"We Get Wise to Him. That's Our Strength: " A Face in the Crowd (1957)

Based on the 1955 short story by Bud Schulberg, “Your Arkansas Traveler,” Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) is the cautionary tale of an American demogogue’s rise to -- and fall from -- power. 

A demagogue might be defined, broadly, as a “political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than rational argument.”

The film focuses on "Lonesome" Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith), a small-time crook and fraud plucked from obscurity in a county jail in Arkansas by a radio programmer, Marcia Jeffries (Patricia O’Neal). She is seeking “local color” for her radio show, and Rhodes can spin a story and sing a folk tune like no other.  

Marcia's search for an audience -- ratings, in modern lingo -- gives the charismatic but malicious Rhodes both exposure and a public platform. Before long, he’s moved to a bigger radio market. Then he transitions to national TV, talking politics and “telling it like it is” to a receptive, low-information audience that hangs on his every word and believes his every false piety.

Rhode’s rise to fame and fortune is aided and abetted by his sponsors and his network. They see his viewership swell to 65 million people. That's a lot of consumers who will buy products from sponsors.

A drunk, misogynist, mean-spirited narcissist, Rhodes appreciatively soaks up all the adoration and power, coming eventually to believe his own press. 

Eventually, he grows so powerful that he advises a presidential campaign in the art of slogans and sound-byes. He also begins hosting a political program, shrouding extreme right wing isolationist views under the soothing umbrella of Southern-fried common sense.  

Eventually, Marcia realizes the key to Rhodes’ downfall involves revealing his true colors to the masses that worship his “home-spun” wisdom and apparent “truth telling.”

As that synopsis makes clear, A Face in the Crowd is a terrifying story of what can happen to America once “politics has entered a new stage: the TV stage.” 

One man’s hateful, ignorant words -- not to mention resentment and anti-intellectualism -- finds purchase in the psyches of millions of like-minded people. Kazan’s camera cuts, at one point to a veritable forest of TV antennae jutting upwards from the rooftops of an urban jungle in order to make his point. These receiving devices look like metal weeds, growing and stretching upwards to the sky. 

The point, of course, is how the mass media can instantly amplify -- for its own enrichment -- one voice to a volume previously unimaginable in human history. Even Rhodes himself -- in a rare moment of apparent self-awareness – recognizes the danger inherent in this technology and its ability to broadcast an entertaining (albeit dangerous) voice to million.  

“Power,” he says, “it’s dangerous. You gotta be a saint.”

But as the film makes plain, Rhodes is no saint. 

His father was a con-man who abandoned the family, and one feels that this is the galvanizing influence in Rhodes’ life. He has never been able to get past his father’s actions, or feel truly confident in himself. Accordingly, he hates authority in all its forms. He hates his father, who abandoned him. He hates the law, which punishes him for infractions. He hates establishment figures, who possess the power he covets. 

Rhodes also hates those who are smarter than he is, like TV writer Mel Miller (Walter Mattthau). Miller represents the education and knowledge that could expose Rhodes as the ignorant lout he is. 

One of the most intriguing aspects of the film involves Miller’s impotence in the face of Rhodes’ continuing disdain and hatred for him. We are led to the conclusion that is easier for a demagogue to to hate and attack than it is for a rational person to respond meaningfully to that demagogue. 

That’s undoubtedly because demogogue’s rely on powerful emotions (anger, rage, resentment) and mob-like followers who repeat mindlessly their every word and slogan. Educated intelligent people are like deer in a headlight by comparison, making logical cases and appealing to cerebral arguments.  

Miller simply can’t conceive of the fact that a nativist, bigoted simpleton could have a better innate understanding of human nature and human foibles than he does. But Miller knows what makes his people tick.

Importantly, Miller fails to fully understand his role in Rhodes’ rise. Like Marcia, he is culpable for elevating a demagogue to the status of national treasure. Rhodes is a distraction, a joke, a fad when it is good for Miller’s wallet or career.  

Only later is the coarseness of the superstar a danger to freedom itself.

What’s amazing about Rhodes, the film subtly observes, is the yawning chasm of cognitive dissonance between his public “persona” and his real personality. 

Rhodes lives in a luxurious penthouse apartment, surrounds himself with wealth and women, and covets his TV ratings. In short, he is a coddled, entitled rich man.  But his public shtick -- his fake, media-driven image -- is as “The voice of grass roots wisdom.” 

On stage, he voices syrupy Christian platitudes like “the family that prays together, stays together,” from his humble “cracker-barrel” sound stage. In real life, he is a philanderer who marries a 17 year old girl and then cheats on her.

In real life, he is also being supported by a political establishment that wants his audience’s votes. 

So Rhodes is a text-book fraud. 

He pretends to be a common-sense, salt-of-the-earth, plain talker when in fact he is a messenger boy for the wealthy elite. Rhodes claims he believes in the common man, but he hates and derides the common man.  

His ambitions are bottomless.  “The whole country is just like my flock of sheep,” he enthuses at one point. 

