Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (24 page)

Scene from
Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Late in the ’50s, fear of communist infiltration of American society continued to stir paranoia. Two years after the release of
Invasion
, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover published
Masters of Deceit
, a handbook for hunting commie spies in America’s own backyard. Sporting a picture of Hoover on the back cover talking on the telephone (as if he were, at that moment, dispatching FBI teams to deal with Russian saboteurs), the book urged its reader to “study your friends … What problems interest them?” Close attention might reveal them as either communist spies or communist dupes. If they are “unemployed workers” or “trade union men” or “a member of a minority group” or even “a mother worried about sending her children to kindergarten,” they might be a target, or even a source, of Soviet propaganda. If any of these groups (to which Hoover added “disaffected youth”) used language like “restore the Bill of Rights” or “Peace” or “restore academic freedom” it was likely that they had fallen for communist deceit and become carriers of the communist contagion.
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers
has also been read as less a metaphor for communist paranoia and more a critique of the stultifying conformism of the 1950s. The idea of one’s friends, neighbors, and family members becoming emotionless drones seeking to escape into an “untroubled world” fit the fears of many Americans nervous about the degree of conformity created by postwar containment culture. Film critic Sara Hamilton, writing a review of
Invasion
for the
Los Angeles Examiner
, warned her readers that “you too may become a potted plant” and suggested that audiences pay attention to the film’s subtext about yearnings for escape into a tranquilized state. Reviewer Jack Moffit, writing for
Hollywood Reporter
, suggested that the film seems “to be saying that modern man [
sic
], tired of facing the mental problems of our intricate age, is prone to welcome the irresponsible life of a human vegetable.”
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In some respects,
Invasion
worked both as a critique of postwar American apathy and anticommunist paranoia. As American cold warriors worried that communists lurked behind every respectable-looking American face, most of the new middle class sought to become that respectable face, to embody the highly touted values of patriotism, optimism, conformity, and a studied normality. Margot Henrikson notes, in
her massive study of cold war American culture that “there was something unnerving and unnatural about the placidity of America during the 1950s.” This placidity seems especially disconcerting given the mixed message of triumphalism and doom coming from official sources. Government-produced educational films described how American families should react in the midst of a nuclear Armageddon, giving precise safety instructions as if an apocalyptic war was just another natural disaster. John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State to President Eisenhower, gave a number of public interviews in which he insisted that “brinkmanship,” pushing the United States to the very edge of war in a high-risk game of international chicken, offered the best promise of peace. Dulles told
Life
magazine in the mid-’50s that “you have to take chances for peace, just as you take chances with war.” This policy of inciting conflict in order to promote peace seemed to have provoked little public opposition at the time. Henrikson points out that perhaps “America’s trance resulted as much from shock as from contentment.”
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In the 1950s and much of the 1960s, American pop culture seemed constructed to secure middle-class contentment. Films like
The Thing
and
Invasion
tapped into the middle-class terror and paranoia just below the surface of its unearthly calm. But most of the material put out by Hollywood offered pure escapist fun combined with the message that the authorities had things firmly under control. These monster stories shared the same aesthetic as the government educational films of the same era. Soothing voices becoming suddenly stentorian and alarmed when describing “the Threat” were followed by more soothing tones promising that experts could contain the Threat, even if it could not be eliminated completely.
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The experts, in government, in the military, and in the scientific establishment, were in charge. The changing meaning of the mad scientist in the fifties creature features provides the best example of what many audiences hoped to find in their monster fantasies. Before the Second World War, science gone mad had been the prime culprit in the vast majority of monster features. Dr. Frankenstein raising his creature or Bela Lugosi wreaking murder and mayhem with bizarre medical experiments reflected fears of new technology and mirrored, sometimes almost exactly, the real-world horrors being perpetrated on unknowing test subjects. Filmmakers did not represent the madness of their scientists as utter, frothing lunacy, but rather as a kind of theological madness, pride, and hubris toward the established cosmic order.

In the vast majority of creature features in the 1950s, the scientist appears as a highly sympathetic figure. While he (and it is always a he) may have unleashed a menace through efforts to better humanity,
his scientific know-how, combined with a little help from allies in the military, puts the genie back in the bottle (or the test tube). Horror historian Andrew Tudor makes the point that, while horror films of the 1930s had their occult experts who could destroy the monster and sometimes stop the mad scientist, horror films in the 1950s actually placed the mad scientist in the role of the expert who battles and defeats the threat.
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The monsters of these films changed as well. Part of the fascination (and terror) of the 1930s and 1940s monsters came from their human shape. Bodies sutured together from the dead and shapeshifting men still walked like human beings. You would never know the vampire did not share our humanity until she showed her fangs. Even King Kong had strong human characteristics. This tendency to combine the human and the inhuman made the monsters terrifying while evoking more complex emotions of desire and sympathy.

