We meet Scott lying on the deck of his boat, next to his short, womanly, wife, whom he jokingly implores: “To the galley, wench. Fetch me a flagon of beer.” They are both carrying out gendered behaviour but mocking it at the same time, carrying out the motions even though they both acknowledge it to be fake. She gets the beer but only after hamming up her role as beer getter. He explicitly asserts their roles: “I provide the boat, you provide the beer.” which is instantly shot down by her: “Your brother, provided the boat.”
All of the warmth and humour in this introduction comes from seeing two likable people ridiculing societal expectations. The viewer instantly likes these characters because they know the world they live in is fake and ludicrous. It would take me a while to empathise with characters set in traditional 50s middle America who thought their world was normal, because from my perspective it is utterly alien. This adds to the timeless appeal of the film, by hinting that our protagonists are already ‘Other’, viewers can empathise with their human situation even from across time, across culture and across gender.
Bear in mind that this conversation takes place in a location that is the furthest possible from other people. They are in the middle of the sea, surrounded by nothing in all directions. A place where social pressure to conform would be at its weakest, where they feel freest to be themselves. The open ocean has no categories or boundaries, things simply exist, until they don’t.
Cue the antagonist, the triggering event of our story, which is what? Nothing. A shapeless, formless, category-less cloud, which appears ex nihilio, envelops Scott absolutely, and then passes. The cloud is not a sentient space monster, not a construct of man, no trope of 50s science fiction, it is something more unfathomably horrific and powerful. It is the embodiment of structurelessness, it is the realisation that reality is not composed of discrete boundaries between separate objects, but in fact an indivisible sea of matter and energy, of pattern and consciousness. What if, in a single moment, you became utterly aware that every victory and failure you thought you had made, were just arbitrary social constructs, which in the bigger scale of things meant nothing. What if every categorical aspect of your identity was fraudulent? What if you were not in fact, a man, but instead, a person?
The cloud is not a force from without, it is not radioactive transmuting magic. The cloud is Scott’s realisation that society can not define him, that even his maleness is not real. And what is the immediate physical effect of this realisition? Glitter. His body begins to sparkle, in cinematic short-hand for a magical transformation.
Louises reaction to this is unconsious disgust. Without thinking she reaches for a towel to wipe off all evidence of this magic. For her it is dirt, a threat to the sterility of their suburban existence. Straight away she knows this is a threat, and she is right. Scotts epiphany, framed as an encounter with the unnatural, sets in course events that will destroy their marriage.
Weeks later, we see their domestic situation up close, and already the seams are beginning to show. Scott begins to feel that his clothes are not right any more. In the literal story of the film it is because he gets physically smaller, but through the lens of the trans allegory, it is because he can no longer authentically wear the clothes of a man.
On the boat, his chauvinistic attitude is a shared joke, but it gets worse over time, from blaming Louise for his condition: “Maybe, it’s the cooking around here.” to his tyrranical verbal abuse of her when he faces the indignity of living in a dolls house. As he is trapped inside a girl’s toy, his masculine ego can not handle losing status and it fights back. He acts out a parody of man-of-the-house, barking orders at his wife, even though he is only 6 inches tall.
This is his struggle to adjust to transitioning, and this is the real antagonist of the film, not the spooky glitter cloud. The film will end not when he defeats the transition and returns to normal, but when he stops struggling, and embraces his new life.
His journey is the usual denial, anger, bargaining etc. He keeps the medicalisation of his condition a secret from Louise out of shame. And maybe this is wise.
Society will not idly stand by and allow people to escape the imprisonment of categorisation. If you reject the labels applied to you, it will trigger an immune response of white blood cells, or white lab coats, to swoop in and diagnose you. The montage of medical assessment that Scott undergoes is reminiscent of The Excorcist. White, male privilege fights back against the cell that refuses to follow its ascribed role. They finally resort to gas-lighting, telling him that his condition is not real: “people don’t get shorter, Mr. Carey. They just don’t get shorter.”
Ultimately the medical establishment is powerless, as their worldview is based on diagnosing, categorising, and then using biological tools to renormalise the deviance. Scott may believe himself to be a victim of a glitter cloud, seeking to return to normal size, but returning to normal is not an authentic solution. Scott is the cause of Scott shrinking. For the first half of the film, all the suffering comes from society rejecting his new identity.
But there is one person who does accept him.
Tiny Tina is introduced as a circus freak, a woman who is abnormally small, presented for public gawking next to a bearded lady, and “Dolly Dumpling, the Fat Lady”. People of unusual sizes and possessing non-standard sexual characteristics are only accepted in society as professional oddities. When Scott meets Tina by chance in a café this seems like a possible escape route for his condition. Maybe, if he can learn from her to accept his condition, he can find a new role as a deliberate abberation, an acknowledged mistake.
“Scott, for people like you and me, the world can be a wonderful place. The sky is as blue as it is for the giants, the friends are as warm.”
