It Came From the 1950s!: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties

Abstract

[...]while the book confirms that the 1950s was "the first authentically American decade," it holds that the different and yet sometimes strangely similar experiences of Britons form an equally valid story. [...]this book considers every variety of cultural phenomena - fiction, poetry, cinema and television - in order to reveal the multitude of ways in which the anxieties of the 50s manifested.

Darryl Jones, Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice M. Murphy (eds.), It Came From the 1950s!: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties

(Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan)

When we think of the 1950s, our imaginations fill with a curious collection of contradictory images. At first we have a vision of a time of peace and stability, an idyllic era following on from the most destructive war in human history. We also, at least in the case of America, have an image of plenty, a superabundance of jobs, money, homes and food, of flashy saloon cars, domestic gadgets and countless more luxury items created to satiate a crazed new desire to consume. The 1950s also strikes one as an age of overweening confidence, when the interests of politicians and the people were apparently one and the same, and grand projects like the construction of highways in the USA and the development of the National Health System in the UK could be accomplished. Indeed, the vision which instantly ricochets through the mind when one thinks of the 50s is still that of the neatly dressed, wide-eyed and perpetually smiling nuclear family, the carefree inheritors of a shiny brave new world.

Ueaking through this pretty picture is an image of the other 1950s, the real 1950s. This was a time of relentless fear and uncertainty, of rampant paranoia and conservatism generated by a new breed of conflict, the Cold War. Barely concealed by a mask of material wealth and wholesome values was a realm of psychological trauma, of doubt, of deep existential despair and mass-tranquilisation. The happy nuclear family was a unit constantly in danger of being split apart by the frustration of parents and the alienation of the young. This was a world in which everything lay in the shadow of the Atomic Bomb's mushroom cloud and the human race awoke each morning not knowing if this would be the day which saw the world reduced to ashes.

It is therefore highly appropriate that the introduction to this brilliant and screwball collection of essays should, borrowing a title which Ueonard Bernstein borrowed from W.H. Auden, classify the 50s as an Age of Anxiety. A multifarious study of 50s' culture has long been needed because, like the Victorian era, it was a fascinatingly schizoid age in which one world and its mirror image seemed to co-exist, and in which a surface of progress and revolutionisation hid from view a violent, regressive reality. This volume presents the 1950s in all their confusing glory, and three smart editorial decisions have contributed to making it such a complete survey of its subject. Firstly, while the book confirms that the 1950s was "the first authentically American decade," it holds that the different and yet sometimes strangely similar experiences of Britons form an equally valid story. For this reason the book's cultural analyses are neatly divided between those devoted to American subjects and British ones.

Secondly, this book considers every variety of cultural phenomena - fiction, poetry, cinema and television - in order to reveal the multitude of ways in which the anxieties of the 50s manifested. After all, this age of anxiety was one whose fears "operated across traditional aesthetic hierarchies and genre boundaries" and reached "an enormous audience made up of highly disparate interpretive communities." Thirdly, this volume regards the 1950s not as a tightly defined time period but rather as a nebulous phase of massive cultural upheaval and diversification. The first signs of this change appeared before the 1950s even began and its effects persisted well into the next decade. Therefore, to assess the significance of this shift, It Came from the 1950s! looks at the extended cultural epoch known as the "long 1950s."

The eleven essays in this collection cover a startlingly wide selection of topics. From bomb shelters to bullet bras, from domesticity to demons, from Frankenstein to food advertising, from masculinity to mutants, not a single important feature of 50s' cultural landscape has escaped these authors. A fine job has been done to balance the different subjects, so that every cultural form gets its share of attention. It's also astonishing how each one provides a distinct perspective on the 50s, so that as a totality the book offers a remarkably detailed and vivid portrait of the era. Moreover, the roll-call of contributors is incredibly impressive. Distinguished scholars and noted experts like David J. Skal, Christopher Frayling and Kim Newman are just some of the names on a list bursting with luminaries.

While the 1950s was a decade characterised by many different tensions, a strong argument can be made that these were all symptoms of the same disease, as all were related to the disaster of World War II. Just as the First World War had followed survivors home from the trenches, so the horrors of World War II drastically overshadowed the societies that emerged after it. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had demonstrated that an almighty new weapon existed which could at any moment exterminate all life on Earth. Living with the daily awareness that, if war broke out again, mankind would be annihilated in a heartbeat is something contemporary readers cannot begin to comprehend, and it's no surprise that an obsession with the Bomb, and a newfound distrust of science, crept into 1950s culture in many ways.

