Shrinking Men
One of the things that’s great about watching old movies is you get to know how the story ends. For everyone. Forever. For all time...or at least until the present moment.
In another 100 years, we might be looking at some of the same films but we’ll have different eyes. Just as we have different eyes today, looking back at the films of the past. So allow us to look at two films with the passage of 70 years’ time, in which everyone involved is long dead and most forgotten now: THE INRCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN.
In 1958 and 1954 respectively, Nathan Juran (working as Nathan Hertz) and Jack Arnold made two SciFi films that (consciously or unconsciously) explored the existential anxieties of white males in a post World War II landscape... one in which a man becomes increasingly small and one where a woman becomes 50 feet tall. They are inverse films - two sides of the same coin - in each, the same result happens in different ways.
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN comes from a Richard Matheson novel of the same name. In it, Grant Williams plays the milquetoast white guy who, after being exposed to a nuclear mist while on his boat in the middle of a vast ocean (symbolizing his unfettered freedom in society), he begins to shrink - a physical manifestation of his emasculation and decentralization in society. This symbolism sees itself through to the film’s conclusion.
ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN makes men smaller by making a woman physically larger. Much of the first half of the film revolves around the husband (played by William Hudson) bemoaning his misfortune of being married to a rich and hysterical wife. He complains about how he can’t divorce her, and spends most of his onscreen time dancing provocatively with another woman. There’s surprisingly little SciFi in the film, and a rumor persists that the original screenplay didn’t have any science fiction to it, and it was an element added at the last minute. This might explain the swings in tone and lack of cohesion in the film but I’d argue there’s also an internal struggle from the men who created the film... is our 50-foot woman the protagonist or the antagonist of this film? Maybe the titles of the films give us a clue: Our shrinking man remains incredible, while our 50-foot woman attacks.
Both films strive for realism in tone and both films find themselves wholly disinterested in the popular tropes of the time, instead leaning into the existential fears the wake of World War II left them in. Gone is the new enemy of extraterrestrials (the only alien in ATTACK appears momentarily as a giant but is of no consequence otherwise) and gone is the political paranoia of global wipeout—our nuke in INCREDIBLE has a singular narrative purpose—to make our man shrink.
In the 70-odd years of time that has passed since the release of these films, many revolutions and movements have de-centered the white male in American society, but nothing has made men literally shrink in size nor women grow to the height of a five story building. SciFi can allow anxieties of the mind to seep out, to unconsciously influence the worlds created by their creators. I don’t know that these issues were at the front of the minds of anyone making these films, but that doesn’t matter... this is where these films stand today in history as we look at them through the lens of 2021. And as a double feature*, these films complement each other in extraordinary ways. Neither film offers an antidote, or a magic cure to set things back to normal - things are changing and they will continue to change. These are not dreams from the past...they are the nightmares.
*These films will be part of a special double feature Pioneer Sci-Fi Film Club in 2022.