But this reprieve is short lived. The infamy of being a world-famous shrinking man renders his home a goldfish bowl of external judgement. It is not the medical intervention that fails him, it is his own un-acknowledged desire to shrink further that breaks him out of this false plateau.
To be small is to be treated like a child. When you lose the status symbols of being a man you are infantilised. Gone are the perks of patriarchy, his job does not want him, and the expectations of matrimony, his wife still loves him but eventually can’t even communicate with him. Though she is sympathetic and still loves him, the marriage struggles under the stress of his transition. Believing him dead, she finally flees the home under the wing of Scott’s brother.
He is now alone.
As soon as Scott falls into the basement, the great unconscious, the film stops being about society, and focusses down to the self. Here he has nobody else to blame, nobody to react to, to compare himself against. There is just his body, and the infinite world around him. He must overcome this final obstacle to truly realise what he is.
“The cellar floor stretched before me like some vast, primeval plain, empty of life, littered with the relics of a vanished race.”
The cellar is primeval, because it has no society there, the surface dwelling human race has vanished from this place. The strewn relics, a matchbox, a nail, a mousetrap, are vanishing memories of society, tools that he initially uses to protect his physical form, before ultimately realising that he doesn’t need them.
“And I resolved that as man had dominated the world of the sun, so I would dominate my world.”
In the basement, you can wear what you like. Gone are the restrictive suits and ties of his career in advertising, the oppression of domestic sartorial expectation. Scott fashions himself clothing to wear in the basement, and that clothing is a dress.
“My ill-fitting clothes were unsuited to the exertions that lay before me.”
His failure to understand himself is the real antagonist of the film. And this horror of transition is represented by the most primal cinematic icon, the giant spider. The final gate-keeper that stands between him and self-acceptance. His narration even tells us that this conflict is metaphorical:
“My enemy seemed immortal. More than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world, every fear fused into one hideous, night-black horror.”
When zoomed in, the spider becomes truly alien, a tangle of limbs, eyes and fangs, it is a body gone wrong. Nothing could better embody the dysmorphic self-disgust of a man wishing his legs weren’t so hairy as fighting against eight, huge legs covered in hair. The spider, whose females are famously bigger than the males, now fights against a man who is incredibly small.
Scott even tells us his reason why he must defeat the spider: “My brain was a man’s brain, my intelligence still a man’s intelligence.” On the surface he uses ‘man’ to refer to his species, as dominant to mere animals, but that second interpretation of ‘man’ really isn’t that far under the surface.
As much as I feel it gratuitously Freudian to look for a phallic metaphor, we have to address Scott’s tiny little pin, plucked from a lady’s sewing kit and weilded as his last bodily defence against his ultimate fear. He wears it at his waist, but god knows he spends his time brandishing it, then re-sheathing it at his belt, then pulling it out again when threatened. This is never a smooth action, he is always fumbling with it, and we must see him do this three or four times.
“I still had my weapons. With these bits of metal I was a man again. “
When he loses his pin in the final climax with the Dysphoria Spider, it is a large pair of scissors which he uses to try and strike the final blow. A pair of scissors… “Too heavy for me to employ as a weapon, they might have another use.” Again, it feels gratuitous to suggest his final battle is in fact gender reassignment surgery. But we’re here now.
If Scott had lost his fight against the spider, he would have lost his freedom and identity, and instead be bound up and immobilised. When he wins, he gets the cake. And it is Scott’s hunger for and rejection of food which triggered this conflict. Following the proposed allegory that size represents gender, his desire for food is a desire for size: “Without nourishment the shrinking process was quickening”
But even after winning it, he spurns it. Is this because the cake is bad, or because he knows shrinking is the right direction to go in? Eating disorders such an Anorexia Nervosa are tied up with a negative bodily image. Would the film have made sense if he ate the whole cake and started growing back to normal again, as the producers wanted?
Let us say that now with hairy-legs out of the picture, that Scott has slain his inner-demon, and now fully accepts his new identity, or lack of it. This is not the time to return to normal, that door is closed, that staircase is innaccessible. “Was I the man of the future?”
Scott had to reject societal expectations of his time, but that doesn’t mean he rejected all other humans, or all other companionship with other people. Merely that his peers, colleagues, family and spouse could not join him on his specific journey. He is still human and wants to be with other humans. Although he knows now his best shot at human connection is with other people who have come on the same journey as him: “If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world?”
Did the screen writer Richard Matheson or the director Jack Arnold have the transgender experience in their mind at all in the creation of this film? Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. You could have as much fun reading into this a metaphor of disability, illness, anorexia, even ethnicity, queerness or mortality. All stories of bodily change, from Kafka’s Metamorphosis to Cronenberg’s The Fly can be read as parables of identity. The categories in question are inter-changeable. The enemy is never the instigator of the change, but the regressive reaction of others, and eventually, the self. The creators were working on a metaphorical layer. This is not a story about becoming small, it is a story about becoming something else.
It is not incredible that he shrinks, it is incredible that he is a man.
Scott’s final realisation is the ultimate expression of non-binary existence:
“So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite. But, suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.”
2023
Stuart Bray 