Invasions USA by Bliss Michael;

Author:Bliss, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Welcome to My Nightmare: I Married a Monster from Outer Space

Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory.

—Abraham Lincoln

I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) moves the notion of invasion into the realm of heterosexual relationships. This film about a woman whose husband is abducted by aliens on their wedding night and replaced with an alien look-alike is a powerful critique of American marriage in the 1950s. The film mirrors Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers in its dramatization of behavioral dysfunction and gives us a portrait of American social life that is less a distortion born of psychological imbalance than a portrayal resulting from insight into what it meant to be in an intimate relationship in the 1950s. As critic Per Schelde has noted, “[The film’s] aliens can be seen as metaphors for the reality of the chasm between men and women in a society where gender differences had been taken to a ridiculous extreme.”[1]

The problems in the marriage of Marge (Gloria Talbott) and Bill (Tom Tryon) don’t stem from external pressures such as fear of Communist infiltration or uncertainty about the future as a result of atomic weapons’ proliferation. Marge and Bill’s journey into the unknowns of a relationship in which both members of the marriage are scouting out new emotional and physical territory demonstrates that the anxieties dramatized in the film come from a place far closer than political events. They come from the depths of sexual psychology.

At the film’s beginning, Marge is engaged to Bill, who appears to be a quite normal American male—that is, if by normal we mean a man who associates with men who drink too much and spend an inordinate amount of time sitting in a bar complaining about women and how the prospect of having to deal with them is very depressing. The claustrophobia of the bar in which Bill and his friends drink is bleak enough. What makes the bar scenes even more so isn’t just the sparseness of these scenes’ set design but the way in which the scenes play out. There is virtually no action and very little dialogue, and what there is of the latter is comprised of Bill’s friends’ complaints about their wives and their girlfriends. These scenes give us the impression that in the 1950s, American men’s social lives have shrunk down to getting together with other men more out of habit than pleasure, and that they drink not for fraternal purposes but out of despair and an inability to think of anything else to do. Depressed about their careers and relationships, these men evidence no political or social awareness or curiosity. They’re mechanical husbands who can’t see how ironic their complaints about their wives are given their own robotic status. If there’s any passion in the film’s universe, one is at a loss to find it.

From the film’s beginning, Marge’s attitude toward marriage is compounded of both anticipation and dread. She is apparently in love with her fiancé but at the same time is nervous about what their life together is going to be like.

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