The creatures of the atomic age bore little or no relationship to humanity. Films like
It Came from Beneath the Sea
(1955) and
Earth vs. the Spider
(1958) pitted the scientific-military establishment against giant, slithering creatures. The heavy of
The Beast with a Million Eyes
or
The Fiend without a Face
evoked no human empathy at all. Creature features stressed the utter helplessness of humanity in the face of these atomic age threats. The scientific–military establishment became the only place to turn. Stephen Whitfield argues that the military and the FBI came to be seen as institutions above reproach in the 1950s, so much so that even Joseph McCarthy’s popularity plummeted after he criticized World War II hero General Ralph Zwicker. Creature features reflected this attitude.
Invaders from Mars
intercut its alien invasion with stock footage of American jeeps, tanks, and other armored vehicles riding to the rescue to the strains of martial music, the GIs atop their motorized weaponry giving occasional fist pumps and thumbs up.
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An America that trusted Harry Truman when he thanked God for weapons of mass destruction could easily see the American military as an infallible institution and the mad scientist as problem solver. Still, it would create a false picture of the era to suggest that Americans, even white, middle-class Americans, never questioned the words of the experts and relied solely on authoritative voices to tell them when all was well. A sense that perhaps the experts had no idea what they were doing informed at least a small segment of postwar American culture. A rather extraordinary moment occurs in
The Thing
when Dr. Carrington praises science as the best way to understand the world since, after all, science allowed humanity to “split the atom.” “Yes,” one of the
Air Force men sarcastically replies, “and that sure made the world happy didn’t it?” Given the degree to which the American public sought to repress the horrors of Hiroshima and the extent to which it responded to government entreaties to trust the bomb and the national security state, this brief jab at the consensus points to a deeper distress. Tales of the fantastic provided a safe forum to vent these minor challenges to the status quo.
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Dissent from the American consensus took many forms. While Beat poets expressed their rage or kept their ironic distance from mainstream American culture, others saw the world full of the monsters that the comforts of postwar America had supposedly banished. Some Americans began to worry that the terrible alien creatures threatening earth at their local theater were something more than Hollywood monsters. Others suspected that not only were such creatures real, but that the military had tried to keep their existence from the American public. Others began to challenge the hegemonic worldview of science and its “experts,” suspecting that more monstrous creatures roamed the world than science had been willing to grant.

Little Green Men

Billy Ray Taylor had been visiting friends on the night of August 21, 1955, when the heat of Kentucky’s late summer induced him to go outside and draw water from a hand pump. It was then that Taylor saw strange lights in the sky that he immediately identified to his friends, the Sutton family, as “flying saucers.” An hour later, strange noises caused Taylor and Elmer “Lucky” Sutton to investigate, shotguns in hand. UFOologist Jerome Clark later described what they saw as a “three and a half foot tall being with an oversized head” with “big floppy pointed ears” dressed in a silvery, metallic garb, with claw-like hands raised in either greeting or threat.
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The sighting of the “Hopkinsville Goblins” shaped the formative narrative of the UFO tradition. Although only two witnesses claimed to see the creatures, elements of this story became determinative for much of the folklore about alien sightings, from the appearance of strange lights in the sky to the rural setting (and the stereotype of the local yokel who sees little green men). Alien invaders became the perfect monster for a society seeking containment from outside threats but uncertain if its boundaries could be guarded. But they also encoded wholly legitimate concerns about American institutions in the era of the cold war and the national security state.

Extraterrestrial goblins in Kentucky were not the first visitors from another world reported by Americans watching the skies. In June of 1947 Idaho businessman Kenneth Arnold was flying his private plane near Mount Rainier, Washington, when he allegedly saw a bright flash (not unlike the flashes of atomic destruction Americans had been warned to look out for) and a series of circular craft. Arnold described these ships to a journalist as moving across the sky “like a saucer would if you skipped it across water.” Referred to in a newspaper story as “flying saucers,” the image became iconic in American culture.
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The summer of 1947 could be called the summer of the flying saucers. Numerous newspaper stories reported on sightings that followed the general outline of the Arnold narrative. On July 7, UFO watchers in Roswell, New Mexico, added a new element to the developing mythos. They claimed to see a ship crash, and some insisted that the military had found and hidden the wreckage (and perhaps the aliens’ corpses). Feeding speculation and folkloric tendencies, military officials released a press release on July 8 that mentioned a “flying disc” as having been recovered. A later release clarified that the “wreckage” had been a weather balloon. Nevertheless, the Roswell sighting became the basis for stories about “Area 51” in Nevada, a military installation that supposedly hid the alien wreckage. The secrecy of Area 51 soon became a metonym for governmental cover-up in general.
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The alien visitation/invasion folklore that developed after the Second World War is, of course, perfectly explicable without resorting to extraterrestrial visitations as an explanation. Postwar anxiety about the bomb and its effects, as well as fear of the “masters of deceit” hiding behind the faces of friends and neighbors, fueled paranoid notions about alien visitors and government cover-ups. Popular culture in the late 1940s and 1950s sometimes represented paranoia as a virtue, a sign of knowing what is really going on. This was especially true in sci-fi monster tales where, in films like
Them!
and
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
, the first person to identify the threat is considered “paranoid” or “delusional” but is later shown as the only person who really knows what is going on.

Cultural theorist Fredric Jameson once called conspiracy theories “poor people’s cognitive mapping.” A more accurate description of postwar American conspiracy theory might be cognitive mapping for the confused. American studies scholar Peter Knight describes conspiracy theory in this period as less about “crackpot delusion” and more about “an everyday struggle to make sense of a rapidly changing world.”
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Perhaps there was more to America’s obsession with little green men than the need to make sense of a confusing world. Although
explainable without resorting to literal monsters from the stars, Americans living in the 1940s and 1950s had good reasons to fear conspiracy. The United States government had, after all, made a fetish of secrecy during the cold war. While there is no reason to believe the American military hid information about flying saucers and alien autopsies, we know they hid plenty of other secrets from the American people. Beginning in the late ’40s, postwar Presidents of both political parties began taking unilateral military action without consultation with Congress or any real effort to determine public opinion. The CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) moved quickly from their original mandate of intelligence gathering to operational activities, conducting secret wars on behalf of American interests around the globe. Later revelations about nuclear testing would reveal a pattern of lying and deception in the name of national security.
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