Hollywood addressed alien encroachment in a number of fi lms, some directly on topic—like The Stranger (1946), G.I. War Brides (1946), I Was a Male War Bride (1949), Border Incident (1949), A Lady Without Pass-port (1950)—and others that can be viewed as implicit commentaries, like the two science fi ction fi lms destined to become classics that I am study-ing here. Although The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thstudy-ing from Another World, both from 1951, are commonly considered responses to the post-WWII realignment into the cold war,4 I will read them as stag-ings of paradigmatic U.S. attitudes and responses to uninvited alien incur-sion into the homeland. Theoretical justifi cation can be extrapolated from Gregory Pfi tzer’s postulation that science fi ction fi lms extend the U.S. myth of frontier expansion into the realm of space exploration, reading/writing aliens through the Native American image.5 Pursuing Pfi tzer’s intuition, one could suggest that if science fi ction appropriates the frontier myth, it implicitly addresses the Spanish/Mexican presence, which after the Mexi-can-American War raised questions of immigration along the new interna-tional border.
The analysis can be contextualized by recalling Diedrich Diederichsen’s observation on Hollywood’s tendency to divide migrants into two distinct types: those who productively contribute to the melting pot and their opposites, the phobically perceived, natural disaster-like subhuman fl oods of evil masses that threaten to undermine the national welfare. Of course, alien visitation fi lms share a fear of the unearthly, nonhuman origins of the migrant. Both aliens considered here begin as undesirables: more than merely the unknown, they present a potential threat materialized in the violation of earthly bound-aries presumed inviolable. In terms that are lost on present-day viewers, both aliens’ ships are tracked during their unauthorized entry by a form of radar, a twentieth-century invention for defense raised to cult status during World War II. Furthermore, both ships exceed earth’s scientifi c and military capaci-ties of the time, in Thing by the enormity of the ship’s weight, and in Day, its speed outstrips that of a ‘buzz bomb,’ the term for the German missiles that terrorized the British during the war. However, while one alien confi rms its menacing potential, the other wins over key elements of the cast with whom the audience can relate, hence ameliorating the initial apprehension.
The respective positive or negative charge is communicated through pro-duction details, even from the opening shot. The title The Thing from Another World appears from a dark nowhere, gradually burning up and out through a blackened screen void of specifi c geographic location to convey a secretive, isolated destructiveness that emerges out of a negatively marked unknown.
In contrast, The Day the Earth Stood Still zooms in all at once, clearly set against a dappled backdrop of the bright, starry cosmos itself set against vast outer space, and as the movie credits fade in and out, the cosmic scenes fade from one into the next to imply movement that eventually approaches earth.
Credits in Thing, on the other hand, are set against a single shot of a frozen, windswept, desolate night, reminiscent of the opening of William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939). The intertextualities purposefully tap opposite associations: in Day, the heavens are associated with clear, bright illumina-tion; in Thing, with a hostile darkness that harbors nightmarish beings.
Day’s opening scenes establish an international context. As the saucer fl ies over many nations, their languages are heard discussing the object’s global transit; the alien vessel fosters world unity by becoming the common object of attention and the subject of multiple discourses. Thing opens on an ice-frozen Alaskan U.S. military base where only English is spoken. Informed of an unidentifi ed fl ying object near an even more isolated base “two thousand miles north,” Captain Hendry remarks, “It could be Russians, they’re all over the pole like fl ies,” evoking a cold-war context wherein two superpow-ers clash on civilization’s fringe with no sense of the rest of the global par-ticipants. In Day, suspicion of the Russians is also expressed, but just briefl y, only to be countered by Klaatu, the alien played by Michael Rennie, who always insists on earth’s multiplicity of nations and peoples, underscoring the global openness of the fi lm’s vision, especially in his intolerance of tradition-ally closed borders. In contrast, Thing’s numerous cold-war allusions and
references—and the Arctic setting itself—reinforce a context of ideological confl ict in the primary metaphor of mid-century terminology.
