A Film Canon

The Incredible Shrinking Man successively reconfigures the decade’s oscillation between the domestic and the cosmic in terms of the infinite and the infinitesimal, expanding the parameters of the suburban home to the unfathomable plasticity of a doll house; the prehistoric and the post-apocalyptic, elevating the navigation of domestic topography into a resurgence of heroic, even primeval labour; and the quantitative and the qualitative, ultimately envisaging a universe that is sufficiently fractallated to render the criteria responsible for protagonist Carey's (Grant Williams) abject emasculation, infantilisation and deindividuation redundant, as evinced in his final embodiment of a mystical, quasi-Eastern spiritual enormity. Combined with the unadorned dialogue, straightforward cinematography, and functional narrative trajectory, this ensures that the film’s strongest moments simply involve the interactions between Carey and the various objects and enlivened objects (including a panorama of intrusive medical equipment, as well as the various predators and parasites lurking around the margins of his home) that transform his progressive shrinking into the pretext for a logistical ingenuity and physical suspense that recall slapstick comedy and anticipate the action movie, culminating in his terrifying encounter with a house spider, which becomes virtually alien in the hands of Arnold’s artful cross-editing,here refreshingly free of the film's more characteristic, dated superimposition.