Delightfully, A Face in the Crowd provides a prescription for the destruction of Rhodes and demogogues just like him. 

Realizing she has created a monster, Marcia turns up the studio sound during a live broadcast, and she lets Rhodes hang himself on-air. Believing the sound is off, Rhodes expresses his true feelings for his audience. “I can make ‘em eat dog food like it is steak!” He reports.  

He is so confident in the fact that his followers will mindlessly follow wherever he leads that he actually says he could “murder” people, and they’d still be on his side.

But that’s not the case. He has overestimated his appeal.

The audience at home finally realizes that Larry is not one of them at all. He is an impostor, and just as much a tool of the hated “elite” as any conventional politician or leader. He has not “told them like it is,” at all. 

He has, contrarily, pandered to them in the worst ways possible, and they have taken his words as the God’s honest truth. He has not only played them and abused them at every turn...he has gotten rich doing so.

Kazan finds a clever visual to express Rhodes’ sudden and dramatic fall from grace. We see the elevator lights going down, quickly, in his apartment building, floor to floor. He starts at the penthouse, and drops to ground level, before our eyes, in seconds. The fall is more than symbolic. It is a meteoric crash he experiences, one even faster than his surprising, relentless rise.

A Face in the Crowd is a terrifying drama in part because of its plausibility. The mass media often gives irresponsible voices of hate, bigotry, and false piety a platform and open mic to influence the nation. 

The film notes the media’s inherent culpability for creating such a demagogue, and rightly so. If you willingly invite the devil to dance with you, you can’t complain, later, when you don’t like how he treats his dance partner. 

The film also thrives because of Griffith’s unforgettable performance. He portrays a monster of such high energy and narcissistic pride. Rhodes is a monster of considerable charisma and, hauntingly, occasional moments of insight. But he has no loyalty or feelings of responsibility to anyone or anything beyond his own self-glorification.  The thought have him possessing real power is terrifying.

A Face in the Crowd is a sobering reminder of how a dangerous, narcissistic demagogue can use and exploit the media (in a symbiotic relationship…) to change the face and values of a whole nation. 

But the film also reminds us how to stop such monsters.  

Journalists, concerned citizens, politicians, and voters all possess a responsibility to see that his “personality finally comes through,” preferably on the very channel that created him.  

“When we get wise to him, that’s our strength,” the film knowingly concludes.

The question that makes A Face in the Crowd such an intense, anxiety-provoking experience is one for the ages. 

What happens if we get wise to the demagogue too late?

To answer that interrogative, one need only look at some of the worst historical tragedies of the 20^th century, and the 21st century.

Let's not repeat those mistakes today.

"Every Man is King So Long as He Has Someone to Look Down On:" It Can't Happen Here

Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951) was the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, and the novelist’s most famous work is It Can’t Happen Here. This work of fiction describes, in terrifying detail, how America becomes a fascist dictatorship.

The novel is set during the election season of 1935 – 1936 and focuses on a journalist named Doremus Jessup as he watches national events unfold in a surprising and terrifying way.

Specifically, a candidate, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip” secures the nomination for the presidency away from incumbent Commander-in-Chief FDR, and then defeats Walt Trowbridge in the general election to gain control of the nation,

After Inauguration Day, folksy Buzz Windrip declares martial law, relegates the Supreme Court and Congress to advisory status, and unlooses his armed “Minute Men” militia -- originally an “innocent” marching club -- upon the country. Stand by and stand back?

American citizens who protest this turn of events are sent to labor camps while Windrip systematically scapegoats Jews, blacks, and women for the nation’s troubles.  

Soon, President Windrip and his PR advisor/deputy/minister-of-propaganda Lee Sarason abolish the names of the states, and partition America into administrative provinces for easier management. The Republican and Democratic Parties are outlawed, and one party replaces them: The American Corporate State and Patriotic Party.  

Leading members of this party become known as “Corpos.”

Watching America succumb quickly to fascism, Doremus joins up with the N.U (New Underground), which helps beleaguered American citizens escape to Canada.

In the end, the tyrant Windrip is run out of office, but Sarason first, and then another dictator follow in his footsteps. 

At the end of the novel, America is still not a free country, and the ruling party wages war on Mexico as a distraction from the internal strife. 

After an apparent false-flag operation, the Party recruits a million American men to fight in the war on the border…

The Dictator: Buzz Windrip

A good starting place in any discussion of this Sinclair Lewis novel is the title. 

“It Can’t Happen Here” is the resounding refrain of many Americans in the book, who just don’t believe something as European -- and therefore alien -- as fascism can take hold in the United States.

It’s easy to see why, in the 1930s, Americans would have said “it can’t happen here.” 

They watched as Mussolini and Hitler rose in distant lands, but because of language and cultural differences, simply couldn’t see such men assuming power in Washington D.C.  

One of the key conceits of It Can’t Happen Here is that American fascism -- while still fascism -- will be cloaked in different trappings. When it rises here, according to Lewis, it will do so draped in militant Christianity and fronted by a candidate boasting a tell-it-like-it-is manner.

