>>4294847I think we're projecting current issues a bit hard onto them. For instance, another stereotype during that era was destroying monuments: the imagery of King Kong includes not only picking up Fay Wray, but climbing up the Sears Tower with her. That's not an isolated event, and we're not sitting around saying things like "large buildings were obviously allegories for land ownership, and national monuments were allegories for seats of government. Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is clearly a metaphor for a foreigner being elected president."
I'd argue that landmarks and women are playing the same role in the stereotypical pulp-era piece: recognizable representatives of the protected center of local human culture. The tension is not intended to be "OH NO IT'S THAT GUY WHO LIVES IN THE SLUMS AND/OR FOREIGNERS" but "OH NO A BIG MONSTER IS ATTACKING THESE THINGS WHICH WE ALWAYS HAVE IMAGINED AS SAFE WITHIN THE METAPHORICAL HEART OF OUR COUNTRY/WORLD". I believe this because I can't think of many works off the top of my head in which the monster/alien/robot is played anything other than completely straight. There are certainly pieces where the author is trying to make social commentary and is, say, using the Voltuscians as a metaphor for African natives, but these appear to be exceptional.
In War of the Worlds, for example, which people always bring up as having Muslim imagery, there's nothing especially Muslim about the aliens except that imagery. The threat from the aliens isn't that they'll impose Sharia Law, or that they'll capture Jerusalem, or that they're specifically targetting churches, etc. It's that they're going to stomp all over the world and kill everyone. The foreign imagery is there just to add exotic flavor for an audience that didn't have access to the Internet and considered travel a luxury. I think that exotic flavor is far more common than social metaphor here.