Both fi lms respond to alien arrival by dispatching military forces to sur-round the ship but within radically different contexts. Thing’s ship lands at night, sliding under surveillance to immediately disappear under the ice, distant from human observation; hence it must be found and brought within a controlled space. Day’s fl ying saucer appears in Washington DC at mid-day in full sight in the middle of that combination of public/private space called a baseball diamond in a park where common people play America’s game. Thing’s alien is brought back encapsulated in ice, while Day’s walks out under his own power and speaks a message of peace. Yet both elicit fear and violence from soldiers, producing a state of confl ict between humans and aliens that results in numerous casualties. The Thing kills several sci-entists and some sled dogs and wounds a few soldiers; Gort, Klaatu’s robot companion, melts down military equipment, including a tank from which not all of the crew escapes, and disposes of two soldiers. Yet the aliens’
attitudes and characters differ on almost all points of comparison.
Both fi lms depict humanlike aliens, but whereas Klaatu looks and speaks quite normally, the Thing is a grotesque giant incapable of speech. Klaatu dons earthly dress to move among humans and gain understanding; the Thing has no costume changes, maintaining his visual distance. Klaatu in Day not only speaks, he also displays admirable rationality in his ability to enunciate calm, measured alternatives to the panicky opinions of the earth-lings. The English-born Michael Rennie gives Klaatu that upper class foreign air with a British accentuation commonly used by Hollywood to characterize esteemed, elite, yet different cultures, like those of Rome or Greece. Rennie also utilizes human gestures—facial, like smiles and bemused surprise in his eyes, or bodily, like a friendly open hand to show diamonds to a boy or a good-bye wave to the female lead—gestures that bring him closer to the audi-ence within a shared code of bodily expression. Key to this rapprochement is Klaatu’s use of small motor movements to handle everyday objects like chalk, a fl ashlight, or a small music box, gestures associated with homo faber.
Deprived of even Hollywood’s semblance of a foreign language, the Thing is limited to animal expression: snarls, screeches, and growls—“grotesquely inarticulate grunting.”6 In addition, he is allowed no fi ne motor movements, and his facial gestures are severely restricted; in effect, he gets little screen time and no close-ups to capture facial nuance, although for at least one critic this constituted one of the fi lm’s best virtues: “The monster’s unseen pres-ence creates an aura of escalating fear that elevates the picture into a classic exercise in suspense rather than a mere ‘monster movie.’”7 When seen, his body movements are writ large: broad sweeps of the arms, running, diving through windows. Likewise, his tool is a long four-by-four wooden bludgeon held in one clawlike hand—nothing small-motor there.
The crux of the contrast comes in each alien’s meeting with scientists. In Thing, the scientist tries to reason with the alien and pleads with the Thing to understand what he is being told and to collaborate with earthlings,
but he receives for his effort one of the Thing’s sweeping blows. Klaatu, however, seeks out Dr. Barnhardt, even breaking in to his offi ce to cor-rect an equation the genius cannot resolve. Klaatu not only converses with the scientist in clear English, he communicates in the esoteric language of astrophysical mathematics and gives him information to facilitate the earth’s exploration of space—an ability that, ironically, turns out to be a key element in earth’s impending decision between peaceful interplanetary coexistence or destruction at the hands—eyes—of Gort.
While the Thing must be destroyed at the end, Day closes with Klaatu eloquently delivering to a gathering of representatives from every nation a dual message—a warning against extending earthly inhumane warfare into the cosmos coupled with an invitation to join the advanced planets in a league of peaceful coexistence: “Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace. Or pursue your present course—and face obliteration. We will be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you.”8 Klaatu in effect offers freedom based on the assumption of a rational tendency toward the higher good that should lead humankind to rise above its baser tendencies, albeit by giving up a degree of ‘legal due process’; additionally, they are free to choose between two or more alternatives of action. The Thing, by pursuing violent domination of his hosts, forces earthlings into only one
Figure 1.1 Scientists inspect the brood of clones spawned from the Thing’s severed hand and fed on human blood. Screenshot, RKO Radio Pictures, 1951. Directed by Christian Nyby. Produced by Howard Hawks.
response: self-defensive violence. Key to the difference is Klaatu’s return to outer space, whereas the Thing would stay, multiply, and colonize earth.
