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2 Empty Boys, Queer Others, and Consumerism Two kinds of sci-fi horror films filled American movie screens in the early and mid 1950s. In Them! (1954), The Thing (1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and The Blob (1958), extraterrestrial invaders threatened wholesome Americans and their self-reliant values. Several of these films, including Them! and Godzilla (1954), featured science and the military working together to expel or kill the aliens. The second kind of film, exemplified in Invaders from Mars (1953) and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), focused on subversion from within. In these, the extraterrestrials found a means of simulating real Americans with replicants, compulsive automatons who would do their bidding. The aliens in Body Snatchers, for instance, grow duplicate bodies of citizens in pods to take control of a small town in California, the first step in planetary conquest. These pod-people look just like those they replace; only their loved ones can tell that something is “wrong.”1 These sci-fi thrillers allegorize the two kinds of threats to national authenticity perceived by many Americans during the early Cold War— external invasion and internal subversion. To counter the first, Americans spent billions of dollars to establish a “military-industrial” complex for “national security.” The second threat was more elusive, its defense harder to devise. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) could arrest spies; local McCarthyites could root out union leaders, teachers, and journalists who might be Communist sympathizers; but finally there was very little difference on the outside between pod-people and genuine Americans. How could patriots tell the simulators apart from the authentic people? The “science” of psychology offered some answers, with its claim to be able to gaze beneath the surface of simulation into the depths of a person’s true, essen- tial self. Psychology could both detect “deviants” and help “normal” people to conform to the ways of a “freedom-loving” nation. Not surprisingly , perhaps, the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947— passed to guard the container of the nation from both within and without —joined psychological manipulation to national security by allowing the government to propagandize its own citizens. Containment liberalism facilitated a linkage between the militarization and the “psychologization ” of the nation. Among the many cold war constructions of these two cultural processes was the “American boy,” a mixture of innocence and independence, vulnerability and strength. Nineteenth-century Americans generally understood boyhood as a time of transition for males from childhood to manhood, which might last from the teens through the mid twenties. By the twentieth century, however, the dominant culture had begun to celebrate the extension of boyishness into manhood through such figures as Teddy Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, and the male heroes of Frank Capra films. In the 1950s the figure of the boy was even more popular but also more indeterminate than before. Responding to the general demand for the type, Hollywood produced a variety of boys during the early Cold War: tough, sexy boys like Marlon Brando, sensitive rebels like James Dean, the boys-next-door like Rock Hudson, sophisticated playboys like Frank Sinatra, and shy but talented boys like Danny Kaye. These Hollywood boys were not as yet the primary breadwinner for a family, although they might become one by the end of their films. Like that of their stage counterparts , the identity container of these boys was fundamentally empty; it had not yet been filled with an adult personality. Indeed, while the dominant culture of the 1950s praised adult males who preserved their boyishness, it generally separated fulfilled men from Empty Boys when males married and began to provide for their families. In the popular imagination, the American boy represented the potential strength of the nation. During the war, Americans used the term to designate all young men who went off to fight for their country. Interviewing veterans for his oral history of World War II, Studs Terkel discovered that the former combatants referred to themselves and others like them during the war as boys, regardless of whether they had been teens or mature males during the fighting. The popular mythology surrounding the “good war” tended to conflate American boys with America itself. The suddenness of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor shocked Empty Boys, Queer Others, and Consumerism 57 Americans into an image of themselves and their enemies that would stay with them for a generation: innocent, vulnerable Americans faced treacherous enemies...

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