JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 140 из 359" The atomwas not split by a gibbering Colin Clive or Boris Karloff in some Eastern European Mad Lab; it was not done by alchemy and moonlight in the center of a rune-struck circle; it was done by a lot of little guys at Oak Ridge and White Sands who wore tweed jackets and smoked Luckies, guys who worried about dandruff and psoriasis and whether or not they could afford a new car and how to get rid of the goddam crabgrass on the lawn. Splitting the atom, producing fission, opening that door on a new world that the old scientist speaks of at the end of Them! -these things were accomplished on a business-as-usual basis.
People understood this and could live with it (fifties science books extolled the wonderful world the Friendly Atom would produce, a world refueled by nice safe nuclear reactors, and grammar school kids got free comic books produced by the power companies), but they suspected and feared the hairy, simian face on the other side of the coin as well: they feared that the atom might be, for a number of reasons both technological and political, essentially uncontrollable. These feelings of deep unease came out in movies such as The Beginning of the End, Them!, Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man (where radiation combined with a pesticide causes a very personal horror for one man, Scott Carey), The H-Men , and Four-D Man . The entire cycle reaches its supreme pinnacle of absurdity in Night of the Lepus , where the world is menaced by sixty-foot bunnies.*
The concerns of the techno-horror films of the sixties and seventies change with the concerns of the people who lived through those times; the big bug movies give way to pictures such as The Forbin Project (The Software that Conquered the World) and 2001, which both offer us the possibility of the computer as God, or the even nastier idea (ludicrously executed, I'll readily admit) of the computer as satyr, which is laboriously produced in Demon Seed and Saturn 3 . In the sixties, horror proceeds from a vision of technology as an octopus-perhaps sentientburying us alive in red tape and information-retrieval systems which are terrible when they work ( The Forbin Project ) and even more terrible when they don't: In The Andromeda Strain , for instance, a small scrap of paper gets caught in the striker of a teletype machine, keeps the bell from ringing, and thereby (in a fashion Rube Goldberg certainly would have approved of ) nearly causes the end of the world.
*And a host of others, many of them Japanese imports, all linked by either long-term radiation or nuclear blast as first cause: Godzilla, Gorgo, Rodan, Mothra, and Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster .
People understood this and could live with it (fifties science books extolled the wonderful world the Friendly Atom would produce, a world refueled by nice safe nuclear reactors, and grammar school kids got free comic books produced by the power companies), but they suspected and feared the hairy, simian face on the other side of the coin as well: they feared that the atom might be, for a number of reasons both technological and political, essentially uncontrollable. These feelings of deep unease came out in movies such as The Beginning of the End, Them!, Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man (where radiation combined with a pesticide causes a very personal horror for one man, Scott Carey), The H-Men , and Four-D Man . The entire cycle reaches its supreme pinnacle of absurdity in Night of the Lepus , where the world is menaced by sixty-foot bunnies.*
The concerns of the techno-horror films of the sixties and seventies change with the concerns of the people who lived through those times; the big bug movies give way to pictures such as The Forbin Project (The Software that Conquered the World) and 2001, which both offer us the possibility of the computer as God, or the even nastier idea (ludicrously executed, I'll readily admit) of the computer as satyr, which is laboriously produced in Demon Seed and Saturn 3 . In the sixties, horror proceeds from a vision of technology as an octopus-perhaps sentientburying us alive in red tape and information-retrieval systems which are terrible when they work ( The Forbin Project ) and even more terrible when they don't: In The Andromeda Strain , for instance, a small scrap of paper gets caught in the striker of a teletype machine, keeps the bell from ringing, and thereby (in a fashion Rube Goldberg certainly would have approved of ) nearly causes the end of the world.
*And a host of others, many of them Japanese imports, all linked by either long-term radiation or nuclear blast as first cause: Godzilla, Gorgo, Rodan, Mothra, and Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster .