American Autonomy and Identity Crisis in I Was A Teenage Werewolf: Exploitation Cinema as Subversive Communist Text

In the mid­dle of the last cen­tu­ry, the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca was in full swing at the Com­mu­nist Threat With­in. McCarthy­ism was rife and Hol­ly­wood was in thrall to the bully­boy tac­tics of black­list­ing. The ram­pant suc­cess of I Was A Teenage Were­wolf [1957] in this time peri­od is sur­pris­ing giv­en its quite obvi­ous den­i­gra­tion of Amer­i­can indi­vid­u­al­ism in the face of author­i­tar­i­an con­trol.

Michael Lan­don is a ‘trou­bled’ teenag­er who has a prob­lem with sub­ju­ga­tion of any kind. He has a prob­lem with being touched, with being crit­i­cized, with being sur­prised. Most­ly he does not like being told what to do. Peo­ple “bug” him. At first blush this could be tak­en as a nor­mal pubes­cent teen­pic where these typ­i­cal bouts of teen angst are vis­i­ble in the guise of the were­wolf; and while this is a valid analy­sis, it does not pre­clude all oth­er analy­ses.

Michael Lan­don is enraged because he has learned that Amer­i­can ide­al­ism is a fraud. The indi­vid­u­al­ism he was raised with as his lifeblood turns to bit­ter gall when faced with the harsh real­i­ty that he must kow­tow to those in pow­er and accept that oth­ers have their own opin­ions. The rage of this real­iza­tion cou­pled with the abil­i­ties of the evil hyp­nother­a­pist result in a man­i­fes­ta­tion of lim­i­nal uncer­tain­ty: the were­wolf. Only as the were­wolf can Michael Lan­don tru­ly be con­sid­ered autonomous and his cri­sis of iden­ti­ty be resolved. He is one of a kind, and instinct beats rea­son leav­ing all ques­tions with­out need of being answered.

Yet Michael Lan­don can­not han­dle auton­o­my either. He destroys all that is around him and is even­tu­al­ly destroyed by the police. While the plot itself might seem rather straight­for­ward in pro­mot­ing con­for­mi­ty, it remains an Com­mu­nist alle­gor­i­cal con­struc­tion of vic­to­ry over the West.

A recap; Michael Lan­don [as Dynam­ic Post-War Amer­i­ca] can­not cope with the inher­ent con­tra­dic­tions between Amer­i­can Ide­al­ism and Prac­tice [man­i­fest­ed in the were­wolf] and is destroyed by the rea­son­able and order­ly impla­ca­bil­i­ty of Author­i­ty [the Police and just about every oth­er adult in the film]. The fact that it was so huge­ly suc­cess­ful is evi­dence enough that McCarthy­ism was right on the mon­ey and that Amer­i­ca was full of com­mie pinko bas­tards in the 1950s.

I report, you decide.