To God, There is No Zero:
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and the persistence of societal anxiety
by "Doc" Hunter Bush, contributor and Podcast Czar
1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man opens with Scott Carey (Grant Williams), an ostensibly normal American man, vacationing on a boat with his wife Louise (Randy Staurt). While Louise is below decks fetching beers, a strange radioactive mist passes, covering Scott in glitter. Six months later, Scott begins to notice that he is shrinking. Doctors initially disbelieve him - perhaps every time you've ever had your height taken before now was wrong? - before eventually subjecting him to a myriad of tests, ultimately deciding that the cloud was radioactive and, in conjunction with some otherwise harmless pesticides Scott had previously been exposed to, was to blame for his current condition.
Before long, Scott has become a public figure, being harassed to the degree that Louise reaches out to secure them an unlisted number. Trapped in his home, continually shrinking, Scott takes to living in a dollhouse until his cat Butch mistakes him for prey, driving Scott out of his to-scale home, eventually leaving him stranded in the basement. The final act of The Incredible Shrinking Man becomes akin to a John Carter of Mars story, with Scott in a harsh, barren landscape, scrounging for food, shelter, and a means to defend himself from the monstrous local fauna before the film ends on a shockingly philosophical note.
The screenplay was based on the Richard Matheson novel The Shrinking Man, Matheson having sold the rights to Universal on the condition that he be allowed to adapt it. The novel and screenplay both share Matheson's central concerns, involving post-WWII nuclear anxieties, and the redefining of masculinity in postwar suburban America. Matheson himself was struggling with what were seen as traditionally masculine concerns, notably providing for his family as a freelance writer.
These anxieties are as thoroughly ingrained into the film as the radiation & pesticide are into Scott. The mist is a tangible metaphor for fears about radioactivity, the fact that it comes along and interrupts not an ordinary day, but a blissful vacation day only calls these fears into sharper contrast. Once home and aware of his condition, Scott begins feeling increasingly emasculated. The fact that a doctor dismisses his medical concerns offhand at first - an all too common event for women, the elderly, bipoc, and plus-sized individuals - only adds a more current framework to Scott's emotional journey.
Scott eventually begins taking his frustrations out on Louise, a shockingly matter-of-fact dissection of toxic masculinity and another surprisingly modern lens through which to view aspects of the film: "Every day it was worse. Every day a little smaller, and every day I became more tyrannical, more monstrous in my domination of Louise." By the time Scott is small enough to inhabit a Barbie Dream House, he's snapping at Louise (in an amusingly tiny voice) about how loudly she speaks and how her footfalls shake his home. In other words: things she has very little control over.
The bittersweet turn of The Incredible Shrinking Man is that, after all that, Scott has passed beyond the desire for food. Smaller than he's ever been, he exits the basement by climbing out through a ventilation grate cover that he'd been too large to get through just a few hours earlier. He takes in the alien expanse of his back yard under moonlight and ruminates about the universe: "So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite. The unbelievably small and the inconceivably vast eventually meet like two ends of the same circle."
He has finally accepted that his size doesn't matter, he still exists and that very existence justifies itself. He matters just as much as anything else. It's a surprising tone to end the film on. Not because of the existentially terrifying concept of shrinking out of known existence, but because our hero, after enduring one indignity after another, after losing everything that was familiar to him, after all that he seems to find peace; acceptance.
There's something to be said for Matheson that he chose to end his screenplay addressing perhaps the greatest, most persistent hum of anxiety - death - with tranquility. It's a beautiful place, emotionally, to end an otherwise very tense tale. That final, untroubled note really drew the previous events into focus for me, calling Scott's fears and the film's underlying worries into greater relief (no pun intended), while also offering a little advice: You can't let your fears change you. Scott's penultimate line is the title of this piece, as I think it is the keystone to understanding this advice: "To God, there is no zero", followed by "I still exist!". Theism aside, God in this case represents the only opinion that matters. Why not let it be yours?
