by CYNDY HENDERSHOT

The Atomic Age immediately perceived itself as a new historical epoch. William L. Laurence, official reporter for the Manhattan Project--the code name for the governmental organizations that developed the atomic bomb--noted that the creation of this bomb "marks the first time in the history of man's struggle...that he is actually present at the birth of a new era on this planet" (164). This self-conscious awareness of the beginning of a new historical age was echoed by the Manhattan Project scientists themselves. For example, in an essay written for the 1946 collection One World or None, J.R. Oppenheimer, physicist and civilian head of the Manhattan Project, called the release of atomic energy "revolutionary" (22). Yet, at the same time that such postwar thinkers appeared to be periodizing the bomb as something unprecedented they simultaneously attempted to take it and its implications out of historical time and place them in mythological and eschatological time. Thus Laurence completed his speculations about "a new era" by adding that we have "full awareness of [the bomb's] titanic potentialities for good or evil" (164; emphasis mine). Similarly, in the course of labeling atomic energy "revolutionary," Oppenheimer described it as "promethean" (22). The bomb and its implications had been historicized only to be ahistoricized as Greek mythology.

This tension between the apparent novelty of nuclear weapons and their apparent connection to continuous, ahistorical forces is one that is equally present in fictional works of this period, including a large number of American science-fiction films from the 1950s which deal either covertly or explicitly with nuclear weapons and their effects. Films such as This Island Earth (1954), It Came From Outer Space (1953), and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) explore nuclear weaponry and warfare by using alien invasion scenarios. Other films, such as The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), The Deadly Mantis (1957), and The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), use a reawakened prehistoric monster as a metaphor for atomic power, while films such as Them! (1954), The Black Scorpion (1957), and Tarantula (1955) show the horror of nuclear weaponry and testing by depicting a non-human force that gains power in the American desert. What is common to all these films, as well as to works like Invasion of the Body Snatche rs (1956), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), and The Forbidden Planet (1956), is the use of familiar mythological forms to represent the new threats present in the Atomic Age.

While this mythologizing tendency has not gone unnoticed by critics of science fiction, what still requires more attention is the way that such ahistoricism constitutes a paranoiac response to the cultural trauma caused by the reality and threat of nuclear destruction, and the way that such paranoia is reflected in both fictional and non-fictional works. Thus in the following essay, I will first briefly articulate a theory of history as the traumatic that needs to be narrativized in order to be expressed, and then go on to show how symptoms of psychic transference/displacement are operative in the mythologizing of nuclear weapons by scientific/political commentators. Turning next to science-fiction films, I will provide an indepth analysis of three representative works of the 1950s: Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, which depicts alien invasion; 20 Million Miles to Earth, which focuses on pre-historic creatures; and The Monolith Monsters, which features radioactive rocks in a desert setting.

Trauma is that which is painfully experienced but which cannot be adequately translated into language or even translated at all. According to psychoanalysts J. Laplanche and G.B. Pontalis, trauma can be defined as "an event in the subject's life defined by its intensity, by the subject's incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization" (465). Trauma, however, can also be experienced at a cultural level, and as Cathy Caruth observes in her introduction to a collection of essays on this topic, trauma "does not simply serve as a record of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned" (151). Thus trauma could be described as a past which is inarticulable as a present reality.

First detonated on 16 July 1945 in the New Mexico desert (see Fig. 1), the bomb and its implications were first experienced as trauma in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In addition to the naked human suffering experienced in those cities, what also needed addressing were the manifold philosophical questions arising from the United States's use of nuclear weapons. Commenting on John Hersey's account of the survivors of Hiroshima, French philosopher Georges Bataille pinpoints a central ethical issue raised by the use of the bomb: "the death of sixty thousand is charged with meaning, in that it depended on their fellow men to kill them or to let them die. The atom bomb draws its meaning from its human origin: it is the possibility that the hands of man deliberately hang suspended over the future" (226). Written in 1947, Bataille's estimate of the victims of the Hiroshima bomb has subsequently been upped to an immediate-death toll of 100,000 and the fatal-injury toll of 50,000 (Lifton & Mitchell xvii). The realization that a human agency could in turn be responsible for the total death of humanity defies the imagination. Discussing nuclear holocaust, psychoanalyst Leon Botstein argues that effective conceptualizing of nuclear war may be impossible: "Total death cannot truly even be imagined; no myth appeared even necessary for Freud. One may, in fact, not be able to create effective psychological myths for the unimaginable prospect which has, only since nuclear weapons, become part of reality, both external and psychological" (301). And it is precisely this trauma--the awareness of the degree to which we (Americans, humans) are responsible for weapons of mass destruction and hold the fate of the world in our hands--that causes our society to, so often, take nuclear weapons outside of history.

