Film

Ant-Agonistic

1973 Horror Fantasy Pits Man vs. Insect

by Emily Hall

There was, in times past, a whole genre of movies that taught us to fear the everyday gone mad. We saw it in The Birds (birds), and in Christine (a car), and we saw it in lots and lots of paranoid insect fantasies in which tiny, dismissible creatures suddenly tap into the universal desire to take over the world. Often, they are genetically mutated to be smarter, bigger, stronger, badder. Remember Them (1954), with the enormous ants? Or Irwin Allen's The Swarm (1978), with the killer bees? Now ants are back, in Saul Bass' 1973 horror fantasy, Phase IV, bringing with them a sweet nostalgia for a time when we feared being destroyed by something we could crush under our heel.

These fears seem to me to be typical of an age--specifically the Cold War era--that allows me to indulge what I call my Star Trek theory. In the original series, handsome, clearly American Kirk seems to spend all his time trying to free the people of distant planets from single consciousnesses: giant, Soviet-like brains that do all the thinking, never allowing the populace a will or desire of its own. Perhaps you recall the pre-latex Klingons? They were beatniks, with goatees and black turtlenecks. No kidding! This tells us volumes about what we feared back then, namely the anti-individualism of Communism on the one side, and the free-thinking liberals on the other. Nowadays--Borg plotline aside--the crews of this endlessly self-generating series take their Prime Directive much more seriously; in a nod to multiculturalism, they live and let live.

Such is the tension that informs Phase IV. Early in the film, the narrator tells us that a biological imbalance has caused the disappearance of ants' natural predators, and a famous scientist suspects that "ants are meeting, communicating, apparently making decisions." Powered by some unknown impetus, the ants infest and devastate a remote area of Arizona desert, killing anything that gets in their way. The scientist--arrogant, loud, British--heads into the desert to investigate, bringing with him a handsome, wholesome statistician/logician who will try to decode the ants' language and peskily insist that acting humanely is more important than finishing the project. As you might expect, there's also a nubile young girl, both a threat and the key to the whole project. It's not an environmental morality tale, as it would be were it made in the '90s. It's a good old-fashioned parable about individual man versus the group will of ants.

While it's unlikely that Saul Bass will go down in history for this, his one foray beyond the opening credits of a feature film, Phase IV is a lot of fun. Bass is best known for his stylish titles for movies such as Anatomy of a Murder and West Side Story; with composer Bernard Hermann he created a new language for Hitchcock films, building the tension of movies such as Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho right into the titles. Oddly, having understood so clearly in his work with Hitchcock what makes a story really scary, Bass opted for a kind of mod, kitschy approach with Phase IV. It's not visually stunning so much as visually engaging, and every inch the unintentional period piece. The scientists hole up in a hermetic laboratory that could have been designed by Buckminster Fuller; they counterattack the ants with poisons known simply as "yellow," "red," and "blue," which cover the surrounding landscape with something that looks like polenta.

The ants themselves are ingenious in their subtlety. They're animated, but not in the overdesigned way that they'd be in a contemporary film. They modestly look like real ants and they act like real ants, except they also get together in groups to chat (looking like a group of Italian men arguing and gesturing insanely), line up their dead, and mourn. Truth be told, I was rooting for them as they systematically fucked up every bit of advanced technology the scientists had hauled into the desert.

Phase IV opens with a shot of an ant contemplatively looking at the night sky. What he and his "people" want, in the end, is much less clear than my Cold War scenario would suggest. But whatever it was that those adaptable ants wanted, they were probably right.