Boys’ Private Fantasies and Popular Culture

As an exercise in the self-analysis of one boyhood, the author analyzes a science fiction film, Invaders from Mars , which had a profound and lasting effect on his emotions when he viewed the film in 1953 at age eight. Cultural meanings and unique individual meanings interact during the act of viewing the film, and the author uses this personal case study to make larger points about collective cultural fantasies in popular culture and individual fantasies in the boy's mind. Psychoanalytic theory about the latency period (ages five to twelve) of psychosexual development helps explain what is so unsettling about the film for the author when he was an eight-year-old boy.