Central to this ahistoricism is the translation of the problem into something universal, mythological--or more appropriately, trauma becomes translated into paranoia. The world of the paranoiac is a delusory one in which historical issues are played out as mythic battles between good and evil. In his history of the Cold War, for example, H.W. Brands describes the paranoiac's view of history as one in which the world is divided neatly into good and evil, which enables him/her to conclude that "Humanity's problems aren't the consequence of some abiding deficiency in all of us. Problems are the work of bad people" (38). Certainly, this was the attitude of Daniel Paul Schreber--a most famous paranoiac, who resorted to such psychic mechanisms in dealing with the history of his time, and whose published memoirs served as the basis for Freud's theory of paranoia.

In America in the 1950s, cultural paranoia performed similar work. As Richard Hofstadter explained in his seminal 1966 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Cold War paranoia involved a re-defining of the historical as the mythological: "History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade" (29). Thus communism could be seen not as a historically specific political system but as an embodiment of mythological evil--pagan and satanic; the postwar Soviet Union becomes mythologically great and evil. Similarly, I.F. Stone astutely observed that during the 1950s American liberals and conservatives alike painted communists as "some supernatural breed of men, led by diabolic masterminds in that distant Kremlin, engaged in a satanic conspiracy to take over the world and enslave all mankind" (69). If the Cold War was a mythological battle against a pagan/sa tanic enemy, then we (the U.S.) as crusaders had been given the bomb by God. We were not responsible for its scientific creation and its implications. Indeed, Harry S. Truman expressed this very sentiment in his 1945 announcement after the destruction of Nagasaki: "We thank God it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and His purposes" (qtd. in Boyer 211). Thus the bomb is a weapon we have been given, and the trauma of using it is alleviated by paranoiac defense mechanisms.

Another reason behind the mythologizing of nuclear technology in the 1940s and 1950s was that ignorance about the new scientific discovery caused people to search for a frame of reference that could make sense of the unrepresentable content of nuclear physics. In an interview in which he discusses the trauma suffered by the victims in Hiroshima, psychoanalyst Robert Jay Lifton observes: "In creating, in recreating experience, we need some prior imagery in order to do that work, in order to carry through that process. And there was precious little prior imagery that could enable people to take in the Hiroshima experience, the event of a weapon apparently destroying an entire city" (135). Lacking frames of reference, American society turned to myth to articulate the meanings of nuclear bombs.

In the mythologizing of nuclear weapons in the 1940s and 1950s, few literary modes were better equipped or played a more key role than science fiction. As John W. Campbell, Jr., noted in a 1953 essay in which he attempted to "place" this genre, science fiction stands in opposition to history, operating as a mythology that charts "the hopes and dreams and fears (for some dreams are nightmares) of a technically based society" (12). In the same year, Gerald Heard argued that science fiction can guide humans in the Atomic Age in a manner similar to the cohesive social function performed by mythology in former times, that it can "shape our reactions to our destiny" by showing us "how to react, how to adapt, how to endure" (255). Focusing on science-fiction ifims, more recent critics have noted a similar dynamic. In Future Tense, for example, John Brosman argues that 1950s films resorted to "various euphemisms such as giant beasts" to depict the bomb (82), just as in Nuclear Fear Spencer Weart discusses the way tha t such films contributed to the creation of a space-age mythology.

Other critics, however, have responded to this tendency in a less positive light. Philip Wylie, for example, complains that 1940s and 1950s science-fiction writers were irresponsible in creating "a new and sinister folklore" that obscured the scientific facts about the bomb (235). Richard Hodgens levels this type of criticism especially at science-fiction films, claiming that they associate technology with "The Black Arts" (261). For Frederic Jameson, science fiction attests to the inability of capitalist society to go beyond its own fixed mindset, that the "deepest vocation" of science fiction is "over and over again to demonstrate and dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future" (153).

