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The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street Analysis

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The Monsters are Due on Maple Street is an episode which takes places in an American suburb when suddenly a meteor object flies over head and afterwards all the electricity on the street goes dead. As the residents become more and more paranoid, they start accusing one another of being “aliens” and in cahoots with the UFO that was seen early. The paranoia heightens until one resident shoots and kills another, at which point all out hysteria breaks out, as the actual aliens watch the town from a hilltop destroy each other. This episode aired in 1960 — ten years after Joseph McCarthy first gained traction for accusing the U.S. State Department of harboring communists — is widely seen as a direct reference to McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Continuing the …show more content…

I see the underlying message of this episode to be that while the external threat of the Soviet Union was legitimate during the time of the Cold War, the largest threat would be destroying each other from the inside out with prejudices and paranoia, the same way the residents on Maple Street did as the Aliens looked on. The final example I wish to draw on serves as an example for South African Apartheid. The Science Fiction movie District 9 starts thirty years after aliens arrive on Earth, not to wage war or to acquire resources, but to find refuge from their planet that is dying. Most humans are not concerned with the welfare of these extraterrestrials, but to figure out how to master their advanced technology, and all of the aliens — or “Prawns” — are placed in a slum city in South Africa called District 9 in which they cannot

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