Fantasmatic Violence as Distinguished From the Real: Neutralizing Legitimate Concerns and Easing Apprehensions with Idealization in the Cold War

In “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag posits that in the developing and adolescent stages of the Cold War between 1950 and 1965, as established by the division of the post-war world into the ideologically adversarial East and West and the development of nuclear weapons by the United States of America and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as well as the preceding demonstrative nuclear catastrophes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki , science fiction cinema emerged as a new filmic medium designed not only to commentate on the perpetual threat of nuclear war, but to pacify the devastating psychological anxieties associated with it. In conceptualizing the titular “imagination of disaster,” Sontag also writes of another, perhaps equally menacing threat to the American and international psyche: banality itself in an era of accumulating industrialization and suburbanization associated with the historical context. With increasing material excesses beginning to subsume everyday American and Western life (though shockingly, not to the degree of contemporary globalized society), science fiction cinema has not only taken upon for itself the mantle of “normalizing what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it,” but also providing for an imaginative fantasized escape that fulfills our extravagant desires. When flying saucers, encounters with aliens or the Other, devastating metropolitan destruction, technological catastrophe, and generalized invasiveness are made and perceived as commonplace, our actualized fears of such carnage in the nuclear era are diluted – and even idealized for the viewer through endearing entertainment. In this sense, science fiction cinema does not glorify violence, but its fantasmatic equivalent – thereby alleviating human uneasiness and allowing for a distracting escape from the mundane.

In Robert Wise’s 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still – released only a few short years following UFO sightings in 1946 and 1947 – social commentary is espoused in the form of a benign, peaceful, and intelligent alien named Klaatu landing on earth and leaving it, appalled with humanity’s comparative warlike stupidity and childishness. The ugliness of human nature is made more pressingly ironic by Bobby’s excusable childlike naïveté being more civilized than the cynicism of many adults featured prominently (and antagonistically) in the film, such as his mother’s boyfriend. Wise also skewers humanity’s increasing dependence on technology in the scene during which electricity is disabled for thirty minutes, ensuing global human stagnation – as if man is incapable of even the most basic functionality without lights, cars, and television, among other things. This may resonate all too realistically, as the film is shot in a black and white “documentary”-like style in an effort to portray how humanity may really react to the “invasion” of a peaceful Other. The media is ridiculed for its sensationalism, ironically ignoring Klaatu’s intelligent commentary on the invasion in favor of more hysteric remarks by the brainwashed masses, to better complement their agenda. The filmmakers make a concerted effort to distinguish Klaatu from other humans despite his kindness and humanoid appearance; personality-wise, he is stoic, reserved, and typically emotionless, yet pacifistic and deeply moral. This suggests that such stereotypically “lacking” traits may in fact be the most ideal human qualities, with most conflicts predicated on emotion. The film seems to idealize the notion of an austere and peaceful existence; for instance, despite its complex technological advancement, Klaatu’s spaceship maintains a sleek and minimalistic aesthetic, implying a sense of beautification of the otherworldly. In the most literal sense of Sontag’s argument, The Day the Earth Stood Still “normalizes” the anxieties associated with foreign invasion by portraying the “invader” as intelligent, strong, beautiful, respectable, and kind despite his lack of emotion or indulgence in mortal trivialities – thereby lessening the generalized fears associated with such an invasion (whether communistic or otherworldly) in the first place, simultaneously requesting that its audience abandon its overly emotional and cynical distrust for those who are perceived as “Other,” as well as its materialistic excesses and reliance on the media and technology (a primary source of our banality), in favor of a cleaner, more minimalistic, and more serene sense of utilitarian, moralistic efficiency.

Furthermore, Sontag’s thesis can be applied to another of other films, including Gordon Douglas’ 1954 Them!, which features an “invasion” of less celestial origins: from giant mutated ants who were transformed in New Mexico deserts by U.S. nuclear testing. Like Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Godzilla, released in the same year, Them! passes judgment on the ethics of the nuclear era itself, and in presenting oversized and destructive, monstrous versions of familiar creatures that inhabit earth (more debatably in the case of Godzilla, though lizards and dinosaurs are still “recognizable” to the general public), these directors attempt both to familiarize the potentiality of a nuclear catastrophe and stress the fact that they are man-made disasters – that perhaps humanity itself is the real menace as the catalyst for an ugliness that Godzilla and the ants cannot control. The relative vilification of the otherwise familiar, a common motif within the context of science fiction cinema, serves to create a fantasy element to entertain viewers by usurping the otherwise banal and ordinary nature of such creatures. Both films also include urban settings that may appear familiar to their target demographic audiences (such as Tokyo and Los Angeles), and conclude with the familiar open-ended science fiction cinematic motif that the threat may return one day to wreak further havoc – creating a fused notion of fantasmatic banality that also calls upon viewers to draw comparisons with the real-life potential implications of man-made disaster, and perhaps to a lesser extent given the endearing entertainment value, to wrest with the moral implications of man’s monstrosity.