"Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned." William Butler Yeats
Abraham Lincoln, a vampire slayer?
This really, really, really seems to be reaching to the bottom of the barrel, until I saw something on Twitter over the weekend, the bones of the story: as a young man, Lincoln sees the unearthly creatures killing his mother, and so he spends the rest of his life hunting down the blood-suckers. Now the story makes perfect sense! His mother, of course, is the motherland and Abe is saving America from blood-sucking politicians by the strength of his axe, i.e., hard work and honesty, the trademarks of his administration (I would love to go into Congress slinging an axe! Oh, and the cutting off the head, since the head symbolizes the governing function, Lincoln cutting the head off means they are not getting re-elected). The importance of this film is that it's going head-to-head with Hollywood royalty: Steven Spielberg.
Daniel Day Lewis stars as Abraham Lincoln in Spielberg's film Lincoln; first photo of him in make-up that has bee released while he was having lunch.
Spielberg is a Democrat and Lincoln was a conservative Republican, and, again, knowing this is an election year and that Spielberg is a supporter of President Obama, and it was Lincoln's Bible upon which Obama took the oaths to protect the office of the Presidency, regardless of Lincoln's politics, you can be sure it will be a liberal film, so, for those of us who are conservatives, the "wilder" of the two films (Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer) might give us the greater satisfaction. It's at least one more film to look forward to this year.
P.S.--thoroughly enjoyed The Innkeepers and will be getting that post up today!
Hansel & Gretl Witch Hunters was supposed to be opening this year, starring Jeremy Renner of The Hurt Locker and the New Bourne Legacy, along with Gemma Arterton from Casiono Royale and Clash of the Titans. It won't be released until 2013, it's in post-production stages right now, and a new Hansel & Gretel is being released with the tagline, "If you get lost in the woods, you just might find yourself." That's interesting. As always, I will. be keeping you up-to-date!
Well, no real surprises, but a few breaks with the other groups, and that's good: if everyone said the exact same thing, what would be the point of all the different awards? Keep this tucked away for when you are filling out your Oscar ballot, but I think the Oscars will go a bit differently: for example, I am not a Meryl Streep fan, but I think she did a fabulous, Oscar worthy job in The Iron Lady, but I think the Oscar will go to Viola Davis for The Help. This may be explained culturally, it's nice to know that the Brits liked The Iron Lady (I certainly did) but I think Americans will go for the Mississippi Maid. Just my thought. I am happily surprised that The Skin I Live In won the Best Foreign Film; A Separation has been sweeping that category (I haven't seen it yet) but that is certainly an upset.
The Vow opens this weekend, and critics are describing it as predictably sweet, but in the first few moments of the trailer above, we see something very serious. Paige (Rachel McAdams) tells Leo (Channing Tatum) that he has to turn the song off, and, mouthing with Meatloaf, he says, "But I won't do that," and then they have the crash. We know from the rest of the trailer that they are married at this point, so when Leo says, "I would do anything for love, but I won't do that," he's saying, "I would fulfill all my vows, but I won't be obedient," and because he has forgotten to be obedient his punishment is that Paige forgets everything.
This is really the sign of great screen writing, since he won't do that small thing, turn off the song, he now has to go and do all those other things that the trailer describes (it's like the sin in the Garden of Eden: because Adam and Eve wouldn't obey the command to not eat the forbidden fruit, the simple command was replaced with the very strict and burdensome Mosaic Law) . The Vow is a much more serious film than first appears and, given that the wedding of 2011 between Prince William and Kate Middleton famously and specifically left out the vow of obedience, we can question, if you aren't willing to be obedient, what good is the rest of it?
When it's a frontier, or a wilderness or purely environmental setting, the "trappings" of culture and society have been removed only to show us what is really taking place in the "civilized world," and that is always something very uncivilized. Joe Carnahan's box office hit The Grey is quite good. You may remember that last week, I deduced that it would be about the oil drilling industry trying to survive against "the wolves of Washington," and I wasn't accurate about that; it's bigger than that, it's more inclusive to all Americans, and like Man On A Ledge, has a great message for what it is that we as Americans truly value and should be fighting for.
The Grey has one of those post-credit endings, and I didn't realize that, so left before the final scene that I didn't know was coming (still being sick I was heavily medicated); if you go and see it, don't make the mistake I made.
There are a number of approaches one can take to the film, including an all-time favorite of mine, game theory. As I watched The Grey, I was actually thinking of Moneyball and radical approaches each of the two films were taking in their discussion of the economy, what happened and how it impacted people (please see Moneyball & the Great American Economy) but one can also compare it to the "clean up team" that enters the company in the beginning of Margin Call and "kills" everyone who is no longer needed (please see Deconstructing Volatile Risk: Margin Call). What all three films do well is summarize the trauma and insecurity in the economy and what will have to be done to survive in the meltdown we've been left with.
Ottway (Liam Neeson) in his room during the last night of camp at the drilling factory. He's trying to write a letter to his deceased wife. He will hold onto his letter and take it out to read on the airplane, but decide to throw it away, crumbling it up and putting it in the back of the seat in front of him; before they leave the scene of the crash, he happens to find it and takes it with him. What does the letter mean? Hope. He knows he can't be with his wife again, but he has that hope that his love for her is stronger and greater than her death, and towards the end of the film, when it is Ottway and the alpha male wolf fighting for their survival, that love of his for her will strengthen him to enter that last fight.
The ambiguous character in the film is Ana, Ottway's wife. As you can tell from the trailer, he is with her only in his mind, through flashbacks; almost at the end, we realize that she was dying in a hospital, terminally ill. That's an important point, because she symbolizes America. Because of women's ability to give birth and fulfill a man's hopes and dreams, women--such as the Statue of Liberty--often represent the homeland, the motherland, the land that gave birth to the hero. That Ottway "lost her" but still loves her desperately, is the strength of his hope and our hope that--for those of us who feel our country has become alien to us and our leaders want to rule over us instead of be public servants accountable to the law and Constitution--we can get out country back. So enter the wolves.
At the scene of the crash.Why does the man bleed to death on the plane after the crash? Ottway telling him, "You're dying," is like telling someone, "You're fired." But that's not enough, that's not all this sad and intimate scene means, as a group of men watch another man die, knowing there is nothing they can do for him. It's Ottway, however, that draws resources from his own experience and gives the dying man what he can, and what Ottway would want someone to say to him if he were the one dying. That's why Ottway is given the leadership role by the others, not because of knowledge of the wolves, or his courage, or survival skills, but because leadership is a quality that comes from within, and leaders have an endless amount of resources upon which they draw and as the man's life slips away from him, Ottway proves that he can sustain life for the group.
There just isn't any other way to understand the airplane crash that happens in the film: the plane busted up into at least two pieces, and a third piece completely missing, and the total ignorance and uselessness of the pilots, means that this crash is the Wall Street Crash of 2008. The suddenness with which it happened and the violence of the jostling and turmoil, the uprooting and disintegration of everything, along with the deaths of 117 people, is a graphic illustration of how the financial irresponsibility of some people impacted those who had no idea it was coming. (It's a film such as Margin Call that really equates getting laid off/fired with death, but it's The Grey that shows you how they die: painfully). It's at the scene of the crash that the wolves start encircling the surviving members of the drill team, and it's easy to understand that as a company that lost a lot in the "economic crash" and is still trying to hang onto what it can, but the scavengers are circling around.
