Inhuman Bitches of the 1950s III: Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman (1958)

Somewhere in what appears to be the California dessert, a woman drives a car alone at night.

As she drives, we hear and see news reports about some kind of extraterrestrial vehicle that’s been sighted around the world. It’s expected soon in California. Lo and behold! The woman encounters the thing: it’s a great, huge, white, glowing sphere! Earth is going to be attacked by overgrown ping-pong balls! Understandably, given the intrinsic dangers of table tennis—let alone intergalactic table tennis—the woman starts screaming her head off. From the mega-pong emerges a massive anthropoid hand, reaching for her. She runs screaming into the dessert and gets away.

Meanwhile, we learn that her husband, Harry, is cheating on her with a remarkably amoral girl named Honey. Harry and Honey. So cute. Except that they are both steaming pools of norovirus upheaval, morally speaking. Harry reveals that he’s only staying with his wife because she’s worth millions and millions of dollars. Harry and Honey start scheming about killing her, or having her involuntarily committed to a sanatorium for her alcoholism.

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Meanwhile, the wife, Nancy Archer, emerges from the desert, saying a 30-foot giant attacked her. No one really believes her—because, although rich, she is also the town drunk—but she eventually convinces her husband to drive her out into the dessert to look for the thing. They find the alien ship and the alien! In keeping with his already-established awesomeness, Harry allows Nancy to be abducted by the alien. Rather pleased at this turn of events, he abandons her and runs home to steal her stuff.

Because Harry is a prince.

But oops: the butler doesn’t like him, and tries to stop him. The police get involved, and they suspect Harry and Honey for scheming to off Nancy. But Nancy returns, seemingly unharmed. Harry feigns love and devotion to her for six seconds, while secretly planning to overdose her on meds. But he won’t have enough drugs, it turns out, because overnight, she transforms into a 30-foot giant.

When Nancy wakes up, she’s on a revenge rampage, fuming about how Harry has been unfaithful to her. She tears the roof off her house; she hunts down Harry and rips the roof off the saloon where he’s cavorting with Honey. Nancy kills Honey and grabs Harry—in a frankly charmingly campy reboot of King Kong. Indeed, this is by far the best scene in the “film.”

Ta-da! Episode three of 1950s Inhuman Bitches! This time, the Inhuman Bitch is a hybrid alien-human and a giantess. Can I get a woot woot?

Eventually, she gets electrocuted by power lines and kills Harry as she goes down. It’s very, kind of like, tidy-untidy. Tidy in that all the morally and/or psychologically dysregulated people die, but untidy in that we don’t really know what’s happening with the aliens, nor how the town will put itself back together.

Ok, so this film is High Camp, no question.

But it’s High Camp with a fascinating socio-political unconscious. Let’s get into it.

The alien, when we see him, is wearing a medieval costume. Seriously. He’s an anthropoid alien wearing a coat of arms on a metal studded leather tunic.

Yep: hoss is literally wearing a shield symbol with three fleur-de-lis on it.  A bald, intergalactic medieval dude who travels in a ping-pong ball.

When I saw this scene, two things happened in my brain. First, I started hearing Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” going through my head. Second, I realized that my love of science fiction and my training as a medievalist had prepared me perfectly for this moment. I’m so here for this mania.

So I start thinking, like what’s up with the medieval stuff? And I realize that this is a secondary form of hybridity that the film is trading in: the far-distant, extraterrestrial future and the far-distant, European past. Put otherwise, the film visually implies that the ultra-advanced alien society is one that never moved on from its medieval roots. This movie is asking us to imagine a world where the medieval past never ended, but instead stayed strong and advanced into a high tech form.

That idea, of course, is deeply political, however implicitly. As a board-certified wizard of medieval things, I am here to tell you that if you make a movie asserting that the future is going to look (or dress) like the Middle Ages, you are making a political film. And if you make that film a horror film, you are doing progressive politics, on some level. If the evil futuristic monster is the European past, you are saying that all the structures of power and social organization that came out of the Middle Ages are to be feared and suspected. You are saying that they are, moreover, to be combatted if they ever attempt to take over the Earth in some kind of contemporary incarnation.

