2.

THE AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION FILM

2.1. The Beginnings

The “special relationship” between novel and film that, to some extent, underpinned
the emergence of the genre in Europe, continued with Hollywood’s later adaptations
(this is particularly evident in the number of Hollywood films based upon the novels of
H. G. Wells), but the “roots” of the American film genre can be traced back to a far
wider variety of sources. Following the popular and inexpensive “dime novels” of the
nineteenth century, came the “pulps,” then the science fiction comic strips and comic
books, which can be traced back to roughly the same period. The character Buck
Rogers made his first appearance in two science fiction stories published in Amazing
Stories and later featured in one of the first science fiction newspaper comic strips in
the late 1920s. The Flash Gordon comic strip followed soon after in 1934. Both of
these comic strips followed the adventures of an athletic, all-American hero who fights
against strange alien forces. Usually surrounded by amazing technological “toys” and
a bevy of beautiful women, Buck and Flash projected a mixture of potency and
technological savvy. While Buck and Flash performed extraordinary feats, they were
no match for the numerous superheroes who were to follow. Seen as a sub-genre of
the science fiction comic strip, enduring superheroes like Superman and Batman
emerged in the late 1930s. Their powers were beyond those of a human hero and their
skin-tight costumes emphasised their super-masculine prowess.
It was comic strip heroes and superheroes like these that crossed over into science
fiction radio serials (e.g. Buck Rogers in 1932 and Flash Gordon in 1935) and later
into the cinema serials. The cinema serials were low-budget films aimed at a young
audience. Episodes numbered between twelve and fifteen and individual episodes
were usually between fifteen to twenty minutes in length. Cinema serials like The
Shadow of the Eagle (1932), The Phantom of the Air (1933) The Lost City (1935)
featured robust central heroes doing battle with evil adversaries.
Technological innovation was also a central feature of these serials, but it was not
until Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (1936) that the science fiction genre really came
into its own within this medium. Flash was followed by Buck Rogers Conquers the
Universe (1939) and the later superhero serials, The Batman (1943) and The
Adventures of Superman (1948). There were very few science fiction feature films
produced in the US during the 1930s and 1940s, so in terms of numbers the serials
remain the most prominent example of the American film genre before the 1950s. The
serial was plotted to a set formula that required a fast pace, easily recognisable and
colourful characters and regular “cliff hangers” to tempt children back to the cinemas
to see the next episode. Many of these features found their way into later feature films
and the American science fiction film genre therefore became inextricably linked with
sensation, commercialism and a juvenile market.
Possible examples of a more adult strand in American science fiction film can be
traced through the remakes, adaptations and films based on the characters of both
Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde that appeared
throughout the 1930s and 1940. However, these are usually seen as part of the cycle
of horror films that proved so popular from the Depression years through to World War
II. In addition, while the science fiction radio and cinema serials were primarily aimed
at a juvenile audience, an exception can be found in the Mercury Theatre’s radio
adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which aired in 1938. Shifting the
location of Wells’ novel to New Jersey, Orson Welles and his troupe of players
deliberately imitated a series of newscasts for the radio version. With the
announcement that aliens had invaded, widespread panic ensued. Tensions were
high at this time with regular news coming from Europe in the lead up to World War II.
Also, as set against the more usual style associated with the children’s science fiction
radio serials, the Mercury’s novel approach was certainly unfamiliar to many. This,
along with the more adult fare offered by Wells’ science fiction narrative, mixed with
the stylistic realism of the performance was not a combination that American
audiences were used to in their popular science fiction.

