Radiation and the movies
“Yes, it is
possible. A fantastic mutation caused by
lingering radiation.” Them, 1954
In November 1895 Roentgen discovered X-rays. The Lumiere brothers presented the first
showing of their new Cinematographe in December 1895. It only took two years for movie makers to
bring the two together, and it has been a long, fruitful relationship for the
moviemakers. Radiation has not made out
quite as well.
For the past 20 years this topic has been a hobby of mine. I have accumulated a list of nearly 400 movies
prominently featuring radiation in one form another in the plot or story line,
and I own copies of around 100 on the list.
This has two notable results: 1) I watched and own a lot of really bad
movies. 2) I feel qualified to write on
this topic as I have paid my dues.
If I asked you to describe a pirate ship, you would have no
trouble. Neither you nor I have ever
seen an actual pirate ship, but we all have a very clear image of what they
look like. We know how the typical
pirate dresses, and recently we learned that while most of them may swagger,
some walk with a slightly effeminate jaunt.
We didn’t make these mental images up, we got them from the movies. Cinema and TV provide us with millions of
mental and auditory images. (Henceforth,
in this chapter I will refer to the “movies”, but this includes TV as
well.) And, when we don’t have any personal experience with something, movies
give us our primary or fundamental understanding and images of a topic.
Less than 1% of the US population has any significant personal
experience with radiation, other than having a medical X-ray done. The other 99+% have gotten most if not all
their understanding of radiation from the movies. Those of us who work in medical radiology
deal with this every day. We hear a
constant barrage of questions which include the phrases “like I saw in that
movie” or “like that guy on TV.”
Recently, “I read on the internet” is getting pretty common too, but
that is covered in a different post.
The process of learning begins very early in life, and for Americans,
learning from the movies starts at a very young age.
As a medical officer in the Navy I attended a course on
alcohol abuse. Why the Navy thought that
was important escapes me, since everyone knows sailors don’t drink. Still, it was an excellent course. One lecture I really liked discussed how the
nature of the world, and the things we learn during our preteen years, strongly
affects our subsequent life. You don’t
have to be an authority on child psychiatry to realize how many facets of our
adult life are influenced by this early learning. The point of this diversion is, and it
relates to the discussion of how we teach our children about fear, I firmly
believe the misinformation so widely distributed in the movies about radiation
has had a profound effect on our national view of radiation; particularly when
you superimpose it on the constantly fluctuating national anxiety about nuclear
war and nuclear terrorism. This process
of misinforming the public, especially our youth, about radiation has been
going on for a long time, so it is useful to look at this topic
chronologically.
As mentioned before, X-rays were discovered in 1895. In 1897 the first two documented movies
featuring radiation were made. The only
one for which we have any details is a British 1 minute silent black and white
called “X-rays”. It shows a couple
embracing on a park bench. When
illuminated with X-rays, their two skeletons embrace. Following the Curies’ discovery of radium in
1898, similar movies using radiation and X-rays as a comic gimmick were
produced.
The Invisible Ray,
1920, was a 15 chapter silent serial notable as one of the first films to
feature a powerful, harmful radiation source being sought by villains. Subsequently, the 20s and 30s saw a rash of
“powerful death rays” and new more powerful radiation sources such as Titano,
Kappa Rays and my personal favorite, Baloneum.
In the thirties a number of serials were made featuring radiation and
ray gun devices with unbelievable properties.
How many children learned radiation could turn white men into black men,
or vice versa, in the 1935 serial, The
Lost City ?
The 1936 masterpiece The
Invisible Ray (same name, different story)featured two greats, Boris
Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Many of the
radiation misconceptions they introduced still persist . It is the first movie where I saw radiation
make someone glow, an effect reused many times.
One of the most common questions I hear from patients having a Nuclear
Medicine procedure is “Will this make me glow?” Another classic idea premiering here was the
line “There are some things Man was not meant to know.”
Madam Curie, the
1943 biography of the discoverers of radium, is notable on two points. It is the only movie I have ever seen where
those in control of radiation are portrayed as compassionate, hard working,
rational, intelligent human beings.
