Us Or Them!: Silent Spring and the "Big Bug" Films of the 1950S‪.‬

* It is now widely acknowledged that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), one of the central texts of the modern environmental movement, is as much a work of science fiction as of science fact. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer have argued that Silent Spring is rooted in the apocalyptic imagination characteristic of the dystopian, technophobic strain of science fiction: terming Carson's grim "Fable for Tomorrow" a "brief experiment in science fiction" ("Silent Spring" 177), one that "invokes the specter of 'evil science' (embodied in popular culture as the mad scientists of comic books and the egghead aliens of science fiction movies)," Killingsworth and Palmer demonstrate that Carson utilizes the techniques of projective fiction to puncture the twin dreams of unlimited scientific progress and absolute human mastery of the physical environment on which the pesticide industry traded ("Millennial Ecology" 30). Readings of Carson's debt to science fiction have focused on her manipulation of the nuclear-nightmare narratives of the Cold War era. Thus Lawrence Buell, in his chapter on "Environmental Apocalypticism" in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995), writes "Carson's prose ... draws on the apocalyptic frame of reference that high-tech militarism and years of Cold War consciousness have implanted in her readers' minds" (293), while Ralph H. Lutts suggests that Carson, by "sounding an alarm about a kind of pollution that was invisible to the senses" and that "could result in cancer, birth defects, and genetic mutations," was subtly connecting pesticides to a more familiar poison: "Pesticides could be understood as another form of fallout" (19). (1) In these readings, what distinguishes Carson as science fiction writer is the speculative nature of her rhetoric: in chapters such as "Through a Narrow Window" and "One in Every Four," where Carson freely admits a lack of conclusive evidence linking pesticides to cancer and genetic mutation, or in "Nature Fights Back," where she extrapolates from current trends of insect resistance to imagine armies of super-insects descending on a nation already enfeebled by its own thoughtless devices, Carson mobilizes readers' hopes and fears by conjuring visions as fantastic as those dreamed up by the industry she assails. With this image of insect armies in mind, I would like to propose that Carson's science fictional rhetoric draws not only on the nuclear tradition but on an allied discourse: the narrative of alien invasion, and specifically of insect invasion, that peaked with the so-called "big bug" films of the 1950s. Alien invasion narratives are practically synonymous with modern science fiction, dating at least to H. G. Wells's 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. They also constitute a genre of peculiar longevity and durability in the American popular imagination, with roots as deep as the Salem witch trials of 1692, which were steeped in the tropes of invisibility, contagion, and identity confusion that would remain fundamental to the genre. (In an indigenous context, one might even consider such narratives inseparable from the arrival of invading foreigners in the Americas.) In the decade before the publication of Silent Spring, this pervasive fantasy was expressed with particular frequency and fervency throughout U.S. popular and political discourse; from communists to homosexuals to rock 'n' roll, Americans imagined legions of subversive enemies worming into the social fabric. Motion pictures of the decade followed suit, with films such as The Thing from Another World (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955), and The Blob (1958) remaining staples of the science fiction cinema. Paralleling this tradition, the "big bug" films--including Them! (1954), Tarantula (1955), The Deadly Mantis (1957), The Black Scorpion (1957), Beginning of the End (1957), and Earth v. the Spider (1958)--pictured in the epidemic