Hollywood Utopia

144 Hollywood Utopia
course exaggerated for dramatic effect but are nonetheless explored from within a
‘teen-flick’ horror B-movie format.
Yet many critics read Them as primarily reinforcing racist ideas through an anti-
Communist tract, with the ants codified as communists. 3 Alternatively, Vivian
Sobchack suggests that such creature films of the 1950s are about the preservation
of social order. ‘What is called for is teamwork, co-operation, and organisation’
(Sobchack 1997: 44). Cohan suggests that Them
does not mean to raise doubts about the achievements of science in unleashing the
bomb any more than the postwar biblicals mean to question the existence of God in
the wake of Auschwitz. Rather than evoke intellectual or moral interrogation by its
audience, Them takes pains to differentiate one social order, that of the ants, from
another, that of the human community which the monsters threaten
(Cohan 1997: 131).
All of these readings assume that ‘ants’ must anthromorphically articulate some
direct attribute of human society. A deep ecological reading, however, promotes a
more holistic, less partisan position, focusing on the consequences of the big
ecological picture rather than simply abstracting an ideological fit, which reduces
inanimate nature to effective surrogates for race, class or even gender debates.
A more accurate contextual reading can be appreciated by looking at Spencer R.
Weart’s exploration of the ‘images’ of nuclear fear and the success of the Godzilla
series - the 400-foot prehistoric reptile that stamped Tokyo flat (reflecting
‘firsthand’ experiences of the bomb) - and similar ‘bomb fears’ in America. In
Them, as already indicated, killer ants the size of buses crawled out of the desert
near the Trinity test site, ‘a fantastic mutilation’, as the film’s scientists explained,
‘probably caused by lingering radiation from the first atom bomb’. Contemporary
moviegoers, Weart argues, ‘found that plausible enough to put them into a cold
sweat. After the army exterminated the creatures, an official in the film worried
that if such horrors followed the first test, what would come from all the bombs
that exploded since’ (Weart 1988: 192). 4 This reading begins to articulate
contemporary global ecological fears and debates embedded within such texts, yet
often ignored by film critics preoccupied with more ‘local’ identity debates.
Similarly, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), directed by Eugene Lourie,
begins with a dinosaur which is awoken in the North Pole as a result of scientific
nuclear experimentation. While there is no intrinsic critique of such
experimentation, its consequences are explored using the monster motif. The
narrative helps to evoke the awesome power contained within nuclear energy and
how such force cannot be controlled through ordinary (i.e. non-scientific) means.