THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN
US, 1957, 81 minutes, Black and white.
Grant Williams, Randy Stuart.
Directed by Jack Arnold.
The Incredible Shrinking Man is excellent small budget science fiction, made in the late fifties before science fiction was so popular and acceptable. It takes a real situation with comment on ecology and pollution and shows some of the repercussions in a human situation and makes a parable of it. The director is Jack Arnold, who made a similar number of small budget science fiction films as well as, at the same time and not quite unrelated especially as regards bombs, The Mouse That Roared. The Incredible Shrinking Man is considered classic science fiction.
1. The overall impact of this film? How important an experience? Or was it merely a science fiction story? What did the filmmakers intend?
2. How successful a science fiction feature? how plausible was the story? How plausibly was it filmed?
3. The film moved to allegory. How successful as an allegory? Of humans in their confrontation with the world and the universe? Of humans before themselves and finally before God? How well handled?
4. Comment on the science fiction style, the initial incidents on the yacht and the cloud, the way the film made man shrink very, very gradually and naturally? The techniques to show how he shrank? The ordinariness of the situation at home, at the doctors, with his wife and brother? How plausible did this make the film and the final allegory section of the film?
5. What were your responses to the hero? As an ordinary man, as suffering and shrinking, the changing of his world and relationships? Did he respond well to his wife? Her trying to understand the situation? Her support of him? His brother?
6. Could you understand the despair of the shrinking man? What impact did the situation have on him? His image of himself and understanding of himself? How important were the sequences of the circus? Why did he go? What did he learn? What effect did it have on him?
7. The frightening nature of the cat? As prepared for when the cat was so ordinary then when it was menacing the house? How terrifying were these sequences? How helpful were they in the screenplay as the transition from science fiction to allegory?
8. How did the house cellar become the microcosm of the world? Was this successfully done? Did it give a depth of meaning to the plight of the shrinking man? (How is the ordinary man in his world a shrinking man?) Note the Robinson and Crusoe and survival overtones of the story, the quest for food, clothing, a house, the man’s climbing and quest for food and survival, his plight with the water and the flood, his confrontation with the spider as a monster and a giant? He himself as a hero slaying a villain, the need to confront the spider to kill him and so to assert himself? How did these contribute to a picture of the human journey from birth to death? How were they allegorical? Were they done convincingly? the mousetrap and the cheese? his clothing, the pins and thread for climbing, swinging him across caverns, surviving on a raft in the flood, the matchbox house, slaying the dragon with a sword, the terror of the spider, a sense of heroism?
9. What effect did this whole adventure have on him? And the risk of losing his wife and family as they moved away? The suffering on the emotional level? The affirmation of himself on an individual level?
10. How convincing was the end of the film? Did it become too message-laden? Of a man becoming small and understanding his place in the universe? Of his understanding his place before God? Why was the man at peace at the end? Even though he had shrunk?
11. Some people consider this a science fiction classic. Do you agree? Why?
