The Atomic Scientist, Science Fiction Films, and Paranoia: The Day the Earth Stood Still, This Island Earth, and Killers from Space

A commonplace of modern perceptions of the scientist is the scientist as a liminal figure, potentially hero, potentially villain. In the popular imagination the scientist who may cure ills and create utopian possibilities is also potentially the mad scientist bent on world destruction. Idealist Victor Frankenstein, transformed into an obsessed, monster-producing man, and Dr. Jekyll, transformed in the sanctity of his laboratory into Mr. Hyde, are two archetypal figures with whom modern scientists have been associated. The scientist as messiah figure bordering on apocalyptic destroyer partakes of the logic of paranoia. In postwar American society, heightened interest in the scientist focused on one particular type of scientist-the atomic scientist flush with the success of the Manhattan Project. Interest in the atomic scientist and cultural paranoia joined in both the "real" world of nuclear physics and in popular representations of the atomic scientist to reframe the savior/destroyer dichotomy within an atomic age in which the scientist literally did increasingly possess the ability to bring about apocalyptic destruction. The heyday of the atomic scientist as potential world-policy shaper extended from approximately 1945 to 1963, and one genre continually explored the ramifications of the atomic scientist and his place in postwar American society-science fiction. In this essay, I focus on three sf films, The Day the Earth Stood Still, This Island Earth, and Killers from Space, which captured for the popular imagination ambivalences surrounding atomic scientists, ambivalences which were framed within a paranoiac discourse which characterized Manhattan Project scientists' portrayal of their mission to the postwar American public. Paranoia provides a strong model for analysis of sf film especially because film creates a forum in which visual representation of the totalizing systems of the paranoiac is possible.1 The worlds created by these three sf films provide representations of the visual, frequently cinematic delusions of paranoiacs. Film supplies a medium whereby the auditory and visual hallucinations of paranoia may have a tangible existence on the screen. Thus what might be called metaphorically the private film in the head of the individual paranoiac may be transformed into a systematized light-and-sound delusion available to an audience. One specific totalizing delusion represented by sf films is the delusion of the atomic scientist as messianic figure. The messianic figures of Klaatu and Barnhardt in Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Cal Meacham in Joseph Newman's This Island Earth (1954), and Doug Martin in W. Lee Wilder's Killers from Space (1954) may trace their lineage back to Daniel Paul Schreber. In Schreber's classic text of paranoia, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), which became the basis for Freud's theory of paranoia, Schreber presents himself as a messiah for a new world order. Schreber believes that God has chosen him to be the mother of a new race of humans following a world catastrophe in which he is the only human spared. Schreber believes that rays are transforming his body into a female one. He comments on the singularity of his experience: "in fact since the dawn of the world there can hardly have been a case like mine, in which a human being entered into continual contact, that is to say no longer subject to interruption, not only with individual departed souls, but with the totality of all souls and with God's omnipotence itself" (88-89). As messiah, Schreber is given revelations into the workings of God and the Order of the World, revelations which no human has experienced before. Schreber states that "I had to solve one of the most intricate problems ever set for man and.... I had to fight a sacred battle for the greatest good of mankind" (130). Schreber must not only propagate a new human species, but must fight for the protection of the Earth itself, for example, traveling to Brazil to build a wall protecting "God's realms against an advancing yellow flood tide," which he takes to be a syphilis epidemic (87). …