Post-World War II, American tried desperately to return to
normal. The problem was, 1940 was ten years ago, before the atomic bomb, secret
Communists teenagers running amok, and science greatly overstepping its bounds.
The artifice of the 1950s can be seen in popular culture, at every level from
newspapers and magazines on up to radio and television. The military-industrial
complex seamlessly transitioned from ammunition to space-age toasters, and
thanks to the G.I. Bill, everyone could afford a house and get cracking on the
business of having a job, having kids, hosting cook outs, and living that
American Dream.
It was all weapons grade baloney, of course. In the midst of
all this prosperity, the threat of encroaching Communism was portrayed as very
real and something to fear. This was the time of the Hollywood Blacklists, the start
of the Cold War, and real-life Cat and Mouse games with Russian spies.
And let’s not forget the emergence of youth culture, too:
rock and roll became big business, thanks to Elvis Presley kicking the door
down for everyone that followed. Teenagers suddenly mattered, and that was
terrifying to the establishment. Why, they’d only recently gotten control of
juvenile delinquency by publicly “encouraging” (by way of televised Senate
Sub-Committee hearings) the comic book companies to self-regulate, thus putting
an end to crime and horror comics, presumably forever.
It’s no wonder that pop culture pushed back. The fifties saw
the rise of counter-culture, the codification of what would become known as Film
Noir, and the popularity of darkly pessimistic novel writing, in particular
hard-boiled crime novels from authors such as Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich,
and James M. Cain.
I don’t think anyone was really buying what America was
selling, but the mindset was one of wanting to conform, to belong, to fit in, even
if you don’t feel like you do. Horror movies moved from the gothic into the
modern age, and made scientists and generals the patsies and the fools who
usually exacerbated, if not outright caused, the monsters to roam free.