In addition, the Thing’s body is coded as inhuman, capable of self-regen-erating its limbs or complete new clones, all through the ingestion of human blood. The scientists describe him as more vegetable than animal, compa-rable to carnivorous earth plants. In contrast, doctors certify Klaatu’s body to be human, and he carries it elegantly. The script describes him as an
“impressive man—a man of tremendous dignity and presence. He has the tolerant superiority that comes with absolute knowledge.”9
Verbal and gestural codes convey the aliens’ affective dispositions. The Thing conveys aggression and pain without any attempt to seek human reciprocity. Meanwhile, Klaatu’s small gestures constitute affective signs in communicative encounters. His humanlike features permit him close con-tact with humans and give him the opportunity to build a nurturing rela-tionship with a young boy, which in turn allows him to express sympathy, joy, affection, and even humor in verbal utterances. He also establishes a discursive play between himself and several earthlings, thus opening a set-ting for complex affective performance that humanizes him.
As expressions of feeling and emotions, affect is linked to affection, love, and sexuality, and once again the difference is stark. Immigrants and aliens present threats on many levels, perhaps the most basic to the family, at the heart of which in patriarchal cultures is the woman/mother/daughter/
potential wife. Any attack on her represents an attack on the community;
any successful liaison with her raises the specter of miscegenation that, like other facets of cultural production concerning the migration theme, carries a positive or negative charge.
We can view possible relationships on two fronts: aliens relating lovingly and/or sexually to humans or infl uencing love/sex relationships between humans they contact. Portrayed as totally menacing, the Thing does not enter into a loving relationship, yet he does threaten the potential love interest between Captain Hendry and Nikki, the lead scientist’s secretary.
In scene one, the rapid-fi re, overlapping dialogue interweaves the main plot—the Arctic scientifi c station besieged by a monster alien—with two subplots: the love interest and the reporter’s search for a story. Interde-pendent, the resolution of the main plot threat facilitates wrapping up the other two. The Thing interrupts the Hendry/Nikki romance by distract-ing Hendry, although ironically also forces the lovers to adjust their roles:
Hendry transforms from common seducer to heroic protector and Nikki from hard-living, hard-drinking, active equal to softer, domestic, passively submissive female. When humans battle the alien most fi ercely, the Thing swipes his mighty arm at Nikki, threatening the protagonist’s object of desire. The alien threat is responded to by granting Nikki the key role of suggesting how to kill the Thing, an answer coming from the heart of the family space and the woman’s domain in mid-century U.S. culture, the kitchen: one kills a vegetable by cooking it. Publicity photos emphasized
the traditional male/protector–female/protected relationship by ostensibly placing Hendry between Nikki and the unseen Thing. At the end, with the Thing dead, scene one is reprised to wrap up the two remaining subplots:
Hendry, his men, and the reporter are gathered again, but now Nikki has joined them as they fi nally hear the reporter send his story to the outer world, ending with the fi lm’s famous warning, “Watch the skies.” In the background Hendry’s men and Nikki persuade the captain to marry her.
The alien threat domesticates the youthful, playful singles: They initially recall the drunken, failed sexual encounter of their fi rst meeting (prior to fi lm action) and later play erotic drinking games, turning them into the promise of yet another socially compliant couple; in the last scene their game becomes traditional with Nikki serving her man coffee. Hence, the defeat of the alien coincides with, and even facilitates, resolution of the love-interest plotline.
In Day Klaatu disturbs the courtship between Helen Benson (played by Patricia Neal) and her fi ancé. As a war-widowed mother, Helen is impressed by Klaatu’s instant rapport with her young son—to say nothing of his good looks. Their relationship builds through verbal contact and semi-intimate, though indirect, communications. Although their relationship remains pla-tonic throughout, Rennie and Neal are given an erotically charged, albeit sublimated, scene. Alone in a dark elevator suspended between fl oors while the earth stands still for an hour, the two achieve open communication at a moment when time is both held and fi lled with ultimate signifi cance concerning, as George Bataille would insist, life’s resistance to death’s unre-lenting threat; signifi cantly, Annie Potts titles her chapter on deconstruct-ing orgasm “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”10 The jealous fi ancé eventually becomes the Judas fi gure responsible for Klaatu’s death at the hands of the military.11 And when the military closes in on Klaatu, he performs an act of communion when he entrusts Helen with his life—and by extension, that of the entire human race—an act that also endows her with the power to communicate (the famous Klaatu barada nikto command) with the most powerful being in the universe, Gort, whose powers extend to resuscitating the dead. While North’s fi nal draft of the script made Helen and Klaatu’s attraction more blatant during a scene in the spaceship while they await the fi nal meeting,12 director Wise eliminated it during fi lming, judiciously leav-ing the relationship implicit in the gestural code. At the end, Klaatu directs his last gesture on earth toward Helen.
