Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting

4. Alien Invasions

111 Someday something’s coming / From way out beyond the stars / To kill us while we stand here / It will store our brains in mason jars. —“Lovecraft in Brooklyn,” The Mountain Goats Legendary producer and director Howard Hawks’ 1951 The Thing from Another World featured a group of American scientists and military men at an arctic station who discover a giant craft frozen in the tundra. An Air Force captain suggests to the team that perhaps the craft belonged to the Soviets since “they are all over the Pole, like flies.” Attempting to extract the giant ship ends in its destruction, but the scientists and Air Force personnel manage to save a “Thing” trapped in a block of ice. The escape of the Thing from its ice prison sets off a debate between Dr. Carrington and the Air Force officers. Carrington believes that the creature can be a “source of wisdom.” Unfortunately, the Thing turns out to be a bloodsucking creature, an extraterrestrial Bela Lugosi that the Air Force men have to destroy (though not before it does violence to Dr. Carrington when he tries to communicate with it). After the struggle with the alien is complete, a reporter uses the base radio to announce the perilous incident to all humanity: “Here at the top of the world a handful of American soldiers and civilians met the first invasion from another planet,” he says. Triumphantly telling his listeners that the Thing has been destroyed, he ends with a warning. “Tell the world. Tell Four ALIEN INVASIONS Monsters in America / 112 this to everybody, wherever they are. Watch the skies. Everywhere. Keep Looking. Keep watching the skies.” America in the 1950s lived in the shadow of the atom bomb. After the Soviet Union developed and tested atomic weapons in 1949, the possibility of a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers seemed both likely and imminent. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist behind the Manhattan Project who publicly lamented his part in creating such a weapon, described the two nuclear powers as “scorpions in a bottle” certain to “kill each other.”1 Americans in the nuclear age tremulously watched the skies much as the final lines of The Thing had insisted. Most watched not for extraterrestrials , but for the sudden flash of an atomic weapon, the signal to “duck and cover” if they were not one of the families lucky enough to have a private bomb shelter. Many convinced themselves, with plenty of help from government and military officials, that a nuclear exchange was survivable, a war in which America would likely even come out on top.2 American cold war culture represented an age of anxiety. The anxiety was so severe that it sought relief in an insistent, assertive optimism. Much of American popular culture aided this quest for apathetic security . The expanding white middle class sought to escape their worries in the burgeoning consumer culture. Driving on the new highway system in gigantic showboat cars to malls and shopping centers that accepted a new form of payment known as credit cards, Americans could forget about Jim Crow, communism, and the possibility of Armageddon. At night in their suburban homes, television allowed middle-class families The Thing from Another World Poster Alien Invasions / 113 to enjoy light domestic comedies like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver. Somnolently they watched representations of settled family life, stories where lost baseball gloves and dinnertime hijinks represented the only conflicts. In the glow of a new Zenith television, it became easy to believe that the American dream had been fully realized by the sacrifice and hard work of the war generation.3 American monsters in pop culture came to the aid of this great American sleep. Although a handful of science fiction films made explicit political messages that unsettled an apathetic America, the vast majority of “creature features” proffered parables of American righteousness and power. These narratives ended, not with world apocalypse , but with a full restoration of a secure, consumer-oriented status quo. Invaders in flying saucers, radioactive mutations, and giant creatures born of the atomic age wreaked havoc but were soon destroyed by brainy teams of civilian scientists in cooperation with the American military. These films encouraged a certain degree of paranoia but also offered quick and easy relief to this anxiety. Horror film scholar Andrew Tudor, after surveying the vast number of monsters...