(no subject)
May. 24th, 2012 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreSo, recently, I lent my copy of The Devil Doll to my coworker and she watched it and enjoyed it*. Today, we happened to be discussing it in passing and an interesting question came up.
Guys, why do you think that we, culturally, are no longer interested in the idea of shrinking people? Because it seems like it used to happen a lot more and a lot more seriously in horror and sci-fi but now it shows up very rarely and, if it does, is almost always played for laughs. Is the anxiety that prompted those stories no longer acting on us? If so, why not? Did we just make The Incredible Shrinking Man and figure, that's it, we got the scary shrinking story right, we're done**?
I feel like there's a paper or something in there somewhere. Someone should write that so that I can read it.
(Also, today I learned that this page exists on wikipedia. The internet is pretty awesome.)
*Which makes me 2 for 3 with her: she liked this and The Abominable Dr Phibes but couldn't make it past the first episode of Farscape. I have now lent her Hard Core Logo for reasons that I do not properly recall at this moment, so we'll see how that goes.
**Like they did with Maltese Falcon.
Guys, why do you think that we, culturally, are no longer interested in the idea of shrinking people? Because it seems like it used to happen a lot more and a lot more seriously in horror and sci-fi but now it shows up very rarely and, if it does, is almost always played for laughs. Is the anxiety that prompted those stories no longer acting on us? If so, why not? Did we just make The Incredible Shrinking Man and figure, that's it, we got the scary shrinking story right, we're done**?
I feel like there's a paper or something in there somewhere. Someone should write that so that I can read it.
(Also, today I learned that this page exists on wikipedia. The internet is pretty awesome.)
*Which makes me 2 for 3 with her: she liked this and The Abominable Dr Phibes but couldn't make it past the first episode of Farscape. I have now lent her Hard Core Logo for reasons that I do not properly recall at this moment, so we'll see how that goes.
**Like they did with Maltese Falcon.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-24 09:16 pm (UTC)But one theory I came to while thinking on this for five minutes was that it used to be that Earth alone (or one's own country of residence) would seem so enormous and overwhelming that people felt kind of "tinier" on the planet. Whereas these days, with the internet and all the other technology we have, we've set ourselves so far apart from the rest of the animal kingdom that it kind of seems like we're the "gods" of this planet, at least. And so the idea of like, the enormity of the world being especially terrifying itself has been passed onto science fiction instead-- instead of being afraid of being made "tiny" in our own corner of the galaxy, we took that fear and translated it to how tiny we feel in the universe now.
Basically that humanity has grown a huge ego and can't imagine being made small on this planet anymore, so we only feel small in the idea of traveling to elsewhere? IDK.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-24 10:22 pm (UTC)