Any interpretation of mid-century fi lm must take into consideration that all movies were played on the stage of post-WWII concerns. In this regard, Day features a handsome, superintelligent, friendly, sensitive male who assumes the role of the pater familias vacated by Helen’s husband, who was killed in the war. By having Bobby, Helen’s fatherless son, schemati-cally explain to Klaatu earth’s history of violent warfare while at Arlington National Cemetery, Klaatu is symbolically invested as the father’s replace-ment and heir. Thus, viewers can read Klaatu’s effort to save the earth from
self-destructiveness as the continuation of the father’s heroic sacrifi ce for world peace, while it simultaneously plays off it to heighten the urgency of the venture. Klaatu’s message to the world can be read as a pitch for a supremely powerful United Nations, made to an international audience cast with a majority of Third World faces. Admittedly, Klaatu’s proposal has a Hobbesian ring with its stress on giving absolute power for settling inter-galactic confl icts to a Leviathan-style police force with no single planetary affi liation, a barely veiled plea for the investiture of an effective U.N. mili-tary enforcement unit. This is consonant with Klaatu’s role as patriarchal surrogate in that he can be seen to advocate the harmony of the multiracial, multicultural global family, the faces of which director Robert Wise popu-lated the audience gathered to receive Klaatu’s message.13
The Thing, on the other hand, betrays a wont toward tyrannical leader-ship that at mid-century would have stirred comparison to that of WWII Axis leaders. Bodies of scientists hung upside down like slaughtered ani-mals to be bled for the creation of a master race would have evoked familiar images in 1951. Characters envision the Thing’s plans for new types of concentration camps for humans to supply blood for eugenics experiments designed to populate the world with alien superclones that would then overwhelm the host culture. The human species, encumbered by emotion and sentiment—read ‘liberalism’—would be displaced by the pragmatic, undocumented other. The image of a couple dozen embryonic Things spawned by the earth scientists in their laboratory would have reminded the audience of reports of Nazi and Japanese human experiments. In short, beyond his characterization as nonhuman, the Thing is linked to an array of feared and hated images from viewers’ then-recent memories.
Both fi lms reinforce these positive and negative portrayals by referencing another Hollywood blockbuster archive, Gothic fi lm. While the Thing’s bulk and stance may remind viewers of Frankenstein, his elongated hands;
talonlike fi ngers; and exaggeratedly high, rounded, hairless head bear a physical resemblance to Murnau’s vampire in Nosferatu (1922). This asso-ciation is reinforced by an array of draculesque elements: His voyage from some mysterious origin to a center of modern civilization to establish his reign, his nonhuman nature within a human frame, his apparent invulner-ability to sophisticated human weapons coupled with a vulnerinvulner-ability to a simple one, his ability to renew his physical power and propagate his kind through the absorption of human blood, and his particular threat to women—all link him to Dracula. Even the situation of humans held cap-tive in a dark, labyrinthine construction from which they cannot escape without risking death parodies a Gothic commonplace. Like Dracula, when trapped the Thing fl ies into the night through a window, and his ultimate entrapment and death at the hands of a group of frightened humans echoes more than one Dracula fi lm, as his melting away also recalls the count’s
talonlike fi ngers; and exaggeratedly high, rounded, hairless head bear a physical resemblance to Murnau’s vampire in Nosferatu (1922). This asso-ciation is reinforced by an array of draculesque elements: His voyage from some mysterious origin to a center of modern civilization to establish his reign, his nonhuman nature within a human frame, his apparent invulner-ability to sophisticated human weapons coupled with a vulnerinvulner-ability to a simple one, his ability to renew his physical power and propagate his kind through the absorption of human blood, and his particular threat to women—all link him to Dracula. Even the situation of humans held cap-tive in a dark, labyrinthine construction from which they cannot escape without risking death parodies a Gothic commonplace. Like Dracula, when trapped the Thing fl ies into the night through a window, and his ultimate entrapment and death at the hands of a group of frightened humans echoes more than one Dracula fi lm, as his melting away also recalls the count’s