Lost in Space: Technology and Turbulence in Futuristic Cinema of the 1950s

Before a commencement audience at Lehigh University in 1949, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) anticipated the central question guiding a forthcoming wave of futuristic Hollywood science fiction. In his remarks that day, titled "Science and the Spirit of Man," David Lilienthal asked the graduates and their guests, "Is our advancing technology good? Is the ever more important machine good? Or [is it] evil?"¹ Just four years removed from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few in the audience would have missed the Cold War implications. Indeed, the cluster of 1950s films on futuristic space travel and alien invasion introduced audiences to all manner of weird machines, robots, weapons, and other phenomena, of human and alien origin, meant, in part, to represent nuclear arms, and the scholarship on those films has emphasized the Cold War elements accordingly.²

Yet for the AEC chairman—and for futuristic cinema in the 1950s—the problem of technology did not stop with atomic weaponry or the standoff with the Soviet Union. "It reaches into the lives of every one of us, old and young, rich and poor, you who graduate today and you who are freshmen," he said. "It concerns the housewife, the librarian, the chemist; it must be faced by the clergyman, the professor and the physician no less than by the businessman and public official. For this is the kind of world we live in—the world of the machine—and this is the struggle of our time." Science and technology could "exhaust," "poison," "foul," or "devastate" the natural world, although they just as likely might "eliminate filth and congestion and disease...strengthen the soil...conserve the forests...humanize man's environment." In the hands of democracies, he said, returning to Cold War geopolitics, scientific and technological innovations promised to deliver humanity to the heights of individual freedom. In that scenario, "Men can direct technology so that it can carry mankind toward the fulfillment of the greatest promise for human life and the human spirit in all history."³

Lilienthal gave hopeful answers to his own questions that day, yet he recognized their thorniness in the "turbulent times in which we live."⁴ Futuristic films of the 1950s, for all their cheap thrills and crude storylines, took a similar tack. They shared Lilienthal's expansive view of technology, looking beyond the Cold War and voicing broad concerns over the triangular interplay of nature, religion, and scientific advancement. This article seeks to re-imagine space and alien potboilers, from Destination Moon (1950) to The Time Machine (1960), as signs of such disruption in postwar values, concerns, and relationships—indicators that the Cold War and other socio-political developments were changing the tenor of everyday life in America.⁵ To accomplish that, the article puts the movies into the context of contemporary debates airing in scientific, religious, political, and journalistic circles during the 1950s. Such positioning reveals that popular cinema offered American audiences a safe and entertaining space for confronting and comprehending the profound anxieties of the era. How might the technological revolution reach into "the lives of every one of us?" Americans found answers to that question—sometimes disturbing ones—in the great cinematic clashes of men, machinery, and aliens of the 1950s.

Naturally, the atomic bomb animated much of the insecurity and fear of the decade. Its development raised the public profile and institutional support of scientists, while simultaneously eroding confidence in their moral authority. The public association of scientists with the birth and implementation of atomic weaponry increasingly rendered them both authors of great human suffering and pawns of government, military, and industry. Filmmakers duly infused their pictures with such Cold War themes. Yet they also articulated a postwar shift in popular attitudes toward nature, the growth of a nascent environmental movement, perceptions of antagonism between technology and nature, and concerns about global population increases. The Cold War helped spur a concurrent spike in American religiosity in the 1950s, reviving public discussion—and cinematic coverage—of piety's place in a world of galloping technological change. Celluloid science fiction pitted...