This week on Gladio Free Europe, we invited Daniel Bessner on to discuss a 1999 movie dripping with millennial nostalgia, The Iron Giant. Set in an idyllic Maine town in October 1957, The Iron Giant tells the story of a boy named Hogarth and his relationship with the eponymous Iron Giant, who fell from the sky and his been causing trouble by consuming all of the metal it can find. The government, alerted to reports of strange happenings, dispatches agent Kent Mansley to investigate the affair.

On one level, the movie is a nostalgia piece for the author’s own childhood. But more broadly, it is a commentary about the Cold War paranoia which was in the air at the time. The government agent Mansley, once convinced of the existence of the robot, goes raving mad, believing it to be an existential threat to the US solely based on the fact that it was not built on America. In a way, the giant is a stand-in for all of America’s worst fears at that time, unmoored from any semblance of veracity. We spent the episode talking about the anticommunist crusades of the time, the public reception of nuclear weapons, and Sputnik and the resulting panic (in the movie in fact, the robot lands on Earth on the day the Sputnik is launched). In a word, the through line of American fear is long, and most of what is discussed has remained with us.

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