Santiago Quintero Vanderbilt University Of Ants and Men: Them!

and the Ambiguous relations between (Monstrous) Immigration and (Apocalyptic) Entomology

I. For the last 60 years, monsters have been one of the most popular causes of apocalyptic scenarios within pop culture. From extraterrestrial invasions and nuclear creatures to zombie pandemics, films, literature, video games and comic books have exposed a latent concern with an End of the World brought about by monstrosities. Of course, these anxieties are not fortuitous, and we need only remit to the etymologic meaning of the word (monstrum, from the latin root Monere which means to warn) for us to realize that in a literal or a symbolic way, its meaning traces an ontological, albeit not less blurry, division between an implicit Us and an explicit menacing Other. The second half of the 20th century enjoyed a privileged position in this monstrous renaissance, especially in the United States. Not only did the political scenario of the post WW2 and early Cold War conflicts serve as a petri dish for the configuration of numerous fantasies about invasive Others, but also technological advances, the fear of nuclear warfare, and the transformation of the U.S into a new world power, allowed Science Fiction films to perpetuate its own Golden Age. As Michael Richardson states in his book Otherness in Hollywood Cinema (2010) no institution has been more successful at binding together economic and cultural dominance on the world stage than Hollywood. (1) On balance, aside from some exceptions, namely King Kong (1933), the

decade of the Fifties witnessed a propagation of movies about Giant Monsters running amok that would long last in the seventh art industry. In this paper, I analyze how these apocalyptic fictions work as metaphors for concerns with global order and bio-politics. I also consider how Sci-fi has helped reconfigure the conceptual constructions of the invasive Other around the figure of the Monster, highlighting social anxieties vis--vis the imminent destruction of the actual socio-political order that lie just under the surface. By analyzing 1954s Them! by director Gordon Douglas, this paper presents how sovereignty conflicts between the U.S. and Latin America, especially Mexico, in the early Cold War period (1950-60s), reflect through the issue of Illegal Immigration, the latent fears of the moment. Finally, I argue that the semantics and aesthetics proposed in the film regarding the Apocalypse indicate a strong ideological and political standpoint in terms of conflict resolution (war, warfare, deterrence, etc.) and responsibility towards that Otherness. II. Alongside Ishirou Hondas 1954 Godzilla and Eugne Louris 1953 The Monster of 20,000 Fathoms, we can categorize Them! as one of the first Science Fiction films about nuclear monsters. And it was a fairly successful one, receiving several positive reviews and earning more than 2 million dollars of revenue in its first year. Despite this, critics have remained surprisingly silent about it. Aside from some mandatory mentions, Them! continues to remain unstudied. The reason is probably that Gordon Douglass movie is not necessarily the best paradigm to describe this type of production. Amazingly and regardless of the numerous attempts to stand out as an iconic front-runner

of the genre, from its production process to its plot details, Them! appears to be the black (and white) sheep of the family, rebel to forms, slippery to definitions. Susan Sontag in her famous article The Imagination of Disaster in her book Against Interpretation (1961), which is perhaps one of the firstif not the firstcritical studies on science fiction films, defines Science Fiction cinema, as films whose principal plot is never about science but about disasters. Movies in which science merely constitutes the medium, a moralistic peripeteia that either causes or resolves disaster through the irresponsible or beneficial use of technology (213). In this way, the gigantic monster that gives the title to the movie, is often the result of reckless nuclear testing, and its end is usually by the same magical science that set it free. Though Them! surely meets the nuclear requirements to fit into Sontags category, it surely fails the disaster part of the examination. Unlike Godzilla or Louris lizard Monster, whose terrible power threatenss to annihilate New York City and Tokyo, the horrific ants in Douglass movie barely manage to destroy anything. The sum of cataclysms produced by them adds up to a total of one trailer-home wrecked and one house trashed. If anything, the ambiguous running amok deeds of the ants feel more like felonies committed by a hideous criminal: murder, destruction of private property, kidnapping. Not in vain, the first scenes from the movie resemble a film Noir more than a Sci-Fi movie. This oscillation between genres is tremendously telling, particularly with regards to the topic of Otherness and immigration. Michael Richardson states that during the heydays of the Film Noir, in the early 40s (it is the cinematic predecessor of nuclear science fiction films), the Other was often regarded as a de-familiarized self rather than

as a foreign entity. In Noirs the self is not us but the amorphous and abstract devouring mechanics of the city in which we live and from which feel alienated. (85) The sudden appearance of marginal creatures in these films, criminals, homosexuals and immigrants (often related to exotic Asians or Latinos), denote a frantic disillusion or as Richardson states: an undersideof the American Dream in which the Land of Opportunity slowly turns into a dark space full of crimes and fear. In the end, the importance of this dialectic process is that it synthesizes a cultural metaphor of the Other that shares the aesthetic and ideological complexities from each of the two genres. On one hand, we have the apocalyptic monsters, products of the atomic era and, on the other, the hideous marginal character of the film noir, always threatening to multiply and take over the cities, alienating us from our own spatial and ideological reality. This is probably the reason why the metaphor of the Ant, the so called social insect, works so well in the movie: rather than destroying us with their hulk-like strength, the real apocalyptic danger posed by these bugs through the whole film is their ability to procreate. In one of the most iconic scenes of the movie, Edmund Gwenns character, Dr. Harold Medford, while addressing the UN with his team of scientists, explains that if the ants are not destroyed before they've established thriving colonies and can produce other ants, man, as the dominant species of life on earth, will probably be extinct within a year. Considering this, it appears to be that rather than dealing with absolute cataclysm, apocalyptic anxieties in Them! take upon the idea of colonial dominance. More than a disaster movie, we face a pre-catastrophic fantasy, a Cassandric narrative that foresees, rather than represents, a possible advent of the End of the World produced not