The dictator in the book, Buzz Windrip, for instance, likes to claim his birth-date is December 25, the day celebrating Christ’s birth. He tells stories about himself that make him sound like a winner, like someone amazing.

In addition to his (false) proclamations about his pious religious nature, Windrup relies on homespun wisdom and colloquial speech to meaningfully connect with the “masses” suffering in the Great Depression.

“I try to make my speech as simple and direct as those of the Child Jesus talking to the Doctors in the Temples,” he declares at one point, again comparing himself directly to Christ.

Windrip’s appearance and attire are similarly deceptive in their home-spun nature.

The politician is known, for example to wear a “ten gallon hat” -- meaning a cowboy hat -- and he flaunts his ignorance and bad academic grades. 

Windrip likes to tell people the story of how a teacher once called him “the thickest-headed dunce in school.”

In short, this fictional fascist dictator evidences what Sinclair describes as an “earthy, American sense of humor.”  

At one point, the author even compares Windrip’s style to Mark Twain. In this fashion, the reader sees how homegrown fascism would look very different in America, from the model across the world.

Windrip’s characteristics purposefully align him with the less-educated “common men” who support him. Like them, he has a disregard for learning and flaunts a no-nothing attitude. He loves the poorly educated.

For instance, Windrip decries diplomacy, calling it “talky-talk” and notes that America is only “wasting our time at Geneva.”  

When he complains and bullies the press, he refers to journalists as “wishily-washily liberal.”

The new President of It Can’t Happen Here also derides so-called elites in other ways. 

He dislikes “haughty megapolises” such as New York and Washington D.C., and to assure that the intelligentsia doesn’t get out of hand he even re-writes college curricula to be “entirely practical and modern, free of all snobbish tradition.”

Lewis describes the America dictator, in fact, as a “professional common man,” one who speaks so that all other “commoners would understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own.” 

And when he seeks power, accordingly, Windrip does so for his brothers, not for himself…or so he claims

“I do want power – great, big imperial power – but not for myself, for you!” He declares. His promise? To somehow recreate the past, a time when the people who are suffering now were doing great.

His Policies

Windrip assumes control of the White House in 1937 according to It Can’t Happen Here, and establishes fifteen policy goals.

Among these policies is the creation of a Central Bank -- to be administrated by a Board appointed directly by the President. 

Also, Windrip seeks the establishment of a commission to determine which labor unions are “qualified” to represent workers… again answerable to the President.  

Both these policies are crucial ones vis-à-vis fascism: the centralization of authority or power in one person.

Very significantly, Windrip’s platform demands the absolute freedom of religious worship, and a maximum wage.  

It is this latter promise that the wages of millionaires will be capped and that veterans will receive a stipend -- wealth distribution, essentially -- that carries Windrip to the Oval Office in Lewis’s text. 

Furthermore, Windrip’s platform targets certain demographics.  

Women, for instance, may work as nurses or in other “feminine” settings such as “beauty parlors,” but otherwise must return to the home to raise children. Typically, women are not valued in a fascist state, except as they can give birth to loyal and strong soldiers.

African-Americans, meanwhile, are to be prohibited from “voting, holding public office, practicing law, medicine, or teaching any class above the grade of grammar school.”  Windrip's supporters seek a return to pre-Civil War society, before the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves.

Furthermore, all African-Americans are to be taxed 100% of all income in excess of 10,000 dollars per family, a year.  Here, we see that a fascist philosophy believes it is appropriate to limit the right to vote to certain groups of people, so as to hold on to power.

As mentioned above, absolute freedom of religious worship is protected in Windrip’s platform, but there’s an important caveat. 

No atheist, Jew, or “believer in Black Magic” shall be able to hold office until first swearing allegiance to the New Testament.  

In other words, you have to be a Christian to enjoy absolute religious freedom in Windrip’s America.

If one wonders why Windrip’s agenda specifically targets women, blacks, and non-Christians, it is because, in Sinclair Lewis’s words, “every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.” 

Fascism thrives, we can discern, when there is an enemy to hate, and an “inferior” to lord it over. 

Furthermore, any socialist, communist or anarchist in Windrip's America is to be tried for high treason. The minimum penalty upon conviction is 20 years in a labor camp, and the maximum penalty is death by hanging, or whatever method the judge in the case happens to find convenient.

In terms of the other branches of government, Congress will serve only in an advisory capacity and The Supreme Court shall have “removed from its jurisdiction” the power to rule the president’s actions unconstitutional, according to Windrip’s plan.

Finally, Windrip’s agenda includes “consistently” enlarging the military of the United States until it shall equal “the martial strength of any other single country or empire in the world.”

Actions Once in Office

After Windrip takes the oath of office in It Can’t Happen Here, he establishes a new cabinet position: Secretary of Education and Public Relations. In other words, this is the propaganda division of the re-formed U.S. government. 

