Hollywood Utopia

148 Hollywood Utopia
The disjunction of cinematic space is unsettling, literally dislocating . . . Once he
falls into the basement the camera changes radically . . . Objects are transformed
here in the paraspace: pins become swords, matchboxes offer shelter from the
storm, pencils serve as life rafts, spiders turn into hellish monsters. Commodities
become objects.
Sobchack concludes, ‘we as viewers, are forced . . . to constantly re-evaluate our
responses to the ordinary and normal, to the animate and inanimate’ (in Bukatman
1994: 160-1).
On a more prosaic level, audiences immediately connect with the use of special
effects to create this diminutive world view. Yet these ‘primitive’ special effects,
addressed in particular to a newly-created teenage audience, are often dismissed as
cheap spectacle. This appears at odds with the literary antecedents of 1950s
science fiction films, which tended to be more narrative and content driven than
the contemporary SFX filmic variety. Peter Biskind dismissively suggests that the
‘visual blandness’ of such films was appropriate to the mood of conformity while
providing an ironic counterpoint to their alarming premises. It was science fiction
more than any other genre that caught the hysteria behind the ‘picture window’
(Biskind 1983: 103).
For the literary academic critic, however, less emphasis is given to the function of
these special effects and their qualities as spectacle (Doherty in Feuer 1990: 148)
than to the literary back-story. In spite of rather than because of their - pedigree,
almost fifty years later they have become legitimate sources for popular cultural
excavation.
The Incredible Shrinking Man is most frequently read as a parable on emasculation
using psychoanalytic (especially Freudian) terminology. Mark Jancovich’s analysis
of the source book for the film suggests that Cary ‘fears losing his feelings of
superiority and significance as a man and becoming subordinate to others’ power
and authority’ (Jancovich 1996: 161). Jancovich goes so far as to assert that the ‘film
not only provides a critique of the values of maturity, but overtly flaunts the
“sensible” and the “realistic” in favour of a world of childlike imagination and awe’
(ibid.: 170). At the same time, through ‘the sympathetic handling of the monstrous
outsider’, the film also questions ‘what it means to be human, and so establish the
right to be different’ (ibid.: 89-90).
The film most clearly projects and dramatically simulates a microcosmic
environment, so that Scott (who becomes emblematic of homo sapiens) can begin
to reappraise his (im)potency over his environment. The causal-effect narration,
which initiated the reduction process, is explicitly ecological, involving exposure to
a lethal pesticide (mysteriously appearing in a dark cloud) while on a boat at sea.