SotA Anthology 2015-16
In this essay,written as
part of COMM205:
Hollywood Cinema,
second-year BA Music
with Communication
and Media student
Emily Futcher discusses
the 1954 monster film
Them! and its messages
about the atomic age
Calling the film a “top-notch
science fiction shocker,” Variety
magazine
promised
Them!
would “thoroughly satisfy fans of
hackle-raising melodrama.”
Interpretations of the
political and social
landscape in 1950s
science fiction films
In a period of time that
almost directly followed
the Second World War,
and with the threat of
communism creating a
sense of hysteria in the
United States of America
that would later come to be
known as the Red Scare,
1950s B-science fiction
cinema became an outlet
for negative views that were
seemingly contradictory to
the positive propaganda
presented
by
the
government. Perhaps one
of the most significant films
of the period was the 1954
science fiction monster film
Them! (Gordon Douglas,
1954), which focused on
the threat of giant ants
that had been created
through mutations caused
by radiation from atomic
weaponry.
This
essay
will aim to explore how
Them! presents seemingly
contradictory interpretations
of the social and political
landscape of the 1950s,
by examining the historical
context and by focusing on
the particular stylistic and
narrative choices made
when making the film.
Gordon Douglas’ Them!
portrays giant ant mutations
produced
by
lingering
radiation caused by the first
atomic bomb test in New
Mexico. This first atomic
bomb test, the Trinity test,
took place nine years
before the fictional events of
the film, in 1945. It ushered
in the nuclear age, with
the atomic bombings of
Nagasaki and Hiroshima in
August 1945 – a culmination
of the struggle between
Japanese and American
forces in the Second World
War (Harvey, 2015). Clearly
then, to both the public and
the government at the time,
the nuclear age - and the
development of the atomic
bomb - was viewed as a step
forwards in the weaponry
needed to defeat those seen
to be oppressive forces,
and to ensure the future
of the United States and
its allies. The film Them!,
however, goes against this
positive function of nuclear
weapons and presents a
world in which the use of
such weaponry has caused
the possible downfall of the
human race; as Dr Harold
Medford (played by Edmund
Gwenn) says: ‘Man, as the
dominant species of life
on earth, will probably be
extinct’. Cyndy Hendershot,
in her book Paranoia, The
Bomb and 1950s Science
Fiction Films, explores
the contrasting view that