Vegetable Discourses in the 1950s US Science Fiction Film

Abstract

The 1950s cycle of US science fiction films is known for its often outlandish representations of all manner of nonhuman others, which provide a means, in turn, for articulating a broad range of Cold War fears over the threats posed by “them” versus “us”—fears of national border incursion, of brainwashing or alien mind control, of violence or mass destruction perpetrated, for example, by space aliens, by mutated earth creatures, by prehistoric earth creatures, or even by robots, minerals, or plants, as genre filmmakers explored a whole range of possibilities. This chapter will argue that these films develop a distinctive and largely negative discourse about the vegetative over the course of the decade and into the early 1960s (as the initial Cold War wave of US science fiction subsided). Of ongoing significance to the genre, this discourse locates in the botanical a particularly threatening form of otherness, characterized by a disposition toward and means for rapid invasion and, sometimes, actual physical attack, combined with a chilling lack of emotion.