Soul of the Future: Them! or Us

The first atomic bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert in 1945.  For the next few years US explosive tests were conducted mainly in the Pacific, but they resumed in the American southwest in 1951, principally in Nevada, where the testing site area was larger than the state of Rhode Island.

In the next decade or so, at least 100 nuclear explosions were detonated above ground, with some 800 underground.  The mushroom cloud from the atmospheric explosions was typically visible for a hundred miles around the site, including from Las Vegas high rise hotels.

In 1953, a nuclear explosion in Nevada was covered by hundreds of reporters and filmed for television and newsreels.  Houses were built on the site, complete with fully equipped kitchens, though inhabited only by manikins.  Reporters called it Doom Town.

 High-speed film images of buildings being blown apart by blast and sundered by suction were widely shown for years.  Cameras showing the aftermath focused on crushed appliances and mangled manikins (though this was supposed to be a Civil Defense demonstration of survivability.)  A survey at the time found that three quarters of the American population saw the test on television or at least heard about it.

News of effects of the tests themselves was more sporadic, but left a cumulative impression.  Increases in cancers as far away as Utah were noted, beginning in the mid 1950s.  A seven year old boy 70 miles from Ground Zero in Nevada who died of leukemia "became possibly the first baby boom casualty of the atomic age," according to Landon Jones, author of Great Expectations. Radiation from a 1951 Nevada test was detected in the snow that fell on Rochester, New York.

There had been at least 20 nuclear explosions in the Southwest by the time that the nuclear-themed monster movie Them! first hit theaters in the summer of 1954.  So the film's spooky opening shots of the empty desert and the spiky Joshua trees on the roadside, was appropriately portentous (the Joshua trees were the tip off however that the movie wasn't filmed in the New Mexico of the story, because they don't grow there. These scenes were filmed in the California desert.)

Fess Parker and James Arness in Them!

Them! was a consequence of the surprise popularity of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms in 1953.  Though Warner Brothers scaled back its original plan for a 3-D color extravaganza, the decision to use secondary stars and unknowns accidentally gave it a place in Hollywood lore as an audition tape for early television stars.

The unknown James Arness was a principal character, an FBI investigator named Robert Graham.  His performance led to his iconic role as Marshal Dillon on the long-running western Gunsmoke.  Interested in animatronic figures for his theme park, Walt Disney went to see the mechanical giant ants. Instead he saw an unknown actor in a small part named Fess Parker, who he recruited to play another ground-breaking icon of 1950s television, Davy Crockett.

Leonard Nimoy in Them!

To a lesser degree, James Whitmore's performance as the heroic police officer Sgt. Ben Peterson preceded steady work on television and his own TV series, The Law and Mr. Jones.  And though it was more than a decade before Star Trek, fans of Leonard Nimoy note his small part as an army technician.

But Them! survives principally because it is an unexpectedly good movie, with taut storytelling, deft cinematography and highly watchable performances.  It is probably the best of the American atomic monster movies, as well as an early icon of the genre.

James Whitmore

The movie begins with New Mexico police officers searching by plane and car for a child reported to be wandering alone in the desert.  The car with Sgt. Ben Peterson (Whitmore) and trooper Ed Blackburn find her, and then investigate the plane spotter's report of abandoned camper nearby.  The camper was destroyed by an unknown force.  They learn the camper belonged to an FBI man on vacation with his wife and two children.  It turns out the girl is the only survivor.

The first sign of a monstrous presence is an eerie sound.  Later, when trooper Blackburn is killed off-camera, we hear the sound again, along with his screams. These scenes begin the tradition of the monster's slow reveal, copied by later monster movies but with less skill and effect.

For awhile, Them! is a taut police procedural, with scattered clues that don't yet add up, suffused with mystery and menace.  Because the camper belonged to one of their own, the FBI sends agent Robert Graham (Arness) to help investigate.  He sends the cast of an unidentified animal print found in the sand back to Washington. He as well as the New Mexico police are flummoxed when they are told to meet two scientists flying in from Washington--from the Department of Agriculture.

Arness and Weldon

The scientists are Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) and his daughter, Dr. Pat Medford (Joan Weldon.)  Weldon reportedly chafed at being directed to play the scientist more intently than the James Arness love interest.

