Monsters in the Machine

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social History ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the American film industry produced a distinct cycle of films situated on the boundary between horror and science fiction. Using the familiar imagery of science fiction, the vast majority of these films subscribed to the effects and aesthetics of horror film, anticipating the dystopian turn of many science fiction films to come. These films often evinced paranoia, unease, fear, shock, and disgust. Not only did these movies address technophobia and its psychological, social, and cultural corollaries, they also returned persistently to the military as a source of character, setting, and conflict. Commensurate with a state of perpetual mobilization, the US military comes across as an inescapable presence in American life. Regardless of their genre, this book argues that these films have long been understood as allegories of the Cold War. They register anxieties about two major issues of the time: atomic technologies, especially the testing and use of nuclear weapons, as well as communist aggression and/or subversion. Setting out to question, expand, and correct this critical argument, the book follows shifts and adjustments prompted by recent scholarly work into the technological, political, and social history of America in the 1950s. Based on this revised historical understanding, science fiction films appear in a new light as they reflect on the troubled memories of World War II, the emergence of the military-industrial complex, the postwar rewriting of the American landscape, and the relative insignificance of catastrophic nuclear war compared to America's involvement in postcolonial conflicts around the globe.

A Bright New Future, With Monsters

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
World War ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's key themes. This book focuses on American science fiction films of the 1950s, many of which are fondly remembered, yet critically dismissed. It argues that it is through the intersection of past and present, of unresolved trauma superimposed upon present anxieties, that 1950s science fiction films acquire topical relevance within their historical context. Science fiction films from the 1950s are a belated response to the national trauma of World War II and the Korean War projected onto the unsettling experience of the Cold War. With much of the critical work on the Cold War aspects of the films already delivered by other scholars, this book will weigh in on the side of the argument that has, as yet, remained critically neglected—the side of past trauma: on World War II and the Korean War, and their troubling legacy in the first decade of the American Century.

The Long Shadow of the Fifties

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Military Industrial Complex ◽  
The Us ◽  
Final Consideration ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The Military

This chapter returns to Eisenhower's term “military-industrial complex” and outlines the concept's extended afterlife, especially in regard to the so-called “war on terror” after September 11, 2001. It suggests that then post-9/11 America under Bush might have seen a return of Eisenhower's (in)famous term. America may have stopped talking about the military–industrial complex for a while, but that did not mean that the military–industrial complex had, quietly, gone away. The return of the term marked a new awareness of political and economic conditions for which it had always been the most apt description. The chapter concludes with a final consideration of what 1950s science fiction films can tell us about the US in the present day—their impact on later films and their continued relevance to the culture.

The Southwest

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
American Southwest ◽  
World War ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

This chapter switches the focus from iconic characters to iconic spaces, following the demographic changes brought about by World War II and the expansion of the domestic infrastructure during the Eisenhower administration. It focuses on the ways in which the military encouraged certain ways of perceiving and experiencing cities, suburbs, and small towns in the transition from World War II to the Cold War. More specifically, it takes on the desert landscape of the American Southwest and tracks its occupation by the military. Closely associated with the development and testing of the US nuclear arsenal, but also with the world of the American frontier and the Western, the southwestern desert appears, in turn, deeply familiar and eerily strange to 1950s American culture. Science fiction films like Jack Arnold's It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Gordon Douglas's Them! (1954) unfold as the Cold War overwrites the traditional connotations of the landscape.

Cinema's Military Industrial Complex

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Mobile Technologies ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Physical And Mental Health ◽  
World War ◽  
Film Exhibition ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Military Industrial Complex ◽  
The Military

Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex examines how the American military has used cinema and related visual, sonic, and mobile technologies to further its varied aims. The essays in this book address the way cinema was put to work for purposes of training, orientation, record keeping, internal and external communication, propaganda, research and development, tactical analysis, surveillance, physical and mental health, recreation, and morale. The contributors examine the technologies and types of films that were produced and used in collaboration among the military, film industry, and technology manufacturers. The essays also explore the goals of the American state, which deployed the military and its unique modes of filmmaking, film exhibition, and film viewing to various ends. Together, the essays reveal the military’s deep investment in cinema, which began around World War I, expanded during World War II, continued during the Cold War (including wars in Korea and Vietnam), and still continues in the ongoing War on Terror.

Military Stock Footage

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
The Public ◽  
Standard Device ◽  
The Common ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The Military

This chapter focuses on the recruitment of the audience into the “military metaphysics” that C. Wright Mills decries as a symptom of America's Cold War mentality. More specifically, it reads attempts at recruitment made by science fiction films of the period through the use of military stock footage. Pilfering the public domain for footage to be inserted into one's own film was a standard device of inexpensive filmmaking that found one of its most extreme expressions in Alfred E. Green's Invasion U.S.A. (1952). Generally dismissed as a hack job and mercilessly lampooned by Mystery Science Theater 3000, Invasion U.S.A. is a prime example of a politically engaged film using one of the common stylistic devices of 1950s low-budget filmmaking.

On “Nationalism and the Imagination”

PMLA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (3) ◽  
pp. 504-506
Author(s):  
Jean Franco
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Memories ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Military ◽  
Depression Era

In her essay “nationalism and the imagination,” there is a tantalizing glimpse of Gayatri before she was Gayatri Spivak. When she gave the essay as a talk at the biennial meeting of the Commonwealth Association for Languages and Literature in Hyderabad, India, and at the Center for Advanced Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria, her two audiences, though completely different, were evidently asking the same questions about nationalism in a supposedly postnational world. But what is most fascinating for me about the talk is that it hints at the autobiography to come, the story of a girl born in Kolkata whose earliest memories include “the great artificial famine created by the British to feed the military in the Pacific theater in World War II” (276). Would she be surprised to know that, coming from Depression-era northern England, I too have early memories of, if not famine, seeing the skeletal bodies of a family starving in the dying heart of the empire? Meanwhile, at school we made daisy chains and were told that the yellow center was Britain and the petals the colonies. There is nothing subtle about empire.

scholarly journals The great Project Camelot: Implications and repercussions of a controversy in social sciences

Sociologija ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 458-480
Author(s):  
Marko Bala
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Social Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military ◽  
Project Camelot

The paper examines the relationship between social sciences and the military-industrial complex in the United States of America during the Cold War era. Based on the review of the most representative texts on this problematique, the author?s main goal is to prove the plausibility of critical view according to which the social sciences have been instrumentalized during the Cold War by centers of power such as CIA and the Pentagon in order to accomplish certain strategic goals. The main focus of our interest is Project Camelot, an ambitous research program which was canceled in the midst of the international scandal which erupted as a consequence of the exposure of the project?s political nature. The first part of the paper describes the Camelot controversy and the reaction of social scientists, as well as the debate on ethical, epistemological, political and practical implications of social scientific research, which was triggered by the affair. The second part of the paper describes research projects whose characterics are similar to those of Project Camelot, and the author hypostasizes that the controversial project cannot be viewed as an isolated case, but rather as a paradigmatic example of the Cold War social science. The text pays special attention to the question of sponsorship/sources of funding of social research, an issue whose scale and importance is especially highlighted in the third section of the paper. The concluding part points on the problem of militarization and instrumentalisation of social sciences fifty years after Project Camelot, while the emphasis is put on the necessity of maintaining the memory on the worst cases of the abuse of behavioral expertise.

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