Then “The Chief,” as Windrip is called, disbands Congress with his re-branded“Shock Troops of Freedom,” the Minute Men, whom he has ordered recognized as an “official auxiliary of the regular army.” 

The Minute Men are issued machine guns, rifles, bayonets and other weapons.

It is clear that Windrip and his PR Man, Sarason, also understand the value of imagery and symbols. 

The Minute Men wear white uniforms and their ubiquitous symbol is a five-pointed star, like the one on the American flag. Obviously, there's a corollary for the use of this symbol in history, vis-a-vis the Swastika.

In this new America, the unemployed are sent to labor camps and paid a dollar a day for their work.  Unfortunately, it costs them between 70 and 90 cents a day for their room and board in the camp…

This is the new reality of President Windrip’s America. 

Lewis writes: “There was a certain discontentment among people who had once owned motorcars and bathrooms and eaten meat twice daily, at having to walk ten or twenty miles a day, bathe once a week, along with fifty others, in a long trough, get meat only twice a week…and sleep in bunks, a hundred in a room.” (page 188).

Historical Context

FDR is one real-life historical figure featured in It Can’t Happen Here. He loses in a primary his bid for a second term because he can’t end the Depression quickly enough for the taste of many suffering citizens.  

Instead, FDR starts a new party, the “Jeffersonian” Party, which represents “integrity and reason.”

However, this is the wrong approach for the time, according to Lewis because this particular election year is about an electorate hungering for “frisky emotions.”  The public is angry, and desires a leader to channel that anger.

What Lewis hints at, then, is that fascism is a philosophy that hinges on emotions such as anger and resentment, and which isn’t, ultimately, susceptible to reason.  

Once you understand that resentment and other emotions are key to fascism, it is clear that the logic, and even the former positions of the dictator are largely unimportant.  He is a strong-man, one whose rage, not reason, is responsible for his popularity.

In the text, one of Windrip’s key supporters is Bishop Prang, a character based on real-life radio personality Father Charles Coughlin (1891 – 1979). 

Coughlin was a fierce anti-communist, a position which led him to come perilously close to advocating for the policies of Hitler or Mussolini at some points. Coughlin was also apparently, anti-Jew, a quality reflected in his comment: “When we get through with the Jews in America, they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.”

“The Chief” -- Windrip himself -- is loosely based on Huey Long (1893 -1935), the Democratic governor of Louisiana from 1928 – 1932, and a U.S. Senator from 1932 - 1935.  In fact, Long had planned to challenge Roosevelt for the presidency in 1936, but was assassinated in 1935. 

His platform called “Share the Wealth” featured elements of Windrip’s “maximum wage” plank.

I suppose the big question about It Can’t Happen Here involves how the American people could possibly let a fascist government come to power. 

In the first case, there is denial among the regular folk (hence the title). Nobody takes the threat of the fascist candidate seriously until it is too late to stop his ascent.

Secondly, It Can’t Happen Here suggests that fascism comes to a nation when the people are suffering and poor, and looking to blame someone for their situation.  In such a context, a strong-man who promises quick remedy, and does so with apparent “common sense,” “earthy” humor, and religious piety is difficult to resist. 

One of the reasons that It Can’t Happen Here is so abundantly worth reading today is that the issues it addresses have not disappeared. In fact, the book is scarily prophetic.

It Can’t Happen Here is a cautionary tale about what a lack of vigilance could bring to America if the so-called "poorly educated" get very angry, and tempers run irrationally hot; if experience and wisdom are no longer valued by voters and a strong man -- an authoritarian -- is sought.

For more than eighty years, Lewis's story has remained a cautionary tale. If we cherish freedom, we must not be fooled by dumb trucks, "plain speaking," populist notions, and demagoguery. We must remain vigilant, careful and informed.

40 Years Ago: Knight Rider: "K.I.T.T. Vs. K.A.R.R."

"I've never seen so many people so crazy over a car..."

- Knight Rider: "K.I.T.T. vs. K.A.R.R."

I don't know exactly what it is about "evil twins," but cult television programs certainly love them, don't they? Perhaps it's just a matter of production exigencies. It's cheaper to feature a lead actor as an "evil" version of himself than hire an expensive guest star, I suppose.

Or perhaps, on a psychological level, we are all just fascinated by the concept of an evil twin.  Two brothers (or sisters), both from one family.  But one is twisted and evil while the other is heroic and good. Maybe we cherish this trope, subconsciously, because it helps to explain our own unique families of origins. 

Me?  I'm the good one.  But my brother?  He's pure evil.  He took all the lessons my father and mother taught us...and twisted them for EVIL!

Data (Brent Spiner) the android has an evil twin, Lore, in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987 - 1994).  The witch, Samantha Stephens has a troublesome "cousin," Serena (Elizabeth Montgomery) on Bewitched (1964 - 1972), and so on.  

