Social Engineering In '50s Science Fiction Films
We have Our God--and Our Isotopes!
And though they often invoked a higher power to demonstrate their humility before the wonders of Creation, this didn't stop 1950s scientific heroes from evangelizing in their own way about what American audiences should either embrace, or shun in post-war life.
Next to aerospace, the burgeoning consumer goods market and communism, one of the major shapers of the decade was, of course, nuclear energy, as promised through Eisenhower's domesticizing Atoms for Peace program.
And, while the media did its part to make this technology seem both safe and inevitable, in reality, U.S. nuclear plants owed their entire existence to the Price-Anderson Act of 1957, which imposed a meager cap on public compensation in the event of an accident.
To the Moon via George Pal
For Hollywood's purposes, though, the most dramatic approach to promoting atoms was space travel, as depicted in the 1950 classic, Destination Moon.
Exhibited just five years after Hiroshima, George Pal's persuasive production banked on the audience's acceptance of a rocket propelled by sustained nuclear reaction, by using the dramatic device of pitting the astronauts against authorities determined to impound the Luna just hours before launch.
Cassini's Dubious Debt to Luna
Dismissing public fears of fallout as unwarranted, the heroes decide to secretly leave ahead of schedule. Despite real-life abortive efforts toward ground-launched nuclear rockets, like 1987's Timberwind project, a scenario reminiscent of Destination Moon's was played out in ten years later when NASA's Cassini space probe was launched, despite massive outcry over its payload of plutonium being of sufficient quantity to render Florida uninhabitable in the event of an explosion.
Interocitor Inspiration
"Trust us: we're scientists" hubris also surfaces in Universal’s 1955 extravaganza, This Island Earth.
Fresh from an impromptu press conference on the golden age to come when "atomic power is teamed up with electronics," Cal Meacham, played by Rex Reason, becomes engrossed in the construction of an Interocitor, a sort of otherworldly Heath Kit distributed as a intelligence test, by a mysterious mail order electronics supplier.
Amusingly, the first application for the powerful machine that comes to Meacham's mind is the laying down of a six-lane highway, helping to cement the rationale that, despite pollution, sprawl and accelerated oil depletion, owning a car is owning a piece of the future--a bias more telling than transient.
From Metaluna to Levittown
The 1950s witnessed the fruition of the car's distorting impact on the U.S. landscape, following three decades of incremental dismantlement of regional light rail systems across the United States, known as the "Street Car Conspiracy."
For its collusion in this social transformation, General Motors (in association with Firestone and others) was fined the price of one of its city buses. But by then the car was indelibly entrenched in the national psyche in company with the strip mall and the boon in tract housing that gave returning GIs and their young families both a place to live and a place to which to drive their cars.
A Foregone Transfusion
The Blob (1958) makes further associations with transport, food and other emerging fixtures of modern life, but with a more up-front consumerist slant. Produced in Pennsylvania, director Irvin Yeaworth, Jr. cashed in both on the popularity of Rebel Without a Cause and Hollywood's success with the auto-liberated teen market's enthusiasm for the outre.
"Steven" McQueen's sober Steve gets distracted from seeking the origin of a vagrant's strange skin affliction by participating in a drag race to appease his reckless buddies. Once the title monster engulfs its first victim, its next stop is a garage, and by story's end, Steve gets his friends to raise a ruckus using car horns to warn the town of the monster.
The Blob in Aisle Five...
In a recursive twist, the Blob attacks a movie theater, a supermarket, and, most famously, a diner--all additional centers of human consumption or mass entertainment. By 1958, the supermarket embodied an astonishing shift in how food got to the dinner table. Complementing its introduction in 1930 by Michael Cullen with the use of artificial chemicals and monoculture post-World War II, industrial agriculture yielded unheard of surpluses. But with the Green Revolution also began today's decline of nutritional quality and safety, increased toxic runoff and the virtual end of the family farm.
... Seed Pods in Santa Mira
Donald Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers strikes a serendipitous chord when one of the first clues Santa Mira's Dr. Miles Bennell has that people are "changing" is not just that one of his patients doesn't believes his mother is still his mother, but that the family's once-thriving vegetable stand is shut down.
A more conscious case for how rapid modern changes threatens human value occurs later, when the people-duplicating invaders evangelize that humans don't suffer when replaced by a pod, but are reincarnated into a more tranquil world--but only because its inhabitants are rendered as emotionally bereft as the things around them.
Body Snatchers may exalt the human condition, but Blob's bonding between clueless adults and "those crazy kids" perversely asserts that the disruptive forces behind car dependency, agribusiness and other culture commodifiers, are to be welcomed as supportive of the lingering interdependent character prior to WWII.
After the bizarre monsters and aliens, the special fascination of 1950s science fiction films derives not just from the cultural narrative they sold to the audiences of that pivotal decade, but how that narrative has played out for viewers, today.
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