![]() And in another scene, police investigate a general store that has been ravaged by the mutant Formicidae. He devotes an entire scene to the elder Medford’s charmingly jargon-laden lecture about ant life cycles chalkboards and slides are dusted off the audience falls, for a moment, under the spell of discovery. (With flamethrowers, mostly.) In terms of sensibility, director Gordon Douglas is clearly a science nerd. Thus, in Them!, while it is fallout from the Trinity blast in New Mexico that transforms the ants into 18-foot armored monsters, it is also a father-daughter pair of entomologists, Gwenn and Pat Medford, who deduce what’s happening and how to stop it. But these Promethean overreachers (and/or their creations) generally come up against heroic doctors or specialists who are equally knowledgeable. The celluloid fantasies of the Atomic Age teem with scientists who are mad, hubristic, irresponsible, or just plain evil. Presented with a sampling of these nuclear fables, by turns outlandish and conservative, cheese-tastic and haunting, what might you infer about the world you’d discovered? Of course, as the French director Francois Truffaut wrote, “When a film achieves a certain success, it becomes a sociological event, and the question of its quality becomes secondary.” Imagine that you were the alien Klaatu visiting Earth for the first time. These flicks “teach us not so much ‘to stop worrying and love the bomb,’ ” he wrote, “as ‘ to keep worrying and love the state.’ ”) ( Andrew Tudor went even further when he claimed that the movies glorified government as a bastion of elites uniquely capable of providing for our defense. ![]() Deep down, these films had reactionary souls Sontag finally concluded that they constituted an “inadequate response” to major socio-political issues. They dehumanized otherness but turned a blind eye to how such dehumanization ended up feeding the nation’s terrors. In their visions of atomic apocalypse, B-movies crystallized American paranoia without questioning it. What they didn’t do was challenge any of the social conventions that rendered such veiled discussions of nuclear power necessary in the first place. The films trafficked in the strange and fantastic-mutants, alien invaders, robots-but they also made real dangers mundane, “inculcating a strange apathy concerning the processes of radiation, contamination, and destruction.” The more Doomsday devices you see go off, presumably, the less they faze you. ![]()
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