Making Tele-Contact: 3-D Film and the Creature from the Black Lagoon (Critical Essay‪)‬

Initially seen very much as a novelty item, as but one more element of the American film industry's response to what Annette Kuhn terms "the audience-stealing appeal of television" (26), 3-D cinema of the 1950s has typically been dismissed as a gimmick by critics and historians. Since it was used largely in fantastic genres (indeed, its most famous examples are probably from science fiction [It Came from Outer Space] and the horror film [House of Wax]), required viewers to wear unwieldy cardboard glasses, and seemed insistently to depend on effects that intruded into the audience's space, it came to be identified as a disconcerting if not quite threatening technique, and its quick disappearance seemed evidence of general audience dissatisfaction, especially with the sense of physical discomfort it caused, which pointedly flew in the face of its supposed rationale of luring audiences back into theaters. Yet this typical historical account of the form omits one of 3-D's more interesting effects, one that must have functioned as both an invitation and an imposition, an attraction and part of the disconcerting effect 3-D had on audiences. Paul Virilio's recent work on how the cinema and other modern communication technologies have affected our sense of reality might offer an interesting lead in this regard, adding a bit more depth and understanding to the historical view of 3-D film, particularly as it flourished in the early 1950s. By looking at one of the most famous 3-D films, Jack Arnold's The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), in terms of Virilio's notion of "tele-contact," we might better gauge both the appeal and disturbance of 3-D, perhaps even understand how part of what it offered was also part of its problem. Attendant upon the development of new technologies of vision and contact in the twentieth century, Virilio has noted a "crisis of the conceptualization of 'dimension'" (24). The automobile, airplane, our various audiovisual systems (including film), even contemporary architecture--all of which he groups under the heading of "means of communication"--have produced what he terms a "collection of spatial and temporal mutations that is constantly reorganizing both the world of everyday experience and the aesthetic representations of everyday life" and, in turn, affecting our very "perception of the environment" (21) we inhabit. And while our popular entertainments, especially film, have variously pursued Andre Bazin's famous formulation of the "myth of total cinema"--a myth involving convincing representation, including a natural "relief" or depth in reproduced images (20)--we have ironically produced a kind of "lost dimension" or draining of reality in Virilio's eyes. An element of that irony, I would suggest, shows up in one of the preeminent efforts at achieving that Bazinian "relief," 3-D film of the 1950s.