For a lot of people, this crash is a good illustration of what has happened to their lives, businesses, homes and security. The big question is, what is the point of keeping Ottway alive only to die in the wolves' den? Courage is like the ebbing of the tide: courage is easy to recognize when someone is charging a wolf, but it's more difficult to see when someone can't bear to go on living through another night, but they do so anyway, and that's when there is no tide, but when that tide comes back in, it's with the force of the tsunami and it will win whatever fight presents itself. Ottway's courage ebbs away from him the night before the crash so that, when everyone else's courage has ebbed away from them, he will be in control of himself, therefore, in control of the situation.
What is the conflict with the wolves? We're in their territory.
The wolves are the politicians scavenging off the land and what's left, while the poor 7 man team surviving the wreck is the wounded work force in America still trying to compete despite the "hostile environment" in Washington and around the world (with other failing economies). Another way of understanding the wolves, though not much differently than mentioned above, is that the "pack of wolves" is actually a "PAC of wolves" or a political action committee, trying to get their representative elected to for their interest(s) regardless of anything else.But being in their territory establishes that the fight for companies to survive in the hostile wilderness of this prolonged recession has to be taken to the "den of wolves" in Washington.
Each person in this scene is going to die because, as great stories know, they are each all ready dead. John Diaz (Frank Grillo) is the guy everyone wants to die first because of his selfish sarcasm; when he fatally wounds his knee, falling down the tree to try saving Talget when the wolves are getting him, after Diaz had punched Talget in the nose earlier while Diaz challenged Ottway's leadership, Diaz has overcome his selfishness. After his long and excruciating walk, Diaz isn't surrendering to inevitability and giving up, he's not dismissing the value of his life by insisting that he doesn't have anything worth going back to, this is his best moment. The treacherous obstacles he has overcome to get this far, are the treacherous obstacles within himself he has overcome to get deeper inside his soul, his own genuine self, and that's why, it's at that scene that we find out his first name, and he introduces himself to Hendrick and Ottway. We never learn Ottways first name because we never learn everything about him: some people are just too big for life, and there is so much within him, that all of his resources won't be realized.
This is pretty easy so far, nothing difficult about this interpretation, but what the film does, in the opposite direction of, Moneyball for example, is to show, by process of elimination and priority, what virtues are not going to lead the war on Washington and guarantee our survival. Moneyball showed how to take seemingly worthless skills and make them valuable; The Grey shows us how there is really only one virtue right now that will get this country through these tough times: courage. Ottway is shown in several different instances, the shades of courage he possesses and why that helps him to be stronger than other members of the team. It's the alpha males that have the last battle, only because Ottway has the well of grace within him to realize he can still make a difference, he can still win his fight. Why does he use the alcohol bottles? Taping them to his fingers, his hands as a symbol of his strength, so the empty bottles show that he is "sober," he's not drunk on despair or anger (he's not using "Dutch courage").
Why does Hernandez die? When he's on his watch and playing the video game, he wishes that his son was there; that's a very insincere attitude towards his progeny, and that reveals the "dead spot" in his soul; because Hernandez is basically "pissing on" the importance of his family, he is attacked by the wolf when he's urinating. Why does Flannery die? Flannery falls behind in the line, and that relates to us that Flannery "is behind" in everything going on: i.e., Ottway has to tell Flannery when they are sitting by each other on the plane that he doesn't want to talk to anyone, Flannery couldn't figure that out on his own. Why does Burke die? He can't breathe at the high altitude and freezes to death. Burke can't "rise" (altitude) to the challenges presenting themselves to the men. Whereas it brings out the best in men like Ottway (and even Sherlock Holmes in A Game of Shadows) the distance to which Burke has to reach up to survive is too much for him. Why does Talget die? The zipper hanging onto the tether symbolizes Talget "hanging onto" things in general, even when it "breaks away from him (the tether between the trees snapping). Just like his little girl who comes to "take him" as he dies, he holds onto things instead of letting things go when he needs to. Why does Hendrick die? Hendrick is the most caring of the men, it's not effeminate in him, but he's so caring that it impedes his will (that's why his foot is stuck, the feet symbolize our will) because he is not hard enough (the rocks) but because he is caring he was the one who could make the leap of faith necessary to get to the trees across the river.
Does God answer Ottway's prayer? Yes.
Ottway asks God to do something, and what God does is give OttwayOttway had been tracking the wolves and trying to find it! What's the big deal with that? That's not what Ottway prayed for, he wanted to find shelter or a cabin, but God gave him an answer bigger than his prayer.
Just as the alpha male in the wolf pack is having his leadership challenged in the dark woods, so Diaz challenges Ottway's leadership. The omega wolf coming for Diaz attacks him in the back, because that is basically how Diaz has treated Ottway, undermining him the entire time although Ottway has saved his life. The attack leaves a scar on Diaz that we don't see until he sets down at the end of his road and insists on Ottway going on without him.
When Ottway is at his weakest, he is brought into the moment and place of greatest strength for the alpha wolf. Symbolically, we can only see this as American businesses who have survived the hardships and trials of what this dying economy has thrown at them, and despite all the tests, they have survived, and that gives them the strength to challenge the politicians in their own den, in Washington itself, and to overcome them in their strength when we are at our lowest, and that means this year's election (I could go a bit more into who the alpha wolf male symbolizes, but I won't beat a dead wolf into the ground). Despite the apparent show of strength in his den, the alpha wolf is taken out by the lone human, and it could be argued that the remaining wolves in the pack who finish off Ottway are members of the (now dead) alpha wolf's press team.
We've all ready discussed why he tapes the bottles to his hand, but what about the knife? Someone may say, it's obvious to tape a knife to your hand when you are going to attack a wolf at a full run, but the symbolic importance is that Diaz had attacked Ottway with that knife and Ottway self with more than just a knife,ken has armed himself with more than just a knife,k but also with the trophy of his own alpha status that he earned when he overcame Diaz's challenge and the trials of survival, including successfully defending himself from the wolves and getting into their den.
When the film opens, it's with shots of the factory: it's a job, and no one there wants to be there, at the "end of the world," and it's called that because, in the beginning of this country, America was the "end of the world," and it was for work and the chance of self-improvement that people learned how to survive in this hostile environment. Before Ottway takes on the alpha male, what does he do? He goes through the wallets of all the men unfit for mankind, and what does he find? Not the money or the credit cards, but photographs of families, fathers with their children and loved ones. That's what is most valued by Americans and that's what's at risk in the test of survival with the economy today: the American way of life. The Grey does an excellent job of using noise and silence, and that presence of noise always lets us know that there is something we are not hearing but should be, something we should be listening to but can't hear, and that's probably a warning about the state of the country right now; we need to get past the noise and really hear what is going on.
No one wants a showdown with our nation's leaders, no one wants to have to enter the den of wolves, but the lack of leadership where there should be leadership in abundance has made it necessary. We should prepare ourselves to see a flurry of films like The Grey in the coming months.
John Sherwood's The Monolith Monsters of 1957 is strange only if one doesn't know the language of the Bible: salt, water, rock, are words describing the spiritual state of the soul, and it can be used positively or negatively. Knowing the states of the soul and the parables used to describe it makes The Monolith Monsters a powerful film, describing for Christians the way sin attacks our soul and spreads throughout the world.
Let's begin with a spiritual analysis of salt.
In the Old Testament, at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, God saved Abraham's nephew Lot and his family from His wrath by leading them out of the cities as they were being destroyed by fire and brimstone, on the condition that they would not look back, for surely they would be destroyed if they looked back; Lot's wife, of course, turns as she flees, and was turned into a pillar of salt.
The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by John Martin, 1852.
In Matthew 5:13, Jesus tells us, You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. How do we reconcile the views of what happened to Lot's wife with Jesus' command? Salt is essential to the biological system to have, but even more so in ancient times because it preserved food. When Lot's wife turned around and looked at the city being destroyed, she was preserving in her heart Sodom and all its sinfulness, not that they Lord had delivered them and preserved them from destruction.
