4. Them! as Myth:
Satan, Dragons, Witches
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At the manifest level,
Them! condenses a number of recent myths and stories
that are essential elements of America's media culture.
It is a detective movie about cops
who nab a gang of killers and sugar thieves,
and see some of the seedier parts of the city,
(and literally see the underworld of the city), in the process.
Along the way, they encounter various well-known "types"
that are clichés of popular culture,
including an egghead doctor who speaks in gibberish
and drunks who talk to each other
as if they are members of the social elite,
as a way satirizing their own station in life,
and the pretensions of those elites, at the same time.
As noted, Them! is also a stirring war movie
in which American troops mass for a miniature D-Day,
a decade after the real one, and cross
not the English Channel, but into the storm drains.
Them! also has traditional gothic elements.
Here, the ants are a Frankenstein-like monster that runs amok,
after being created, not by a mad scientist,
but by mad science itself.
And they are vampire-like creatures that
live in a hole in the ground
and stalk the night, draining the life out of people,
with stingers and mandibles.
Dr. Medford is the eccentric genius-scientist,
who discovers the truth --
a figure we know well from Dracula and other gothic stories.
Barely beneath these expressions of
well-known cultural templates
there is a less obvious mix of ancient, Medieval and Faustian
myths and archetypes,
imbued with magic and romance.
Here, we are told a story about
chthonic monsters that rise up from the underworld
and threaten the world on the surface,
after humanity, in its lust for power,
takes Godlike or magical power
onto itself and upsets the order of nature.
Dr. Medford, who is a both a wise man or
wizard and an old King,
and the FBI agent, Robert Graham, who is a young hero or knight,
lead the fight to save humanity. They destroy the monsters in the underworld
with flame throwers for swords
and bazookas for catapults.
In the end, having gone through a process of initiation
in which he finds the qualities in himself needed to
stand up to the beast,
the young hero -- the FBI agent -- wins the king's daughter.
That Dr. Medford plays the role of a wizard
in this myth is obvious.
His science gives him seemingly magical knowledge and abilities.
He is also an impish character
with qualities associated with trickster figures.
He is small in stature and has secret knowledge,
and he constantly undermines the world of rules and regulations
by refusing to obey its dictates.
He is also an old and infirm King who needs an heir,
as shown by the fact that the other characters
look to him as an authority.
He is the one who gives the speeches,
leads the meetings and makes the essential decisions,
even as the others cater to his needs,
because he is older and somewhat frail.
The beast is a flying dragon that
has brought blight to the land,
as seen in the desolate landscape haunted by
a howling wind.
It is the dragon slain by Saint George,
in a rescue of the King's daughter.
Perhaps, it is the Gorgon Medusa killed by Perseus, in Greek legend,
and the sea monster he kills to rescue Andromeda.
And perhaps the entire nest is like the Greek Hydra,
a monster with many heads.
In place of fangs, the monster has mandibles;
in place of horns it has antennae.
The creatures are also Satan who emerges from Hell to devour humanity.
Although they are consumed by fire
instead of living with fire as their element,
they produce the burning liquid, formic acid.
Like Satan and some of these other mythic creations,
they are a force of death which means they are associated not only with blight
but with the underworld and crypts
(the underground nests),
and with graveyards (the "graveyard" with the skeletons of victims).
The ants -- especially the queens -- are also witches,
which means the effort to expose and destroy them
in their role as disguised communists, is literally a witch-hunt.
Created by some horrible magic
they fly through the air
and prowl the night looking for people to devour.
In one scene, we see an ant that even looks like a witch,
with a long phallic "nose" and bulging eyes.
Like the witches we know from fairly tales,
the ants kidnap children, take them into their abode,
and prepare to eat them.
Actually, in the movie, the children are said to have
run into the storm drains themselves
to escape the ants, although it turned out they ran
right into the ant's nest area.
But the effect is the same -- children held captive
by gruesome, witchlike, creatures.
The conclusion, in which the children are rescued
just before they are about to be eaten,
is the same as we see in fairy tales, as well.
Thus, the movie takes stories of horror and monsters
that are universal and have long histories,
and that play to primitive fears in the human heart,
and it combines them with the science of movie-making
to tell a universal story about life
and the dangers facing the modern world.
It uses myth and legend as raw material to offer social criticism,
and a warning about the future,
providing an example of the way the creations of the past
are used to point to an unknown future.
And like many of the contemporary myths found in movies,
it also tells a story about the development
of the individual and society,
in which the monsters are occasions for growth
as the central characters go through
a process of initiation.
But Them! isn't merely a depiction
of the social situation of the 1950s
that expresses ideas about dehumanization
through the archetypes of monster movies
and the myths they are built on.
The movie is itself now a kind of myth
and it has played a significant role in shaping the genre
of movies about mutant nature that turns against man.
Four and a half decades later,
now that it seems as if humanity
is itself entering a time of myth
in which the world of machine-death has expanded
with computers, and biological and chemical weapons,
and with the numbing, symbolic, violence of media,
what the movie has to say about the way
aggression, dehumanization and the unnatural
can be produced by modern society
has taken on new relevance.
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We now go deeper into the movie,
to reveal the psychodynamics it embodies.
(These pages are password
protected.
You can email editor@transparencynow.com
for access.)
