Contents PROOF
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
PROOF Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgements x About the Contributors xi Introduction 1 1 A-Bombs, B-Pictures, and C-Cups 17 DavidJ.Skal 2 ‘It’s in the Trees! It’s Coming!’ NightoftheDemonand the Decline and Fall of the British Empire 33 Darryl Jones 3 Mutants and Monsters 55 Kim Newman 4 ‘Don’t Dare See It Alone!’ The Fifties Hammer Invasion 72 Wayne Kinsey 5 Genre, Special Effects and Authorship in the Critical Reception of Science Fiction Film and Television during the 1950s 90 Mark Jancovich and Derek Johnston 6 Hammer’s Dracula 108 Christopher Frayling 7 Fast Cars and Bullet Bras: The Image of the Female Juvenile Delinquent in 1950s America 135 Elizabeth McCarthy 8 ‘A Search for the Father-Image’: Masculine Anxiety in Robert Bloch’s 1950s Fiction 158 Kevin Corstorphine 9 ‘Reading her Difficult Riddle’: Shirley Jackson and Late 1950s’ Anthropology 176 Dara Downey vii July 5, 2011 12:20 MAC/CAME Page-vii 9780230_272217_01_prexiv PROOF viii Contents 10 ‘At My Cooking I Feel It Looking’: Food, Domestic Fantasies and Consumer Anxiety in Sylvia Plath’s Writing 198 Lorna Piatti-Farnell 11 ‘All that Zombies Allow’ Re-Imagining the Fifties in Far from Heaven and Fido 216 Bernice M. Murphy Bibliography 234 Filmography 244 Index 250 July 5, 2011 12:20 MAC/CAME Page-viii 9780230_272217_01_prexiv PROOF 1 A-Bombs, B-Pictures, and C-Cups1 David J. Skal When the atomic bomb leveled Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, newspaper readers learned not only of the appalling devastation but also of the explosion’s unearthly beauty, a glowing hothouse blossom rising to the heavens. Witnesses to the test blast in the New Mexico desert on 18 July tried to describe the indescribable. Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, deputy to General Leslie R. Groves, head of the War Department’s atomic bomb project, combined the language of the theatre and literary criticism in his recollection of the event to the press: ‘The lighting effects beggar description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty that the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.’2 From its first deployment, the atomic bomb began radiating metaphors about knowledge, sin, and science that gave startling new life to ancient ideas. ‘I am become Death, shatterer of worlds,’ said bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Upanishad after the first test detonation. H.G. Wells, who died in 1946, bitter and frustrated by a war that had dashed his utopian hopes, saw a real Judgment Day. ‘[T]he end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded,’ he wrote in Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945).3 Promethean presumption, the spoiling of Eden, Pandora’s box, the golem, Faust, and Frankenstein all absorbed new energy from the atomic blast and in the process gave popular culture of the post-war years a particular mythic intensity. Like the fatal, beautiful plants envisioned by Nathaniel Hawthorne in Dr Rappaccini’s garden, the blossoming of the atom had a resonant symbolism that folded modern science into ancient alchemy. 17 July 5, 2011 10:53 MAC/CAME Page-17 9780230_272217_03_cha01 PROOF 18 It Came from the 1950s! Uranium was the new philosopher’s stone, a substance that promised almost mystical powers over the physical world and the processes of life. Public receptivity to a re-energized Frankenstein mythos didn’t come out of nowhere; the war years had seen an unprecedented number of mad scientists in Hollywood films, not only from the major studios but from independents as well. It is not surprising that the war effort was shadowed in popular entertainment by anxious images of applied science and technology. Without overtly challenging the patriotism of wartime audiences, mad science films provided a safe outlet for diffuse fears about the scientific, technological and military juggernaut that was engulfing the world. Dr Cyclops (1940) presented what remains one of the screen’s most chilling portraits of an obsessed scientific mind, a distillation of all the Depression decade’s suspicions about experts and intellectuals and run- away science. Dr Thirkell (Albert Dekker) is a classic scientific hermit, holed up in the Peruvian Andes, where he has found a way to use atomic radiation to miniaturize living things, in much the same way previously essayed in Tod Browning’s The Devil Doll (1936). Thirkell’s intellectual brilliance is matched only by his nearsightedness – literal as well as figurative. Completely self-absorbed, he cannot fathom his visitors’ objections to being used in his experiments or their outrage at being reduced to the size of figurines. All human values are beneath consideration. As iconography, Thirkell’s