According to H. Bruce Franklin, moreover, not only did the various modes of science fiction bring an awareness of the Atomic Age to the attention of a popular audience, but they also created a mythology of nuclear weapons that was then adopted by American policymakers. Thus, in War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination he argues: "For fifty years, from the first atomic explosion in Robert Cromies's 1895 novel The Crack of Doom until 1945, nuclear weapons existed nowhere but in science fiction, and in the imagination of those directly or indirectly influenced by this fiction, including scientists who converted these inventions from fantasy into facts of life" (131). In Franklin's view, the American myth of "the ultimate peacemaking weapons" that would lead to world peace under American hegemony directly shaped the nuclear policies of the United States (153).

If Franklin is correct in arguing that the atomic bomb was born out of science-fiction mythology, then one can also see why the re-mythologizing of it after Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an easily achieved goal. Even those Americans who made nuclear weapons a reality could not separate these weapons from the science-fiction myths that had influenced them. Similarly, as Martha A. Bartter notes in The Way to Ground Zero, insofar as the public reaction to the bomb "reflected traditional millennialism, with references to holocaust, Armageddon, and apocalypse," such terms had also been used by science fiction "to imply that an atomic war would be the last one" (113). Whether directly or indirectly America drew on a mythology fashioned by science fiction to understand the nuclear threat.

Yet it is not ignorance alone that caused 1940s and 1950s America and science fiction to turn to the mythological as a means of safely articulating the trauma of the nuclear experience, for as I have noted even those who did understand the science, like Oppenheimer, made similar moves. If the bomb is outside history, then belief in the positivist notion of history, so dear to science fiction and to America, could continue. Brands argues that the implications of the atomic bomb hit the United States particularly hard because "few peoples have placed such store in the future as Americans, for whom each generation promised, and usually delivered, greater wealth and power than the previous generation" (67-68). The problem, in short, was to describe how a weapon that may destroy the earth could be assimilated into a positivist notion of American history, and the only solution involved culturally removing it from a notion of historical progress.

The aliens themselves are portrayed as an ancient force linked with mythological and apocalyptic traditions. They first appear to the earth in the form of St. Elmo's Fire, an electrical discharge named after St. Erasmus, patron saint of sailors. At a barbecue, Russell and Carol and Carol's father, General Hanley, see the phenomenon, and Russell mentions that it was regarded as an omen in ancient times. Carol says that there have been so many around the space project that those who work there have gotten used to them. The film also links the phenomenon of St. Elmo's Fire with paranoia when the lights are eventually revealed to be eyes spying on both Operation Skyhook and the new secret project developed to destroy the alien threat. In this way, a natural phenomenon is conjoined with ancient mythology and paranoia to make the aliens embody a threat that is clearly removed from history.

The aliens, moreover, are presented as literally existing outside of time. When Russell, Carol, Major Huglin, and Sergeant Nash go aboard the alien spacecraft, the alien voice tells Russell to listen to his watch. Upon doing so, he discovers that his watch and his pulse have both stopped. The aliens explain that their form of space travel happens between the beats of hearts and watches, that is, outside the boundaries of human time. Their status as a mythological force is further reinforced when they advise earthlings to look to the sun for a warning, a message that they broadcast for twelve hours across the world. Just prior to their invasion, in turn, an explosion takes place on the sun that creates floods and other extreme weather conditions, thus ruining communications and transportation. The aliens here are clearly being placed in eschatological time, warning the world of an impending apocalypse, which they then attempt to effect.

In their ability to control the sun, however, the aliens are also linked with nuclear threat. In an article in One World or None, astronomer Harlow Shapley traces the origins of nuclear technology to the examination of "the character of ancient sunlight" (8). The explosion of the first atomic bomb created an effect like a sunrise, inspiring historian Ferenc Morton Szaz's book title The Day the Sun Rose Twice. Laurence describes the explosion of the atomic bomb as possessing "the light of many suns in one" (10-11). Further, the UFOs resemble the mushroom clouds of hydrogen-bomb tests, which frequently assumed a saucer-shaped form. Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers also associates the aliens with the nuclear threat by way of their ability to vaporize their victims. When they land at Project Skyhook, for example, they vaporize soldiers who have fired at their spaceship. John Hersey recounts a rumor that circulated around post-blast Hiroshima that a man and his cart close to the Museum of Science and Industry had bee n transformed into a shadow, the man frozen in the movement of raising his hand to whip his horse (73). Yet the aliens' vaporizing of their victims ironically sanitizes nuclear weapons, since the dead and the mangled, suffering bodies of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki become cleanly disappearing bodies. When the aliens destroy Operation Skyhook, Carol and Russell are the only survivors left, a post-nuclear war Adam and Eve, but who will also soon be dead: "the air is becoming toxic," Russell says into his tape recorder, suggesting that he and Carol are about to be exposed to radiation poisoning.

