The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955)

Hi Aki,

Today I watched The Invasion of the Body Snatchers a Walter Wanger/Allied Artists sci-fi thriller directed by Don Siegel.

The story has a doctor being called in to the hospital to interview a strange mental case: a respected man from the nearby town of Santa Mira, CA, a doctor himself, who is raving paranoically about ‘them’ and how his whole town was taken over. As the man (Kevin McCarthy) settles down and tells his story, the screen goes blurry and the flashback begins.

It started ‘last Thursday’ when the Dr was called back early from a medical conference he’d been at for a couple of weeks. People were frantically trying to get appointments and would only see him. But when he gets into his office, none of the appointments show up. And there’s the little kid who runs screaming into the road ahead of the Dr’s car, claiming his mother isn’t really his mother. And there’s the middle aged woman who claims her father isn’t her father, even though he looks just like him, sounds just like him, and remembers everything her father knew. She can’t even explain what it is, there’s just ‘something missing.’

The Dr meets another person come back to the town, his old flame Becky (Dana Wynter). She’s just off being divorces, and he’s also divorced, so they feel the old magic and go on a date. But the restaurant is empty. Nobody comes there anymore, the owner tells them.

The Dr gets another frantic call, from a friend and writer. He goes to the writer’s house and finds on the man’s pool table a dead man – what seems to be a dead man. But the face is oddly indistinct, and the hands have no fingerprints. The dead man does, however, happen to exactly match the general physical shape of the writer. And later that night, the dead man begins to wake up – and now he has a cut on his hand just where the writer cut his hand an hour ago.

Soon the cause of all this becomes clear, when the Dr finds in his greenhouse four large seed pods, that burst open, and out of them emerge the slimy, rapidly changing, forms … forms that match with increasing exactitude the Dr, his girlfriend, and the writer and his wife.

It happens when you sleep. When the pod-thing reaches maturity, which it can do inside a day, it can read all your memories while you sleep. When ‘you’ wake up, you are a pod-person too.

The discovery of the threat takes up the first half of the picture. The second half details the frantic efforts of Dr and girlfriend to get out of town to warn the other communities. But the pod people are growing thousands of the pods in greenhouses (it’s a central California farming town) and trucking them out to those other communities.

In a confrontation with some of the pod people, the Dr gets a chance to learn just how it was it happened. The seeds came first from space, and landed in the fields. The pods can take on the exact semblance of whatever life form they choose. They are just like humans, except they have no emotions, no fear, no love, no greed, no ambition, no faith. They all think just alike.

The Dr and Becky manage to run into the hills, chased by the pod people, and they find temporary shelter in an abandoned mine. But Becky sleeps, and when the Dr kisses her, he rises off her body in horror – she’s one of them now. He runs out, chased again, and ends up in the middle of the freeway, desperately trying to get someone to pick him up, to believe him, to take the threat seriously…

Back in the present, he fails to persuade the examining physician, until a report comes in of an accident where giant, weird seed pods fell off a truck. At this the alarmed physician calls the FBI to send out the alert and seal off all roads to Santa Mira.

The film is one of several of the ‘Who Goes There? or, My Neighbors are Aliens!’ films that came out in the 1950s, and is one of the best of them. Supposedly the creators were aiming at the rise of suburbia and the lifelessness of it, or the general rise of more plastic people following the tumultuous years of Depression and war. It also plays into the general fears of Communists and Communist sympathizers that plagued the popular imagination, fanned by zealots of the far Right.

Siegel kept the pace moving along smartly. This is vital for a story which is, at base, preposterous. We have to keep getting new scenes to be distracted from thinking about what we’re watching. The pods themselves are a bit ridiculous, except for the genuinely (to this day) creepy shots of the pods bursting and the bubbling, oozing proto-human shapes sliding wetly out.

The script and first cut of the picture had no frame story, and ended with the shots of Kevin McCarthy as the Dr in close-up looking straight into the camera shouting, ‘You’re next!’ – but when Wanger and the other brass at Allied Artists saw this, they thought it was too bleak and frightening, so they gave Siegel money to shoot the frame, which ends on a more hopeful note. (I wonder if there is any DVD version that gives us that version – it would be a pretty simple matter of skipping the bookend scenes and suppressing the voiceover narration.)

One thing the flashback structure does give us though is a sense of fear and foreboding from the opening. There is a necessary Act 1 of exposition in which everything seems normal on the surface, before the Dr begins to suspect that something is really wrong (with the examination of the unfinished corpse on the writer’s pool table). Without the flashback structure, these scenes would play very tame, even boring; but with the prologue that sense of fear hangs over all this, and we have been assured that something is really wrong; this lets us interpret everything even slightly odd in ways the Dr doesn’t as yet; it also makes us suspect everybody around him, and lets us develop our paranoia over a longer portion of the picture’s running time.

Of course, the closing scene shows us the Dr now relieved, feeling he’s no longer alone. But there is no certainty that the pods can be defeated. There are only the grounds for hope, and no real hope at all.

(Two interesting side notes: Sam Peckinpah was Siegel’s assistant for a few pictures, including this one. Sam claimed to have done a complete rewrite of the script himself, a claim which is widely disputed. In the 1980s Phil Kaufman remade the picture as a comment on the Reagan years and what looked like a return to 1950s life.)

One problem: there really isn’t any difference between the pod people and the regular people. In the 1980s remake (with better actors and more time shooting) Kaufman tried to bring out in performances the lack of emotions when people ‘went pod’ but Siegel really doesn’t get that, and the script doesn’t highlight the difference. Instead, and this is interesting, the difference shows up in the reactions of those not yet converted. They know, and we get the idea just because THEY react that way. In the same vein, what’s so bad about being a pod? The movie doesn’t give a good intellectual answer, but it gives us a good movie answer – because our heroes react in horror to the conversion of those they know, and because the conversion is forced – nobody has a choice.

In this light, it would be an idea to make a My Name is Legion adaptation (the Richard Mathieson novel adapted 3 times as Last Man on Earth and Omega Man in which all the world is vampires, except one man) along the pod people idea: show the doctor faking that he’s a pod person, and so far as he knows everybody else has changed over – but he doesn’t know for sure, so he has to hide himself, who he really is, and yet he’s always tempted – is this woman ‘real’ or that man, that kid?

Here the metaphor would cover things like being gay and trying to pretend you’re straight in a homophobic society, or being an immigrant in a different culture, or being ‘different’ in any way and trying to fit in.

Since this question of ‘fitting in’ is so strong among adolescents, it could be done in a teen-high school setting. The teachers are the main proponents of the pods, they grow them and convert kids; the hero is the last one, so far as he knows, who’s still a ‘real’ kid.

In a weird way, this is the same issue as Kurosawa’s Ikiru.

(27 April 2009)