So, I suppose it's inevitable that the talking car on Glen Larson's Knight Rider (1982 - 1986), K.I.T.T. (William Daniels) -- the "Knight Industries Two Thousand" -- would also have an evil automotive twin, the deep-voiced, malicious K.A.R.R (Paul Frees).

As Lore is to Data, so is K.A.R.R. (Knight Automoted Roving Robot) to K.I.T.T.: An early, unstable prototype eventually de-activated by its creator, Wilton Knight (rather than Noonien Soong) for safety reasons.  

In the first season Knight Rider episode "Trust Doesn't Rust," the morally-challenged K.A.R.R. is discovered in storage and re-activated by a pair of crooks, who then utilize the "evil" Trans Am for a crime spree.  Knight Rider's hero, the jocular Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff) outwits K.A.R.R. in a game of chicken, and sends the evil twin plunging down off a cliff into the ocean (apparently re-using stock footage from The Car [1977]).

In season three's "K.I.T.T. vs. K.A.R.R." there's a re-match between these 1982 Pontiac Trans Am titans.  

Round two commences when pair of beach combers, John (Jeffrey Osterhage) and Mandy (Jennifer Holmes), discover that K.A.R.R. is perfectly operational, only buried in the sand. They use their truck to excavate the car, and soon K.A.R.R. is attempting to enlist John in all manners of criminal activity. He damages the pace-maker of John's employer so John can take ownership of his company. And then K.A.R.R. uses his programming to steal money from a new-fangled ATM machine.

Meanwhile, Michael (Hasselhoff), K.I.T.T. (Daniels), Bonnie (Patricia McPherson) and Devon (Edward Mulhare) are understandably concerned that K.A.R.R. is back on the scene. Michael worries because K.A.R.R. -- admittedly just a very intelligent machine -- seems to "corrupt everyone he touches."

Bonnie believes she has a solution to the K.A.R.R. dilemma. She wants to install new lasers on K.I.T.T.  "I can double its penetration!" she enthuses, a suggestive line of dialogue played absolutely straight but which cheekily reinforces the widely-acknowledged love relationship that exists between mankind and his cars.

Unfortunately, K.A.R.R. launches a frontal assault on the Knight Industry rolling laboratory (in the back of a truck) and steals the penetrating lasers from Bonnie in an impressive and unexpected action sequence.

Finally, Michael and K.I.T.T. play another game of chicken with K.A.R.R. and once more, K.A.R.R. seems destroyed. 

Miraculously, K.I.T.T. himself is completely unscathed after a mid-air, turbo-boosted, head-on collision, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. K.A.R.R. just sort of explodes into debris, but you'd think both cars would suffer equal damage.

"K.I.T.T. vs. K.A.R.R." motors along at about seventy-five miles an hour, juiced by an unfettered delight in its own silliness. The writing isn't exactly bad so much as droll, or cheeky.  It looks like everyone, especially David Hasselhoff, is having fun, and the dialogue is filled with zingers. "I'll bet George Lucas drives one of these things," says John, getting behind K.A.R.R.'s steering wheel.

When I was a kid, I watched Knight Rider religiously on Friday nights. And the episodes with over-sized, science fictional-type threats (such as K.A.R.R., or the truck, Goliath), were always my favorites. 

Tales of  Michael and K.I.T.T. putting away small-time crooks just didn't appeal to me. But whenever those evil twins -- and Michael also had an evil twin, named Garth, if I recall -- rolled out, I was hooked.

Today, "K.I.T.T. vs. K.A.R.R." seems a bit simplistic, but it hasn't lost one iota of fun. I don't know why the Michael/K.I.T.T. relationship (sort of a Kirk/Spock type of thing) remains so vital, but it does.  

As William Jeanes wrote in The Saturday Evening Post last year: "Cars are like clothing. Life would go on without them, but it wouldn’t be the same. To someone like me, who has always believed that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess, it seems only right that we live in a nation with more cars than drivers. A preponderance of Americans agrees with me, which is why we as a country have carried on a 125-year love affair with the automobile."

I suspect that, not-too secretly, we all desire a talking car as a friend, one as loyal and smart as K.I.T.T. is. One who can keep us company as we get from Point A to Point B.  And that the car should actually believe he is superior than us -- while simultaneously learning the rules of human relationships -- just makes the friendship all the sweeter. Why aren't we all driving talking cars, today?

Nostalgia plays a big part in my fondness for Knight Rider.  The 40 year old series is like a time capsule of 1980s fashions and pop tunes. There's nothing too mentally taxing here, yet the show is undeniably amusing, and in on the joke.

Of course, if you'll pardon the expression, your mileage may vary...

Abnormal Fixation at Sci-Fi Pulse Today!

The popular genre web-site Sci-Fi Pulse is covering Abnormal Fixation today, our indie-web series today! 

The site, and Ian Cullen, hav published our series press kit, which goes over the characters, cast and crew, episode titles and summaries, etc.  

Teaser trailer dropping next week!

Check out Sci-Fi Pulse here!

