294
PARTISAN REVIEW
stein monster, is the result of too much cleverness, and the consequences
for all the world are only too apparent.
These consequences are driven home more powerfully in movies
like
The Incredible Shrinking Man
and
The Amazing Colossal
Man
where the audience gets the opportunity to identify closely with the
victims of science's reckless experimentation. The hero of the first
movie is an average man who, through contact with fallout while on
his honeymoon, begins to shrink away to nothing. As he proceeds to
grow smaller, he finds himself in much the same dilemma as the other
heroes of the
Atomic Beast
series : he must do battle with (now)
gi–
gantic insects in order to survive. Scientists can do nothing to save him–
after a while they can't even find him-so as he dwindles into an
atomic particle he finally turns to God for whom "there is no zero."
The inevitable sequel,
The Amazing Colossal Man,
reverses the dilemma.
The hero grows to enormous size through the premature explosion of
a plutonium bomb. Size carries with it the luxury of power but the
hero cannot enjoy his new stature. He feels like a freak and his body
is proceeding to outgrow his brain and heart. Although the scientists
labor to help him and even succeed in reducing an elephant to the size
of a cat, it is too late; the hero has gone mad, demolished Las Vegas
and fallen over Boulder Dam. The victimization of man by theoretical
science has become, in these two movies, less of a suggestion and more
of a fact.
In the Interplanetary Monster movies, Hollywood handles the pub–
lic's ambivalence toward science in a more obvious way, by splitting
the scientist in two. Most of these movies feature both a practical scien–
tist who wishes to destroy the invader and a theoretical scientist who
wants to communicate with it. In
The Thing,
for example, we find
billeted among a group of more altruistic average-Joe colleagues with
crew cuts an academic long-haired scientist of the Dr. Frankenstein
type. When the evil thing (a highly evolved vegetable which, by mul–
tiplying itself, threatens to take over the world) descends in a flying
saucer, this scientist tries to perpetuate its life in order "to find out
what it knows." He is violently opposed in this by the others who take
the occasion to tell him that such amoral investigation produced the
atomic bomb. But he cannot be reasoned with and almost wrecks the
entire party. After both he and the thing are destroyed, the others con–
gratulate themselves on remaining safe, though in the dark. In
Forbiddin
Planet
(a sophisticated thriller inspired in part by Shakespeare's
T em–
pest),
the good and evil elements in science are represented, as in
Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
by the split personality of the sdentist. He is
