Cold War Paranoia

The Invisible Boy (1957)

In the opening scene of The Invisible Boy, two members of the military brass arrive at the Stoneman Institute for Mathematics, the home of an enormous supercomputer which is housed in an underground complex. They are escorted by Dr. Mereneau, the chief computer scientist and leader of the supercomputer project, nine levels underground to a large control room filled with towering computer banks, whizzing tape reels, and flashing lights. Apparently unimpressed with the technological display, one of the officers asks "Is this all there is to it?" Mereneau replies "Well, we do have 5300 cubic yards of microtransitors directly overhead." They then enter the room that houses the main computer, an enormous, egg-shaped glass dome enclosing several spinning disks that is flanked on both sides by fifty-foot banks of flashing lights. Mereneau announces with pride, "Stored within that big machine is the sum total of human knowledge, constantly being revised and brought up to date."

In Androids, Humanoids, and Other Science Fiction Monsters: Science and Soul in Science Fiction Films, Per Schelde suggests that, "computers have become [to modern science fiction] what the lab full of hissing liquids was to Dr. Jekyll: the core signifiers that serious, potentially dangerous science is in progress" (133). In The Invisible Boy, and many other science fiction films about supercomputers, the beakers, Bunson burners, mysterious vapors, and "hissing liquids" of the scientific laboratory are replaced by monolithic computer banks, spinning tape reels, blinking and flashing lights, and a cacophony of beeps and whirs. Equally important, however, to this film's representation of the computer as "potentially dangerous science" are the computer's size and location. The main computer is the size of a small house, and Mereneau's comments about the "5300 cubic yards of microtransistors directly overhead" indirectly evoke the excessive, almost obscene, dimensions of the Krell computer in Forbidden Planet. The computer's sprawling physical existence (it occupies several rooms and levels of the complex) and its enormous dimensions signify the extent to which it already surpasses its human creators and operators, and foreshadows its ambitions to take over the entire universe.

Moreover, it is located in an "underground complex," a phrase, like "Top Secret," that operates in complex ways within the discourse of cold war paranoia, trading on competing cultural fears about national security, technology, and governmental power and secrecy. The computer is being used by the military to construct an orbiting "space platform," which would protect the United States from Soviet atomic attack, and the military fears that if the Russians find out about the project before the platform becomes operational, it would spark an atomic war. The institute's underground complex hides the installation from Russian spies ("Our friends on the other side of the pole," as one of the officers puts it) but it also hides it from the public.

More on The Invisible Boy

More Cold War Paranoia:  Colossus: The Forbin Project

More Cold War Paranoia: WarGames

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