Gwenn is a slightly more upscale version of Cecil Kellaway in
 The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. Though, like Kellaway, the roles he played included Santa Claus (in his case, in the classic 1947 Miracle on 34th Street) and numerous priests, bishops, doctors, grandfathers and absent-minded professors as well as Elizabeth Bennet's father, Gwenn had more gravitas, and could do drama convincingly.  Despite one typical comic scene, in this role he made his distraction more a product of dread of the possible consequences of what he discovered.

Without sharing their suspicions, the Drs. Medford lead the others to their first encounter with the creatures (and the obligatory scene of the damsel scientist in distress.)  The elder Dr. Medford tells them what they're confronting: giant ants—“a fantastic mutation probably caused by lingering radiation from the first atomic bomb.”

Ants can become carnivorous, the scientists note, and they kill by injecting their prey with formic acid. Ants also breed quickly and in great numbers. They must find the rest of these monsters before the queens fly off to build other nests, and it’s too late.

They can hear their eerie sounds as the wind whips up the sand and the elder scientist says, “We may be witnesses to a biblical prophesy come true—and there will be destruction and darkness come over creation, and the beasts shall reign over the Earth.”

This is the second variation of atomic monsters: not a creature from the deep past awakened by the Bomb (like The Beast...) or even awakened and altered by radiation (Gojira/Godzilla), but present-day creatures whose evolution is deformed by nuclear bomb radiation.  By this time in the mid 1950s, it was widely known that radiation could cause mutations in future generations, though the secrecy and denial of evidence fueled runaway speculation.

The choice of ants was inspired, not only on the spectrum of creepiness.  Ants are among the most successful species on the planet, relying on communication and a social structure.

 Whether the filmmakers knew of it or not, the evolved ants of Them! were preceded by the evolved ants of H.G. Wells in his short story "The Empire of the Ants."  In what appears to be Wells' version of his friend Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness," ants in a remote jungle have evolved a deadly poison and the strategic intelligence to challenge human civilization, as they slowly spread into the more populated continents.

This story is an illustration of Wells' warning that the human species should not assume that its place of power is permanent, for evolution continues. "In the case of every other predominant animal the world has ever seen," Wells wrote in an 1894 essay, "the hour of its complete ascendancy has been the eve of its entire overthrow."  In Them! the Wellsian warning against human arrogance was amplified by atomic power.

The giant ants themselves, seen in mostly brief glimpses, are clearly inhuman. This is another difference in the monster genre, for animators and model-makers tended to emphasize characteristics shared with humans when depicting monsters like King Kong, Godzilla and the Beast.

Once the scientists ascertain that a queen ant has landed in Los Angeles, the government calls a press conference and informs the public of the danger.  (The official conducting the conference was played by Charles Meredith, who usually depicted authority figures like bankers and military officers, as well as Secretary Drake of the United Worlds Space Rangers in the 1950s TV series Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. He also did the voiceover for a technical film on the results of an atomic test.)

Meanwhile the montage of citizens watching and listening to the broadcast merges with military teams in jeeps driving through the dry riverbed into the storm drains and into the seven hundred miles of tunnels under Los Angeles, where the last nest was located. It’s a literal descent into the underworld, with the confines of tunnels adding to the suspense and sense of dread.

The climactic battle involves heroism and self-sacrifice, teamwork and violence. The technology of civilization has overcome the threat of nature, deformed by the result of human technology.

With almost no pause, as the surviving principals peer down into the pit, the film ends with this grim dialogue: "If these monsters got started as a result of the first atomic bomb tests in 1945, what about all the others that have been exploded since then?" asks Graham. "I don't know," says Dr. Patricia Medford. "Nobody knows," says her father, the elder scientist. "When man entered the atomic age, he opened the door into a new world. What we eventually find in that new world nobody can predict."

"Nobody can predict" is a statement about the future that these films make, contradicting the official line supported by everyone’s conscious behavior that nuclear weapons were keeping America safe, and ensuring a brighter future. Atomic anxiety—and atomic apocalypse—was finding its way into the open.

As directed by Gordon Douglas, with a final script by Ted Sherdeman, Them! was an exemplary film.  It was also a major box office hit--easily one of Warners top grossing releases of the year, with a long life ahead.

