frontier by facing the dark Other embodied in the sacred prey and contained by the hunt (Slotkin 12). However, the frontier hunter soon abandons these religious and spiritual ideologies that bind the hunter to nature, the prey, and the hunt—and replaces them with the ideologies of “progress,” expansion, and economic growth, thereby setting him in conflict with Indian ways. In the Frontier Myth, “each stage of its development . . . relates the achievement of ‘progress’ to a particular form or scenario of violent action” (Slotkin 11). Although various segments of Frontier society defined progress differently, whatever definition was used soon led to the concept of “savage war.”

Savage war became a central aspect of the Frontier Myth. At this stage coexistence between the Native Americans and the frontier settlers was acceptable to settlers only if the Native Americans were completely subjugated. These savage wars “inevitably become ‘wars of extermination’ in which one side or the other attempts to destroy its enemy root and branch”—a scenario regularly played out in alien invasion films with the aliens, at least in most cases, playing the role of the “bloodthirsty savages” (Slotkin 12). The lines are drawn with the “civilized” settlers on one side and the “savages” on the other—or so the justifications of the narrative go. The violence of the Frontier Myth’s savage war is always framed as redemptive leading to a stronger, rejuvenated community. This scenario plays out over and over again in science fiction invasion film from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers made in 1956 to more recent films such as Independence Day made in 1996.

However, only part of the impact of these films lies in the way they represent and resolve contemporary tensions and modify U.S. myths. These films, like fairy tales, folktales, and the ancient Greek myths and plays, fascinate us “by crossing certain taboo lines” and evoking fears regarding such issues as pollution of the body, the dead, and the phallic or destructive woman (King 198). In Danse Macabre, Stephen King identifies two categories of science fiction film—one that “comments on the social and political scene” and the other that “doesn’t want to score political points” but is concerned with revealing taboos and “helping [the audience] to better understand what those taboos and fears are, and why it feels so uneasy about them” (198). For King a film belongs in one category or the other, but I find the issue much more complicated. Some of these films, especially “take-over” films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers which King sees as a political film, are both products of their time (political) and seem to animate older human fears, the apolitical. This ability to function on several levels at once is an integral part of the science fiction invasion film’s impact and one of the reasons for their continued popularity. As Schechter observes, “It seems self-evident to me that any movie as intensely nightmarish as Invasion of the Body Snatchers has got to be ‘about’ something besides political tensions of three decades ago. Certainly it isn’t the film’s political meaning that makes it so scary to TV audiences today” (52–53). Schechter’s assessment is also evident in other 1950s invasion films such as Invaders from Mars, It Came from Outer Space, and The Fly.

Many of these films are clearly about more than political tensions of a historical moment in time. They tap directly into a variety of taboos and fears long held in the west. For example, the science fiction vamp, discussed in chapter three, is the descendent of a long line of predatory women. Scholars, including Lea Jacobs, Janet Staiger, and Kristine J. Butler, note that the vamp is a staple of early cinema and appeared in everything from American films such as D. W. Griffith’s The Mothering Heart (1913) and Frank Powell’s A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Introduction: Gendering Science Fiction Invasion Films
• 2   Science Fiction Blue Prints for Cold War Gender Roles: Mystique Models and Team Players
• 3   Saturday Matinee Cautionary Tales: Science Fiction Vamps and Promethean Scientists
• 4   Invasion from Within: Mom, the Nuclear Family, and Suburban Masculinity
• 5   “I’m Not the Monster Here!”: Science Fiction Working Women after Rosie’s Retirement and the Men They Work With
• 6   Postwar Prototypes: Female Heroes and Progressive Men
• 7   Keep Watching the Screens: Gender in Fifties Science Fiction Films and Beyond
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index