There’s only one essay I’ve read that gave me equal insight into pop-culture media and ‘what it all means’ and left me a similar sensation of having a deep truth explained to me for the first time clearly. That essay looked at the low budget sci-fi movies that were produced from the late forties through the late fifties. According to the essayist, in those post-atomic, jet-age years, those movies expressed our new found cultural fascination with science and the scientist, both previously icons of derision, and our deep fear of what wonders or nightmares they might next unleash on an innocent and unsuspecting humanity. Godzilla, a figure I’d always found completely laughable and not the least bit frightening or convincing, was cast by the author as symbolic of the weapons of the US military in WWII: the common Nipponese going naively about his/her own business when out the blue, out of the east, out of the fathomless emptiness beyond the shore, comes sudden, indiscriminate horror and chaotic, overwhelming destruction; just like that delivered by B-29s ten years before. The entire society mobilizes to stop it, yet cannot. It disappears as quickly as it came, leaving collapsed building, raging fires and piles of dead in its’ wake.

The UFO, the alien species, becomes representative of our fears of the “other”, the alien culture, alien race; not sharing our values, our familial bonds, our community, bent on our destruction or our submission. Very similar, the author positted, to our fear first of the Japanese and the Nazi fascist, then of being overwhelmed and occupied or annihilated by the godless, inhuman communists. I was never able to watch campy old science fiction movies quite the same way after reading that.