The legendary pillar of salt known as Lot's Wife on Mount Sodom, which looks very much like a monolith monster from the film, doesn't it?
On the other hand, when Mary, the Mother of Jesus, left Jerusalem with John the Evangelist, she preserved within her heart the Stations of the Cross, the Divine Sacrifice that had been made by Her Son for the world. Lot's wife was preserving the food of sin, Mary was preserving the food of holiness and righteousness. The wages of sin would have destroyed Lot's wife anyway because she did not know how to live according to the ways of the Lord because she desired only that food that pleased her, not the food she needed to sustain her on her journey to salvation. This is the important role that salt plays in The Monolith Monsters.
The Jordan River, one of two possible sites where Jesus was baptized. By looking at the landscape you can tell how important water is and its presence would not have been taken for granted.
Next, the important role of water.
Sacramentally, it is very easy to understand water: just as water is essential for the body's survival, so the grace that water symbolizes is essential for the survival of the soul. Grace, not only as it comes to us from baptism when our soul is cleansed of Original Sin, but the constant Grace--God's own Life--that we receive in moments of temptation and weakness, is essential to sustain, strengthen and renew our souls. Responding to Grace builds our bond with God; denying Grace distances us from God.
Baptism of Christ, Francesco Alban, 17th Century.
Culturally, water signifies sex.
Spiritually, water-as-grace is life-giving to the soul as culturally, sex is life-giving to the body. Because the sexual experience is equated to a renewal of the senses and the generation of biological life as Grace gives the soul life, water as a sexual symbol can be both positive and destructive.
Yul Brenner as Ramses in The Ten Commandments which was released only one year before The Monolith Monsters came out in 1957.
The last of the important symbols is rock.
When the Lord decides to call the Israelites out from the Land of Egypt, he "hardens Pharaoh's heart," and makes it like stone, but then in the New Testament, Jesus is compared to a rock, that "rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone supporting all the rest," so how do we reconcile these two oppositions? When there is no grace, the heart becomes hard like rock (as in the view of the surrounding desert in the photo of the Baptism site above) but, when the heart is full of Grace, the heart is also fully resolved in all of its endeavors and becomes as stable as a rock: strong and supportive.
Now that we have working definitions of these symbols, we can understand The Monolith Monsters.
Just as he starred in The Incredible Shrinking Man, Grant Williams also stars in The Monolith Monsters which director of TISM Jack Arnold helped to write the screenplay.
The beginning of the film opens with a scientific discussion which was a stylistic tool in the Sci-Fi films of the 1950s: they build up the role of science (because science ended World War II through the Manhattan Project) only to spend the rest of the film presenting a problem that science can't solve. Ben Gilbert (Phil Harvey) drives along the deserted old San Angelo road in the desert of California. He stops the car because it's overheating; we will see this device of the car running out of water employed again in 1963 when Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier) drives up to the convent in Lilies of the Field and will ask for water because his car is thirsty. Meanwhile, Ben gets out to fill the tank with water and grabs a stone to keep his car from rolling back down the hill; as he fills the water tank and water drips down, touching the meteor stones beneath the car.
The road is the road of life, the road of salvation, the San Angelo road, i.e., the "angelic road" that we will discover has been abandoned. Ben making this journey up the dusty desert road has waited too long to give his car (symbolic of his soul) water (grace). When he gets out of the car, he grabs the first thing he can to keep from back sliding in the spiritual life: one of the rocks. In and of themselves, the rocks aren't bad things, but when Ben pours the water into his car, he's waited so long to fill it that he makes a mess and drops some of the water, i.e., he isn't capable of receiving all the grace that his soul needs up on this part of is spiritual journey and he loses some of the grace he needed.
The meaning of this can be understood if we forward a bit to when Ben talks to town newspaperman Martin (Les Tremayne) and talks about making an original discovery. Grace isn't enough to keep Ben going at this point, he wants some worldly excitement the way Martin wants some exciting news to report, and that's the first important lesson of a film of this kind. Whenever somebody dies in a film, it's because they are all ready dead, and the lead-up to their death is to show us why they are dead and cannot, like the hero, go through the steps of conversion necessary to complete their journey.
When Ben gets into "The Office of the Interior" (and we should take that symbolically to be the "interior life" or the life of the spirit), it's hot and he opens a window; the heat is a sign of a spiritual trial, because when impurities are going to be worked out of metal they are subjected to high heat in order to purify them and the same is true of the soul, but instead of cleansing Ben of his impurities, Ben's impurities will be brought out for us to see just before it ruins him.
There is more that Martin doesn't understand than just geology jargon. "The desert is full of things that don't belong. Take the salt flats out there. Used to be an ocean bed. Now that ocean knew the middle of a desert was a pretty silly place for it to be so it just dried up and went away." The salt flats and the mining going on are the "flock of Christ" compared to the "flock" of black rocks Ben finds out on the road. The Christians in the town use that salt to preserve their faith and the salt is there because of the ocean that was there, the ocean of Christ's mercy; later in the film, it will be water filling in this space left by the "dried up ocean" that will save the town and the world from the attack of the monolith monsters.
This isn't staring into the abyss, rather, staring into the mirror of the soul. Dave should be realizing right now that he needs to be converted, because what has happened to his buddy is about to happen to him.
When the storm comes in through the windows, we have a good idea of what has happened because of a side comment made by Martin. Just as in The Incredible Shrinking Man when Louise left the door open and the cat got in to attack Scott, so in The Monolith Monsters, leaving the window open (because earlier in the day it was hot) shows that Ben hasn't been vigilant, rather, like sleeping through too many geology classes in school, Ben wasn't keeping guard for everything that could come in to harm him. In this case, Ben has been working too hard, and that's why it is a clipboard falling over to trigger the chain reaction to start the rocks multiplying (please see Se7en and the Eighth Deadly Sin for a review of the Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman film and the harms of over-working). It's rather surprising to see Ben sleeping there in the office, but that's because his life and work are one, and when the cold blasts of loneliness come into his soul, he doesn't have any counter-balance to off-set the work with the relaxation he needs to rejuvenate.
When Dave Miller (Grant Williams) gets out of his car, he throws away his cigarette. This is one of those great moments of screenwriting and directing when the purpose of the hero is revealed in the first moments of him being introduced to the audience. In order to survive this ordeal, just as he tossed away his cigarette, Dave has to get rid of an appetite he has been hanging onto, specifically, the relationship he is having with Cathy Barrett (Lola Albright).
This is a great shot because it describes for us what caused Ben to die: being caught between work (the area of the geology lab) and between his personal life (where he sleeps) petrified him so he could no longer do either one of them well. The moment Dave touches Ben to try to get him to "wake up," Dave realizes there is no life in him, which is the constant theme running throughout the film.
When we go to the desert and we meet Cathy and Ginny Simpson, it's the conversation that lets us know, through the eyes of the innocent child, what is wrong in the town of San Angelo. Cathy and Dave are having a relationship, specifically a sexual relationship, and they aren't getting married. Today, when more than half of the couples in the United States are cohabiting without being married, this probably doesn't seem like such a big deal, but that is precisely one of the social evils films such as The Monolith Monsters were trying to avoid (and we will see this in the next posting in this series on Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World of 1951).
The desert can invoke two different things: it came be the place where the spiritual athletes of God go to purify themselves of sin and temptation, or it can denote those who have lived a life without grace and their soul is as parched of God's Life giving Grace as the desert is parched of water.
Cathy should be embarrassed when Ginny points out that lizards don't get married, because having sex without the covenant of God binding a man and a woman together puts us on the level of the animals; animals don't get married, so don't act like an animal, Ms. Barrett. Men and women get married because they are God's children, so act that way. "Why don't you and Mr. Miller get married?"and perhaps we find out the reason later: Dave's bad coffee. "The reason for my prolonged bachelorhood," he says, because anyone who drinks that kind of mud can't be easy to live with. But the mud he drinks is symbolic more than anything, because instead of drinking the pure water of grace, he drinks the muddied waters of sin.
What's important about this scene is what is important about all the 1950s Sci-Fi thrillers: what has it done to the children? What is the next generation going to suffer as a result of what we are doing? The black rock that Ginny takes from the "scene of the crime" with Ms. Barrett is symbolic of what is in Ginny's heart: men and women don't have to get married, they can live like the lizards. If Ms. Barrett thinks Mr. Miller is so special, why won't she marry him? We know Dave has asked because we find this out later but we also know from The Incredible Shrinking Man about the increasing independence that women are gaining; Cathy Barrett can provide for herself, and Dave Miller provides that "animal comfort" for when she gets lonely, but just like Louise in TISM, Dave Miller isn't worth the sacrifices Cathy would have to make of Dave sometimes being grumpy, and so it's easier to just live like the lizards.
When Mrs. Simpson tells Ginny to leave that rock outside, she knows exactly what she is talking about: she can see the "dirt" on Ginny's hands and knows that Ginny needs to "wash" before joining the rest of the family. Mrs. Simpson knows that Ginny has been contaminated by what she has brought home, but doesn't realize how powerful it is nor how even she and her husband have been contaminated by it all ready. Ginny dropping the rock (sin) into the water (immersion Baptism) is an oxymoron, because it's Ginny who should be receiving Grace, but that illustrates for us something more startlingly: a "baptism into sin." we normally think of these things with horror films such as House of Dracula but given what happens, the death of her parents and destruction of her home (and her own near-death experience) we cannot underestimate what Ginny "really learned" at school today and it wasn't about irrigation canals.
Jumping forward, we see Ginny having to be placed in an iron lung, all too familiar to people in the 1950s because of earlier epidemics of Polio which effected entire towns. This image is incredibly important because so many families were directly effected by polio, especially when it was discovered that it was fecal matter entering into the drinking water of communities that was the source of infection (Dave's "drinking mud" fits in nicely here). When Ginny drops that black meteor in the water, and then she's in the iron lung, the disruptive and wide-spread damaging effects of what is happening in the film would have had a more immediate impact on film audiences in the '50s more so than today: sin spreads as fast as polio and is as dangerous.
This is where the "science build-up" I spoke of in the beginning gets undermined by the film, and is, again, a typical technique of the era.
When they drive out to the Simpson farm, it's so hard for Cathy to find Ginny that she passes her by, and then she has to peer into the darkness to see her, contrast this with the brightness of the day and how close they were sitting during the field trip (pictured above). This great directing technique demonstrates the shock children all over the country were slowly going into at the ways their lives were changing (we will see the exact same thing happen in Them! and Invaders From Mars in upcoming posts). When Ginny is in the doctor's office and he notes that her temperature is "sub-normal," we will reference this when we discuss The Blob, but it lets us know that, just like her teacher Ms. Barrett, Ginny is becoming cold-hearted, because it doesn't matter that Cathy thinks Dave "is special," the lesson Ginny learned is not to let Dave know he's special, and that's cold.
Mr. & Mrs. Simpson petrified. Note, please, how they are lying side by side but in different directions. This shows how Cathy's and Dave's relationship is effecting married couples, because sexual relations was an impetus for getting married, being able to have sexual relations without marriage is a plague to those who sacrifice for the sake of their marriages. What's the point of getting married, then? And this position we find them in illustrates for us what some people address as "bed death" in marriage, when husband and wife stop having sex because they are growing apart (lying beside one another and yet worlds apart). The Monolith Monsters puts forth that the monolith monsters are Cathy and Dave, a nice couple that no one would suspect of bringing devastation onto their town, but who are because of the way they are behaving and refusing to conform to social norms for their good, the good of society and the good of the children.
It's not enough to know that Ginny, and everyone, needs salt, the "salt of faith"; they also need the grace of baptism and the day-to-day grace that sustains us in our journey. Whenever the rocks start multiplying because of the water, that's a sign of the multiplication of sin (specifically, sexual sins, like Sodom pictured above) and the growing of those sins details for us how easy it is for one sin to spread and the destruction it causes, not only to the sinner's soul, but all those with whom the sinner comes into contact and influences by their sin.
It's lifeless, and when we realize, we each individually realize for our self how sin destroys life within us, that is the moment of our real and genuine conversion.
The Monolith Monsters is an incredible example of utilizing the language of the Bible to instruct about its lessons using the methods of the day; it was a better film in the 1950s, much more appreciated, but when we understand its effectiveness and the truth it communicates, it opens up another means of instruction for us. Like Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments the year before, The Monolith Monsters shows us how we can either have hearts of stone that God can write His commandments upon, so that we may live, or we can be the stone statues like Lot's nameless wife and condemn others to share our fate.
Jack Arnold’s 1957 Sci-Fi thriller The Incredible Shrinking Man (which has been preserved in the National Film Registry) is important because it provides us insight into what was really happening in the 1950s Sci-Fi genre of film and literature: whereas film makers such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas hold that the films were about Communism, the political “other” of America in the 1950s, TISM smashes that concept and provides a different thesis that the Sci-Fi films were about Americans, not Communists, and the monsters and aliens dominating the genre in the 1950s, those who had grown so enormous, merely illustrates how, because of the guilt of launching two nuclear attacks against Japan, we had become small and lost our humanity, we had become alien to ourselves, and the Sci-Fi genre was a mass catharsis of our guilt more deadly to our psyches than radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (this posting builds upon The Second Original Sin: Art In the Atomic Age, The Decade Of Turmoil: Film In the1950s and Love In the Sonic Age: Attack Of the 50-Foot Woman).
The obvious rebuttal is, but Lucas and Spielberg were alive in the 1950s and you weren't, so wouldn't they have a better clue about what their movies meant to their generation? And that would be an excellent rebuttal, however, there are two important points to undermine that position: first, we can never really see something pertaining to ourselves accurately because we are a part of it, in this case the films, and the films are a part of us; secondly, the understanding about the aliens and monsters being about the Communists isn't supported by any other genre of film. For example, Westerns were the dominating television show during the 1950s, but there isn't an accurate or feasible way of introducing interpretations of Communists into the Westerns; there is the same case with film noir and even the major dramas throughout the 1950s. (I will be making other posts to demonstrate how the thesis I am proposing is supported by other genres, but I am starting with the Sci-Fi genre first). If the "Communist thesis" was viable to interpret the Sci-Fi genre, we would see traces of it being explored in other genres as well.
The central conflict for Scott Carey (Grant Williams) is with the giant spider. The death struggle with the spider is repeated with different symbols throughout the film; if we can understand this scene, we can understand the film. (Jack Arnold is a prominent director in the Sci-Fi genre of the '50s, and two years before TISM, he did Tarantula using the same spider for TISM as in Tarantula. The giant spider symbol could easily be a reference to J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings, the third best-selling novel of all time. Within the third book, The Two Towers, Frodo Baggins is poisoned by a large spider named Shelob who may be the inspiration for both Tarantula and TISM.The Lord of the Rings was being widely published between 1954-5, so it's conceivable the writers and film makers had come across it).
I am quoting extensively from Scott's monologue after the basement floor has flooded and he's all washed up, realizing that he's probably not going to be found or rescued. By taking it out of context, (which I usually don't like to do) the phrases and depth of desperation in Scott's thought processes come through; as you read, please, if you will, imagine that the "spider" is really his wife, Lou (and I will discuss her at length below).
