The Incredible Shrinking Man: Our Shrinking Place in the Universe

    Last class, we watched the 1957 Science Fiction classic “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” In the film, Grant Williams plays Scott Carry, a man who’s hit with a toxic mist while on vacation with his wife. This mist causes him to begin rapidly shrinking in size. At first, he only loses a few inches, then begins to lose two feet, and in the final stretch of the film becomes smaller than a spool of thread. The film can be interpreted in any number of ways, but I am going to examine it through the lens of Modernism. Modernism is a term that usually refers to a cultural shift that began in the early 20th Century of American and European history, arguably around 1930. The term is used to refer to a philosophical movement in which people we’re becoming self-aware in an increasingly industrialized world. People began turning away from religion and organizations like the church to become more immersed in the realm of science, logic, and free thinking. New forms of art, literature, and new media such as photography/film are examples of modernism. One concept to be examined and debated was the idea of the traditional nuclear family. The film was released less than twenty years after world war two. Scott’s shrinking body could be a representation of mans shrinking place as the “Head” of the household. During World War II, many women began to enter the workplace to fill in for many of the men who were overseas fighting in Europe. When they came back, many women didn’t like the idea of having to step aside and return to the sole role of mother, and child bearer. This became the spark for many woman's rights movements. Scott begins the film in a place of dominance, making his wife get him a beer, and ends the film with his wife being forced to provide him with food, shelter, and safety. He is possibly becoming obsolete in a world that is no longer ruled and decided over solely by men. Scott's realization is that he’s simply a single person in a larger universe is what the films ends on, and the audience could see this as a message of globalization. The US was no longer a country able to act on its own but now had to be part of a greater union after the events of two world wars.