only by the atomic power of the monsters, but also by their ability to spread and conquer the world. Of course, this resonates immediately with one of the most representative social and political fears, which is the immanent threat from Communism. Cautionary Tales that, as Keith Booker argues, seem[s] genuinely designed as attempted interventions in contemporary debates concerning the Cold War... (65) In a curious precedent of the movie, which I believe serves as a historical and social background for the plot, American entomologist William Steel Creighton identified in 1930 an exotic new type of ant in the Alabama area. The new species, which later was declared to be a pest, was promptly described by the scientist as a chronic nuisance and a threat to The American Way of Life, referring mostly to the way their unsightly nests disfigure lawns (23). Interestingly, for Creighton, the destruction of a typical middle-class commodity also represented a threat to the nations dominant and self-conscious ideology, just as Cummunism represented a menace to capitalist ideals. Later, in a recent study from 2006, Professor Walter R. Tschinkel (also an entomologist), explains that this exotic species, now known as the Fire ant, actually came from South America, and that, coincidentally, it spread out in the same areas that were susceptible to illegal immigration (namely the Southwest and Southeast of the United States). Curiously, aware of this allegoric relation, Tschinkel regularly plays with the language he uses in his book to explain the whole process of migration done by the Solenopsis. Terms like La Conquista (The Conquest), used to refer to the spread out of the species, or descriptions in which the ant makes part of a hoard of immigrants that traveled to the United States without passport or visa(23), continue to reinforce the conceptual anxiety about the danger the Other constitutes for the preservation of the the

nations Status Quo, this time related to the cultural connection between Immigration and the monstrous metaphor of the insect. Naturally, mixed anxieties between the Cold War period and the postcolonial condition of Mexican immigration were not uncommon. Just in 1954, the same year Them! was released, the US governmentaware of the illegal immigration problem the Braceros Program causedlaunched the famous Operation Wetback aiming to help 2 million Mexican aliens to repatriate. Now, As Ronald L. Mize and Alicia C.S. Swords point out in their book Consuming Mexican labor: from the Bracero Program to NAFTA (2011), far from being a clean bureaucratic process, it was stained by serious racist and Texan-style Jim Crow segregation (27) behaviors. Racist to the point Governmental figures like Attorney General Howard Brownell sought the congressional approval to involve the US Military, as well as the organized labor in order to eliminate the undocumented by all means. (34) In the end, it seems that annihilation is the ultimate solutionin real life and in fictionto fight the immanent threat of the invasive Other. In the last part of the movie, for example, the spectator also is witness to a final showdown in which the hero, using a flamethrower, kills every single ant, including the queen and her eggs. Surprisingly, and regardless of the atomic monsters, these scenes overflow with a tremendous realism. Different from the formulaic apocalyptic movies, in which the solutions to the monstrous problem are usually brought about with incredible technological inventionsperhaps the same technology that caused the monster to run amokThem! resolves everything using regular, prosaic and realistic weaponry.

Despite that, I do believe that those are the scenes that actually ratify Them! as a science fiction movie. In the film noir, for instance, no matter how much the protagonists are surrounded by menacing and repulsive Others, the decision to eliminate one of them is still linked to an ethical conflict in which another human being, no matter how different he or she is, is going to be harmed. On the contrary, in Science fiction, it is the monstrous disguise concealing the Other that allows us to eliminate him without remorse. Without the sci-fi component, those final scenes would seem to be a massacre or to be part of a War movie in which ethical ambiguities are stressed, like Stanly Kubricks 1957 Path of Glory. Nonetheless, the scene has no ethical ambiguity, its even celebrated: humanity has been saved! Now, like Susan Sontag, I too believe that Science Fiction films temper the sense of otherness ,of alien-ness, with the grossly familiar this way perpetuating clichs about identity, social consensus and responsibility (225). Nonetheless, I also believe that these movies instead of allaying us from our real problems and anxieties by neutralizing them through the beatification of a fallacious and fantastic production, stress a very crucial ethical standpoint regarding conflict resolution. They normalize our responsibility and actions towards the Other and justify, under the aesthetic excuse of the disaster (or the Apocalypse), whatever decisions we make in order to maintain our lawns free from exotic ants. We eliminate the monster not only because it is a monster, but also because it is right to do so, it is not unethical. III. To conclude my essay I would like to jump forward in history. 56 years after Them! was released in theaters, Robert Rodriguez directed Machete (2010) and

presented, in my opinion, one of the most interesting stories about illegal immigration and the Mexico-US Border conflicts of the last years. In one of the most iconic scenes, the movie presents a television commercial about Senator McLaughlin, played by Robert de Niro, in which he proposes his campaigns solutions to the topic of Illegal Alliens in the US. The segment, that oscillates between the laughable and the scary parodying actual political campaigns, opens with a close-up on a bunch of Maggots crawling over each other allegorizing the immigrants and their conditions. A voice in the background follows: The infestation has begun, parasites have crossed our border and are sickening our countrydestroying us from the inside. The rest of the commercial is a synchronized succession of cinematic frames that intercalate images of Mexican people and insects, while the narrator states that Mclaughlin does approve solutions like an electrified fence and the negation of amnesty, just to finish up saying: he wants to protect you from the invaders Once, Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said that perhaps the history of the universe is the history of some metaphors. Metaphors that explain our existence, metaphors that relate to us in such profound ways that we continue to reproduce them: life as a path or a river; the temporality of a rose; love as prison, etc. Now, even though Borges never left the referential framework of poetry, I do believe the quote acquires a different tint in the light of the Senators example or Science fiction. It denotes the account of other Metaphors strong enough to change history, invade other countries and make us take political action.