This exact scene doesn't happen in the film, so that's why it's interesting that it has become so famous. But even though this scene doesn't actually take place, all the elements of this shot are present at the same time in the film and aides us, the viewers, in understanding what is trying to be done: the feminine spider (like Scott's wife Lou who sews a dress, the spider weaves, linking it to the world and space of the feminine) is up against Scott who is now significantly smaller than the spider and has only the needle, also a feminine symbol, which has been appropriated as a male/phallic symbol.
(The video for this scene is immediately below, but this is the lead up monologue): I still had my weapons. With these bits of metal I was a man again. If I was to die, it would not be as a helpless insect in the jaws of the spider monster. A strange calm possessed me. I thought more clearly than I had ever thought before, as if my mind were bathed in a brilliant light. I recognized that part of my illness was rooted in hunger, and I remembered the food on the shelf. The cake threaded with the spider web. I no longer felt hatred for the spider. Like myself, it struggled blindly for the means to live. If I was to fight it, if I was to win the food, then it must be now, while strength remained, while I was still of sufficient size to scale the wall. It was not decision that drove me to the crate, but reflex, as instinctive as the spider’s. My legs trembled, not with fear, but with weakness, and yet somehow I found a giant strength, urging me to the death-struggle. My enemy seemed immortal. More than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world, every fear fused into one hideous, night-black horror. Still, whatever else had happened, my brain was a man’s brain, my intelligence still a man’s intelligence. . . . One of us had to die.
"Impaling the spider with my hook," is a definite sexual reference, and the fluids oozing from the spider's body and getting all over Scott after he has pierced the spider with his sword is symbolic of the "exchange" which takes place in the sexual act and has perhaps never been better explored than in this sequence. "One of us has to die," one of us has to be dominant and the other has to accept submission and let their "will to rule" and their "will to dominate," die. Note the clothes Scott wears in this sequence; like Nancy after she has grown 50 feet in Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, Scott's costume seems to hearken back to the caveman era, and examines the "primitive arrangement" between men and women which gave rise to society. The scissors do a good job of illustrating that "exchange."
Normally, the scissors would be a female instrument, to aid in the making of clothes for example, but scissors would not be possible without the metal used to make them and the metal is a masculine object. That's why Scott re-appropriates the needle as his sword and a bent straight pin as a hook, to reclaim them as masculine objects. (It probably would have been easier for Scott to get a wooden splinter to use as a spear to throw at the spider or adapt as a bow for arrows to shoot it with, that way, his risk would be minimized, but minimizing risk isn't the purpose of this conquest scene). The pins and the metallic scissors is Scott reminding Lou what he has given to their marriage, the exchange which has taken place from the beginning of time, and her end of the deal, what she has to give in exchange for what she is getting.
The scissors being used to drag down the spider doesn't work, and that's probably because it's the idea of "severing the umbilical cord," (the hook is the sexual act, the thread is the cord and the scissors the means of cutting the cord) the appeal to the female spider (Lou, Scott's wife) that she should be loving to Scott because a woman like her gave birth to Scott, and women want to (generally) have children; Scott and Lou do not have children although they have been married 6 years so killing Lou's will to dominate because he gave her children (think of Mrs. Doubtfire here) isn't applicable. Here's where the clever idea of "exchange" is introduced (and yes, this has Marxist reekings, but it's just too interesting to pass up).
Scott is in front of the cake, the spider on the web, crawling down, and then there is a basket there in the upper-right corner of the shot. The basket, again, re-enforces the space of the feminine not only because it is "weaved" as the spider weaves the web we see, but because women generally use baskets to carry things in (think of Little Red Riding Hood) because a woman carries a child until term, likening her womb to a basket. There is another element of the feminine here: the cake, specifically, the angel food cake. It's not only feminine because it's a cake that was probably baked by Lou and that we saw her eating earlier in the film while she was sewing, but because it is nutrition.
It's not a mere technique of thrills and chills that the food, the cake, can only be gotten by the death of the spider: the cake is nourishment. Specifically, the cake is an angel food cake, and anyone who has made angel food knows that it takes about a dozen eggs to make (so it's nearly all protein); the eggs make it a specifically feminine food because eggs are associated with life which is associated with women. But because it is protein, it will sustain man and the protein his muscles need so he can do his part in the partnership between a man and a woman. But a man needs more than just physical nourishment, he requires food for his emotions and soul, and that is up to a woman to provide as well by means of her love and her willingness to care for him. So, the image above, of the spider guarding over the angel food cake, illustrates for us the dichotomy of woman: the spider symbolizes her will to dominate her husband while the cake symbolizes her ability to care for him; in order to get the "angel" out of his wife to care for him, he has to have a means of destroying the spider within her (really the most famous spider of all is the latrodectus hesperus or black widow who kills her mate; for more on the divided nature of woman, please see The Medusa Within: Clash Of the Titans).
Publicity still for The Incredible Shrinking Man, reading: "Louise Carey takes her husband in hand." The next year, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman would make this a reality when Nancy picks up erring husband Harry and squeezes him. The hands, of course, symbolize strength, so women in the 1950s were beginning to use their strength to dominate their husbands in ways that had not previously been done, specifically, the "liberation" of women from the home during World War II when women went to work in factories and got used to making decisions that, previously, their husbands were making; but this is the catch, even for women (such as Louise Carey above) that might not have worked during the war, other women that were influencing her had. Just because it didn't effect every household, some women seeing single mothers, widowed by the war, were dis-illusioned by the seeming independence and freedom of those women and grew to resent the sacrifices inherent in a marriage. If women saw women being able to provide for themselves that which men had always provided as a part of the marriage contract, then women were increasingly willingly to forgo marriage in exchange for independence and freedom.
How can I support all this?
Fans of the film will say, and rightly so, that Lou never exhibits that kind of behavior towards, Scott, that it's the exact opposite, she is loving and refuses to leave him. However, all we really need to do is watch the opening dialogue between the two of them and we see a far darker woman, a modern woman and not a wife. (Below is the first part of the film, please, if you haven't seen it before, just take a moment to watch the first part).
The film begins with a shoreline and waves lapping upon it; there is a shot of the water and the sky, then a “drop shot” to a boat in the ocean (Jack Arnold would go onto direct Gilligan's Island, so linking the Minnow from Gilligan's Island to the boat in TISM is absolutely feasible). The two shots remind us of “the natural world” and the natural world order of humans being above the animals. Next, we see the boat in the middle of the ocean—the shoreline has disappeared—and we hear our narrator’s voice: “The strange, almost unbelievable story of Robert Scott Carey began on a very ordinary summer day. I know this story better than anyone, because I am Robert Scott Carey.”
The title card showing the radiation cloud/mist which Scott encounters and leaves that strange glitter all over his chest. Just as the cloud is in the title cards, so it is throughout the entire film. In fact, we could say that the cushion which Lou takes from between the two of them on the boat deck to put behind her back, that "thing" which comes between them, is the cloud, and the cloud of unknowing is directly what causes him to shrink.
I could write an entire post about these two lines, so detailed and intricate is the ramifications and the consequence of this being said in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and in the 1950’s. Several great films of this era were situated in the Pacific/Asia: From Here To Eternity, Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (the surrealist artist Luis Bunuel), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Mister Roberts, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, Around the World in 80 Days, The King and I, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Sayonara, Heaven Knows Mr. Allison, South Pacific, On the Beach and Operation Petticoat, not to mention all the films that take place on or around the water, such as The Old Man and the Sea, Suddenly, Last Summer, An Affair to Remember and Big Country (Gregory Peck's character is always likening Texas' vastness to the vastness of the ocean with which he is familiar) so, The Incredible Shrinking Man is situating itself, just within these two opening shots, in a very definite sphere, the natural order and the “new order” created by the way World War II ended.
