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Popular Culture Review
and the momentary separation of the two opens up a third, triangulating position
for the Martian invader, a fellow pretender to Sylvia’s affections.17
By now the metal ships have extended long metal tentacles crowned with
one-eyed heads into the cracks and fissures of the ruined house. Sylvia, turning to
find one such head violating her with its stare, begins screaming; Clayton severs
the head from its phallic extender which retreats, limp and vanquished, into the
“pubic area” of the hovering ship. Yet the battle is not over, since an actual
Martian creature has left his metal ship and slithered into the house. Its slimy,
amphibious appearance is most evident in this scene; it is depicted as a creature
lacking the protective skin that keeps its biological soups and juices from spilling
out—a domino theorist’s worst nightmare. The “big scream” of the film is the
shot of a slimy, webbed Martian hand reaching out and clawing onto Sylvia’s
shoulder. Horrified, she turns her head and freezes, her stunned expression no
doubt eliciting a roar of delight and sympathy from original audiences; finally she
can make the noise necessary to bring Clayton running, who beats off the
extended (again, phallic) hand with his own phallic substitute, a club of wood he
pulls from the wreckage. Put off thus, the Martian flees back into the darkness,
not to be glimpsed in such naked form again.18 Rescued from her oily suitor, the
female character, positioned as prize between the two contending male forces, has
nevertheless effected an important fraternity between Clayton and this terrifying
other: both respond in “ordinary” fashion to Sylvia’s charms, continuing the latter
in its Martian-as-Russian manifestation—the unwelcome but recognizable visitor,
if not welcome challenger or even just “one of the boys.”
The early shot of the townsmen bathed in the Martians’ red glare, which
suggested an infectious communism that warranted fear and cautious relations, is
rewritten at this point in a scene that again backs away from it challenge to U.S.
diplomacy. Clayton has joined his stuffy academic colleagues at a well-funded
university somewhere north of the initial attack, who are in the process of
directing an atomic launch at the Martian troops. In fact, the detonation, much
like the early above-ground tests in New Mexico and Nevada, is a social event for
the surrounding community, witnessed by dozens of patriotic onlookers and
chronicled by hordes of eager reporters on the bomb beat of their respective print
and electronic media. We see a handful of official detonators making their way to
the firing site in jumpsuits of silver foil, no doubt some miraculous anti-bomb
material which will protect them from atomic blast and fallout. Clayton and
Sylvia wear clumsy plastic eyewear and a voice booms authoritatively over a
loudspeaker: “Two minutes to bomb time. If you have no goggles, turn away.”
The hilarity of this scene as a model for civil defense aside, we must
realize that the film is not only camping up and trimming down bomb
preparedness for the sake of a smooth plotline but is in part buying into the
vestigial notion of immunity, particularly U.S. immunity, from a weapons
technology we created and therefore hopefully still controlled. Indeed, this