Let’s do a quick run-down of what some of those structures of power and modes of social organization are.

1.     Profound classism, aka: the three estates model. According to canonical medieval social philosophy (yes, that existed; it was the Dark Ages, not the Totally Incapable of Abstract Thought Ages), in the Middle Ages, a person was either a laborer, a warrior, or a member of the clergy. Each of these classes (or estates) was expected to serve the other two: those who worked made food for those who fought and those who prayed. Those who fought, fought for the workers and clergy. Those who prayed, prayed for everyone else. The system seems ok, in that it’s radically symbiotic. But it’s also real bad, because there’s exactly zero room for social mobility, there’s zero room for a middle class, and there’s zero explicit room for women.

2.     The Catholic Church. You went to Church every day, and the Church enforced strict and all-encompassing moral rules and expectations, particularly about things like sexuality and gender relations. I mean, sure, the Church also prohibited things like murder. But on a quotidian basis, one of the Church’s most important powers was to regulate and delimit human sexuality.

If you think about it, the film is engaging pretty specifically with both of these things, but with a fascinating twist. The classism of the film is rigid: everyone in town has to obey and kowtow to Nancy Archer, because, as the police chief notes, “she pays all our taxes.” She’s got all the diamonds, all the money, all the power in the town. Everyone has to work either with her, or around her. Either they flatter her, like the police, or they control and manipulate her, like Harry.

But the film’s take on gender relations is where it’s visual invocation of the Middle Ages gets the most edgy. This is a film in which a woman—Nancy—is imprisoned in a loveless marriage, because Harry wants to extract money from her. Harry cheats on her, and has done for a long time. Indeed, at one point, Nancy got a separation from him, but her doctor and husband prevailed on her to take him back. Her doctor and husband. The two big patriarchs in her life. So she took him back, but she says repeatedly in the film that she regrets that choice, and wants a divorce. But divorce, in 1958, wasn’t all that easy to obtain. Indeed, American marital law has a long, dark tail, reaching all the way back to—wait for it—the Middle Ages. It’s never been easy for women to get divorces, because divorce works against the structures of power and patriarchy that support both the Church and the class system. Women have to stay put, even in the worst marriages. That’s what patriarchy wants, going back a real long time.

So the medieval alien in the film is doing some real work. He highlights how Nancy is trapped in what is essentially a medieval situation: a rigid class structure and a horrific marriage. She can’t escape either easily, because she’s female. So, semi-compassionately and semi-panicking, the film gives Nancy the fantasy scenario she needs to escape her medieval situation. She gets transformed into a giant, who can tear apart buildings and destroy her enemies at will.

Look out 1950s: the Inhuman Bitch is here to set things on a better path. She prepped by getting familiar with a terrifyingly medieval looking future, and then turning to face her own present head-on, and larger than life.

To be clear, this film is ludicrous. It’s not a film I’ll ever show in a class, because I have a hard time deliberately annoying my students. But I will say this: there is a resonance of this film’s weird feminism that I think we could stand to think about again, now. We are now poised at the brink, I fear, of a new American Middle Ages. Class structures are ossifying, not loosening. Gender norms, having been on a trajectory of loosening for several decades in a row, are growing more rigid again—or, at least, that’s what I see. Patriarchal institutions are gaining in power, and rapidly. When I look to the future, I see the very past that I’ve spent my whole career studying. And I think those of us who feel fear at that future, those of us who, even while we probably laugh at the depiction of the Bald Medieval Alien, also feel a little uncomfortable with how on-the-nose he is, we should all be trying to find ways to get Big and Fucking Loud, just like Nancy Archer.

But in the 1950s, Nancy Archer’s path to liberation was also a path to her own demise; as I noted earlier, she dies by electrocution at the end. More painfully, the possibility of a quasi-feminist variation on the Inhuman Bitch idea pretty much died with her. As we’ll see, one year later, in 1959, the Inhuman Bitch phenomenon has gotten much more bitterly and stingingly misogynist. Tune in next Friday, for Wasp-Woman.