This makes David J. Skal's essay "A-Bombs, B-Pictures, and C-Cups" an excellent starting point. Skal writes that the A-Bomb's detonation was the nail in the coffin for hopes of a scientific utopia and "gave startling new life to ancient ideas" about man's interference with nature. Myths and legends from Prometheus and Pandora's Box to Faust, Frankenstein and the Fall of Man were refurbished in a series of films dealing with scientific doomsdays. Whether the threat came from outer space, from underground or beneath the sea, Skal argues that all of these movies betray a preoccupation with guilt and sin. He also notes that in many of them the monster is man. The 1950s saw the rise of the figure of the "Mad Scientist" as uncertainty grew about "the scientific, technological and military juggernaut that was engulfing the world."

Kim Newman's essay, "Mutants and Monsters," continues in this nuclear vein. Newman challenges the view that the seemingly infinite number of monster movies made in the 50's were all variations on the "nature takes revenge" theme, instead arguing that they present a surprisingly complex range of reactions to the rise of nuclear power and atomic testing. Ever the man prepared to venture excitedly into shadowy regions of cinematic obscurity most of us leave alone, Newman compares the merits of films like Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Monster That Challenged the World to prove his case. He also shows how several bleak British and Japanese movies gave a sceptical and even despairing response to America's development into the Atomic superpower.

Mark Jancovich and Derek Johnson's essay focuses on many of the same movies as Skal's and Newman's, such as Them!, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still, and it too offers a new interpretation of these classics. Unlike sci-fi novels and television series, where the author was regarded as the creative imagination responsible for the work, the sci-fi movie was primarily seen as a showcase for the talents of the special effects artist. In Jancovich and Johnson's view, a wizard like Ray Harryhausen was the real "star" of these films not because his creations were convincingly lifelike but rather because of his "capacity to create spectacular and off-beat fantasies."

If the cinema provided the most graphic projections of 50s' neuroses, the printed page remained a powerful witness to the more insidious insecurities of the time. In her fascinating essay, Loma Piatti-Famell examines how Sylvia Plath's writing attests both to "the formation of a contemporary consumer identity in American society" and to Plath's "desire to create a 'perfect' domestic space." By decoding the semiotics of 50s' food advertising and the iconography of the 50s' kitchen as these appear in The Bell Jar, Piatti-Famell gives an powerful reading of Plath's work as preoccupied with the image of the consuming woman trapped within a frightening Gothic space in which she is viewed as an object to be consumed and where her body is something to be feasted upon like meat.

Robert Bloch, a writer whose quirky short-stories are criminally underestimated, is the subject of a fine essay by Kevin Corstorphine. Although they originally appeared in gore-splattered and sensational horror and sci-fi magazines, Corstorphine believes that Bloch's 1950s' tales cunningly subverted the exploitative, misogynist attitudes of these publications. Corstorphine argues that they are studies of the two anxieties which troubled men most deeply in the 1950s, their anguish at their inability to find an identity in the Post-War world and the incestuous nature of their creativity, embodied in their need to cannibalise the work of father-figures as a crude way of compensating for their inability to create ex-nihilo like women. As a writer "self-re flexively aware of his own anxieties and those of his readers," Bloch was, according to Corstorphine, extremely innovative in his use of the "narrative of psychology to construct plot," a skill Bloch would demonstrate best in Psycho.

Another writer particularly attune to the unease of her age was Shirley Jackson, the subject of a superb essay by Dara Downey. Downey focuses on the hitherto overlooked connection between Jackson's fiction and the "Myth and Ritual" school of American anthropology which, by the mid-50s, had become the last word in literary interpretation. Downey argues that even though Jackson's writing makes "explicit use of the archetypes and quasi-mythical plots" that this school of anthropology sought to identify, her deployment of these motifs and ideas stemmed from a desire to "complicate, rather than create a coherent, unified mythology around, the relationships between women, houses and wider social structures of belonging." By looking at two of Jackson's most famous novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Downey's incisive essay illustrates how Jackson's fictions occupy "a realm other than that of absolute reality." Her belief that they must be read rather than explained proves once again that Jackson is a figure whose works are vital to any discussion of modern Gothic literature.