70 Years Ago: Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers

In 1954, Dell published a science fiction novel,The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney. Finney's landmark work has been translated to film a whopping four times, in 1956, 1978, in 1993 and in 2007 (as The Invasion). 

Some of the terminology associated with the Invasion of the Body Snatchers franchise, including the descriptor "pod people" has landed in the pop culture firmament of our country and remained there for decades. 

We have seen variations of the paranoid tale in efforts such as The Stepford Wives (1975), and even on Buffy the Vampire Slayer ("Bad Eggs"). There have also been entire TV series titled The Invaders and Invasion which grapple with some of the same core concepts as Finney's story.

Finney's novel (which was first appeared serialized in Colliers Magazine) commences with this paragraph, and one might consider it a mission statement for the book, and also for the film adaptations :

"I warn you that what you're starting to read is full of loose ends and unanswered questions. It will not be neatly tied up at the end, everything resolved and satisfactorily explained. Not by me, it won't anyway. Because I can't say I really know exactly what happened, or why, or just how it began, how it ended, or if it has ended; and I've been right in the thick of it. Now if you don't like that kind of story, I'm sorry and you'd better not read it. All I can do is tell what I know."

After this disclaimer of sorts, Finney escorts the reader to the evening of October 28, 1976 in a small-town in southern California called Mill Valley. It's a Thursday around 5:00, and the book's main character, Dr. Miles Bennell narrates the story in the first person. He's a young family practitioner, having inherited the local medical practice from his father, and is well-known and well-liked by the locals. 

Miles is an effective literary protagonist because his style of narration is crisp and at times it feels as though readers are actually reading doctors notes, narrated directly into a tape recorder. The voice is intelligent, the language smart, but there's nothing too flowery, too knowledgeable, too over-the-top or melodramatic to break the spell. And Miles never gets to see the whole picture...he just reports what he sees. A kind of literary Cloverfield, in a sense. Readers aren't privy to the big picture, only on how the events impact Miles and the town of Mill Valley.

In short order, the divorced 28-year old Miles is met at his office by his old flame, the recently divorced Becky Driscoll. She wants to talk business not pleasure, however. Her aunt, Wilma Lentz, has begun acting...strangely. She claims that her uncle Ira is not her Uncle Ira at all. Oh he looks like Uncle Ira, sounds like Uncle Ira, moves like Uncle Ira and has all of Uncle Ira's memories...but Wilma is sure -- just sure -- he is not the same man. 

Hot for Becky but also genuinely concerned for his patient, Miles goes to see Ms. Lentz and question her about this. "Miles, there is no difference you can actually see," asserts Wilma to the town doctor. She won't be moved from her position, and Miles attempts to talk some sense to her in what is the first of the novel's many comments on psychology and psychiatry, which in the 1950s were moving rapidly into the American mainstream.

"Now listen to me," says Miles..."I don't expect you to stop feeling emotionally that this isn't your uncle. But I do want you to realize that he's your uncle, no matter what you feel, and that the trouble is inside you. It's absolutely impossible for two people to look exactly alike, no matter what you've read in stories or seen in the movies. Even identical twins can always be told apart - always - by their intimates. No one could possibly impersonate your Uncle Ira for more than a moment without you, Becky or even me seeing a million little differences. Realize that, Wilma, think about it, and get it into your head, and you'll know the trouble is inside you. And then we'll be able to do something about it."

The preceding paragraph is critical to an informed reading of Finney's novel because it lays down the underlying subtext and dynamic of Finney's novel: the idea that psychology/psychiatry and rationality has in essence - by exploring the human mind - killed God, faith and belief and most significantly, imagination. 

Wilma Lentz just knows that her Uncle isn't the same man that he was, but she can't prove it, and there is no scientific rationale - no acceptable scientific rationale, for her beliefs. Therefore, she must be sick. Right?

If you know the story of the Body Snatchers, you know that Uncle Ira is indeed not himself, but a "snatched man," a replicated man, an alien invader who duplicated Ira but who lacks the emotionality of mankind. This new being, one who looks and sounds like us, is the ultimate triumph of the rational age, the age of such sciences as psychology, one might assert. The aliens have not merely sublimated emotion (as Miles has asked Wilma Lentz to do), but have eliminated it from the gene pool.

Miles is torn between two competing belief systems in the book. On one hand is the intelligent, rational, steadfast psychology of his friend Mannie Kaufman, a local psychiatrist. Mannie suggests that Wilma and the others who begin to suspect that their loved ones are not their loved ones, are actually delusional. That the madness is all within their sick minds, not in reality. He lays out a convincing case that this strange belief is merely a "contagious neurosis." In compelling terms, he describes case histories of mob hysteria (including the Mattoon Maniac of Illinois...) to prove his point. You want to believe him, he makes the case so powerfully and so logically.

