The Blob, An Ecological Fable from the 1950s
Svengoolie recently brought The Blob back to ooze through his MeTV show. A none-too-gripping account about a threatening amorphous mass from space, the 1958 work is now generally remembered as the first leading role of American cinema icon Steve McQueen. The film is a treasure trove of fifties sci-fi and horror tropes — invasion by an unknown force or being, dim-witted adults and smug officials who won’t listen to young people, a pseudo-scientific solution to repel the invasion and a gender-based division of labor between steadfast men and their faithful, he-was-right-all-along, women. What is different from our perspective in the early twenty-first century is that, what once looked like a fairly tedious and cliched horror film, now reads like an oddly prescient eco-fable.
After the title ‘character’ crash-lands from space it grows by absorbing humans. When McQueen as Steve Andrews, a not-quite-believable teen at twenty-eight, tries to tell responsible adults that he saw the town doctor killed by something horrible, parents and most of the police condescendingly dismiss him. Two of the officers bookend the typical continuum of reactions to this age-group — the paranoid cop sees young people as stereotypical pranksters always up to no good, the sympathetic cop listens to their concerns and thinks there might be something to what they say.
Even Steve’s friends are skeptical about the Blob’s existence. However, their belief in one another, their solidarity as an easily-dismissed social group and Steve’s sincerity bring them to his side. The creature itself finally comes into public view when it invades the movie theater and sends spectators, mostly out-late teenagers, screaming into the streets. By now a large mass that engulfs all it its path, the Blob resembles nothing so much as a rolling gelatinous amalgam of melted plastic and industrial waste.
At the time of the film’s release, the Blob would have been seen as another quirky monster along the lines of The Thing (1951) or the Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). Those films have been understood as figurations of perceived threats to American society, the first from Cold War communism, the second from an increasingly visible and assertive African American population. The Blob, though, has not conjured up anything so specific, although creeping 1950s moral rectitude might have been a good candidate. The time of a more direct reference has arrived, however, and at this point in history the ectoplasmic glob figures as a distillation of environmental poison come to life. Like Frankenstein, this fusion of detritus has returned to destroy not only those whose wanton disregard created it, but the innocents in the way as well.
The film the teenagers are watching when the Blob enters the theater is the 1955 work Daughter of Horror. In this largely forgotten German Expressionist knock-off, a young woman wanders nighttime streets among dicey individuals and is picked up by an abusive man. In flashback she re-visits a traumatic childhood incident and soon after kills her abuser. Pursued by a sadistic detective, she spends the night with other outsiders in a jazz club where she is beset by hallucinations and visions of guilt.
A film-within-a-film is often a significant moment in cinema, and in this case the female lead in a horror movie is the key to an important gender reversal in our present. The women in The Blob, unlike the woman they are watching on screen, tend to be deferential, soft spoken and passive. Jane, Steve’s girlfriend, is so quiet she can hardly be heard at times. In crises the women are prone to panic, and those who come in contact with the monster become hysterical fodder for the ooze. In this era, it would seem, any woman who is active and on her own like the main character in Daughter of Horror must be, by implication, a guilt-ridden psychotic killer.
Fast forward sixty years and once again the young are pointing at a monster, but this time the catastrophe is not science fiction. Recent strikes and protests by students have dragged the environmental crisis into full view, but in a turn-around from the gender clichés of The Blob, a strong and resolute young woman has become one of the most visible leaders of the movement. Sixteen-year old Greta Thunberg began protesting ecological disaster outside the Swedish parliament in August, 2018, an act that inspired school strikes in Australia in November, 2018. On March 15, 2019 she was joined by Extinction Rebellion and like-minded groups in a worldwide strike by more than a million students.
As was the case in The Blob, the act of calling attention to a looming horror has brought abuse upon the messengers and induced hysteria in onlookers. Now, though, it is largely males who are coming unhinged at what is transpiring on their screens. In the online British magazine Spiked Brendan O’Neill called Ms. Thunberg “chilling . . . positively pre-modern,” part of an “extinction-obsessed green cult.” The Spectator’sRoss Clark labeled her campaign a “well-crafted piece of PR,” and insisted that she answer a series of questions before being interviewed on BBC. In an attempt to portray action against climate change as an economic menace, the far-right party Alternative for Germany has dredged up fifties stereotypes and deemed Ms. Thunberg “psychotic”. Other commentators have equally distinguished themselves by mocking her appearance and Asperger’s syndrome.
Will the environmental coalition of the young be able to overcome the inane clichés of these passive spectators and keep the new Blob from overrunning the planet? What stopped the old one? Nothing, until Steve remembers that it turned away from the store’s walk-in freezer. Cold was the answer, so the authorities summon teens with fire extinguishers to temporarily freeze the creature, then call for a military plane to transport it to the Arctic.
As Steve comes out of the diner, which had caught fire in an ill-fated attempt at electrocution, Dave the policeman says “at least we’ve got it stopped.” In the film’s last words Steve replies “yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold.” The Blob is then, in the final shot, dropped into the polar region by parachute as music rises and a large question mark forms on screen.
This notion, the Artic as the last stop for monsters, has a history that goes back at least to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). Perhaps what was once considered an unworldly place seemed a fitting end for unworldly creatures. Whether this choice in The Blob is historically determined or whether we can credit screenwriters Theodore Simonson and Kay Linaker (as Kate Phillips) with prescience is moot. The question is, now that the Arctic ice is melting, are we are about to meet the monstrous forces spawned by years of environmental neglect?
The fact is, though, that we have already counted the first victims of the threat. Sea creatures are dying of microplastic ingestion, while island and coastal communities are being inundated by rising sea levels. At this point in the drama, it is unclear how our globalized, real-time sequel to The Blob is going to play out. Will we finally have the sense to listen to the young as they sound the alarm and warn us about what is approaching? Or, like the heedless citizens of Downingtown, will we instead continue to mock, disparage and ignore the messengers as we blithely go about our business? The question mark that took shape on that screen so long ago is once again hovering in the air.
