Hollywood Utopia

4 CONSPIRACY THRILLERS AND
SCIENCE FICTION: 1950s TO 1990s
Prologue
The roots of science fiction and its potential to expose several ecological fears
within western society can be seen most explicitly in American 1950s B-movies.
The post-war period legitimised an expansionist mass production engine fuelled
by an unheard-of growth in conspicuous consumption. This encouraged western
culture to present and maintain, if only superficially, a sense of progressive
evolution within an overall plan that was premised on ‘improving’ society through
the conquest of nature. At the same time, the break-up of post-war certainties
augmented by the cultural effects of the atom bomb in particular helped to spark a
critical ecological representation which initiated a radical reappraisal of this
otherwise unquestioned form of progress.
Yet the predominant interpretation of 1950s B-movies, particularly in the light of
the Cold War, has continued to be centred on anti-Communist paranoia or fears of
an enforced Fordist/McCarthy-style conformity. A newly-constituted ecological
interpretation, I will argue, repositions these strictly ideological readings alongside
a more modernist discourse of rational control and technological mastery. The
chapter will begin this historical reappraisal by examining the naturalisation of
American human conformity, which ostensibly validated social and cultural
Fordism as it came to be known. Close analysis of conventional exposure of the red
paranoia of 1950s America through the seminal Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956) will be compared to the psychologically obsessed agency in The Incredible
Shrinking Man (1956) and framed within nascent ecological preoccupations
embedded within 1950s science fiction.
These thematic representations and preoccupations continued with the 1970s
resurgence of science fiction through a more reflective form of eco-paranoia, which
will be illustrated through readings of Soylent Green (1973) and Logan’s Run
(1976). While cult 1950s narratives like The Incredible Shrinking Man posited a
nascent redemptive belief in eco-spiritual harmony, more contemporary 1970s
science fiction conspiracy films helped create a more reflexive and overt exposé of
major ecological issues.
Central to this preoccupation with representation of self and human agency is the
feeling of ‘loss and the desire for unity that is born of (such) loss’ (Campbell in
4 Conspiracy Thrillers and Science Fiction 139