Screen Enemies of the American Way: Political Paranoia About Nazis, Communists, Saboteurs, Terrorists and Body Snatching Aliens in Film and Television

241 Pages·2010·2.42 MB·English

by  Fraser A. Sherman

Screen Enemies
of the American Way
ALSO BY FRASER A. SHERMAN
Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan:
Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films Made for Television
(McFarland, 2000; paperback 2009)
The Wizard of Oz Catalog: L. Frank Baum’s Novel, Its Sequels and
Their Adaptations for Stage, Television, Movies, Radio, Music Videos,
Comic Books, Commercials and More(McFarland, 2005)
Screen Enemies
of the American Way
Political Paranoia About Nazis, Communists,
Saboteurs, Terrorists and Body Snatching
Aliens in Film and Television
FRASER A. SHERMAN
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
Acknowledgments: This book would have been harder to write and
poorer in final quality without the help of my friend and fellow movie
buff Ross Bagby, who suggested a lot of movies, taped more than a few,
and helped me figure out which X-Filesepisodes were absolutely essen-
tial.
It would also have been a lot harder without the many writers ref-
erenced in the bibliography, whose work was invaluable in making sense
of the movies and their times.
And a special thanks to my fiancée, LeAnn Spradling, for her sup-
port and patience while I was working on this.
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Sherman, Fraser A.
Screen enemies of the American way : political paranoia about Nazis,
Communists, saboteurs, terrorists and body snatching aliens
in film and television / Fraser A. Sherman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978-0-7864-4648-3
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
1. Motion pictures—political aspects—United States. 2. Motion
pictures—Social aspects—United States. 3. Television and politics—
United States—History. 4. Television—Social aspects—United
States. 5. Paranoia in motion pictures. 6. Motion
pictures—United States—History. I. Title.
PN1995.9.P6S54 2011 791.43'658—dc22 2010048313
British Library cataloguing data are available
©2011Fraser A. Sherman. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, i ncluding photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without p ermission in writing from the p ublisher.
On the cover: Jeff Bridges in the 1999 film
Arlington Road(Rogue Pictures/Photofest)
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1. German Fifth Columns: The Hun, the Third Reich and the Rise
of the Fourth Reich 7
2. The Yellow Peril and the Fear of Japan 27
3. The Red Menace: Bolsheviks, Commies and Atheists in America 44
4. Red Scare: Fifth Column Anticommunist Films from 1949 to 1960 55
5. Communist Fifth Columnists After 1960 73
6. Muslim Fifth Columns in America 89
7. Invasion of the Body Snatchers 97
8. Brain Eaters, Human Duplicators and Other Science Fictional Fifth
Columns 111
9. Invaders, X-Files and Dynamators: Alien Fifth Columns on
Television 134
10. Sexual Politics and the War Between Men and Women 146
11. The Master Race 153
12. Satanic and Supernatural Infiltration in Film and Television 157
13. Miscellanea: Corporate Takeovers, Secret Societies and the JFK
Assassination 163
Appendix 1: Film Credits 181
Appendix 2: Television Series Credits and Synopses 209
Bibliography 213
Index 215
v
To my family: Dad, Mum, Craig, Tracy, Marianne and Paige.
To Cindy and Dori, who are as close as family.
And to LeAnn, who changed my life so much for the better—
I could have done it without you, my love,
but it wouldn’t have been half as much fun.
vi
Introduction
From the beginning, Americans have worried about the enemies within.
Evil, un–American adversaries, who have betrayed the founding principles of the
United States. Enemies who want to subvert the nation and destroy its free, democratic,
independent character.
There were Jacobins, admirers of the French Revolution intent on spreading its tactics
and its mob rule to North America. There were the Freemasons, who drank the blood of
their enemies; their secret pacts to each other trumped their loyalty to the U.S.A. And,
of course, Catholics, who’d stop at nothing to bring this bastion of Protestantism under
the Catholic yoke.
In 1835, telegraph inventor Samuel Morse warned that Austria plotted to install one
of its royal family members as emperor of the United States with the help of Jesuit mis-
sionaries and “the minds and the funds of despotic Europe.” Chinese coolies and later
Japanese farmers were seen as imperial agents hoping to claim the Pacific Coast for their
respective emperors. In the early twentieth century, German spies plotted all manner of
devilry, and the Elders of Zion schemed to take over America and the world.
After World War I, Bolshevik immigrants threatened to stir up the workers and
wreck the American economy. Nazi fifth columnists sought to cripple America before
World War II, as did Japan’s Black Dragon Society. After World War II, the American
Communist Party, under direct orders from Moscow, committed murder and sabotage
until the heroic agents of the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee
brought the traitors down. And at the end of the century, we learned that entire towns
were infiltrated with Satanists who tortured pets, murdered witnesses and molested chil-
dren.
In the 21st century we have some Americans convinced that Hispanic immigrants
are agents of “reconquista,” plotting to seize the Southwest back from the U.S.A. And
that all American Muslims are allied with radical Islam to destroy the West. That George
W. Bush authorized the 9/11 attacks and Barack Obama is a Muslim sleeper agent.
Every one of these paranoid fantasies has had fervent believers, not only among fringe
extremists and oddballs, but in the mainstream and the corridors of power. Henry Ford
believed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the American government had hundreds
of thousands of Japanese-Americans interned as a threat in World War II; fear of com-
munism was as widespread and mainstream in the 1950s as the fear of Muslims is today.
With these fears of infiltration so widespread, it’s no surprise that fears of a fifth col-
umn have been a recurrent feature in American movies.
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INTRODUCTION
Nazi fifth columnists plotted mass destruction in All Through the Night. Little Tokyo
USA, Across the Pacificand Betrayal From the Eastshowed that even American-born Japa-
nese were more loyal to their emperor than to America. Big Jim McLain branded com-
