Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II by Steffen Hantke (review)

The outré creatures that terrorise the schlock cinema of the American 1950s – the mutated insects, the alien invaders, the 50-foot women – can easily distract from the forces who endeavour to fend off these rampaging menaces: namely, by and large, the US military. In Monsters in the Machine, Steffan Hantke claims that the abiding influence of 1950s sf horror film on our global popular imagination can be understood in part due to the critically neglected role of the US military in these sensational films. Regardless of whether the matinee special-effects extravaganzas explicitly depicted the military as triumphant or bungling, the films consistently registered military values, themes and ideologies in spectacular images and memorable scenes that have indelibly marked the sf genre and its public perception. In an astutely argued series of original and detailed case studies buttressed by well-researched historical context and solidly integrated cultural theory, Hantke delivers a book-length study that amply fills an overlooked area of visual-studies scholarship.

Hantke begins the book with a token nod to the Gothic representation of modern technoscience in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818) as a progenitor of the fifties amalgam of horror and sf. Wisely refusing to be drawn further into debates over genre origins or purity, Hantke oscillates between considering these creature features under discussion as a hybrid mixture of horror and sf or simply as part of some loose, nebulous conception of sf as a heuristic category. In the introduction, Hantke observes a ‘pervasive military theme’ (15) in the following films that will later receive close scrutiny in the book: The Thing from Another World (Nyby and Hawks US 1951), Them! (Douglas US 1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel US 1956), I Married a Monster from Outer Space (Fowler US 1958), Invasion U.S.A. (Zito US 1952) and The Time Machine (Pal US 1960). Beyond film-studies researchers interested in this spate of underrated films, this book will appeal to scholars interested in 1950s sf television given the insightful readings of episodes from the television series The Outer Limits (US 1963–5) and The Time Tunnel (US 1966–7) provided as well. Some of the military themes that recur in the ensuing discussion are organisational hierarchy and efficiency, military bonhomie and homosocial fraternisation, and militaristic norms of zealous self-sacrifice and aggression. Uniting this thematic focus is the underlying thesis that the popular culture of the 1950s can be framed in terms of what Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famously cryptic 1961 Farewell Address terms the ‘unwarranted influence’ of ‘the military-industrial complex’. Hantke adds nuance to this broad idea by invoking C. Wright Mills’s notion of ‘military metaphysics’, or what Hantke refers to as the effect of the military on ‘social, cultural, and ideological matters beyond those that strictly and narrowly apply to economics and politics’ (23).

Such an emphasis on military presence in the Cold War stresses the collaboration between Soviet and US superpowers with the rise of a global military-bureaucratic elite. Following the Second World War, this military power was manifested in numerous interventions in the Third World by way of military bases, proxy wars and economic coercion. In chapter one, Hantke therefore cogently traces the decline of the war film as well as the eclipse of supernatural horror in the postwar cinematic era of Hollywood with the rise of cinematic sf spectacles as a deflected response to the trauma of the Second World War. Despite the dissolution of the Office of War Information (OWI), Hantke argues that 1950s sf films enlisted support or, sometimes quite literally, recruited members for military mobilisation through a normalisation and identification process Hantke connects to Althusserian ‘interpellation’. The flamboyant scale of 1950s sf cinema therefore, according to Hantke, indirectly derives from the Second World War propaganda campaigns. In a more sophisticated stance than some...