Not only does the film allegorize the trauma of the nuclear threat as one issued by ancient, mythological aliens, it also furthers this distancing by rewriting the history of the Manhattan Project. After the destruction of Operation Skyhook, Russell attempts to find a way to defeat the aliens, and upon discovering that they use sound as a weapon, he decides that he can create a similar device which can put their saucers off-course and cause them to crash. Accordingly, the government and military set up a "concealed laboratory" to which they ship supplies and send scientists. In this way, the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, which was responsible for creating the Atomic bomb, is turned into one that works to save the world from an alien threat, and which thus bears no responsibility for its weapons research since it is merely mimicking its enemy. In the film, moreover, instead of that enemy being a human one--"build the bomb before the Germans do" was the slogan of Los Alamos--it is an evil, mythological enem y, the kind of enemy that characterizes paranoia, one ancient and continuous, and in this case also one which clearly does possess the technological means to destroy the earth. In Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, in short, it is aliens who create burning ruins, not Ameri-cans.

A similar paranoid defense mechanism is evident in Nathan Juran's 20 Million Miles to Earth which uses the mythological to displace the emotional affect of nuclear weapons onto a prehistoric creature. In the opening of the film, a tension between timelessness and current technology is immediately established as an American spacecraft returning from Venus crashes into the sea near a Sicilian fishing village. After juxtaposing the idyllic quality of the fishermen with the technologically advanced spaceship, however, the film goes on to redirect responsibility for the havoc that ensues by having Pepe, a boy in the fishing village, innocently release the Venerian creature that the spaceship has brought back in a specimen capsule, and which the mature astronauts would have never allowed to run loose. Such cinematic presentation suggests that the creation of nuclear weapons was a blameless release of an ancient force, reflecting the manner in which the creations of the atomic and hydrogen bombs were typically port rayed in American society. In describing the scientific decisions that led to the creation of the bomb, for example, Laurence observes: "the discovery of fission may be compared to the discovery by ancient man of how to produce a spark" (38). America's discovery of nuclear weapons was, hence, blameless and part of an ancient, continuous process of discovery.

Additionally, as in the case of Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, in 20 Million Miles to Earth, the cultural specifics of nuclear weaponry are displaced through the association of the Venerian creature with mythological time. Dr. Leonardo, the scientist who tries to study and save the creature, speculates that the creature, which resembles a dinosaur except for its human torso, is either a mutation or a throwback to a prehistoric species. The creature and its threat are thus outside of human history, and especially outside of positivist progress. Evoking Greco-Roman mythology, with its sea creatures such as the Scylla and the sirens, when the creature wreaks havoc, even hiding in and emerging from the Tiber at one point, it appears to be a creature from an ancient past reclaiming its old haunts. In this context, in turn, one might note that for Laurence the explosion of the atomic bomb is not only a Titan breaking loose, but also "a monstrous prehistorical creature with a ruff around its neck" (238). By linking nuclear bombs with a prehistoric force, the film and 1950s American society in general attempt to attribute the responsibility for and the effects of the nuclear destruction to ancient forces beyond human control.

Also linking the creature to radioactivity--and reflecting the mixed attitudes toward such scientific research at that time--is its rapid growth rate. Indicative of the positive side, a 1948 article entitled "A World Worth Waiting For" speculated that radioisotope experimentation will result in the ability to control growth in animals, plants, and humans (34). For others, however, radiation presaged a growth rate Out of control--a notion, incidentally, that was subsequently disproved by the square-cube law which argues that when an organism's dimensions are squared, its mass is multiplied by eight, resulting in the enlarged organism's death. In the film, this mixed reaction can be seen in the way that it is the earth's atmosphere that has upset the creature's metabolic rate and caused its incredible growth, suggesting that the fallout from atmospheric tests is so strong that it can cause an alien creature to grow to gigantic proportions. Similarly, that the creature feeds on sulfur to survive hints at an ant hropomorphized bomb, a weapon which must feed off uranium in order to grow and become powerful. Where all these ideas come together, in turn, is when the creature battles an elephant in the streets of Rome, and a fallout shelter sign in the background gives the fight apocalyptic overtones, invoking the fear of nuclear war that led to the creation of the Civil Defense program in America in the 1950s.