Second, it is about the most boring movie I have ever seen, and I have
seen some bad ones. Clearly, radiation
is a lot more exciting when it is in the hands of lunatics, mad scientists,
Nazis, Communists, terrorists, dishonest government bureaucrats and
megalomaniacs.
In 1945 the first atomic bomb explosion changed a lot of
things in the world, including the movies.
It was a boom time for radiation in the movies. The first one out of the gate was The Beginning or the End, released in
1946. This was a pseudo-documentary
about the making of the first atomic bombs.
The government oversaw the production, as the real information was
classified. The producers had no real
footage of the explosion as it too was classified (such was the level of
paranoia), so they created a “mushroom cloud” using oil in a fish tank of water. In the coming decade a flood of radiation
movies was unleashed. While few were
done in this “documentary” style, many feature a newsmanesque narrator,
probably for budgetary reasons, who supplements the storyline with “facts”
about pre-war atomic testing, radioactive fallout, lingering radiation and
potential mutating effects. With no
source for real facts or experience, is it any surprise that so many baby
boomers, who grew up on these movies, have an almost primal fear of radiation?
These post war movies can be separated into some broad
groups based on their plot and the way they use radiation: anti-war movies,
radiation mutant movies and radiation thrillers. The United States during this
period was in the midst of the Cold War, with paranoia about communists and a
coming atomic war running high. Here and
around the world there was an anti-war movement, and this was reflected in the
movies. In the US this gave rise to
several post-apocalyse movies such as Five
in 1951, The day the World Ended in
1957, World with End in 1956, Teenage Caveman in 1958, On the Beach in 1959 and The world, the Flesh and the Devil in
1959. As a group they were generally melodramatic and always included at least
one long soliloquy on the evils the atomic age had brought to man. On the
Beach is by far the best of them, although Teenage Caveman, which stars a 25 year old Robert Vaughn as the
teenager, is so bad it is fun to watch. The World , the Flesh and the Devil had
a forward thinking racial allegory in addition to the post-holocaust theme.
In 1954 the Japanese movie Gojira was released, a metaphorical anti-war, anti-American movie
in which a large monster with radioactive breath mercilessly destroys Japanese
cities and kills thousands of innocent civilians. It is still considered one of the classics of
Japanese film making. Joseph Levine
bought the rights to Gojira, and
released in the US in 1956 as Godzilla. He edited out the anti-US language and most
of the metaphorical references to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
inserting an American, played by Raymond Burr, into the film to save the
day. The movie was a hit in the US, but
for entirely different reasons from its success in Japan and the rest of the
world. Both versions contain essentially
no true statements or images about the actual effects of radiation. Interestingly, over the years the Japanese
view of radiation and Godzilla has changed.
Japan is heavily dependent on nuclear power, and in the movies, Godzilla
evolved into a hero, fighting such evil menaces as the Smog Monster.
Perhaps the best of the American films in this genre is
1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still.
It has higher than average production values and an excellent cast. A strong anti-war, anti-nuclear arms message
is presented with far more plot, and far less horror than the typical movies of
the period. Of course, those in control
of nuclear weapons cannot be trusted.
Although not truly an anti-war movie, but more a comment on the nuclear
paranoia of the time, another true classic from this era is the 1955 release, Kiss Me Deadly. Based on a Mickey Spillane novel, gumshoe
Mike Hammer is on the trail of “the great whatsit”, a box that turns out to be
filled with radioactive material. In the
end, when the box is opened, the results are not good.
While these anti-war flicks had their place in American
cinema, radiation mutants were the king of the hill throughout the fifties. The first, and arguably the best of the
breed, was Them, released in
1954. Murder victims are found in the
Mojave Desert, and the subsequent investigation uncovers giant ants as the
killers. These mutated ants are the
result of previous atomic bomb testing.