Elizabeth McCarthy's snappily titled "Fast Cars and Bullet Bras" is an equally revealing piece of scholarship. McCarthy hilariously explains how Rock 'n Roll was diagnosed as a "communicable disease" by so-called medical experts whose views were popularised by a media keen to disguise the fact that juvenile delinquency was mainly a consequence of poverty. Unlike her male counterpart, the female juvenile delinquent was handed over not to the police but to psychoanalysts to be cured of her moral sickness. This "lawless female" was a subversive figure whose supposedly voracious sexual appetite meant that she posed a deadly threat to clean-cut American youths of both genders, and McCarthy illustrates how this figure's sexual aggression even saw her transformed, in the fevered imaginations of artists, into a bizarre human-car hybrid and a living weapon!

If there was plenty to be afraid of in 50's America, over in Blighty a new generation of fear-makers were going into production and the three articles on British horror in It Came From the 1950s! are among its highlights. Wayne Kinsey's essay on the early days of Hammer, "Don't Dare See It Alone!," shows how the studio turned the X-certificate into a source of box-office gold, and its history of the battle of wits between movie producers and the British Board of Film Censors (told through a series of juicy extracts from their correspondences) is extremely amusing. If ever there was someone in a position to explain the cultural significance of Hammer's resurrection of Dracula in the form of Christopher Fee, it is Christopher Frayling and his essay is, as one would expect, a tour de force of scholarship, humour and perspicacity. What both of these contributions manage to do is to recapture the shocking impact these original Hammer films had on their 50s' audience, to remind de-sensitised modern readers of what made them so controversial and so successful.

Released in 1957, the same year as Hammer's revolting first foray into the Gothic, The Curse of Frankenstein, Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon could not have been a more different kind of beast. Darryl Jones's expert dissection of this classic explores the subtle interplay of forces and themes that make this a more intriguing and haunting horror film than Hammer could ever have dreamed of. Tracing the film's development from its origins in M.R. James's tale "Casting the Runes" to its troubled post-production, Jones reads Night of the Demon as a clash of civilisations in which Dana Andrews' rationalist psychologist, the smarmy embodiment of American materialist arrogance, is taught that the powers of darkness are all too real by Niall MacGinnis's genteel, trickstering warlock. Jones also elucidates the film's unsettling depiction of Britain as a twilit bastion of ancient beliefs and shadowy Old-World practices, precisely the quality that still makes Night of the Demon such a nightmarish experience, and it's to this volume's credit that it should devote proper space to the horror film increasingly acknowledged as the greatest ever made in the British Isles.

The relentless nostalgicisation of the 1950s and its frequent depiction as a cosy, complacent age is something many contemporary filmmakers have deconstructed, and the era's curious cinematic afterlife is examined by Bernice Murphy in her essay, "Re-Imagining the Fifties." By considering two well-chosen "50s'" movies, Todd Haynes's melodrama Far from Heaven (2002) and Andrew Currie's zombie comedy hielo (2006), Murphy takes a penetrating look at how these films exploit the "slippage" "between the way in which the decade is mediated to us through the television and movies of the decade itself and how it actually was." With Neo-Conservatives constantly trying to convince us that the 50s was the time when life in America came closest to perfection, Murphy rightly observes that we must not forget that their version of the decade, like many movie-world versions, is a fantasy "in which the era's institutionalized racism and sexism, are glossed over, and apparently minor historical details such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the near-fascistic excesses of the McCarthy era go conspicuously unmentioned." The value of these deconstructions, Murphy believes, lies in the fact that they remind us that the 50s was the time "when many of the most troubling - as well as the most admirable - aspects of modern American life were established."

It Came From the 1950s! fills in one go a substantial gap in popular culture studies. Unlike so many academic collections, not one essay in this volume seems lightweight or unoriginal, and there is a pleasing sense of cohesion about the whole enterprise. Furthermore, the writing on display is unusually witty (the best joke of all being the book's subtitle: "Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties") and the volume bounces along so effortlessly that you wish it were twice as long. However, what really makes It Came From the 1950s! a success is the obvious affection the contributors have for their subject and it's rare to see enthusiasm shine from the pages of an academic work as clearly as it does here. A bold start for the considered appreciation of 50's popular culture, It Came From the 1950s! is sure to stimulate plenty more debate and discussion.

EDWARD O'HARE