I vividly remember seeing this movie at the theatre when I was a child, either during its first run or shortly afterwards when it hit the Saturday matinees (and quite possibly, both, because I recall seeing it more than once.)

The audience for this movie was largely if not primarily young—the children and preteens born during World War II or afterward. That is worth remembering when examining its classic structure of monster tales—the slaying of the dragon. So while the monster being slain by figures representing those who created it—namely scientists and the military—this ideological outcome, while playing into official US imagery, was the only possible one for a Hollywood movie appealing to children. The ending had to be reassuring. Children needed to believe they will be taken care of, and that people in authority—acting nobly and efficiently—were equal to the task.

It so happens that the adult characters in Them! are notably exemplary. As the anonymous author of the blog and you call yourself a scientist writes:

“One of the most striking things about this film that in any given situation, whoever is best qualified to deal with it is always in charge—which sometimes gives us the military taking orders from the scientists. It is taken for granted that teamwork and cooperation are the best way of dealing with the crisis, with each person’s expertise coming to the fore in turn, and everyone pitching in wherever he or she is needed. (When [FBI officer] Graham is trapped by the collapsing tunnel, General O’Brien rushes to help with the digging). Conversely, almost startling by their absence are the power-plays, head-buttings and tantrums usually associated with this sort of subplot, as a way of creating (artificial) drama.”

Whatever the filmmaker’s intentions, the movie they came up with specifically spoke to the young watching in the dark. The film begins with a child wandering in the desert, clutching her doll, in such profound cataleptic shock that she doesn’t respond to others around her. It is a frightening image, guaranteed to focus our attention, and the gentle care by all the adults she encounters is reassuring. She has survived her encounter with the monsters, though her parents and sibling did not. But it places a child in danger, and in need of protection.

(The unforgettable performance of the little girl was by Sandy Descher, whose unusual and mesmerizing features showed up in another 1950s atomic classic, The Space Children. As a child she specialized in portraying terror, on television and in movies. She went on to a substantial career lasting into the mid 1960s, including a role in the 1955 remake of The Miracle on 34th Street. )

The final showdown with a new colony of giant ants nesting in the Los Angeles sewers occurs because two young boys are missing—boys around my age, and the age of my friends sitting next to me in the huge darkened hollow of the movie palace. Once again, we are placed in the action as potential victims. The James Whitmore character—the policeman who first comforted the little girl-- saves the two boys, at the cost of his own life.

Yes, we were fully aware that this was a monster movie, but the warning of the dark mysteries of the atomic age at the end were not lost on us. How could they be—especially in the coming months and years, when nearly every monster on every Saturday had the same dire origin? We understood that even when the present monster was defeated, the danger persists.

While English language poster emphasized the
innate horror of giant ants, this foreign language
poster names them the Atomic Demons

As that anonymous blog author notes, "Them! is the first American film to really place the possible consequences of “the bomb” front and centre. .. it deals explicitly with the genie out of the bottle, arguing that what started at White Sands did not simply stop at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; that such forces, once unleashed, have a tendency to take on a dangerous momentum of their own; including, perhaps, rebounding against those who set them in motion in the first place.”

Though matinees would feature seemingly innumerable giant insects and other mutant creatures over the next few years, diluting the effect, these first films (Gojira and Them! especially) remain as artful expressions of unconscious anxieties.  For the word "monster," after all, come from the Latin "monere," to warn.  The original English meaning of monster (according to the OED) is "a divine portent or warning."

Though the fashion for them comes and goes, the monster tale is ancient and persistent.  In distilling all stories to seven basic plots, scholar Christopher Booker names the first plot "overcoming the monster."  If the monster is the Bomb itself, these stories suggest that no one can yet figured out how to overcome it.  They concentrate instead on overcoming the more comprehensible monster that the atomic bomb monster created.

The Bomb hovered over our Saturdays even apart from the Bug-Eyed Monsters created by radiation. In fact there was hardly a science fiction movie of the mid to late 1950s that did not refer to nuclear bombs or atomic apocalypse in some way. These variations are also instructive on the power and range of nuclear fear, as will be explored next time.

Soul of the Future: The Atomic Monster Awakes

Earlier posts in this series can be found by clicking on the Soul of the Future label.

