The characters in Them! find themselves in a disturbing situation. Something terrible is happening. Walls are torn open. There is destruction on a large scale. People are disappearing. A man is dead and his body has been injected with formic acid. These incidents are a puzzle that the characters are compelled to solve because that is the only way they can deal with a threat to their survival. But the anomalousness of events also represents another kind of threat because it challenges their faith in a stable world governed by an order of nature.

At first, the characters are in a state of denial; they refuse to acknowledge that the anomalies they are encountering are, in fact, anomalies. A strange sound must be the wind. An oversized print couldn't have been made by anything as large as the print seems to indicate. When they go to the store, with its torn out wall and destruction, there is horror and recognition -- something out of the ordinary is taking place. Amid growing recognition and investigation, there is then the scene of total horror -- the archetypal scream -- in which Pat Medford confronts the beast and viscerally expresses her sense of danger; her repulsion at its ugliness, and her recognition that they have lost their foothold in a reliable order of nature. Then, as the characters begin to understand what they are dealing with and how to fight it, the movie moves toward the restoration of the order of nature. The beasts go up in flames, so Pat Medford and Agent Graham can live in a world where it is safe to settle down and raise a family.

In the end, all gaps are filled and the broken pieces are put back together. First, the gaps in the understanding of the characters have been filled. The characters can now take all the fragments of information -- the sand print, the high-pitched sounds, the holes in the walls -- and fit them together into a coherent story. Second, the tear in the fabric of the natural order has been stitched back up, although we are left with the sense that other eruptions of the unnatural could emerge in the future. And third, the ants can no longer go on a rampage of castration, tearing things apart and creating the large holes that were their calling card.

Ultimately, all three of these gaps or tears are related. After all, it is the fear of castration as a violation of the natural order of life that is causing the gaps in understanding. When the characters put the story together and confront the danger, they undo the fear of castration at the same time.

To accomplish this, they have to follow the anomalous signs outside of the natural order and into a hidden realm of the unnatural, populated by vampire-like creatures that live underground and stalk the night. As part of this process, the characters see that the anomalous incidents are instances of some larger category -- giant mutant ants -- which ultimately makes it possible for them to put their world back together in one piece.

As viewers, we are in much the same situation as we vicariously experience the confusion and lack of knowledge of the characters, while we maintain the "privileged" position of safety and greater knowledge that is granted the audience. But our vicarious experience of the characters' confusion is only one of the ways the movie tries to invoke in us the feeling of being puzzled. It does so in another way by offering us anomalies that we may perceive consciously or outside of consciousness ( or that we may miss altogether). The anomalies begin right away, with an opening scene in which an airplane emerges into view from the distance, with a sound and appearance that could momentarily be mistaken for that of an insect. Since we know this is a movie about Them!, we are already a little on edge and ready to be frightened.

After recognizing the flying object is just an airplane, we then see it below us, (lower left) as if we are above it in the air. Below it on the ground (upper right) is a car that it appears to be keeping pace with. The plane looks vaguely like it is stalking the car, as if it is a bird of prey or some other flying creature, which can induce a sense of foreboding. A moment later, we learn that the pilot is merely communicating by radio with the car's occupants.

Later, Sgt. Peterson's partner gets another call on his car radio and at first it is impossible to make out the words. We sit there, uncertain if we have missed something or if the movie intends the radio message to be incomprehensible. Then we see that the message was unclear to Sgt. Peterson's partner, as well. With these scenes, the movie is playing with our perceptions, leaving us temporarily uncertain what the pattern of events is. It is giving us a briefer version of the state of confusion and mastery we experience as we watch the characters figure out what is taking place, where the ants are, and how they can be destroyed. But it is also inducing a sense of foreboding, in preparation for the horrors the movie has planned for us.

The movie creates another kind of puzzle by offering similarities between human society and the ants, which turn elements of the movie into echoes of each other -- the people in the gas masks and the black helicopter that have antlike features;  the use of poisons by the human characters and the ants; and the similar appearance of the human leaders in their headquarters and the ant queens in their dark nests. There is also the fascinating depiction of the entrance to the anti-ant headquarters that looks like a giant mouth, ready to swallow up two reporters, so the institution that is supposed to be saving humanity from the ants seems like it too is about to devour humanity. 

And there are the similarities, not between the people and the ants, but between the desert landscape and the ants, including a pattern of branches that looks like the face of an ant.

These are all instances in which two elements in the movie, both of which are shown, are made to look like one another. They can be distinguished from another set of similarities in which the ants have something in common with communism, Satan, witches, dragons, and so on, although the second element isn't shown directly in the movie.