Whether the Roman Empire is invoked to describe the Soviet Union or to describe the United States--whether the creature in the Coliseum is them or us--the use of the Roman Empire as metaphor for Cold War policies again removes the issues of nuclear weapons and Cold War hostilities from historical time, and places them in biblical, mythological time. Indeed, the view of the Roman Empire as decadent is in itself largely the construction of Christian commentators who contrasted the evil pagan world to the new, pure world that their gospel was designed to implement. In the same way, accusing either Soviets or McCarthyists of Roman decadence removes Cold War politics from history and creates a paranoiac opposition between good and evil. In 20 Million Miles to Earth, the creature who has been fatally wounded by Calder is first seen standing on top of the Coliseum, then tumbling to the ground, suggesting that nuclear weapons and their ills can be defeated just as the ancient, decadent Roman world could be defeated by Christianity.

Ironically, the concluding words of the film attempt to situate its story within historical time. Looking at the creature's body, Dr. Uhl asks, "Why is it always so costly for man to move from the present to the future?" While this statement may suggest an underlying anxiety about nuclear weapons, overall the film is designed to remove the nuclear threat from both the present and the future by displacing the traumatic postwar present onto a prehistoric alien that is metaphorically linked with the Greco-Roman world. It would seem that the cost of moving to the future--the postnuclear world--has been so high that neither a present nor a future can be imagined. Commenting generally on the way that science fiction addresses such issues, Benjamin Shapiro rhetorically asks: "How can there even be any sense of continuous time and universal truths? The answer lies in the linking of mythic past with the historical, experienced present and the hopeful projection of contemporary values and paradigms into the terrifying , unimaginable future" (104).

This conversion process is clearly operational in John Sherwood's The Monolith Monsters, in which the nuclear threat is displaced onto meteoric rocks that feed on human silicon, grow enormous, and wantonly destroy all people, buildings, and objects in their path. Like Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, this film opens with a narration that firmly establishes the threat as an ancient, though continuous one. "From infinity they come--meteors," the narrator reminds us; "from time immemorial, the earth has been bombarded by objects from outer space," which are products of a force that can be traced back "from the beginning of time?' In 1950s America, however, meteors were also associated with more immediate causes and dangers. Eyewitness accounts from the Trinity Site recount that many of the civilians who witnessed the explosion there believed they had seen a meteor hit the earth (Laurence 195; Szaz 84). Hersey reports that when Father Kleinsorge, a Christian missionary, experienced the blast in Hiroshima, it "remin ded him of something he had read as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth" (12).

In the film, effects of atomic explosion and the need for atmospheric testing is immediately called to mind by the way that it is out of the desert that the monolith monsters emerge. The bomb was first exploded in the New Mexico desert, and, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the deserts of the west and the southwest provided the most frequently used sites for the approximately 215 atmospheric tests (see Fig. 2) which took place in the United States between 1945 and 1963 ("Known Nuclear"). As I have argued elsewhere, 1950s films such as The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came From Outer Space, and Invaders From Mars frequently use locations in the American desert as "appropriate sites for troping the invisible danger of radiation" (30). In the case of The Monolith Monsters, however, this danger is also redirected from its source to the setting itself. Thus when geologist Ben Gilbert brings a meteoric rock back to the lab for analysis, he puzzles over its composition, stating, "it just do esn't seem to belong," to which local reporter Martin Cochran replies, "the desert's full of things that don't belong." In short, whereas it was the Trinity and subsequent desert bomb tests that caused unnatural radiation levels and contamination, Monolith Monsters attempts to use the natural strangeness of the desert as a means to make the unnaturalness of bomb tests less threatening. It is the desert that has been "gathering the secrets of time and space for billions of years," as Professor Flanders, a geology expert in the film, puts it.

In The Monolith Monsters, the effect of contact with the rocks is a strange psychological reaction of zombie-like behavior, and a physiological reaction whereby the human body begins to turn to stone. As one of the researchers discovers, the rocks are parasitic: they absorb silicon from the human body, vampirizing it in a manner somewhat analogous to the effects of leukemia, a disease that is a frequent result of exposure to radiation. Yet while the film thus raises the specter of disease contracted from radioactive materials, it defuses the psychic threat of this specter by associating the mysterious disease with the mythological--i.e., the rocks' ability to change flesh into stone recalls the myths of Medusa and Midas, as well as other Greco-Roman tales of metamorphoses. Further, enlisting modern science, the film lessens the impact of exposure to radiation by suggesting that the mysterious disease can be completely and miraculously cured.

