The Incredible Shrinking Man

The Incredible Shrinking Man

Released three years into the civil rights movement, The Incredible Shrinking Man reads like a cry from the desperate depths of a society about to crack open. A loved one’s footsteps, a purring cat start forming a nightmare amidst the lethargic paradise of American suburbia. The doll’s house grows foreign; dangerous and unrecognisable to its own master. It is a deeply domestic fear, a metamorphosis in relation to one’s surroundings. A shrinking in lieu of Kafka’s exoskeletal growth. Being rendered useless, invisible, a nuisance to your own home and those who love you. It is the intimate entrapment of the white man in his own history. A history he does not understand, nor wish to understand. A lineage of horrors rotting under his house that he does not dare examine or take responsibility for.

And it is this denial, this ‘labyrinth of attitudes’ as Baldwin puts it, that he cannot be released from. To face the labyrinth, is to abandon Ariadne's thread and lose one’s identity. Confused and scared, Scott Carey replicates the world he knows and understands in the jungle of his deserted basement. Perhaps, with wishful distortions, it is a simpler world, one governed by straightforward understandings of danger and protection. The struggle that begins here, at the underbelly of domestic bliss, is a complex evasion of all too real and threatening life-sized conflicts.

His Christian God reassures him he is indeed special, no matter how small. That there is, after all, a plan for him as all other creations. God favours the white man once more, as He did years before, when He led him to African, Asian, American and Oceanian shores. To spread His word, with a stick in one hand, and the Bible in the other. To take up the White Man's burden of endlessly conquering the ground he steps on. From the streets of Manila to the mouldy cracks of the cellar floor; marching toward His light.

But the 20th century has split open the atom of truth and man has clawed his way in:

‘We have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the sum of our achievement. We have taken this journey and arrived at this place in God’s name. This, then, is the best that the white God can do. If that is so, then it is time to replace Him—replace Him with what? And this void, this despair, this torment is felt everywhere is the West.’

[ James Baldwin, Down at the Cross ]

Last Update: September 2024