2.2. The First Golden Age (1950-1960)

2.2.1. Positive and Negative Visions of the Future

The sudden appearance of the science fiction feature film in the 1950s is thus not so
surprising as might first appear. The genre emerges as a symbolic response to an
America transformed by heightened public recognition of the vast power and socio-
political consequences of rapid advances in science and technology; a new
consciousness of the relativity of spatial and temporal distance, and the planet as a
connected global community; and by a lived sense of political enmity and geophysical
vulnerability. The Cold War period is marked ambivalently – both by the historically
unique threat of nuclear annihilation and the domestic promise of new technologies
such as television and the computer. Politicians urged technological superiority in the
“arms race” and school children went through “duck and cover” civil defence drills,
while consumers bought “modern” home appliances, wore “miracle” fabrics, and lived
“better through chemistry.”
The science fiction film poetically dramatized and gave visibly concrete and novel
form to the hopes and fears generated by these new conditions of existence. Indeed,
the two key films that initiated American SF film’s first “Golden Age” are exemplary in
symbolically figuring the positive and negative attitudes about the technologized future
that informed both the culture at large and the genre in particular. Destination Moon
(1950) was big-budget, its Technicolor narrative of a manned space mission optimistic
about an expansionist future enabled by the cooperation of hard science, high
technology, and corporate capitalism. In images filled with shiny futuristic technology,
a sleek spaceship, the beauty of limitless outer space, and “special effects,” the film
visually went “where no man had gone before.” However much marked by the ideology
of its present, the film’s creation of awesome moonscapes, its extra-terrestrial
perspective on Earth, its grounding in current scientific knowledge, and its privileging
of human curiosity presage later visionary science fiction such as 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). With the moon as its
destination and with “special effects” technology as its means of transportation,
Destination Moon promised its audiences a progressive, expansionist, and shiny new
future.
The Thing (1951), however, was pessimistic about both rational science and the
future. Low-budget and black-and-white, the film’s narrative about a murderous alien
creature on an Arctic military outpost was xenophobic and anti-science, privileging
technology only for the weapons it provided against alien attack. Indeed, with its dark
mise-en-scène and caution against obsessive scientific curiosity, The Thing harkened
back to earlier horror films whose moral was “there are some things man is not meant
to know.” Claustrophobic, creating danger in off-screen (and outer) space, it presaged
not only its own remake in 1983, but also the wary and confined vision of the Alien
films (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997). The Thing envisioned the future not in terms of
limitless space and scientific progress, but in terms of merely staying alive and safe.
Its paranoid last warning was: “Keep watching the skies!”
These two films set the boundaries and tonal range of the first period of science
fiction’s popularity as a genre. They also dramatized the period’s essential
ambivalence about the new Cold War conjunction of science, technology, the military,
and corporate capitalism. But for some few exceptions like War of the Worlds and
Invaders from Mars (both 1953) which were Earth-bound nightmares of alien invasion,
the legacy of the big-budget, effects-laden Destination Moon were films that, even
when cautionary, celebrated technology as progressive and the American future as
expansive in awesome and poetic displays of graceful, glittering new machinery, and
startlingly beautiful extra-terrestrial landscapes and spacescapes. Nonetheless,
perhaps because of production costs or the prevalence of fear over hope, there were
far fewer science fiction films like When Worlds Collide (1951), Riders to the Stars
(1954), The Conquest of Space (1955), and Forbidden Planet (1956) than black-and-
white films that shared the paranoia of The Thing.

2.2.2. “Creature Features”

This negative vision of the future developed in several directions: “creature features,”
alien invasion fantasies, and films about the fear of radiation and nuclear apocalypse.
“Creature features” foregrounded atomically awakened or mutated creatures that
embodied the present threat of nuclear annihilation in “prehistoric” figures. Stomping
cities and chomping their inhabitants, primal beasts and giant insects caused mass
urban chaos and, through special effects, brought to visibility the imagination of
disaster and the aesthetics of destruction. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953),
Them! (1954), Tarantula (1955), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), The Deadly
Mantis (1957), and The Black Scorpion (1957) give us creatures who condense in their
gigantic size, primitive biology, and acts of mindless and outsize destruction not only
the affective charge of an annihilating energy run amok, but also the suggestion of
humanity’s post-apocalyptic future as a regression to prehistory and the primal sink.
At the same time, however, these primitive creatures drew attention away from the
advanced science and technology that gave rise to them – thus allowing scientists and
the military to use that science and technology to “save” humanity (just as they had in
World War II). Hardly regarded as works of art or social commentary, these films were
nonetheless culturally significant. Ritualistic in their simple plotting and repetitive
structure, they were mythic in function – narratively resolving intense and contradictory
feelings about scientific rationalism and advanced technology, and their historically
novel destructive (and military) applications.

