Themes of the Science Fiction formula film:

1. Fear of the future
   • America in the 1950s in the grip a a national emergency - "age of paranoia" - like film noir's theme of human inperfection and fear of the unknown
2. Vast destruction
   • "imagination of disaster" on a scale so vast that man will have no future, will lose control of his destiny and destroy himself - man is his own worst enemy
3. Federal government is agent of salvation
   • alien invasion starts local then grows; help flows national to local - stable institutions restore order (Army, SAC)
4. Science is good
   • "rule of reason" by technology and science (Sontag) - coalition of the center - soldiers and scientists
5. Us vs. Them
   • people vs. the pods & blobs & big bugs, culture vs. nature, moderates vs. extremists - film polarizes and defines both extremes, dehumanizes the enemy or reveals the enemy within - home is safe while danger is "out there" - sometimes Them are formed by our own creation and represent our own destruction.
6. Consensus solution
   • repressive (weapons destroy the monster from the superego) or therapeutic (consensus heals the monster from the id) - permissivesness and selfishness represent internal threat - need for reaffirmation of traditional values, patriotism, family, discipline, self-sacrifice

Resources:

• Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing; How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties, New York, Pantheon Books, 1983.
• Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, New York, Delta Books, 1967)
• Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics; The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, Boston, Unwin Hyman, 1988.
• J. P. Telotte, Replications, A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film, University of Chicago Press, 1995.
• Paul Sammon, Future Noir, The Making of Blade Runner, New York, HarperCollins, 1996.