But the other voice in Miles' head, the voice that ultimately allows him to believe in the alien invasion, belongs to an imaginative writer named Jack Belicec. As a hobby, Jack collects newspaper clippings that involve inexplicable happenings around America. Like the time frogs fell from the sky in Edgeville Alabama. Or that story in Idaho, about a man who spontaneously combusted...but his clothes were unharmed. Jack is the opposite side of the human equation from Kaufman, the side that can conceive of things beyond science, beyond psychosis. There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in Kaufman's philosophy (or in the DSM V), and Jack is the character who gives voice in the novel to that aspect of "us."

Ultimately, the novel serves a as a rejection of "cold" science and also as plea for humanity to hold fast to the sometimes strange beliefs he holds. From the valedictory passage in the book, as expressed by Miles:

"But...showers of small frogs, tiny fish and mysterious rains of pebbles sometimes fall from out of the skies. Here and there, with no possible explanation, men are burned to death inside their clothes. And once in a while, the orderly, immutable sequences of time itself are inexplicably shifted and altered. You read these occasional queer little stories, humorously-written, tongue-in-cheek, most of the time - or you hear vague distorted rumours of them. And this much I know. Some of them - some of them - are true."

Besides the battle between science and belief, Finney's The Body Snatchers treads primarily on the idea of relationship "alienation" made literal. Those alienated from their families are actually dealing with alien life forms. That's pretty clever, actually. But if one gazes at the characters in the book, many are also coping with the fall-out of bad relationships. It can't be a coincidence that the two main characters - Becky and Miles - are both divorced. And that's the ultimate form of human alienation, isn't? You live with a person you love for years and years and then you wake up one day and suddenly don't feel the same way about that person anymore. Without warning, something has changed. Overnight, you "don't know" that other person anymore, that husband, that wife, that uncle, aunt, parent or child. Alienation of affection is what I'm talking about here, and it happens all the time in normal, mundane relationships. 

The alien invaders of Invasion of the Body Snatchers symbolize this strangeness in human interactions. I don't believe it a coincidence either that the changeover from human to alien comes like a thief in the night, during sleep. Alienation of affection can go on for months or years but when grappling with it, it seems to have come all at once. You don't recognize the person in bed beside you anymore. They feel like a stranger. They look like your mate; they have your mate's memories...but they feel like an interloper, a changeling.

What the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers lack is the core of humanity and the human experience: emotions. They can pretend to have feelings and they can skillfully mimic emotions, but they don't feel anything at all. Without emotions, there is no excitement. Without excitement there is no ambition, no love. Without ambition, nobody writes books anymore...imagination vanishes. Kaufman - now an alien - will never finish the textbook about Psychiatry he began as a human being. That is the fate mankind is doomed to in the novel if the aliens win; if we abandon the imaginative side of ourselves.

Late in The Body Snatchers, Miles confers with Kaufman as well as with a "converted" professor. They explain to Miles the end game of the aliens, beings who have arrived on Earth in giant seeds, pods for lack of a better word:

"What do you do and for what reason? Why do you breathe, eat, sleep, make love and reproduce your kind? Because it's your function, your reason for being. There's no other reason, and none needed...You look shocked, actually sick, and yet what has the human race done except spread over this planet till it swarms the globe several billion strong? What have you done with this very continent but expand till you fill it? And where are the buffalo who roamed the land before you? Gone. Where is the passenger pigeon who once literally darkened the skies of America in flocks of billions? The last one died in a Philadelphia zoo in 1913. Doctor, the function of life is to live if it can and no other motive can ever be allowed to interfere with that. There is no malice involved; did you hate the buffalo? We must continue because we must..."

You have to admit, there's a cold logic to the alien motive for their takeover of Earth, but the difference is that we still feel pity for the buffalo or the passenger pigeon. If we could change their fates, I submit we likely would. With cold science, there's no need for pity, no need for remorse, no need for compassion.

Some other interesting notations about the book and how it differs from the film versions. 

First, the ending. The climax of Finney's Body Snatchers is not inherently nihilistic, bleak, depressing or dark, as some have claimed over the years. In fact, at least two film versions feature abundantly darker endings than what is featured here. In the novel, the pods flee Earth when they realize how irrational human beings are (again, human emotions!), after Miles and Becky wage a hopeless war burning fields of the alien pods.

Secondly, the alien countenance: In this novel, the aliens are not easily detectable. They lack strong emotions, but as I wrote above, they have the capacity to mimic human emotions. It isn't so easy to spot them in the novel as it is in all the film versions.

Thirdly, Finney goes to great lengths to describe the science behind the "body snatching" procedure and why that procedure occurs during sleep. The explanation involves "tiny electrical force-lines that hold together the very atoms that constitute" human beings. These force-lines are in constant flux, constant change, but they change less, according to Finney, during sleep. And during sleep, that "pattern can be taken from you, absorbed like static electricity, from one body to another." Only the 2007 version of the material came this close to offering a scientific explanation for why the changeover occurs during sleep.

Also, Finney reveals what the future is for planet Earth should the aliens win: all organisms on the planet will die within five years and the the pods will seek another world to duplicate. 

The novel indicates that there was once life on Mars and even on our Moon, but that the pods duplicated - and then destroyed - all life there. 

