#733: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Don Siegel
Initial release: February 5, 1956 (USA)

What would you do if everyone you knew suddenly seemed to turn against you? What would you do if you were suddenly a stranger in your own town? You might wonder if everyone you knew had been turned into a pod person, just like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a movie you've heard about but probably never saw.

A doctor returns home from a convention to his practice in a small California town. He has tons of messages: while he was gone, a wave of patients had all visited demanding to see him, only to change their minds. There's also a rash of people who are convinced that their loved ones are impostors. Initially, he and a psychiatrist friend dismiss it as mass hysteria. After all, it's the mid-50s: McCarthyism is turning people against their neighbors, the social pressure to conform is unrelenting, the civil rights crusade is gaining steam, and the specter of nuclear war hangs over everything. But our hero, Dr. Bennell, isn't fully convinced. When he discovers incomplete duplicates of his friends growing in basements and greenhouses, he resolves to call the authorities, only to be told by a switchboard operator that all lines are busy. He and his on-and-off girlfriend try to leave town, only to be chased down by a horde of their friends and neighbors, all of whom are alien imposters, grown from pods to replace the townspeople one by one as they sleep, the replacements lacking emotion and individuality — and shipping more pods out to neighboring towns and cities. He stands in the highway, screaming to anyone who will listen — which is no one — of the coming threat.

Perhaps more than most science fiction films of the era, Invasion of the Body Snatchers captures the  mood of the 1950s. Variously interpreted as a critique against the paranoia of McCarthyism or the perceived conformity of a communist takeover, Invasion tells a story that's hard to pin down, yet sums up pretty well the overarching anxieties of the 1950s. So ingrained into the film are these anxieties that the cast and crew in later years have since denied any particular political allegory, as did the author of the book the film is based on. They thought they were just making a movie. One could take that at face value, sure, but I think it's equally possible that those very anxieties were part of the background radiation of the era and thereby informed the tone of the film. The notorious panic in 1938 over a radio play of War of the Worlds certainly exposed the American public's shredded nerves over the looming specter of World War II; similarly, one could take 1968's Night of the Living Dead as a (mostly accidental) commentary on racial matters and the obscenities of the Vietnam war. And, turning the dial even further ahead, the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (which, in my view, is the better version overall) could stand as a commentary to the collapse of 1960s counter-culture and the return of a consumerist, conformist society.

The original film ended with Bennell screaming on the highway, an incredibly dark moment that seemed to presage The Twilight Zone. The studio, a Poverty Row outfit called Allied Artists, demanded that a framing story be added for a more optimistic ending. In this version, Bennell tells his story to a psychiatrist at a Los Angeles hospital, who initially disbelieves him until a hospital attendant relates the story of a man who was crushed under a pile of mysterious-looking giant pods in a truck accident, thereby confirming a key detail and leading the psychiatrist to summon the police and FBI. One could argue that this fundamentally changes the meaning of the film, thereby confirming the McCarthyist reading of the story being about communist infiltration. Personally, I think the addition of the frame instead indirectly confirms the anti-McCarthyist reading: an ending imposed on a film by a studio that believes its audience, that is to say, Americans, to be stupid, sheep even, craving happy endings and disinterested in heavier topics, a populace that must always be smiling amidst a vast kingdom of white suburbs with perfect lawns and perfect teeth and perfect families. A studio that assumes its audience to, in essence, already be pod people.

"They're here already!" Dr. Bennell screams. "You're next! You're neeeext!"

-june❤