How is it possible that the imminent and greatest threat in human history to civilization and life on the entire planet Earth is not the focus of comprehensive efforts by humanity to address it?

How can it be that this climate emergency brought on by global heating has been the subject of scientific warnings for more than half a century, that scientific modelling has proven correct and predictions are coming true, and many public figures have acknowledged this for a generation, but much of society seems not to comprehend it, and a large segment--including a powerful US political party--continues to deny it, even while it is demonstrably happening?

How can news that supports this science, and represents real life information that emphasizes the dangers be relegated to the bottom of the news reporting?  How can the likely murder of a billion be treated with less importance than the murder of a single individual, or the fate of the planet for millennia be ignored in favor of a celebrity's momentary pique?  How can the erasure of the future not be the most important news of the day?

Some of the answers can be suggested by attitudes towards the previous apocalyptic threat of the recent past, the nuclear weapons that spread for a generation following the first atomic bomb explosion in 1945.

The first atomic bomb was detonated in secret, in the New Mexico desert.  The explosion was so bright that it was seen by a woman who was blind from birth and traveling in a car miles away. "A colony on Mars, had such a thing existed, could have seen the flash," writes Gerard J. DeGroot in The Bomb: A Life. "All living things within a mile were killed, including all insects."

Witnesses to this and later nuclear bomb detonations spoke of the brightest light, the largest explosions, the longest and deepest sound they had ever experienced. These bombs made their own windstorms and firestorms. They began in an explosive instant and kept growing, as if they might never end.

Over Nagasaki in a plane trailing the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb, journalist William Laurence watched the bomb explode upwards: “It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”

An observer on a U.S. Navy ship 30 miles away watched the fireball of one of the first hydrogen bomb explosions rise and spread: “It looked to me like what you might imagine a diseased brain, or a brain of some mad man would look like.”

Oppenheimer

So profound was the experience (or even the reports) that many fell back on extreme metaphysical and religious imagery. Robert Oppenheimer, chief scientist at Los Alamos, famously compared the first atomic bomb explosion to a Hindu god—Krishna, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” An Army General felt doomsday, and the blasphemy of humans tampering with such forces.

President Truman (who ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima but only read reports on it) wondered if it fulfilled the Biblical prophesy of the fire next time. Winston Churchill called it “the Second Coming in Wrath.” For both those who had witnessed the first atomic detonation and those who had only heard about it, Spencer Weart writes in Nuclear Fear, “the explosion served less to introduce new ideas than to bring ancient thought of apocalypse to new and vivid life.”

Biblical illustration

The last book of the Bible is about the end of the world. In the Catholic Bible it is called "Apocalypse", but the Protestant translates the word from the Greek into English as "Revelations."   The Bomb was a revelation. But of what?

One conclusion was widely drawn. “If I were asked to name the most important date in the history and prehistory of the human race,” wrote author Arthur Koestler in 1978 in his final book, “I would answer without hesitation, 6 August 1945. The reason is simple. From the dawn of consciousness until 6 August 1945, men had to live with the prospect of his death as an individual; since the day when the first atomic bomb outshone the sun over Hiroshima, mankind as a whole has had to live with the prospect of its extinction as a species.”

According to sociologist Edward Shils, the atomic bomb brought the fear that the Biblical Apocalypse was at hand to society at large.

These would not be baseless fears.  By the mid 1950s, both the United States and the Soviet Union were building arsenals of atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs, which were vastly more destructive by orders of magnitude.  By 1961 President Kennedy could assert in his Inaugural that the world contained enough nuclear weapons to destroy humankind seven times over, and not be contradicted.  The foreboding hung over everything in those Cold War years.

Admiral Ingram

The potential danger was immediately grasped after World War II, so much so that the need to control nuclear weapons by an international organization like the United Nations was universally obvious.  "No one questions the vulnerability of mankind to the destructive effects of this devastating new weapon of war," wrote recently retired Admiral Jonas H. Ingram, Commander-in-Chief of the US Atlantic Fleet during World War II, in the popular 1947 Collier Yearbook. "In fact it is such a destructive weapon that it should be outlawed in warfare, for the general use of it over any protracted period of time would spell the end of our civilization."