Not one of the four films have picked up on this element, to my recollection. Maybe film number five?

40 Years Ago: Tales from the Darkside (1984)

The low budget Laurel horror anthology, Tales from the Darkside, may be a relic from the 1980s, but it's one relic eminently worth excavating, especially around Halloween time.   

Like its brethren, Rod Serling's Night Gallery and The Twilight Zone, Tales from the Darkside -- produced by George A. Romero, Richard Rubinstein and Jerry Golod -- remains a highly didactic horror television enterprise, one very concerned with  social commentary. 

As I wrote in Terror Television (1999): "if one looks beneath the veneer of gore and grue, it seems fairly clear that many episodes of this series" are "modern morality plays, cautionary tales about what might happen to an individual who acts selfishly or maliciously."

The Writer's Bible for Tales from the Darkside made this conceit explicit. "The Other World" or "Darkside" intervention featured in each 30-minute tale was a deliberate mechanism or tool by which the cosmic scales of justice could be balanced.  

And yes indeed, this notion is squarely rooted in the great and noble tradition of EC's Tales from The Crypt or Vault of Horror.

Exhibit A regarding this didactic aesthetic is the series' sterling premiere segment, "Trick or Treat" written by George Romero himself.   Although set in rural America in the 1940s, the program aired in the early Reagan years, and remains just as powerful a parable about greed in 2011 as it was during the time of its original broadcast. 

Directed adroitly and economically by Bob Balaban, "Trick or Treat" involves a nasty old miser, Mr. Hackles (Barnard Hughes) who "collects every penny" that is due him, and gives nothing back to the poor farmers in his community who support his business at a general store.  

And in point of fact, Hackles has even set himself up as a sort of local bank by offering the farmers ample credit when the chips are down.  With nowhere to turn, they accept his "kind" help, only to see him ruthlessly leverage control of their very lives.

Explicitly, the vulture-like Hackles views the people in his town as "backward" primitives, and notes that "people make their own misfortune."  Hackles also derides "the little people and their little lives."   Accordingly, on Halloween night, this "self-made" man doesn't give out candy.  Instead, he dispenses advice.  He tells young Trick or Treaters that "I made my fortune...and so should you."

In today's vernacular, then, old Mr. Hackles is clearly part of the 1 percent.

Each year on Halloween night, Mr. Hackles makes it his business (and pleasure...) to torment the so-called little people of his town.  In particular, he instructs the poor farmers to deliver to his house their children every October 31st.  There, they will be permitted to search the imposing home for his I.O.U.s.  If the children find them, their parents' debt will be completely absolved.  If not, the debt stands.  

Of course, in all the years Hackle has played this sadistic game, no child has ever found the stash of creditor's notes, in part because Hackle's arranges nightmarish "frights" for the children: booby traps and  monster effigies that scare the kids away.

Essentially, Mr. Hackles demands that the good citizens of his town literally turn their children into "debt slaves," becoming his play things for a night in the vain hope that one lucky family might get a reprieve from their bills.  

Again, this idea represents a metaphorical commentary on the nature of the American dream.   Studies have revealed that many low-income Americans don't want the rich to pay their fair share in taxes because they believe they too will one day be rich.  After all, they might just win the lottery, right?  And every Halloween night, Mr. Hackles organizes just such a lottery...but with no real winners.  It's hard to win a game in which one man (or one percent...) leverages all the power and holds all the cards.

In "Trick or Treat's" denouement, Mr. Hackles inevitably gets the tables turned on him.  This Halloween night, it is not children who show up to play his game...it is an array of ghouls, including a terrifying witch.  

One might say that these ghouls occupy his house, even...

In short order, these representatives from "The Other Side" play a little trick on Hackles: they cast his cash (and his prized I.O.U.s) to the four winds.  Hackles attempts in vain to retrieve his "belongings" and ends up chasing the almighty dollar right down the corridors of Hell.  

"You're getting warmer now.  Warmer..." a hideous devil informs Hackles as the miser goes at last to his just reward in the Lake of Fire.  Notably, Hackles feels treated unfairly by those who wield more power than he.

But Mr. Hackles...I thought we all made our own misfortune?  Aren't you a self-made man?

Produced on a budget of just $200,000, "Trick or Treat" dominated the 1983 Halloween weekend Nielsen ratings in major markets such as New York, thereby assuring that Tales from the Darkside would soon become a weekly series; a series that lasted for four years and eighty-nine episodes.  

Episodes such as "Trick or Treat" were generally the norm rather than the exception, and various series installments tackled issues of racism, "hate" radio and other topics from the national discourse of the day.   "Trick or Treat," of course, serves as a pretty explicit and ghoulish reminder (in the early Yuppie era, no less) that "upward mobility" should concern more than the bottom line on a bank account; that our final, eternal "upward mobility" might depend on our accumulation of other currency, namely decency, empathy and compassion.  

In other words, the episode conforms to that line from Matthew: "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven." 

Trick or Treat...