Like the characters, we may be in a state of denial about these puzzles even as we are motivated to solve them at the same time. Both the denial and the desire to understand come from the same source since to understand is to take a journey into our own dark regions where we will confront our own dragons. As the movie unfolds and evokes our identification with the characters, it induces a desire in us to do just this. Put in terms of traditional psychoanalytic theory, it encourages us to explore the hidden recesses of our own unconscious thoughts and face whatever horrible truth is found there so we can overcome our own fear of being castrated and devoured, and cease fragmenting our world and filling it with anal deadness. 

But in trying to do this we are up against forms of disguise both in the movie and our own thoughts that are described by psychoanalytic theory. In one form of disguise, disturbing ideas are transferred so that one idea may be represented by different images and concepts in the movie. Thus, the meaning of the female genitals or anus as a castration wound ends up being transferred onto all kinds of images of holes or openings. Images of good parents are transferred onto Dr. Medford in one place, onto a police commander who cares about his men in another, and onto Sgt. Peterson as rescuer of the children in a third. In a second form of disguise, different ideas are transferred onto the same representation so they are condensed into it. Thus, Dr. Medford depicts not only a father but a king, a wizard, a child, a psychoanalyst, and the quality of insight in the mind. In a third form of disguise,  there are disconnections. Chronologies may be disrupted or cause and effect may be broken up so we don't see the connections between them. Agent Graham, for example, shows up nine years after the atomic explosions and after the first sequences of the movie. But, in the underlying fantasy, all of this is about him and he is there all along.

All three of these forms of disguise are based on the same activity of the mind in which A is given similarities to B so we will respond to A as if it is B, while there are also differences between A and B so we won't see this consciously. Giant holes are made to look enough like our fantasy images of castration so we will perceive them as if they are, but not so much like our image of castration that we will become consciously aware of what we are perceiving and experience an unacceptable increase in anxiety. 

So, in Them!, we are presented with a simulation of events in which fictions are made similar to what we might see in life, so we will react somewhat as if they are real. At the same time, these fictions are constructed out of a play of similarity to, and difference from, unconscious ideas and images that we project onto the world, as a way of challenging us to remember, but only in a small and safe way, while the movie, ultimately, allows us to continue our usual amnesia.

Some of the more obvious similarities in the movie, such as between the people and their technology and the ants, or between the anti-ant invasions and D-Day, are intended to help us remember by giving us a chance to have moments of conscious insight in which we get part of the movie's symbolism. Faced with Dr. Pat Medford in a gas mask, looking disturbingly antlike, some audience members can't help but have an "aha!" experience in which they get the movie's theme -- we are the ants. 

But more disturbing insights, such as the anal and oedipal qualities of the atomic explosion and the ants as castrating mothers, are not so obvious. Very likely, they are communications from the unconscious of the creators of the movie to our own unconscious, whose purpose is to make us feel we can overcome our internal demons, without getting too specific about what those demons are. 

Nevertheless, we can take Them! up on its invitation to remember, and with a zealousness its creators didn't consciously intend, by trying to follow all of the signs that are offered back to their sources in other domains of meaning -- about politics, myth, dehumanization, psychodynamics, and so on. In other words, we can try to make Them! -- and ourselves -- more transparent by treating the disguised similarities in the movie as portals to other stories. The similarity between the holes and castration are portals that lead into one of the stories the movie is made of, which deals with psychodynamic fears and desires. The similarity of ant society to communist societies leads to another story, about political perceptions and fears. All of this is in line with the idea that the raw material for representations is, in fact, other representations, an idea that partly derives from the literary theorist, Northrop Frye.

If we follow this approach, we end up "surfing" the web of representations, with Them! as our start page, as we click our way from one set of narratives themes to another, while  backtracking away from dead ends. As we do so, we stitch together a pattern that is the meaning of the movie. Put another way, we engage in what is sometimes referred to as "free association" but always coming back to the start page.

But even as we make progress in weaving together these apparent fragments into a coherent picture, we find ourselves facing the ultimate puzzle -- what do all these domains of meaning have to do with each other. All are there as a result of a process of "convergent displacement" by which meanings from different domains end of "occupying" the same representations. But what is the connection between references to communism, science, modernization,  dehumanization, dragons, Satan, witches, anality, incestuous desires, castration, nature, and growing up? In understanding these references, are we taking a journey into one primal nest of meaning or are we going into nest after nest, confronting one set of oversized creatures after another, with no obvious connection between them?

We already have a partial answer from previous sections which describe the ways some of these meanings intersect. Most notably, they describe the way communism, mutations, and some forms of rationality in modern America are viewed by the movie as something unnatural and inhuman, and as forms of deadness that we associate with anality. Behind the urges to abstract and order, the movie tells us, we will find a culture of dehumanization and  destructiveness, and we will find urges that express a fascination with the dead zone of the body -- the anus -- even if it is disguised by purifying it of dirt and containing and hiding its destructiveness. This extends into the movie's mythic symbolism, since Satan, dragons and witches are all images of morbid deadness and destructiveness. Satan, imbued with anality, is the reign of death in the world. Dragons make the land waste. Witches are the "hags" of death. Their bodies are constricted and broken, they move around at night; are in touch with the occult world, and devour children.