Another way that the film deals with the effects of atomic explosions pertains to rain, which becomes a threatening aspect of nature when the rocks grow to alarmingly huge proportions during a rainstorm. As Hersey recounts, one of the postblast horrors of Hiroshima was the black rain that fell and caused eyewitnesses to exclaim, "The Americans are dropping gasoline. They're going to set fire to us!" (38). Causing this phenomenon, as Wilfred Burchett explains, was the way that "large drops of moisture formed by minute particles of carbon thrown up by the heat" turned into "water vapour when it reached layers of cold air. These became charged with radioactive dust and fell in isolated showers of what everyone referred to as 'black rain"' (66). In the film, abnormal black rain is refashioned as a natural rain that feeds an ancient and threatening force, and this effect is closely related to another. Farmer Joe Higgins comes into San Angelo and reports that giant rocks have killed his livestock, and that his dog has been changed into granite. One of the most widely publicized of the unusual phenomena that occurred in the immediate vicinity of the Trinity test was the cattle that had been exposed to the blast and came to be known as the "atomic calves." The cattle, which had been grazing near the Trinity site, appeared healthy, but a few weeks after the blast they lost their hair. When it grew back, it grew back white. A New Mexico rancher also reported a black cat that had turned half-white after the explosion (Szaz 132). While the cattle remained healthy, their discoloration stuck in the postwar imagination as one of the eerie threats of fallout.

As is characteristic of other films of its kind, in The Monolith Monsters the dangerous threat of nuclear bombs is coded in the beginning of the film, only to be denied subsequently by refraining it as something ancient, and here, natural. The meteors travel to earth, are aided by natural forces in their attempt to grow, parasitically drain the earth and humans of silica, and are eventually stopped by a combination of human agency and nature. After the rocks have been destroyed by the salt water released into the dry, desert lake, Dave Miller, geologist and hero of the film, provides the closing words, when he says to Martin, the reporter who had expressed concern about contact with the rocks: "You always called that dry lake nature's worst mistake. It looks like now she knew what she was doing, huh?" The film thus reassures audiences that nuclear weapons are part of a natural, continuous process that has a reason behind it.

The science-fiction films of the 1950s in general performed important cultural work by representing the nuclear threat in a mythological form palatable to a popular audience. Apropos of postwar science-fiction magazines, Bartter argues that "radiation, fallout, mutation, and atomic destruction of the biosphere" found expression in those publications when "the American press was largely glib, reticent, or silent about the subject" (128). I agree with Bartter that science-fiction spoke about the nuclear threat, but I would add that in their means of speaking--paranoid fantasy--such works also minimized the very threat they spoke of by mythologizing it.

Film provides a medium in which the auditory and visual hallucinations associated with paranoia can have a tangible existence. Trauma in such cases means taking the unrepresentable horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, radiation contamination, and nuclear apocalypse and translating this horror into the threatening, yet curiously comforting, black-and-white world of the paranoiac. History as the Real disturbs; history as myth allows a society to perceive itself as part of a continuing and seamless process. Thus as much as these science-fiction films depict the psychic impact of nuclear weapons, so much do they also ultimately work to make the nuclear threat mythological and even natural. It hence becomes something outside of the bounds of human time and also outside of the scope of human responsibility. One of the great values of examining popular film, therefore, lies not only in what such works reveal to us about cultural paranoia, but also the form it takes in our own times. While 1950s B science-fiction films have attracted and retain a cult following, their appeal today is largely predicated on ironic laughter at works considered to be no more than museum pieces. Yet this response in itself might point to just how much we are still suffering from and trying to displace the trauma of nuclear destruction. [*]

CYNDY HENDERSHOT is Assistant Professor of English at Arkansas State University. She is the author of The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic (1998), plus numerous articles on literature, popular culture, and film.

(*.) My thanks to Antony Oldknow of Eastern New Mexico University for his helpful suggestions and ideas regarding this essay. A version of this essay was presented at the "Webs of Discourse" Comparative Literature conference in Lubbock, Texas (February 1998).

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