I like big bugs and I cannot lie

Even children can get a handle on divining subtext and collective symbolic anxieties through the television, especially when it shows 1950's giant bug movies. I love them giant bugs... TARANTULA is tops, THEM the coliseum and even BEGINNING OF THE END the start of a full on pawty. Of course not all the big monsters of Atomic Age America are bugs, i.e. BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, but since an old girlfriend once termed them derisively "those giant bug movies," i.e. "ugh, you're not going to stay up all night  drinking whiskey and watching those giant bug movies again, are you?" I think of them that way.

In the hospital for week at age three for a minor operation: I'm in bed in a room with a television playing EARTH VS. THE SPIDER (1959) and the older kid in the room insisted on changing it because I was too young--I might get scared; he didn't understand that I was scared of the hospital and of him and of everything else and the only source of comfort, of relief from the anxiety, lay in the image of a giant spider super-imposed over a 1950s suburban neighborhood. Nowadays I can conjecture that my feeling of powerlessness as a three-year old lost in the hostile uncaring world of rectal thermometer-wielding nurses and humiliating hospital patient's smocks was allayed by seeing those humble creatures that man in his snobby superiority trods on now turned-large enough to tromp on him in just as callous a manner. I enjoyed seeing suburban houses that imprisoned my grounded friends crushed. And giant forbidding city buildings dads hid out in brought low.  If I was the size of the AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957) I could find that evil rectal nurse and break her in twain, and ditto that kid who turned the channel from EARTH VS. THE SPIDER. and I can't remember if I got him to turn it back or not, but I remember my outrage and horror that he would dare to change it. If I knew where that kid was today, I'd swear upon him an oath vile enough to raise the hairs on the necks of men, to make giant bugs out of... smaller bugs.

In the 90's after college, living in mid-town Manhattan in a loft over a Pita Grill; my only cure for the depressive blues was Leadbelly or an six-hour SLP video tape I'd made a decade earlier: TARANTULA - THE DEADLY MANTIS - THE GIANT CLAW. I loved them all, and still do. But they're now each in a DVD set and seen all clear and restored, and missing the fuzzy static they needed to seem 'alive.' They're still soothing, but not fuzzy warm soothing. You can see the sad ghost town emptiness of the sets, the smears of make-up on once-manly men of action and science, the gaffer glove left unnoticed in the corner of the frame. 

When stressed, even today, I can get calm just thinking about giant spiders menacing John Agar in the Arizona desert. The giant tarantula rooteth me, he maketh me lie down in arid Jack Arnold pastures. In fact thinking about TARANTULA has become better than seeing it. If I'm afraid of slashers and boogeymen, I dream of mutant ants for solace.

So why giant bugs? Why the 1950s, and atomic age anxiety? As we saw in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) for God there is no zero, no high or low - the life of a dung beetle equal in scope and importance to the life of an emperor. God doesn't recognize size, wealth, status, or relativity. SHRINKING MAN is an existentialist classic but it makes me feel lonely and adrift. The human protagonist is all alone in the end, and that's never fun. He needed a mate to shrink along with him, to go and repopulate the atomic core of existence: instead he goes it alone. A man needs friends, and a girl, if his bug enemies are truly to perish in the napalm flames Clint Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef in a bit part before they were famous, fires.

Camaraderie is key for a good bug movie, the easy and natural way citizens and various levels of law enforcement cope with catastrophe. With a common enemy, especially one that has no vocal chords with which to defend himself in the courts of our nation, America is an emproudening place to be. Without such an enemy, America must dress up its own foot as a sneaky terrorist and blow of its own toe like Uncle Sam in an old campfire tale I heard down in Maryland one spooky summer. More than just a symbolic manifestation of atomic and sexual anxiety, the giant bug is a good, wide target. That's why we need giant bugs. Would you like to know more? 

There is one film that I like even more now that I can see it in a theatrical aspect ratio: THE GIANT CLAW (1957). Jeff Morrow--with his hair of slick oily blackness-- is my new cranky idol. And that amazing bird / on a wire is no longer laughable, but truly psychedelic, wondrous and eternal.

Not to make this all about me, but I look at that face below, and I see a little bit of myself, and maybe, of us all, even that rectal thermometer-in-the-middle-of-the-night-trauma-inducing nurse. Now more than over, we need laser canons, and giant bugs, and giant birds to eat the bugs, and to destroy hospitals and homes and their cloying perfumed gardens. As the atomic bomb's loving father, Robert Oppenheimer once said, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." He was quoting the Baghavad Gita, but he was looking right into the New Year.