FILM CHRONICLE
the thing but to wrestle with it as well (in order to save the heroine)
indicates that he is in constant danger of tripping over the thin boun–
dary between specialist and average Joe.
The fact remains that there is a new separation between the scien–
tist and the monster. Rather than being an extension of the doctor's
evil will, the monster functions completely on its own, creating havoc
through its predatory nature. We learn through charts, biological film,
and the scientist's patient explanations that ants and grasshoppers are
not the harmless little beasties they appear but actually voracious in–
sects who need only the excuse of
~ize
to prey upon humanity. The doc–
tor, rather than allying himself with the monster in its rampage against
our cities, is in strong opposition to it, and reverses the pattern of the
Mad Doctor films by destroying it.
And yet, if the individual scientist is absolved of all responsibility
for the "thing," science somehow is not. These films suggest an un–
ealliness about science which, though subtle and unpremeditated, re–
flect unconscious American attitudes. These attitudes are sharpened
when we examine the genesis of the thing for, though it seems to rise
out of nowhere, it is invariably caused
by
a scientific blunder. The giant
ants of
Them!,
for example, result from a nuclear explosion which
caused a mutation in the species; another fission test has awakened, in
Beast From Twenty Thousand Fathoms,
a dinosaur encrusted in polar
icecaps; the spider of
Tarantula
grows in size after having been injected
with radioactive isotopes, and escapes during a fight in the lab between
two scientists; the grasshoppers of
Beginning of the End
enlarge after
crawling into some radioactive dust carelessly left about by a researcher.
We are left with a puzzling sub-statement: science destroys the thing
but scientific experimentation has created it.
I think we can explain this equivocal attitude when we acknowledge
that the thing "which is too horrible to name," which! owes its birth to
an atomic or nuclear explosion, which begins in a desert or frozen waste
and moves from there to cities, and which promises ultimately to de–
stroy the world, is probably a crude symbol for the bomb itself. The
scientists we see represented in these films are unlike the Mad Doctors
in another more fundamental respect: they are never engaged in basic
research. The scientist uses his knowledge in a purely defensive manner,
like a specialist working on rocket interception or a physician trying to
cure a disease. The isolated theoretician who tinkers curiously in his
lab (and who invented the atomic bomb) is never shown, only the
practical working scientist who labors to undo the harm. The thing's
destructive rampage against cities, like the rampage of the Franken-
