The Incredible Shrinking Man

         Around my house, our Saturday night routine is currently dominated by MeTV, starting with the weekly sci-fi horror film on Svengoolie, followed by an episode of Star Trek (the original series), and sometimes Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (though thank heavens the boys' interest in that has begun to wane - I can endure some pretty crappy stuff, but Buck is an atrocity). Usually the Svengoolie movie is something simply entertaining and diverting, which is what I expected with last Saturday's entry:

        To my surprise, there were some profound elements and examples of really incisive social commentary in the film. Based on a novel and released in 1957, the film tells the sad tale of Scott Carey, a man hit with a combination of insecticide and radioactive fallout that makes him begin to gradually shrink, with his entire body growing smaller and shorter. Carey's first symptoms are baggy clothes and being lighter at the scale, then he notices his wife no longer needs to stretch to kiss him. As time goes on, he becomes ever smaller and shorter, his shrinking briefly arrested by an antidote researchers develop. Even this only temporarily halts the process and Carey eventually shrinks to only inches in size, living in a dollhouse. When his wife leaves for an errand, he is pursued by the couple's cat and falls into the basement to face even greater challenges and terrors.

        In its themes of alienation and degradation, The Incredible Shrinking Man arguably treads some of the same territory as Kafka's The Metamorphosis: transformed into a medical and scientific curiosity, Carey is reduced (no pun intended) to an object of observation and is robbed of everything that once gave his life meaning. In reaction, he becomes taciturn and sullen, avoids going out, and is increasingly churlish and demanding with his wife. Writing on the novel and the book, Mark Jancovich has argued that the character's plight expresses the anxieties lurking beneath middle class white masculinity in the 1950s: without a job and physical superiority over his wife, Carey is no longer a "real man" (Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s 158-163). In fact, later in the film when Carey's height has temporarily stabilized in response to experimental treatment, he begins a relationship (presumably without his wife's knowledge) with another woman who works at a local carnival for little people. He enjoys the fact that, even though he's only fifty-two inches tall at that point, she's still shorter than him. Soon though, his shrinking begins anew and when he notices this woman is also now taller than him, he angrily stalks off and abandons her, unwilling to be the diminutive partner. There's much to be said for this interpretation and I would only amend it to say that these cultural norms about masculinity are not necessarily limited to the 1950s and are still prevalent among many in the 2020s.

        With Carey's descent into the basement, the film projects this theme of the entwinement of masculinity and power into an almost mythic dimension. As everyone assumes him dead, Carey is utterly marooned in the basement and left to his own miniscule devices. He proves resourceful, however, using a matchbox for shelter, pin needles and thread for climbing, and drops from a water heater for drinking. The greatest challenge comes in the form of a spider, which to Carey's continually lessening size, assumes enormous proportions. 

        The spider begins to absorb Carey's attention, assuming in his mind the role of the classic quest-monster that must be slain to capture the treasure. In Carey's case, this is not gold or jewels, but a block of old cheese that is the only source of food in the basement and is quite inconveniently placed near the spider's web. He determines to kill the spider, climbing with great effort up to its web and slashing at it with his hooks and pins.

        He succeeds in killing the spider, which is the culmination of a kind of catharsis: forced to survive on his own in the wild (to him) perils of the basement, Carey reasserts his masculinity through feats of strength and power available to him in his new, miniature world. 

        Honestly, I thought the movie would conclude shortly thereafter with someone discovering Carey in the basement, telling him a cure had been found, and the audience would see him restored to his original size, his manliness saved to live happily ever after. Evidently, this was also the ending the studio at the time wanted, but the filmmakers had something else in mind. Instead, shortly after killing the spider, Carey wanders to a grate on the wall of the basement and, since he has steadily grown smaller, he is able to walk out onto the lawn. As he further lessens in size, he stares up at the stars and moon, realizing that the infinity of micro-space might be just as wondrous as the infinity of outer space. No matter how small he gets and no matter who knows it or not, Carey declares, "I still exist," before vanishing into the microscopic world.

        This bolder, much less conventional ending seemed to move past the cultural critical elements of the rest of the film and even be a way to suggest a transcendence of infirmity or disability, a way to defy, reject, or redefine the limiting elements of one's altered life. Perhaps, after tyrannically raving against his loss of typical white male prestige, the trials in the basement have led to an imagination of a broader, more complicated self. From that view, the entire film would be a kind of hero's journey into the realization of inner self.

        Or maybe I'm reading too much into it all. Paradoxically, sometimes it takes looking at the fantastic to better appreciate the mundane. That's why Science Fiction has always been such a great cultural lens.

        And, as a reminder, if you like this kind of cultural analysis of movies, maybe you'll like my book.