shaved head seems influenced by Peter Lorre’s similar bald pate in Mad Love (1935); it simultaneously draws attention to his braincase while rendering him creepily child- like. Thirkell is, after all, a monstrous baby, concerned only with his own interests and gratifications. Dr Cyclops was the brainchild of the producer-director team of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack, the same pair responsible for another famous study of relative scale, King Kong (1933). Hollywood’s bogeymen laureates, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, became even more identified with mad science during the war than in their first decade as the screen’s leading purveyors of fear. Karloff, of course, had built an identification with the Frankenstein story (despite other, distinguished work as a character actor), and Lugosi had played a handful of mad doctors among his villainous characterizations of the 1930s. Now, both men occupied the laboratory the way the Nazis occupied France. All the Hollywood mad doctors of the war years operated in obses- sive reclusion, paralleling the real-world secrecy surrounding the efforts of military research scientists. The public, of course, knew nothing of July 5, 2011 10:53 MAC/CAME Page-18 9780230_272217_03_cha01 PROOF A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 19 the Manhattan Project, but it did know, from a thousand reminders about loose lips and sunken ships, that there was much at stake in keeping science in the service of war hush-hush. Movieland madmen of the 1940s also conducted their experiments under conditions of strict secrecy; those who stumbled into their laboratories or learned their secrets were dealt with harshly. But it would have been strange for the public not to be curious about the secret activities of wartime scientists. Might there be a superweapon in the works that might defeat Hitler? But part of the message conveyed by Hollywood horror pictures was that it was better not to poke around laboratories, ask too many questions, or interfere with techno-scientific prerogatives generally. But for audiences, the closed laboratory would have the irresistible appeal of Bluebeard’s forbidden room. Enrico Fermi, a key member of the scientific team at Los Alamos that gave birth to the atomic bomb, pooh-poohed concerns among his colleagues that deployment of the new weapon might present ethical problems. In a quote that might have rolled easily off the tongues of Lionel Atwill or George Zucco, Fermi is reported to have said, ‘Don’t bother me with your conscientious scruples. After all, the thing’s superb physics.’4 He is also said to have wagered with co-workers all night over whether the bomb might ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world. But after witnessing the test blast at Alamagordo, Fermi was so shaken he was unable to drive his car. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer later expressed his misgivings about participating in the development of the bomb, his oft-quoted 1956 observation that ‘we did the work of the devil’ being the most pointed. Following the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic device in 1949, Oppenheimer opposed the development of an even more powerful weapon, the hydrogen bomb, an invention championed by his far more hawkish counterpart, Edward Teller. President Harry Truman ordered the development of the H-bomb in 1950, and Oppenheimer was investigated as a possible Soviet agent. Nuclear jitters increased as the United States became embroiled in the Korean War, with talk of possible H-bomb deployment. Hollywood’s first post-Hiroshima monster of any consequence was, like one of Rappaccini’s creations, a vegetable. The Thing from Another World (1951) featured James Arness in his pre-Gunsmoke days as an eight-foot-tall space alien found frozen in Arctic ice. Despite the extrater- restrial pedigree, Arness’s make-up is clearly inspired by the tried-and- true Frankenstein formula. And while not initially created by science, this jolly green golem is protected by a scientist who can’t pass up an experiment, regardless of the dangers (‘Knowledge,’ he says, ‘is more July 5, 2011 10:53 MAC/CAME Page-19 9780230_272217_03_cha01 PROOF 20 It Came from the 1950s! important than life’). The Thing from Another World also forges a link with Frankenstein in its evocative use of the North Pole as a setting; Mary Shelley had employed the same backdrop as a framing device in her novel, though it had not yet been featured in any film adaptation. The arrest, trial, and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for pass- ing atomic secrets to Russia gripped the nation between 1950 and 1953, a period when invasion fantasies with atomic overtones began to pro- liferate in Hollywood films.