Military Stock Footage

This chapter focuses on the recruitment of the audience into the “military metaphysics” that C. Wright Mills decries as a symptom of America's Cold War mentality. More specifically, it reads attempts at recruitment made by science fiction films of the period through the use of military stock footage. Pilfering the public domain for footage to be inserted into one's own film was a standard device of inexpensive filmmaking that found one of its most extreme expressions in Alfred E. Green's Invasion U.S.A. (1952). Generally dismissed as a hack job and mercilessly lampooned by Mystery Science Theater 3000, Invasion U.S.A. is a prime example of a politically engaged film using one of the common stylistic devices of 1950s low-budget filmmaking.

The Long Shadow of the Fifties

This chapter returns to Eisenhower's term “military-industrial complex” and outlines the concept's extended afterlife, especially in regard to the so-called “war on terror” after September 11, 2001. It suggests that then post-9/11 America under Bush might have seen a return of Eisenhower's (in)famous term. America may have stopped talking about the military–industrial complex for a while, but that did not mean that the military–industrial complex had, quietly, gone away. The return of the term marked a new awareness of political and economic conditions for which it had always been the most apt description. The chapter concludes with a final consideration of what 1950s science fiction films can tell us about the US in the present day—their impact on later films and their continued relevance to the culture.

A Bright New Future, With Monsters

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's key themes. This book focuses on American science fiction films of the 1950s, many of which are fondly remembered, yet critically dismissed. It argues that it is through the intersection of past and present, of unresolved trauma superimposed upon present anxieties, that 1950s science fiction films acquire topical relevance within their historical context. Science fiction films from the 1950s are a belated response to the national trauma of World War II and the Korean War projected onto the unsettling experience of the Cold War. With much of the critical work on the Cold War aspects of the films already delivered by other scholars, this book will weigh in on the side of the argument that has, as yet, remained critically neglected—the side of past trauma: on World War II and the Korean War, and their troubling legacy in the first decade of the American Century.

The Southwest

This chapter switches the focus from iconic characters to iconic spaces, following the demographic changes brought about by World War II and the expansion of the domestic infrastructure during the Eisenhower administration. It focuses on the ways in which the military encouraged certain ways of perceiving and experiencing cities, suburbs, and small towns in the transition from World War II to the Cold War. More specifically, it takes on the desert landscape of the American Southwest and tracks its occupation by the military. Closely associated with the development and testing of the US nuclear arsenal, but also with the world of the American frontier and the Western, the southwestern desert appears, in turn, deeply familiar and eerily strange to 1950s American culture. Science fiction films like Jack Arnold's It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Gordon Douglas's Them! (1954) unfold as the Cold War overwrites the traditional connotations of the landscape.

Veterans

This chapter focuses on the traumatized war veteran and the repressed memory of World War II. The key text is Gene Fowler Jr.'s I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), which imagines the monstrous invader as an alien creature masquerading in human form. Underneath the perfect human surface is the grotesquely malformed alien creature—a potent visual metaphor that captures the complexity of the veteran's traumatization, especially when the injury is both psychological and physical in nature. The alien impostors in the other two films discussed in the chapter—William Cameron Menzies's Invadersfrom Mars (1953) and Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)—address the larger impact of the male veteran's presence in the peaceful postwar community. The chapter tracks the disturbance caused by the veteran as it spreads from romantic couples to families and to entire towns and the nation at large.

Decolonization

This chapter examines the issue of Cold War decolonization in films that chose the global sphere as their setting. Films like Richard Fleischer's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Irwin Allen's The Lost World (1960), and Ib Melchior's The Time Travelers (1964) testify to the science fiction film's interest in placing American travelers in postcolonial locations. Starting in the late 1950s and gaining momentum in the early 1960s, this trend was infused with new eagerness by the Kennedy administration's foreign initiatives (from the space program to the Peace Corps). Superficially, these films demonstrate that US intervention in the Third World is called for and legitimate whenever Soviet influence appears as a rival or counterforce to American attempts to gain allies or secure markets. However, upon closer inspection, some of these films also make room for an alternative reading of Cold War history. They acknowledge that the US must sometimes confront a danger more insidious than Soviet communism—political non-alignment driven by “economic nationalism.”