International control was was essentially US government policy at first, but not for long. And once the Soviet Union had the Bomb, any attempt to outlaw or control the Bomb was not only forgotten but came to be a virtually forbidden and unpatriotic concept.

Though atomic bomb tests were widely publicized, the US government enforced wartime secrecy and was caught lying about effects, particularly radiation.  Those lies were exposed in particular by two books, both best-sellers: John Hershey's Hiroshima and Dr. David Bradley's No Place to Hide, about the radiation effects of hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific.

“The fact that hydrogen bomb fallout could devastate entire territories was treated as a military secret, for it undercut prevailing ideas on nuclear war and civil defense,” writes Spencer Weart. “The government scarcely knew what to say to itself; let alone to the world public. In the absence of reliable facts, indeed with the world’s main source of atomic information largely discredited, anxieties could only continue to grow.”

For Americans, it often became unpatriotic to question military authorities or certainly the Bomb, and since the avowed Soviet enemy had their Bomb, it seemed futile and foolhardy. So few ordinary citizens said anything derogatory or doubtful in public—or said anything at all. Such sentiments might invite a charge of being a Communist in this contaminated atmosphere of McCarthyism, J. Edgar Hoover and the Blacklist, when not just those employed by government or Hollywood, but all kinds of people could suddenly lose their jobs, homes and families after such accusations.

Plus the immensity of it all was difficult to grasp consciously, and even more difficult to face. This became especially true when it seemed that invisible radiation effects could wound, poison, kill and deform from remote distances, and from forgotten or unknown events.  Everyone was vulnerable, and essentially helpless.

For these and other reasons, anxieties couldn’t be consciously accommodated for long, or directly expressed. They went underground, translated into the language of nightmare. They could be faced only as fantastic stories on a giant bright screen, watched in the dark.

But even by the mid-1950s--after Hiroshima, the 1946 Bikini atomic tests narrated on radio and shown in newsreels and television film, the hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific, reports of Soviet tests and the resumption of nuclear explosions in the atmosphere above the American southwest--the big Hollywood studios mostly ignored the Bomb completely.  It took independent producers with small budgets to even mention it.

However, efforts to directly express what the Bomb might portend were inadequate. Instead, the first successful and popular films about the consequences of nuclear weapons did so with the symbolism of the monster.  Though it had its own fearsome icon--the mushroom cloud--the Bomb was not itself portrayed as the monster.  Its power and dangers were expressed through the monstrosities and the monsters it might create.  It was the monster maker.

Hollywood may not have understood the atom but they got monster movies, at least eventually. Tales of monsters were as old as literature, as old as myth and folk tales. The atomic monster storytellers absorbed many of the salient features of these tales and incorporated them, beginning in the US with The Beast From 20.000 Fathoms, released in the summer of 1953.

Independent producer Jack Deitz asked young animator Ray Harryhausen to create a fictional dinosaur for this low-budget movie inspired by a short story by Harryhausen's boyhood friend, Ray Bradbury.  The script was officially co-written by Fred Freiberger, later a Star Trek producer.

Released the year before the Japanese atomic monster film Gojira (later repackaged with new footage as the worldwide hit Godzilla) and one of its inspirations, The Beast...also began with a nuclear bomb test, though less specific or reality-based than in the Japanese film.  It occurs in the Arctic, where no Bomb was ever exploded, apparently to both further the plot of it waking a frozen dinosaur and possibly because of easily available avalanche footage.  (Playing military liaison Colonel Jack Evans, Kenneth Tobey was revisiting the Arctic of the 1951 s/f classic, The Thing From Another World.)

There's a fair amount of curious dialogue that plays with paradoxes and anxieties. The first exchange occurs just after the test as three scientists discuss the Bomb tests with Colonel Evans.  The chief nuclear scientist and main protagonist is Dr. Tom Nesbitt (played by Paul Hubschmid, billed here as Paul Christian, a Swiss actor with a slight accent who played in mostly German language films. Perhaps he was meant to suggest America's German rocket scientists as well atomic bomb physicists.)

Nesbitt observes somewhat wearily: ”What the cumulative effects of all these tests will be, only time can tell.”

A second scientist says, “You know, every time one of these things goes off, I feel as if we were helping to write the first chapter of the New Genesis.”

 “Let’s hope we don’t find ourselves writing the last chapter of the old one,” Nesbitt answers.