munists as worse than lepers and charged that all American communists were guilty of
high treason. TV’s 24 shows Islamic terrorists hiding among us like ordinary people;
Arlington Road showed the same was true of terrorists on the radical right.
The same fear has been translated into science fiction and horror films: Invasion of
the Body Snatchers had emotionless pod people living among us, scheming to replace the
rest of us. In Rosemary’s Baby, Mia Farrow discovers that everyone around her, even her
husband, is part of a Satanic conspiracy. In The Stepford Wives, Katharine Ross realizes
that the women around her have all been transformed into something inhuman and she
worries she’ll be next.
This book is about political paranoia and the fear of the fifth column, as it’s been
captured in film and television. Since films in this vein aren’t a clear-cut genre the way
“western” or “mystery” is, I’ll start by defining my terms.
The fifth column. Spain’s General Emilio de Mola, who fought on the Nationalist
side in the Spanish Civil War, is credited with coining the term in 1936. De Mola
announced that in addition to four columns converging on Madrid, a “fifth column” of
Nationalist supporters was waiting inside the city to rise up and strike. “Fifth column”
entered the language as a term for infiltrators, agents living among us, pretending to be
one of us but secretly working against us (whoever “us” might be) on behalf of some
outside master.
Political paranoia.As Richard Hofstadter puts it in The Paranoid Style in American
Politics, political paranoia is different from the clinically defined mental illness. Clinical
paranoids fear they’ve been personally targeted; political paranoids see their entire country
under the gun. Clinical paranoids worry someone’s poisoned their coffee; political para-
noids believe communists are poisoning America by putting fluoride in the water.
The Game is a gripping story of paranoia as businessman Michael Douglas finds
himself caught in a web of danger, unable to figure out what the rules are, who’s behind
it or who is on his side—but it’s a personal threat, not targeting anyone else. Likewise,
Sean Gullette in Piappears to be surrounded by conspiracies; they’re focused on him, not
America.
In some of the films in this book, on the other hand, the target of the conspiracy is
the entire country. Even when the protagonists are at personal risk, it’s only part of the
overall threat: Kurt Russell in The Thingknows one of his friends is an alien shapeshifter
plotting to kill him, but the long-range goal is world conquest. In the original The Stepford
Wives, the men of Stepford are plotting to replace Katharine Ross with a robot duplicate,
but they’re doing the same to every woman in her town.
Political paranoia has little to do with any real threat; as Hofstadter put it, if fluori-
dation turned out to be harmful, it still wouldn’t make it a communist plot. When there
is a real threat, political paranoia blows it all out of proportion: Japan did have spies in
America, but interning all Japanese as traitors was politically paranoid. All the convicted
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Introduction
Japanese spies were Caucasian. The Soviet Union had an espionage operation too, but
contrary to I Led Three Lives and I Was a Communist for the FBI, the Communist Party
of the United States of America (CPUSA) wasn’t composed entirely of Soviet agents, and
didn’t murder people who opposed it.
The book is about the American movies in which America has been infiltrated by
the enemy, whether that enemy is Japanese, German, Muslim, Soviet or extraterrestrial.
The people around you aren’t what they seem; even your friends and family may not be
who you think they are; and the reality behind the facade is a threat to your way of life,
your country, and possibly your entire world.
That kind of political paranoia has been a constant in America, and the movies
mirror that. Hollywood hasn’t covered all the forms of political paranoia—the movies
don’t have a history of anti–Freemason, anti–Semitic or anti–Catholic stories—but it has
reflected many of our fears as America has moved through World War I, World War II,
the Cold War and the War on Terror.
While the different waves of paranoia might seem to be separate phenomena, they
have a lot in common. As Susan Sontag said of science fiction films, the “imagination of
disaster” is the same in every age: The fifth column may differ in details, but all that really
matters is that they hate our freedoms (or our capitalism, or our democracy, or for aliens,
our emotions) and want to destroy them.
Or as my friend and fellow film buff Ross Bagby has put it, fifth columnists and
enemy spies are “bogeymen”—generic, interchangeable adversaries. Soviet villains, for
example, are never motivated by love or patriotism for their own country, but only by
hate for America. The USSR itself has no character in most movies other than to be “the
enemy”; it has no history, no scenic beauty, no literature or music, nothing that might
inspire affection from its citizens. Movies such as Jet Pilot and Silk Stockings show that
exposure to good American food or jazz is enough to convince some Russians to switch
sides. Bogeymen aren’t defined by who they are or where they come from as much as by
not being American.
As a result, the different strains of bogeymen blur together. RKO’s The Whip Hand
assumes that a Nazi scientist will be just as happy working to destroy America for the
Reds; Strange Holiday, an anti–Nazi short released in 1945, was rereleased in the 1950s as
an anticommunist short, just by replacing the swastikas with a made-up symbol.
Or consider 1999’s Arlington Road. Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack play right-wing
terrorists but since nothing is said about their agenda other than their hatred for “godless
society,” they could just as easily be post–9/11Islamic terrorists—or for that matter sixties
radicals or agents of SPECTRE The villainous South African diplomats in Lethal Weapon
2 (1989) could just as easily have been villainous Soviets if the Cold War hadn’t been
coming to an end; instead, South Africa, with its apartheid government, served equally
well in the role of an evil nation we don’t like, and whose representatives can therefore
be assumed to be plotting evil.
Likewise, the Rambo cartoon of the late eighties showed us that ninjas, Nazis, Arab
terrorists and street punks with Mohawks can all work together in a common cause, as
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