Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (23 page)

In February of 1956 the movie industry magazine
Boxoffice
described how “ever since the atomic explosions” the deadly possibilities of “mutations to animal life because of radioactive fallout” had caused a boom for science fiction films. While middle-class America seemingly had little desire to view freaks for entertainment (and certainly not to see them on the streets), science fiction fantasies about mutants, usually created by radiation, became a major box-office draw. In the decades after World War II, American moviegoers saw the utter destruction of their major cities from fifty-foot women and giant insects, monstrous beings created by radiation or nuclear testing. American horror in the first years of the cold war raised creatures from under the earth and sea, gigantic destructive creatures frequently called forth by scientists and
government officials but almost always defeated by scientific know-how and the national security state.
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Fear of how the public would respond to the realities of radioactivity and fallout led to a massive disinformation campaign by the American government in the years after the Second World War. In the late 1940s historian Paul Boyer points out, government civil defense plans sought to “downplay the danger of radiation in an atomic attack.” Seeking to eliminate public fears about the dangers of fallout from atomic tests, official government educational pamphlets, such as
How to Survive an Atomic Bomb
, advised readers to ignore the “foolish stories” that they had heard of radiation’s dangers and to “learn not to be afraid of those words ‘radiation’ and ‘radioactivity.’”
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Efforts to dismiss fears of radioactivity quickly found their way into Hollywood films. In 1954 Japanese filmmaker Ishiro Honda’s
Gojira
(Godzilla) used the Japanese Yokai (“monster”) tradition to tell a finely wrought tale of the dangers of the nuclear era. Using imagery borrowed directly from the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Gojira
contained a number of highly politicized digs at the United States and its atomic policy. The monster is raised by atomic testing and only destroyed, not by more scientific/military wizardry, but by the willingness of human beings to sacrifice themselves. A 1956 release of the film to American audiences chopped and slashed Hondo’s moving tale into unrecognizability. Using much of the footage from Hondo’s original,
Godzilla: King of the Monsters
(as the U.S. release was called) added an American reporter as a hero and sublimated the atomic theme. All references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki were eliminated.
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Survivors of America’s use of atomic weapons proved a more powerful image than Godzilla. In 1955 the so-called Hiroshima Maidens, twenty-five young Japanese women who as children had been horribly burned and disfigured by the first atomic bomb, came to the United States to receive corrective surgery. A Hiroshima minister, himself a survivor of the attack, joined with
Saturday Review of Literature
editor Norman Cousins in an effort to transform their visit into agitprop against nuclear weapons. Staying in host homes throughout New York City, the women received a significant degree of attention. The American government watched uneasily. Cold war historian Margot Henrikson notes that once-secret communiqués between Washington and American officials in Japan now reveal official concern over whether or not the Hiroshima Maidens represented communist agitation.
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We now know Americans had more to fear from radiation than they ever realized. Secret tests by the U.S. government and major institutions
of American medicine, not an all-out nuclear exchange, exposed thousands of American citizens to sickness and death. Between 1948 and 1952 the government released radioactive material on select American communities to “see how it moved.” In almost the same period, doctors connected with Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital fed small amounts of radioactive food to mentally retarded children in order to study its effects on human digestion and to determine whether an antidote for radiation sickness could be developed.
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Exposing mentally retarded test subjects to dangerous radiation seemed perfectly reasonable to medical researchers in the postwar period. Strong cultural connections between mental and physical abnormality and the idea of the monster remained, even if the freak show had gone into decline. Mental retardation signaled both physical abnormality and social shame, an expendable class of Americans. In an era that fetishized normalcy, birth defects represented a kind of social death.
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Ironically, the health of children was very much on the minds of the “baby-boomer” parents who, between 1946 and 1964, brought seventy-nine million children into the world. Given the amount of cultural attention being paid to the possibility of radiation creating mutant monsters, it is not surprising that the baby boom created its fair share of monster tales. Unfortunately for many Americans, these horror stories were real and affected tens of thousands of families and their children.

In 1962 a tranquilizer known as thalidomide had been advertised to expectant mothers as a “cure” for morning sickness (and as a salve for anxiety). Soon afterward, the drug was discovered to act as a reagent for profound birth defects. Extreme craniofacial deformity became a common side effect, as were children born with stunted or missing limbs. A panic ensued. David J. Skal notes that tabloid newspapers “became actual sideshows” with photographs of “freakish” births and headlines like “New Thalidomide Monsters.”
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Therapeutic abortion represented one humane option for dealing with this living horror, but state laws passed in the late nineteenth century made receiving a safe procedure next to impossible. In this context, Sherri Finkbine became the most public face of the thalidomide tragedy in America. Finkbine, the host of a local Phoenix, Arizona, version of the children’s program
Romper Room
, took thalidomide during the first trimester of her pregnancy. Discovering the dangers of the drug and counseled by her doctor, she attempted, unsuccessfully, to obtain an abortion in the United States. Amidst death threats, she and her husband traveled to Sweden to secure medical treatment. The fetus,
remarked the attending physician, had no limbs or face and likely would have died at birth.
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Mutations seem to threaten all the cornerstones of American domestic life. If they could live in the womb, they could certainly pay a visit to your neighborhood. The Love Canal tragedy, which unfolded over three decades, further underscored the dangers of scientific mutations. In the early twentieth century, William T. Love imagined a modern, industrial “dream community”—a utopia of middle-class American values and technological innovation in upstate New York. By the 1910s his dream had died, and by the 1920s, the site was used to dump chemical and industrial waste, buried beneath the earth like the monster of a late night drive-in feature. In 1958 the Hooker Chemical Company sold the waste site to the city of Love Canal for one dollar. The site became a thriving working-class community, though one with an unusual number of birth defects that became increasingly severe over time. By the late 1970s the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded that, for a twenty-five year period, eighty-two different kinds of chemical compounds (eleven of them carcinogenic) had leached through the soil.
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The outcome of Love Canal seems like a monster tale. An official from the EPA who visited the community in 1979 found a landscape from a postapocalyptic nightmare. “Corroding waste disposal barrels,” he wrote, “could be seen breaking up through the grounds of backyards. Trees and gardens were turning black and dying … Puddles of noxious chemicals were pointed out to me in basements, others yet were on school playgrounds. Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play with burns on their hands.”
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Americans had every reason to be afraid of monster mutations in the postwar era. Cultural fears can create strange refractions, a desire to deal with fear by transforming anxiety into desire. This combination of worry and fascination over the menace of mutation appears in the overwhelming popularity of the costumed heroes of Marvel Comics. Marvel’s history stretched back to the 1930s when the small company had been known as Timely Comics. Marvel found a large audience during World War II when legendary artist Jack Kirby created Captain America, a super-soldier who fought Axis evil with his allies Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch. In the postwar period, Marvel published popular war comics, as well as horror and sci-fi. Many of these titles dealt with the possibility of radiation creating mutated monsters.
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Marvel’s line took a definitive turn in 1961 when editor Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby created
The Fantastic Four
, a comic that turned human
mutations into heroes. The setting for the transformation of the four is a scientific experiment gone wrong, the soon-to-be heroes exposed to what Stan Lee called, in his original synopsis of the story, “cosmic rays.” These unidentified rays granted all four special powers and changed one of them into a super-powered monster, which Lee called “the Thing” (obviously a riff on the 1951 film). Thing, though a member of the four and a hero, was originally imagined by Stan Lee as so monstrous that his fellow superheroes worried that he might eventually lose control of his short temper and destroy humanity.
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The popularity of Marvel’s new supergroup christened a remarkably creative era in which Marvel artists collaborated to produce a lineup of costumed heroes that became icons of popular culture. Almost all of these are mutated human heroes, created from some kind of radioactivity. Peter Parker as Spider-Man premiered in August of 1962, transformed into a human arachnid after being bitten by a radioactive spider. Daredevil, blinded by radioactive sludge, is also given extraordinary powers by the industrial accident. The X-Men, young people born with special powers, are actually referred to as mutants. Their strange abilities are seen by the larger society as a kind of birth defect, further proof that Marvel had channeled the nation’s collective nightmares.

Given the nation’s obsession with monsters, the Incredible Hulk represents the most interesting of Marvel’s enduring creations. Lee has said that the possibility of a monster as a superhero triggered his idea for the Hulk (and he had done something very similar already with the Thing). The cover of the first issue featured a stylized subscript that read: “Is he man or monster or … is he both?”
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Appearing in the summer of 1962, the protagonist was a sympathetic scientist transformed into a monster when exposed to the fallout from a “gamma bomb” he had created. In Bruce Banner, Marvel created yet another scientific expert who raised a monster—and yet who remains a hero. The origin story clearly borrowed both from Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with the twist that the Hulk would be portrayed fighting a myriad of space invaders and evil mutants. He was a monster who would battle monsters.
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The Hulk corresponded with much of American public opinion’s understanding of the terrible weapons developed, tested, and used by their own government and the scientific establishment. Science had created lethal weapons but, the public optimistically thought, such weapons would only be used against America’s monstrous enemies. The monster could become an ally of the national security state.

Pod People

Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, along with
The Thing
, represents the best of 1950s sci-fi fare, fully making use of very real American terrors. The story follows Dr. Miles Bennell, who finds his hometown of Santa Mira, California, in the midst of a “mass hysteria.” His patients claim that their parents are not their parents and their friends are not their friends; they have become emotionless automatons. Dr. Bennell and his love interest discover strange, suppurating vegetable pods all over town, pods that explode to infect, invade, and take over the minds and bodies of their neighbors. These enslaved human beings place more pods around town in an attempt to infect even more people.
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What are the origins of these invading body snatchers? Miles speculates that “it may be the result of atomic radiation on plant life or animal life. Some weird alien organism. A mutation of some kind.” Later in the film, he goes further and suggests that Americans had opened the door to this invasion of apathetic affectlessness. Miles ruminates that, for a long time, he had been watching his patients allow “their humanity to drain away.” Miles’ reflection on the stilted, empty nature of American culture perfectly gels with his first diagnosis of the pod epidemic: “mass hysteria” and “delusion” caused by “what’s going on in the world probably.”

Invasion
can also be read as a critique of cold war-era paranoia about the supposed communist next door. Joseph McCarthy had, for a time, rallied enormous support for his crusade against an internal threat and convinced many Americans that their neighbors were not their
neighbors. Beginning in 1950 the Wisconsin Republican made a series of increasingly outrageous claims about communist infiltration at the highest levels of society, an internal alien invasion that transformed even the State Department and the Pentagon into a frightening mass of pod people. In the same year, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which barred immigrants who had belonged to “Communist or Communist-front organizations” from entering the United States.
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