The meaning of these images reveals that the ants are an expression of a morbid death complex that is part of the human mind, which is fascinated not with death as something natural, but with death-in-life -- with turning life into a wasteland, and with corpses, anality, evil, the tomb, the unnatural, the occult, wastelands, and cold-blooded hate, all of which are involved with our morbid death complex. So what humanity is threatened by in Them! is its own morbidity. 

More specifically, the movie tells a story about the connection between science, responsibility and human morbidity. The story goes like this: We have attained new powers to manipulate reality. But we have used those power to express the dark side of our nature by creating the bomb, which is the ultimate expression of our tendency to make things dead. It now threatens to undermine nature and potency, and turn the world into a wasteland. Satan, witches, blight-carrying dragons, communism, dehumanization, anality, numbers and jargon, castration, mutations -- all converge on this central symbolism that tells us the bomb is the reign of death in the world -- a reign of death that we can already see in the characteristics of modern societies.

The characters' role is to go into the nest of death and stop it from multiplying. In a sense, what they encounter is the fertility of our morbid death complex -- how it can expand and turn the world into more of itself. Through our identification with the characters, we experience what it is like for our urge to live to triumph over morbid death, until, at the end, we see the male and female come together and know they will produce more life.

Seen from this perspective, Them! is one of many stories that tell us we can't be trusted with ultimate power -- that power corrupts and absolute scientific power could destroy us. As in the movie, Forbidden Planet, it tells us that if we develop the power to control the world, our own dark side will escape and turn the world to waste. As noted earlier, and in other places on this site, this is a basic theme of science fiction, which tells us so many variations on the Frankenstein story in which our own monstrous creations threaten to undermine reality and destroy the world. Here, the Frankenstein monster is a modern vampire that has to be killed to stop it from feeding off life and turning the world into more of itself.

But this theme concerning analized unnatural death is connected to another meaning in Them! that we find in much of science fiction and horror, and that takes us to the heart of the collective fantasy life of the West. There is a battle that is going on inside us -- do we unconsciously perceive our effort to gain control over the forces of nature as a normal and acceptable act of the maturing of the species? Or do we experience it as an oedipal and generational usurpation of power, an expression of corrupt motives, and a breaking of chains that we believe must bind us? As we learn how to control nature, are we "prying open" mother nature, castrating and raping her and revealing forbidden secrets, or merely going to a new level. Put more simply, do we feel we can be trusted with these new powers and that we have the right to enjoy them or that this will generate retribution or cause our own evil to go out of control? In Them!, our evil and oedipal desires do go out of control (or the character believes they did), in the explosion of the bomb as an act of fantasized or enacted analized incest or incestuous rape against mother nature. Then there is retribution as this act generates its progeny -- the castrating, devouring, mother come to mete out her revenge.

Perhaps, beset by guilt over these motives and the fear of retaliation, society and the individual are depicted as regressing into anality. It then infects everything and threatens humanity's future.

But, in the movie, these regressive fears are met by healthy progressive desires to mature as a species, become adult and affirm life, embodied in Agent Graham and the other characters in their capacity as truth seekers and problem solvers. In confronting their worst nightmares, they take an essential step as their wisdom begins to catch up with their power and life begins to conquer morbid death. Thus, they show themselves worthy by standing up to the danger and to their fears, and they take responsibility for their creation, manifesting precisely the qualities humanity did not show in the imprudent atomic testing nine years earlier. 

We see this conclusion repeated in other works of science fiction, in which humanity progresses beyond desires for oedipal overthrow and anal deadness and sadism, embodied in villains, monsters and mad dreams, as male and female come together and prepare to generate life and create a good society. In innumerable stories, from The Time Machine to Star Wars, young characters who represent a young society or a society being born learn how to be adult and use their powers to further the aims of life.

Them! is thus one of many stories that show us how we have projected our oedipal and generational dynamics onto technology and nature. It tells us that the attainment of new powers arouses fantasies of oedipality and retribution in us which come from the internalized image of parents and from our own projected aggression. And it depicts the development of humanity as taking the same form as the development of the individual toward maturity.

Like many of these other works, Them! tells us that the maturing of humanity is imperative now that its technology is expanding with such creations as atomic weapons, just as the development of emotional maturity becomes imperative in adolescents as they develop the anatomic "weapons" of sexuality and aggression.

All of this is suggested by the scientist's warning at the end, which contains the movie's final image of a hole or portal, and its final image of birth: "When man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What we eventually find in that new world nobody can predict."

What we are finding, of course, is ourselves. The message of the movie is that the outcome of this encounter is still undecided. Whether we end up discovering our ability to create life or death-in-life is up to us.

Notes