Whereas Scott references the marriage between them, Lou calls Scott, "my friend," and seems to dissolve the marriage bond, especially when she says, "I'm on vacation, too," and this is the part that starts making Scott into a pest, instead of the man she married and supposedly loves.
Let us first of all consider his name: Robert Scott Carey. His last name, “Carey,” is feminine, “Carrie,” and invokes the film made just a few years earlier in 1952, Carrie, based on Theodor Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie, about a woman who lives with numerous men and brings each of them to ruin as she advances in society to become an actress (her designation “sister” is not religious, rather, reminds the reader of her role as a sibling to another woman, or, in broader terms, a social sister to all women, something like the relationship of Eve and Lillith).
Carrie of 1952 starring Eddie Albert, Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones was nominated for Best Costumes (Edith Head) and Best Art Direction; additionally, Sir Laurence Olivier received a BAFTA nomination for his performance, so it was a well-known film during the early 1950's. Carrie well-illustrates the new kind of woman discussed above, and both Albert's and Olivier's character demonstrate (in varying degrees) Harry from Attack of the 50-Foot Woman.
This is important because, throughout the 1950s, we see the masculinization of women (Them! for example, has the audience see the leading actress, Pat, stuck getting out of an airplane the first time we see her; her top half is in the plane and her feet on the ground, so she’s stuck between the natural world and the man-made world and throughout the film, she struggles between them) and the feminization of men. Robert’s last name “Carey” creates the same situation for him as was being depicted for many women in the science fiction films of this decade. Similarly, Robert’s wife Louise goes by “Lou” throughout the film, bringing out the masculine in her nature. This is further developed when a woman also 36 inches tall from a carnival comes to talk to Scott at a coffee shop and she tells him that her name is Clarice Bruce.
Clarice Bruce and Scott Carey having coffee. Her femininity is deceiving because while she seems like the "angel food cake" of the female world, it was, for example, Clarice who made the first move to come and sit with Scott; even though Clarice tells Scott that he is taller than her, at the park (a symbol of the Garden of Eden) Scott realizes he's shrinking again when he's standing in front of her, showing Scott that even with a small woman he's small.
The second important point about these opening lines is that he wants to establish his authority as the author of the story and the one who knows most about what has happened. It’s an “almost” unbelievable story, and yet there is the element that allows us to believe it, and by the end we will believe it, every scene of it. It is his(story) not her story, and as Scott (like most men in the 1950s) increasingly looses his identity, his-story is what he will retain and his own ability to meditate upon his being, his thoughts and reflections are his, not given to him by his wife with whom he has to bargain for a drink.
Seeing the cloud, about which, he can do nothing. We can also take the cloud to be that which is "hiding his wife" from him; there's this woman beside him, but where did the woman who loved him go to? Between every man and woman there is a cloud of not knowing, a cloud of uncertainty (this is also a famous spiritual phrase which I am not invoking in this context).
As we focus in on the boat and see Scott and Lou, she makes a small but significant gesture: she takes a pillow/cushion that is between them and puts it behind her back. They are reclining against the boat’s windshield. A boat is a vehicle and, as vehicles typically symbolize the Holy Spirit (who guides us and takes us where we need to go in life to fulfill our destiny) a boat is particularly linked to the Holy Spirit because a boat travels on water (the sacrament of Baptism and symbol of Grace) but boats figure largely in the story of Jesus: sleeping on the boat during the storm, Peter and his brother were on a boat when Jesus called them, “Follow me and I will make you a fisher of men,” the disciples were on a boat when they saw Jesus walking on the water, then they were on a boat again when they saw Jesus on the shore (after the Resurrection) and Peter walked on the water to get to Jesus.
When Scott goes to the doctor's the first time to have himself checked out, the doctor asks how often he has had physicals and Scott responds for the draft board and life insurance purposes; these would (psychologically and emotionally) establish a man's height for him because being able to serve his country in war and provide for his family at his death are both ways that men prove their worth to themselves and others so both those examples was a time when Scott felt that he did "measure up" to expectations of him.
So, within the first few seconds of the film, we have the water and the cultural references to the Battle of the Pacific during World War II (a fact further emphasized by Robert mentioning sailing to the Philippines, where a large part of the War in the Pacific took place), the boat and the windshield (glass always symbolizes reflection) and the cushion that has been between them has now been put behind Lou is “supporting her” in what she does next; the meaning of the conversation about to take place is being “blocked” by both Scott and Louise, so the conversation which takes place, the vehicle of the rest of the story, is not going to be meditated upon by either of them, they are turning their backs to it and blocking it out.
Will you please pass the salt? It's right there, get it yourself. The importance of salt, specifically, will be discussed in my next post on Salt of the Earth: The Monolith Monsters, but right now, we can easily link Mr. Smith (Brad Pitt) wanting his wife to get him the salt to Scott Carey wanting his wife to get him a beer; both men face the same giant obstacles: their wives' indifference to their needs. Some conflicts just never get resolved.
What is the conversation?
It’s funny how things don’t change very much. It’s very similar to Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, when John asks Jane to pass the salt and she never does. In The Incredible Shrinking Man, we know they are on vacation and Scott says, “I’m thirsty,” which references Christ’s thirst upon the cross, but what’s really important is that Scott then says, “Louise, I think we should get married.” Granted, every time someone mentions being thirsty in art/film/literature doesn’t reference Christ on the cross, however, Christ’s “work on the cross” is juxtaposed against them being on “vacation” and Scott asking Louise to marry him (the Crucifixion was Christ wedding Himself to the Church) all combines to make a stronger reference feasible. When Louise responds that they have been married 6 years, we know from St. Augustine that 6 is the number of imperfection (the earth was created in 6 days, but not perfectly the fullness of salvation history had not been realized) so it’s not the 7 year itch being referenced, for example, but that something—like the cushion—has come between them to make their marriage imperfect (the number 6 is significant because Scott doesn’t start shrinking until 6 months have passed and Scott is over 6 feet tall regularly).
Lou isn't very supportive. She tries to sacrifice and be strong for Scott when he's getting the really bad news, but if she had been more attuned to his needs at the beginning of the film, Scott wouldn't have started shrinking to begin with. But there is another uncanny similarity between TISM and Mr. & Mrs. Smith: women's bad cooking. In TISM, Scott references the "cooking around her," in relation to him loosing weight, and John Smith tells Jane what a lousy cook she is and she replies that she never cooked a meal in her life.
At this point, Scott realizes he has to bargain with his wife, so he makes a deal with her that if she will get him a beer, he’ll get dinner. As in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, it’s not labor, rather a labor of love that is requested. When I am at my mother’s, for instance, we can’t keep her in her chair, she’s waiting on us hand and foot, because she loves us and wants us to be comfortable and have all our needs; Lou is not concerned with her husband’s needs, she is concerned with her own comfort. It’s not that it’s the “woman’s place” to get the menfolks’ beer (Scott will call her a wench in a few seconds, specifically to emphasize that his desire for a beer is not just putting Lou "in her place," but because he wants to know that she cares for him) but because women are created from spirit, it's women’s unique characteristic and inherent sensibility to love and anticipate love’s needs. When one is quick to anticipate the needs of their loved ones, the beloved knows they are loved and that's what Scott wants to know, that Louise loves him.
