The Incredible Shrinking Man: Other Dimensions

Fittingly for a movie whose title serves virtually as synopsis, The Incredible Shrinking Man gains force by simplifying its story to the point of austerity, without digressions or milking of suspense. Admirable as Matheson’s novel is, his screen adaptation improves on it in many ways. The book’s flashback structure is replaced by a lean, linear account. The deleted plot elements—among them the drunken pedophile who tries to molest Scott and the infant daughter who plays with her father like a toy—would have only cluttered the film’s rhythm of unimpeded descent. The novel’s preoccupation with Scott’s resentment at being sexually deprived is artfully suggested rather than belabored. No audience could miss the note of male abasement in the telegraphic line “I felt puny.”

Stripped of particularities, Scott becomes a 1957 version of Anyone, a role for which Grant Williams, with his curious lack of individualized traits, seems perfectly cast. We scarcely glimpse him as he was before that white mist came along, nor can we linger on any moment thereafter, as the film races to keep pace with his metamorphosis. No sooner does he reach a new stage of diminishment—registering shifting states of panic and rage and self-loathing—than he is hurtled into the next, until the moment when he lands like a discarded plaything in a box of old rags at the bottom of the basement steps, ready for the posthuman phase of his adventure.

There is no time for portentous foreshadowing: the unforgettable scene takes precisely one minute. Scott stretches out with eyes closed. The white mass looms on the horizon. He stirs, blinks, takes note of the phenomenon. The cloud approaches. Warily, he sits up, rises to his feet. His back to the camera, Scott stands firm as the cloud fills the sky in front of him: he looks for a moment like Siegfried in Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen, the primeval hero confronting the unknown. In the close-up that follows, his courage falters. Then comes an awkward attempt at retreat; the cloud enfolds him and moves on, leaving him with a mysterious glistening over the surface of his skin, just as Louise emerges with his beer. He tells her it was “some kind of mist.” The episode passes with eerie swiftness and weightlessness.

Fade to “an equally ordinary day, six months later”: the milkman is making his morning delivery to the Careys’ suburban home, a fifties advertising image come to life. It is the first, and mildest, of the chronological leaps forward that structure the film, each marking a more jarring transition. The first observed change is comically minor—a pair of pants grown mysteriously larger. Everything is still on the level of domestic small talk: the laundry, weight loss, a misfired joke about Louise’s cooking. But from the moment Scott sees himself in the mirror, it’s as if he already divines the worst.

These early scenes, so lifelike in their depiction of a suddenly emerging medical crisis, generate unavoidable anxiety. Louise remains in denial—“You’re gonna start taking vitamins”—as their reality founders. The tests Scott undergoes at the California Medical Research Institute are presented in a montage reminiscent of wartime documentaries. The scientists’ expertise is meant to reassure, yet they can come up with only a diagnosis without a cure: an anomalous convergence of exposure to insecticides (some years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring made this a familiar theme) and radiation, from a source left ominously blank, as if such a mist might turn up anywhere. Scott already foresees the end, encouraging Louise to plan for a future without him. As she tells him he is still her husband “as long as you’ve got this wedding ring on,” the ring of course slides from his finger to the floor of their car. This simple close-up signals that the true descent has begun.

The next leap forward initiates a succession of indelible images. Scott’s brother talks to a seemingly empty armchair whose back is to the camera, explaining why he can no longer provide financial support and urging Scott to sell his story to the newspapers. After a tantalizing wait, a reverse shot reveals Scott in the armchair, some three feet high, his legs just protruding over the edge. For most audiences, the effect is unavoidably laughable, yet with that very response we are made complicit in Scott’s sense of humiliation. From now on, his change in size will be measurable, as every ordinary object grows large. In the novel, Scott becomes aware of “the illusion that he was not shrinking, but the world enlarging.” In the movie, that illusion is sustained by special effects so cunning in their combination of process shots and oversize props that the suspension of disbelief becomes almost total.

It is not so much a question of how the effects are achieved as of what they are used for. The changes of scale generate compositions that are complete narratives in themselves, never more so than in the episode marking the outer limit of Scott’s dealings with the human world. In a few quick shots, we see Scott apparently restored to his original dimensions, see Louise coming downstairs and calling out to him, see Scott holding his ears in pain as his room begins to shake, and, as she kneels beside a large dollhouse, register that this is his residence. The sight of him, now some three inches high, stepping onto the tiny balcony and railing at her for making a racket manages to be at once hilarious, horrific, and painfully moving. At this point, the “normal” world has become thoroughly nightmarish, with the strong implication that it has always been thus.