2.2.3. Alien Invasion

The alien invasion films dramatized another cultural anxiety: the popular fear of
Communism as a dehumanizing political system bent on destroying individual
subjectivity, committed to world conquest, and proficient in frightening new forms of
“invasive” and “invisible” domination like “brainwashing.” These films disguise
(sometimes only thinly) Cold War nightmares about being “taken over” by powerful,
inhumanly cold (and rational) others, who would radically flatten human emotion and
transform (American) consciousness into a collectivity, but they do so in two quite
different forms.

2.2.3.1. The Aesthetics of Destruction

Like the creature films, one type of invasion film features the aesthetics of destruction
and an urban America under attack – but here from aliens, whose superior weapons
blast distinctly American landmarks like the Washington Monument. At the same time
the invasion is seen through newspaper and television montage as global in scope.
War of the Worlds (1953) and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) dramatize radical
xenophobia, fear of planetary annihilation through high-tech weaponry, and a
contradictory yearning for both a United Nations fantasy of peaceful global coalition
and another morally clear-cut – rather than ambiguously “cold” – world war. Only The
Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) took a critical view of the period’s xenophobia, its
extra-terrestrial (if humanoid) protagonist speaking out against irrational fear and
knee-jerk militarism, and emphasizing the cosmic consequences of nuclear power.
Even this film, however, used the threat of planetary destruction (by the technologically
superior extra-terrestrials) as the solution to the threat of planetary destruction (by
technologically inferior humans). Its singular critical intelligence and plea for world
peace was thus ultimately informed by the very structure of Cold War détente.

2.2.3.2. The Threats of Communism

The second type of alien invasion film dramatized cultural anxieties about the more
“invisible” threats of Communism: infiltration of the US by a subversive “fifth column”
and ideological “brainwashing.” Invaders from Mars (1953), It Came from Outer Space
(1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), I Married a Monster from Outer Space
(1958), and The Day Mars Invaded the Earth (1963) locate themselves in the ordinary
and familiar worlds of small-town and suburban America where aliens “take over” the
bodies of family members, cops, doctors, workmen, and lovers. These low-budget
films created a paranoid style (and spectatorship) in which alien “difference” was
marked not by special effects but by the wooden demeanour and small failures of the
human-looking aliens to respond appropriately in ordinary human situations: not
blinking at the sun, not responding maternally to a child or passionately to a kiss. Yet,
in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, those “taken over” tell those still human: “Love,
desire, ambition, faith. Without them, life is so simple.”
Expressing Cold War fears about a “soulless” alien social system and emotional
fatigue at the complexity of global politics, these invasion films gained additional power
from their location in American suburbia – for the 1950s were also marked by
ambivalence and critique of the rise of the gray-suited “organization man,” the
sameness of tract housing, and of “creeping conformity” (a domestic equivalent to
alien “collective consciousness,” whether Martian or Russian).

2.2.4. Nuclear Apocalypse

SF post-apocalyptic fantasies played out anxieties of yet another kind. Fear of

radiation’s effects on the human body were poeticized in extreme dramas of scale like
The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Amazing Colossal Man (both 1957), while
visions of life after nuclear apocalypse were set in recognizable urban contexts, now
ghost towns emptied of people but for a few survivors. Structured around loss and
absence, both elegiac and cautionary in tone, On the Beach and The World, the Flesh
and the Devil (both 1959) starred significant Hollywood actors and were received less
as science fiction than as serious adult drama. Other low-budget films like Five (1951)
or the later Panic in the Year Zero (1962) also foregrounded moral questions of the
period about what “survival of the fittest” might mean in actual post-apocalyptic
practice.