This scene is later in the film, but after Scott finds out that he is definitely shrinking, Scott and Lou go out to the car and Lou asks if he wants her to drive; no, he says. That should be taken symbolically, because Scott still hopes that he can remain "in the driver's seat" of their relationship (as Honey Parker referenced in Attack Of the 50-Foot Woman). Scott also tells Lou that she doesn't have to stay married to him and Lou denies that. While she intends to stay, she's not really telling Scott the things he needs to hear, "to make him feel big again" to make him feel like a man.
Later on, it's by Scott’s business suit not fitting him that he realizes he's shrinking, and this means he doesn’t “measure up” to his job, whether that is at work or at home (his job of being a husband; it could also be that, because the boat they borrowed was Scott's brother's boat, Lou feels like he isn't successful, or at least not as successful as his brother who owns the business that Scott only works at). Lou suggesting that he is just loosing weight isn’t the compliment for a man that it would be for a woman, so Scott retaliates with a complaint about her cooking. He then asks her to pick up a “bathroom scale,” and a “scale” is significant because it’s a unit of measurement and he wants to know objectively how he measures up.
When Scott runs out into the night and encounters a carnival on the midway, it references two important events. The first is the Battle of Midway, in the Pacific and the second important point is the great film by Tod Browning Freaks (1932).The Battle of Midway was a major US Navy victory in World War II, which takes us back to the beginning of the film with Scott's reference to the Philippines and Scott referencing his Navy draft registration with the doctor. While the Battle of Midway should be a victorious reference, it's more about suffering in this context and the the kind of battle that Scott is waging inside himself at this time. The reference to Freaks lets us know how Scott is being poisoned (as Hans is poisoned in Freaks) and feels himself being mocked and stared at everywhere he goes, that there is no place for him just as there is no place for those who are Freaks in society.
The "big woman" (Cleopatra) and the little man (Hans) from Tod Browning's great drama Freaks of 1932. Jack Arnold would have known this film (everyone in the film world has seen it) and when Scott wanders into the "freak show" this is specifically what Arnold wants his viewers to think of and the ruin brought on so many people by the conflict in size between the leading characters in Freaks. Hans' little girl friend Freida (also a dwarf) tells Hans that even though he's in love with Cleopatra, to her, Hans is a plaything, but to Freida, he is a man. This is a great and necessary way of understanding the relationship of Scott Carey and Clarice Bruce.
Scott’s “relationship” with Clarice is what Feminists would call a perfect example of masculine relativity, that is, men only feel like men when there is a woman beneath them. In order for men to feel masculine, they have to be subjugating women. This isn't the point TISM is making: Clarice can still see Scott as a man, whereas Lou sees Scott as a pest and nuisance. This is the point that not only TISM is trying to make, but most of the dramas and and film noirs of the 1950s are trying to make as well: after World War II, men needed women to love them and help with the healing of the emotional and psychological wounds they sustained after the war, but instead, they realized that they came home and had a new war to fight with the women they loved because the women no longer loved them.
Publicity still for The Incredible Shrinking Man.
That lack of love is what causes Scott to shrink, just as a woman's love builds a man up and makes him feel big because he feels important. We know this is accurate because, after Scott has killed the spider (the ultimate symbol of "threatening female sexuality" in the film) he continues to shrink. If conquest was all Scott needed, then by the film's own standards he would no longer be shrinking, it would be stopped.
When we next see Scott, he’s in a doll’s house. The relationship of “dolls” to the 1950s shouldn’t be underestimated, for example, it’s identification with a doll that they hope to find a lost sister in The Searchers of just two years before and Marlon Brando starred in Guys and Dolls in 1955. In Hitchcock’s 1950 thriller Stage Fright, it’s with a blood-stained doll that a murderer is psychologically cornered. And, predictably, the little girl in Them! carries a doll with her when the policemen find her and wild Helen even has a doll in The Helen Keller Story (the next year, the deputy will call Honey Parker a "real doll" in Attack of the 50-Foot Woman).
What’s the point?
The move into the doll's house is really the last straw because a house, a home, shelter, is what a man most wants to provide for his wife and family, and now that Louise has to provide him with a doll's house is the sign that Scott knows his lack of a job and ability to earn an income has made him a woman, no longer a man because, in spite of his biological sex, by society's standards of what makes "a man a man," Scott "doesn't measure up."
We have a tendency to project human feelings onto dolls, to pretend that they are human, but they are not; for Scott, living in a doll’s house, he is the recipient of human emotions but he is no longer human (rather, thinks of himself as being human) that’s why he starts acting so tyrannical, to be a tyrant is to lose one’s humanity because you lose your grip on reality (Nero was a great tyrant who watched Rome burn because he lost the sense to realize how catastrophic it was). Scott reflects to himself that, as he becomes smaller, he becomes “more monstrous in my domination of Louise” but it's not because he's growing smaller, but because Louise is being more dominating in making decisions (such as getting an unlisted number, she never consulted Scott about it) and so there is a subtle, but very real power struggle going on between them.
The next scene tells us why.
A house can be a symbol for a soul, so that Scott is now living in a doll's house shows that his soul has become feminine and toy-like.
The famous "cat face in the door of the doll's house" lets us know that Scott believes Louise is having an affair. “Heaven only knows how she managed to get through those weeks,” but he knows, too. A cat is always associated with female sexuality and a window means self-reflection or, because the eyes are the windows of the soul and windows are the eyes of a house, a window can refer to something that is seen and intuited. As Louise prepares to leave, she leaves the door open and that’s when the cat comes in, but that gesture symbolizes that “she’s open” to a liaison (as in When Harry Met Sally and Harry spits the grape “seed” on the closed window, meaning, that Sally is “closed” to receiving his seed, please see Fate vs Chance: When Harry Met Sally).
Scott lying on the couch suddenly “scratches” the surface of the truth as Butch the cat "scratches the door" of the doll house: Louise is cheating on him. (Cats are always associated with female sexuality, so for the cat to be named “Butch” means that female sexuality is going to “butcher” Scott, just as, in Pulp Fiction, Bruce Willis’ character Butch “butchers” a man in the boxing ring; the name "Butch" for the cat also, like Scott “Carey,” “Lou,” and Clarice Bruce, mixes the gender identity). Scott opening the door to see the giant cat symbolizes two things: the overwhelming truth that Louise is cheating on him and the loss of domination of the natural order. As the opening shot of the film suggests, there is a natural order, the ocean meeting the shoreline, and man was made to dominate that world, but now, as often been commented upon, he can’t even dominate the household cat, that is, his own wife.
When Scott is backing up and the cat reaches into the house and scratches his back, that’s indicative of how Louise has “stabbed him in the back” but, do you think Scott told Louise about meeting Clarice? When we are depressed, we tend to think wild things and this is what is happening to Scott, Louise is not having an affair, but Scott feels so helpless, he can't even say the words to himself, he can only think of them in abstract images. Scott, being hard on himself for acting "monstrous" to Lou, then imagines a way that Lou would be "monstrous " to him (to absolve himself of being tyrannical to her) and that's where the monstrous cat, literally comes in.
Before the cat comes in through Scott’s doll house door, he thinks, “Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow the doctors will save me,” and this would be a good time to discuss his doctors. Anyone who has read my post on The Bright Autumn Moon: The Wolf Man knows what I am going to say about Scott's primary doctor, Dr. Silver: the word “silver" sounds like the Hebrew word for “word” so silver is the Word in Christianity, hence, the Physician Scott is in need of, just like the Wolf Man, is the Word of God. As Scott lies upon the couch in the doll house scene, we must think of another doctor, Sigmund Freud, who used a couch in psychoanalysis; so, Scott lying upon the couch in this scene means that we are to assume the guise of Freud and understand the cat chasing and striking Scott as Freud would understand it, sexually.
