The Dragon's Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age

1. Atomic Familiars on the Radioactive Landscape

1 Atomic Familiars on the Radioactive Landscape “Oh my,” thought the little piglet, “what will become of us all?” Patty, the Atomic Pig (1951) Nuclear Radiation as a Cultural Icon On what appears to be a normal day off the Pacific coast of California, Scott Thomas is relaxing on his boat and enjoying a peaceful day of leisure . His wife has just gone below to grab two beers when he notices a strange fog approaching. He stands up, and for a moment the fog envelops him. The cloud passes, and when his wife returns, she sees that Scott seems to be covered with glitter. The couple thinks nothing of the phenomenon until the impossible begins to happen: Thomas begins to shrink; he has been transformed into The Incredible Shrinking Man.1 Released in 1957 as public concern over radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests was rising, The Incredible Shrinking Man uses the device of a radioactive cloud from such a test as a plot twist. It causes Scott Thomas to become so tiny that he has to fight with cats and spiders. He shrinks out of his job, out of his marriage, out of his life. His exposure to radiation has a devolutionary impact on him: he fights a progressively smaller and smaller set of adversaries, until finally he becomes microbial. At no point do we see any form of destruction or horror; the only monster is the silent cloud of fallout. After Scott innocently notices it in the opening scene of the movie, it slowly and inexorably dehumanizes and erases him (fig. 1). The monster postulated in this movie was a real monster; its clouds blew across the United States even as the movie was in theaters. Moviegoers could consider the notion that the fog in the air when they left the showing of The Incredible Shrinking Man might just be that real, live monster. Radiation embodies some of the most paradoxical iconography of the early Cold War.2 Its abstract nature (invisible, odorless, tasteless), when combined with its true dangers (genetic mutation, cancer, death), allows it to evoke impossible worlds emerging from the ordinary one. Able to kill silently and invisibly at a distance and, by the late 1950s, widely reputed to be present in mother’s milk and human bones, radiation represented a Atomic Familiars on the Radioactive Landscape c 13 threatening technological world that seemed to exist beyond reach of the senses.3 In the 1954 science fiction movie Them! radioactivity from the Trinity test turns ordinary ants into giant insects that roam the deserts of the Southwest, eventually filling the Los Angeles sewer system.4 Radiation was a tool-in-trade for television, radio, movies, novels, and short stories as the strange force that authenticated any departure from normal space and time. It was the magic bullet of science fiction plots: passing a clicking Geiger counter across a scene was as good as waving a magic wand— be it giant bugs or bug-eyed aliens living in a vast underground city, the clicking made any plot twist believable. Radiation came to symbolize a break in the normal structure of everyday reality; it was a narrative marker to indicate that a boundary had been crossed and that from this moment on anything was possible. Radiation was often used in popular culture to signify that the future had arrived. But the envisioned future was, as likely as not, a dystopia where insects are our ultimate competitors and the scale of our own human violence is measured in biblical terms. In the plot structure of science fiction movies, radiation is inevitably detected the instant before matters go awry. Not unlike the theatrical maxim that a gun seen on stage must go off by the third act, the clicking of a Geiger counter in a 1950s science fiction film was a sign that something technological was 1. Scott Thomas faces the fallout cloud that will change his life in Universal Pictures’ 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man. 14 c The Dragon’s Tail about to go terribly wrong and that objects and events that might otherwise seem physically impossible (such as invisible creatures that suck the brains out of unsuspecting humans) are almost certain to happen. Radiation was the device employed in science fiction plots to make the emergence of monsters, both prehistoric ones and the products of genetic mutation, believable, and weapons testing was cited as...