“You sound like a man whose scared, Tom,” says Colonel Evans.

“What makes you think I’m not,” Nesbitt says. And then weirdly all three men laugh.

But while checking a snowy outpost after the test, Nesbitt has seen the prehistoric monster.  No one--including the military psychiatrist-- believes him.  In their rationalistic skepticism, they are almost parodies.These no-nonsense technicians are without culture, without any sense of the past. (The psychiatrist even gets his reference to the Loch Ness Monster wrong.) Their blandness in the face of cosmic scale would recur more obviously and meaningfully in Kubrick’s 2001. For them, myth is only a pejorative.

Nesbitt's quest to get someone to believe him takes him to an unnamed university in New York, where he meets Professor Elson, a kindly and seemingly eccentric elder scientist (played by Cecil Kellaway), apparently the world's foremost paleontologist.  Elson doesn't believe him either, but Elson's young and attractive assistant, Lee Hunter, is more sympathetic.  (She is played by Paula Raymond, who after this film worked mostly as a guest actor in television.)  Eventually she invites him to her apartment to examine sketches of known prehistoric creatures. Their banter includes dialogue that indicates the pivotal point of the nuclear age in separating the past from the future, but also in a future returning to that past.

She has already quoted Prof. Elson's dictum:“ The future is a function of the past.” After she tells Nesbitt how she was Elson's student and became his assistant after she earned her degree, he observes, "You deal with the past, I with the future."

She seems worried, and says softly, “How uncomplicated the past was.”

"And how bright the future can be," he responds, with a romantic smile.  She notices this and reigns him in (for the moment.) "Let's get back to the present."

Eventually the professor is convinced, and theorizes that the creature is returning to its home grounds in the canyons deep beneath the Hudson River.  He goes down in a diving bell to find it.  Again, a bit of stray dialogue highlights this pivotal moment in time. “This is such a strange feeling," he says as he descends into the depths.   "I feel I am leaving of world of untold tomorrows for a world of countless yesterdays.”

He spots the monster and describes it in technical terms to Hunter. His last words, before the monster devours him (offscreen), are: “But the most astonishing thing is—“

So far the movie has been a somewhat ponderous and wandering search for the proof that then immediately presents itself, when the monster comes ashore at what looks like South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan.  The monster movie finally begins.  Here Harryhausen's innovations in stop-motion animation take over, as the monster smashes things, terrorizes New Yorkers, eats a policeman (who nevertheless seems to appear in a following scene), survives armed attack, and spreads an unspecified disease from its wounds.

Attempts to kill the monster with bullets and explosives would risk spreading this deadly disease, but Dr. Nesbitt has a solution: shooting a radioactive isotope into the existing wound, to kill the disease tissue and the monster with it.  (These were still early days of radiation therapy for cancers that were almost invariably fatal in the 1950s.)  The nuclear scientist using radioactivity to kill the monster awakened by a nuclear bomb is a paradox to be repeated in these movies: science created the Bomb and the military uses it, but only science and the military can save the world from the Bomb's consequences.

While Harryhausen's giant monster was clearly the appeal of the picture, the atomic bomb scenes weren't merely to provide an excuse.  There was a sense that what atomic scientists were doing was itself monstrous, that they were playing with forces beyond human ken and control.  This sense was especially evident in the publicity for the movie, particularly a long trailer, which asked, "Are we delving into mysteries we weren't meant to know?"

Besides Harryhausen's dinosaur animation, this movie is also remembered for the final scenes, where Nesbitt and a sharpshooter (played by the not yet famous Lee Van Cleef) attack the dinosaur from atop a Coney Island roller coaster.

Despite its inadequacies, this movie did very well at the box office.  After shooting it for a mere $200,000, producer sold it to Warner Brothers for twice that, and much to the studio's surprise, Warners made millions.

So Warners decided to jump into the monster business, with a big budget movie in color and 3-D about atomic mutant giant ants.  But the studio soon got cold feet, and opted for a less ambitious black and white feature.  The result nevertheless was a classic of the genre, and a very good movie by ordinary standards, called Them! 

....To be continued...

R.I.P.

Poetry Monday: In A Dark Time

BK photo

In A Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight comes again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing on the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Theodore Roethke