The Incredible Monster Woman Watches a Film
Other Worlds Film Festival recently hosted a Pioneer Film Club chat about double feature selection, The Incredible Shrinking Man and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.
I was excited to dive into these films since they were two I hadn’t yet seen. I read this blog to prepare for what I was about to watch. I finished the viewings with an irksome feeling, a lot of side-eye, and a few pages of notes for the discussion. Beware: Spoilers ahead!
The Incredible Shrinking Man… Or Is He?
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (Jack Arnold, 1957) came across as the overdramatic lament of a man who was upset his wife didn’t have dinner ready when he got home from a day of playing golf. Let me explain. Our dashing leading man, Scott Carey, is on vacation with his wife. When it’s made clear that she is, in fact, on vacation too, and not just there to be his beer wench while he relaxes (the nerve of that woman, am I right?) he has to bargain with her until he is her lowly equal. This just didn’t sit right with him, and in his anguish a sparkling mist engulfs him, and his shrinking life begins.
We later hear from scientists that his condition was from a combination of radiation and an insecticide. But it feels like a metaphor for his feelings of emasculation. Home from vacation, he starts not filling out his clothes and blames his wife and her cooking. (Again with the servitude!) As his demands go unmet he gets smaller and smaller. The true cruelty he faces is being forced to figure out how to feed himself when even a crumb of cake is dangerously close to the spider that dwarfs him, and he has to maneuver a mousetrap for cheese.
Oh, the spider! Scott faces two notable foes in his new world, a spider and a cat. Both of these creature face-offs make for splendid scenes and seem like natural choices as predators for Tiny Carey. But the use of cats and spiders in film and literature are heavily piled with feminine symbolism, and even more specifically, witches and insubordination. Whether this was an intentional or subconscious choice is still telling of the sexist tone behind this film. At every point, Scott’s threat is a woman or something that represents women. I see you, Scott.
There is one part that offers Scott hope. He meets the lovely Clarice, who was born little and is happily and successfully working at the carnival, which is a conversation for another day. Scott has stopped dropping in size and he sees a new life, and maybe even a new companion (who he is still taller than), in his future. But when the shrinking picks up again, and he becomes shorter than Clarice as well, that hope disappears.
In his minuscule monologues we hear “I am a conqueror!” and “I will dominate!” even when he is an inch tall because his ego cannot take being anything other than The Man on top. At the end of the film, he finally sees the grandeur of the world, the cosmos, and that even the smallest creatures matter. But was this empathy or ego? Does he really feel for all the people and creatures he had to be above in his regular life or is this just to qualify himself in his lowly circumstance?
Then there is the dollhouse scene. This was my favorite scene in the film for a few reasons. It was fun to watch the scale of the man in the dollhouse, running from the cat. Great effects work, but again, I’m going to ruin it with feminism. I instantly thought of the 1879 play by Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, and the use of dollhouse symbolism in storytelling to say that the perfect family life is not what it seems and that there is manipulation at play. Usually, this is centered on a woman, a mother or a daughter. But here we see The Man living in the dollhouse, and while it’s a wonderful visual, it further tells of his feelings of being emasculated.
This is all subjective. Yes, there were other looming themes at this time, like war and radiation in the atomic age. But that doesn’t mean misogyny didn’t exist at the same time. And that was what was most prevalent to me in this viewing.
Attack of the 50FT Woman
The second part of this double feature was ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN (Nathan Juran, 1958) and the contrast is massive. Nancy Archer’s cad husband is planning her murder with his Honey. Nancy is suffering from the emotional abuse of her cheating and scheming husband and just wants to hold her life together and that makes her a monster. Her needs are too big. She’s crazy, out of control. How dare she take up that much space!
Of course, there’s the alien in the desert and radiation that causes her growth, but again, metaphors! Not that anyone believed her anyway. I’m sure gaslighting was exactly what she needed. They only gave Nancy 65 minutes and then they killed her. She didn’t get pity or monologues of depth like Shrinking Scott, just the stigma of being an emotional woman. Maybe that’s why there’s not as much to review for this film.
When I shared my notes at the Pioneer Film Club, I prefaced with the disclaimer that my notes were long, and that I would be quick as to not take up too much of the meeting’s time. I made myself small because, unlike Small Scott, shrinking is what women are conditioned to do every day. Maybe that’s why I didn’t feel sorry for him. I was told there is an INCREDIBLE SHRINKING WOMAN, and my love for Lily Tomlin will convince me to watch it, but will it really be any different from what I watch the women around me do in their daily lives just to avoid being seen as giant monsters?