The Incredible Shrinking Man · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A sewing pin, carried like a lance. That's the image people keep from this picture, and it's worth asking why. Nothing about the pin has changed. It is the same pin that sat in the sewing box when Scott Carey was six feet tall and had no use for it. What changed is the man holding it, and with him every relation that pin could enter into. At full height it's a pin. At six inches it's a spear.

Hold onto that, because it's the whole film, and it's a stranger subject than the poster promised.

Jack Arnold was Universal's reliable hand at creature pictures, the man who delivered Tarantula and Creature from the Black Lagoon on schedule. Richard Matheson adapted his own novel. What the two of them built out of a pulp premise is a film about the disappearance of the fit between a body and its world.

Deleuze has a name for that fit, and it is the engine of most movies ever made. He calls the ordinary run of cinema the movement-image: a character perceives a situation, feels something about it, acts, and the situation changes. Perception flows into action without a gap. What that machine quietly depends on is a body with purchase on the world around it. Doorknobs at hand height. Stairs sized to legs. A telephone you can lift. Take the fit away and the machine stalls, even though everything is still right there to be seen.

The first act of Shrinking Man is that stall, staged domestically. Carey can see his entire house and use almost none of it. He shrinks out of his marriage before he shrinks out of human scale: still present, still looking at his wife, no longer able to act as a husband toward her. Deleuze called this break the crisis of the action-image and dated it to the postwar ruins, to characters stranded inside situations too big to answer. Arnold arrives at the same place via a radioactive cloud and a can of insecticide. That isn't a genre accident. The sensory-motor link Deleuze describes is at bottom a question of scale, and this is the one film that takes the question literally, millimeter by millimeter.

Then it goes downstairs, and becomes something else.

Deleuze noticed that certain filmmakers, Stroheim and Buñuel above all, let an ordinary setting show through as something much older: a world of appetite and predation with no manners in it. He called the ordinary setting the derived milieu, and the thing showing through it the originary world. Usually a film has to work for that, with lighting and rot and cruelty in the performances. Arnold gets it optically, and for free. The cellar is just a cellar. The mousetrap is a mousetrap, the scissors are the scissors from upstairs, the spider is the house spider that lives in every basement in America. Change one variable and the basement is a hostile continent and the spider is revealed as what it always was, an animal that eats. Nothing has been exaggerated. That is the horror of it: no exaggeration was required.

Watch what happens to the objects once survival takes over. The pin becomes a weapon, the mousetrap an engine, the scissors a landmark you navigate by. Deleuze's word for a piece of the world torn out of its use and recharged by a drive is fetish, and the cellar is an inventory of them: household part-objects seized by thirst and fear and given functions that have nothing to do with sewing. The route Carey takes across that floor is a zig-zag between them, one disconnected fragment of space to the next.

Under all of it runs the slope. Naturalism, in Deleuze's account, is organized by entropy, a line running downhill toward exhaustion. Most horror offers a threat with a body, so that killing the body ends the threat. Arnold's threat is a rate. Carey does kill the spider, and it's a real climax, a duel in which every move he makes discloses another fact about how large the world has become. Deleuze would call that the small form of the action-image: the act reveals the situation instead of resolving it. He wins. The slope doesn't care. That is the structural invention, and it's why the film outlived its budget. It is built so that no victory can be final, and the whole inherited American grammar of convergence, of the rescue cutting toward relief, has nothing here to converge on.

The technique deserves a word, because it is an argument. Arnold and effects cinematographer Clifford Stine used oversized props, split screens and traveling mattes to hold the man and the object inside one frame. That last part matters. A cut can be doubted. Bazin's case for deep focus was that keeping things together in a single continuous space obliges you to believe the relation between them, and Arnold, who had shot Creature from the Black Lagoon in expressive deep-focus wide angles, knew that in his hands. So the composite is the point: a frame containing a space that is secretly two spaces, married on an optical printer and served up as uncut. Deleuze's term for a space fragmented out of any stable use is the any-space-whatever. Here the apparatus itself manufactures one.

None of that grammar was invented on this picture, and the film is better for it. Dr. Cyclops had worked out the core illusion in 1940, full-scale oversized props and rear projection standing a miniature actor in a normal room. The Devil-Doll put doll-sized people among giant household objects in 1936, which is where the giant scissors and the mousetrap staging descend from. Behind both sits John P. Fulton's traveling-matte work at Universal, the homunculi in jars in Bride of Frankenstein and the process he built for The Invisible Man, an in-house optical lineage Stine drew on directly. A year earlier, Arnold and Stine had already composited a scale-wrecked body into live desert plates for Tarantula; the spider in the cellar is that spider, rehearsed. Arnold's own addition came from the Black Lagoon: he had spent that film teaching audiences to pity a hunted creature, and here he simply moves the husband into the creature's position, cornered and unheard inside his own house. Fantastic Voyage, Innerspace and Ant-Man all play in the cellar this film built. Mostly they kept the props and dropped the slope. Each of them hands the scale back.

Which brings us to the ending Arnold had to fight the studio to keep. Ordinarily what lies outside the frame is the next room, offscreen space you could walk to; Deleuze calls that the relative out-of-field. Occasionally a film makes you feel an outside that isn't a place at all, that no repositioned camera could reach, and that one he calls absolute, the frame opening not onto adjacent space but onto the whole, and onto time. Carey keeps shrinking past every scale at which a rescue could be delivered, still talking, and the film follows him down instead of cutting away. The mist that began it was a change in the whole; these last minutes are that whole taken seriously. He is asked, and we are asked, to think smallness with no floor under it, which cannot be pictured. Deleuze believed cinema's highest power was to bring us up against what thought can't think. A Universal creature feature does it here without blinking.

Watch it again for the objects rather than the monsters: the pin, the trap, the scissors, the cat who has not changed either. Every one of them is exactly what it was, and every one means something new, and the film's entire argument lives in that gap. What would your own house be, at an inch? Arnold's answer is the one nobody expected from him. Not a prison. A continent, and then something larger.