Mind-Munitions

260
Propaganda in the Age of Total War and Cold War
The new ‘Enemy Within’ now became all members of American
society who had ever shown any sympathy with communist,
socialist, or even liberal causes – regardless of the wartime alliance.
More ominously, anyone who protested against government
measures came to be labelled ‘a subversive’. As one cinema newsreel
stated in its coverage of public protests in New York in 1949:
‘Union Square in New York was the backdrop for these scenes of
Red violence. From their ranks will come the saboteurs, spies and
subversives should a Third World War be forced upon America’.
The growing number of television viewers from 1948 onwards
could witness the menace for themselves as people previously
unconcerned with political affairs were sucked into the climate of
fear from the (dis)comfort of their own living rooms. They were
told that the media were full of Soviet spies and communist lackeys,
which merely brought the media into line. Hollywood suddenly
became keen to demonstrate what we would now call political
correctness by making a succession of anti-communist movies,
such as The Woman on Pier 13 (1949, originally entitled I Married
a Communist) and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951). Films
can also serve as mirrors of their times and it is possible to identify
Cold War concerns that would have resonated with contemporary
audiences in many popular movies of this period, from High Noon
(1952) to On the Waterfront (1954).
Science fiction films are an especially rich genre for analysing
such themes as ‘the enemy’ or ‘the invader’ as metaphors for reflecting
contemporary fears of hostile aggression and invasion. Alien
invaders needn’t automatically look like bug-eyed monsters; their
appearance could be deceptive. In The Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1953) the aliens take control of the body and minds of
citizens from small town America who thereafter start behaving
mechanically and collectively in what is a suspiciously American
perception of what a communist society would look like. Compare
this version with the remake in 1978 – the period of detente – in
which the invaders are more clearly extra-terrestrial than Russian.
In the science fiction film Them! (1954) about giant flying red ants
taking over the sewers of Los Angeles, the invaders have been
created by mutation following nuclear test explosions. The ‘fear of
the bomb’ genre of films and the ‘fear of invasion’ genre came
together perfectly in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) in which
an ostensibly benign alien humanoid (played by Michael Rennie)