Now that the cat is trying to get in through the back of the house, we can see how it’s “taking over” his thoughts, the way an idea seizes upon us and then we are overwhelmed by it. Scott running out through the front door indicates that he has “made a run for it” in their marriage and that, even as he needs Lou most now, he has also disconnected himself from her emotionally because he’s “made a break for it.” When the cat faces him and Scott decides to pull down the lamp on the cat, the cat scratches Scott, ripping his shirt apart. This bearing of Scott’s chest takes us back to the beginning of the film when Scott’s chest was also bear then, correlating to the cloud of radiation which caused this whole mess: not knowing whether or not he can trust Lou has again come between them and caused him to grow so small, that everyone will now assume he's dead. Now we can piece together why it was the “insecticide” that triggered the diminution of Scott Carey: insecticides kill “pests,” and Scott is realizing, as he runs the grocery errand for Louise, that he is a pest, and this makes Scott start to “feel small” so he becomes small.
Before Scott makes it to the lamp, he’s running, and the cat’s paw reaches around from behind him and scratches him in the face; this symbolizes how Scott has “lost face” as a result of Lou’s affair, just one more thing to make Scott feel small. Pulling the lamp down on the cat means a confrontation with Lou that he’s “illuminated” about what’s going on. When Scott makes a run to the top of the basement, the basement symbolizes our most primal instincts, our most base and animalistic self (he’s looking down at the staircase, indicating a “digression”); his fight with the cat is actually symbolic of a conversion, because when Lou returns home just as she said she would, carrying a package, Scott realizes he was wrong about the affair, and trying to keep the cat out is trying to keep the thought of Lou’s infidelity out of his mind (please feel free to insert your own experience here, if you have had doubts about a friend’s loyalty or your spouse’s, if you have had doubts about someone that were founded but proved false, trying to “close out” those aggressive thoughts is extremely difficult). Scott being pushed into the dirty crate indicates for us both the fall he has taken (because he believed Lou had “fallen” sexually by cheating on him, he now takes the fall he accused her of) and he’s in with the dirty rags indicates Scott’s willingness to demote Lou to a “dirty woman” so he has to take on the filth he threw onto her in his accusation of her adultery.
The floor of the cellar indicates that he's "fallen" as low as he can.
As Scott surveys the cellar floor, he says, “ No desert-island castaway ever faced so bleak a prospect.” comparing it to Robinson Crusoe which had been made just three years before (lead actor Dan O'Herlihy was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor, so it was a well-known film and available through Netflix). As Scott begins looking for food, he says, "I was driven by hunger and also the horrible thought that without nourishment the shrinking process was quickening.” The nourishment a man needs, of course, is the love of his wife, and without that nourishment, he feels small and insignificant, he shrinks to nothing. This is the part of the story that is almost unbelievable, the vulnerability of a man and his need for his wife’s love. Of course men take it for granted, but this graphic story also relays to us the striking necessity of what happens when he’s denied that love.
When Scott begins his trial of survival in the cellar, we should take it as the drastic turning back of the clock on mankind, the 50,000 years B.C., when man was a tiny creature in the world of giant creatures bent on his destruction. The encounter with the mousetrap illustrates this for us. When we see a scene in any film where it’s like, “Come on, you have to be kidding me, spring the trap first, then go for the cheese, even the mice in my house know to do that! Don’t throw your hook away, use it to span the distance of the box, that stick isn’t going to hold!” we should not be concerned with inserting common sense, rather, quizzing ourselves as to why the scene has been written as it has, and then we realize it's because Scott, and all men, are starting all over from the beginning (the leap he has to take over the box, for instance, is the leap of faith).
For those who have read my post The Exorcist: Absent Fathers, you may--like me--be thinking about St. Joseph and the mousetrap, its relationship to this scene here and, if you scroll down the page at A Better Mousetrap, if provides some wonderful theological discussion on the spiritual nature of a mousetrap, specifically how it relates to St. Joseph. That Scott is using a nail to try and spring the trap may relate to the nails of the carpenter, Christ and His Crucifixion. We can't be sure, however, it is important that, for the first time in the film (at the end) Scott specifically mentions God and the mystical workings of the universe, so Scott's being and his relationship to God are on his mind, so it's obviously on the film makers' minds as well. Why is the cheese lost? The cheese is food for a pest, a mouse, not a man, who needs the love and care of his wife, symbolized by the cake as spiritual nourishment.
The flooding of the cellar by the hot water heater is quite interesting because, again, the heater was a masculine object, a sign of man's inventiveness and his ability to overcome the elements to make himself comfortable and assure his survival. Now, it's an instrument of his destruction (it destroyed his shelter, the match box). But what is it that Scott uses to float himself? A pencil. It not only references the writing of the book that Scott was working on earlier in the film when he was big enough to hold a pencil, but the presence of the pencil as a life-saving device makes us question its relationship to the flood and we could deduce that this is supposed to invoke Noah's Flood (the flood) and its recording in the Bible (the pencil as an instrument of a scribe); another likely reference is to the story (the pencil) of Robinson Crusoe (who was shipwrecked but whose story is recorded in writing).
Scott hanging onto a pencil amidst the water flooded from the water heater. The foot you see is Scott's brother's who is helping Louise get packed to leave the house. Scott floating on the pencil reminds us of watching him write earlier in the film a "book" and how, we can suppose, he wasn't able to finish because he got so small he couldn't hold the pencil any longer. Another way of looking at it, however, is that he was still too big to write what really needed to be written, what the world really needed to hear, and it isn't until he becomes "the smallest of the small" that he understands enough to tell the world what it needs to hear.
At the end of the film, when Scott has shrunk as far as we will see him go, he mentions "God's silver tapestry," and that phrase, "silver tapestry," doesn't make sense unless we understand the reference to "silver" and Scott's doctor, Dr. Silver, discussed above.
Looking out the screen at a bird to whom Scott offers a morsel of the cake before the big battle with the spider. Why doesn't the bird take the cake? Because that's not the food the bird wants. Birds symbolize the Holy Spirit, and we can be assured that this is an accurate deduction because the other side of the screen, in the grass, is where Scott will mention, for the first time in the film, his relationship to God. So the bird there is God's presence, waiting for him to "be small enough," in spiritual terms, to come over to His Side because God doesn't want to take food from Scott, God wants to give Scott the Food that eternally satisfies.
When Scott crawls through the screening to step onto the grass, he has "passed through" the screen just as, in the beginning, he passed through the cloud of radiation (and he is talking about the radiation bursts in this scene), but he has also passed through the screening as he has passed through that "great unknown" that was coming in-between Lou and Scott when they were on the boat (a screen as a partition that separates or hides something). In this sense, we can say that Scott Carey is a hero because he has experienced that conversion necessary for a hero to complete their journey.
The flooding of the basement floor and Scott hangs by a nail at the foot of the stairs (lower left corner) desperately calling out to Louise whose feet we see on the bottom step, but she doesn't hear Scott. This is a great set-up because Scott is "beneath Louise" at this point in their relationship. What Scott really needs is to be flooded with the "warmth of her love" not flooded by the hot water heater.
When Scott realizes "there is no zero with God," he's realizing that, in terms of worldliness he is zero, but he has finally arrived at that blessed state of "emptiness" that, in spiritual terms, means fullness: he is empty of himself but full of God. This provides us with the important role that spirituality plays in a man's self-identity and relationship to God. When man knows God, man knows himself, and when he knows himself, he will be the man he needs to be to his wife, children and society; when a man has failed to know God, he has failed in all his roles and relationships. Until a man acknowledges that God is bigger than himself, he is a small man, indeed.