This classic piece of radiation misinformation, quoted in the opening of
this blog, has been recycled more times than an aluminum can. Every conceivable insect and animal,
including men, was mutated by various forms of radiation exposure. Giant tarantulas and spiders were pretty bad,
but they can’t hold a candle to the mind controlling giant crabs in the
exciting 1956 hit, Attack of the Crab
Monsters. People were shrunk in films like The Incredible Shrinking Man, and
enlarged in the Attack of the 50 foot
woman. Men were made invisible,
turned into steel, given the power to kill, given X-ray eyes or just become
really ridiculous, low budget monsters. Given
the lack of any real knowledge of radiation effects at that point in history,
is it surprising that a whole generation of kids (the baby boomers) grew up
with radically misinformed mental construct of radiation effects? Remember that pirate ship—in the absence of
real images, the void will be filled.
Emerging in the Fifties, but becoming the predominant motif
in the sixties, was the radiation thriller.
The James Bond movies are typical of this genre. A highly dangerous radiation device falls
into the wrong hands, the future of civilization is threatened, and our hero(s)
have to get it back, usually just in the nick of time. Here again we see that atomic energy is
primarily sought out by mad scientists and megalomaniacs. “Normal” people want nothing to do with it.
Combining the nuclear thriller and anti-war themes produced
some of the best radiation movies of the 60s.
Dr. Strangelove, 1964, is a
terrific movie, a chilling satire of the nuclear arms race. Peter Sellers is at his best, playing three
of the main roles. Fail Safe, 1964, is another well done anti-war thriller.
For the most part the seventies and eighties were not very creative in the
use of radiation in the movies. They
replayed the same themes, with slightly different twists, and better production
values. The post-nuclear holocaust
premise was very popular, probably because it allowed the moviemaker to create
any world they wanted. Movies like Mad Max and Planet of the Apes were typical of this genre.
The radiation thriller took on a new twist with movies like The China Syndrome and Silkwood. In these flicks the protagonists are decent
people, fighting against greedy corporate executives and government officials
who control nuclear plants and radioactive materials. As mentioned before, the timing of The China Syndrome, released a 12 days
prior to Three Mile Island incident, made it particularly powerful. Both these movies were ultimately used by the
media and environmentalists in a process journalist John Schwartz of the
Washington Post later termed “the Cuisinart Effect” in reporting. In discussing nuclear accidents and
radioactive materials, clips from the movies are often used. While the movies are referenced, juxtaposing
the fact and fiction in this way tends to blur the line between them in the
mind of the audience. Schwartz
identified the process in a report on the ebola virus interspersing clips from
the movie Outbreak, but the cuisinart
effect is not uncommon in “special reports”
dealing with radiation.
The idea of radiation induced mutations from lingering
fallout underwent a mutation itself in the last 25 years. The new culprits are nuclear waste and
researchers using radioactive materials.
What kid doesn’t know that when a small reptile is exposed to glowing
nuclear waste the obvious result is a Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtle? When a
radiation exposed spider bites you—here comes Spiderman. When a researcher
is exposed to gamma rays, he becomes a modern day Jeckyl and Hyde know as The Hulk. If your school is too close to a Nuclear
plant you end up with the Class of Nuke em High. Here one of the unstated side effects is
really dumb kids and bad actors. To this
day, people are still being mutated by radiation in movies like the Fantastic Four.
Unfortunately, the last 25 years have seen the rise of a new
world threat both in life and the movies, terrorism. The threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of
a terrorist nation or organization is about as anxiety producing as any plot
one can imagine. This is a real
threat, and the consequences would be ugly.
However, movies of this nature seldom present realistic outcomes from
such an attack. They tend to greatly exaggerate the destruction possible. I believe they play on
our unrealistic concepts of radiation, and actually heighten such fear. When we watch a movie about massive forest
fires it doesn’t usually make us worry about using our barbeque grill or
fireplace. In radiology we often see a
general heightening of fears of low dose radiation when a nuclear terrorism
movie which misinforms the public with statements like “even the smallest dose
of radiation can cause cancer” is released.
To summarize this chapter, while on a conscious level adults
may know that mutant turtles and giant ants don’t exist, I believe the enormous
amount of misinformation about radiation we learn from the movies as children colors
our perception of radiation for the rest of our lives. I know what pirates and pirate ships
look like, and I have known it since I was a kid.
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