Pod People Binge: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

The late great movie critic Pauline Kael once wrote that the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers was “the American movie of the year – a new classic…the best movie of its kind ever made.” 

Even at this late date, I can find no reason to quibble with that assessment.

In particular, Invasion of the Body Snatchers craftily updates the 1950s context of the original Jack Finney novel, as well as the Don Siegel film adaptation.  It does so in order to deliberately comment on the contentious 1970s: the decade of “The Me Generation” and the Watergate conspiracy and cover-up.  

Accordingly, the film’s conclusion seems to be that human life in the decade of “self-realization” seems to hamper, not encourage, real connection between people, while an overt, even paranoid lack of trust in society’s institutions and hierarchies makes that disconnect exponentially worse.  

In the absence of real connection and real love, a seed grows, and terror blossoms.  

Invasion of the Body Snatchers thus concerns, as film scholar Michael Dempsey noted in Film Quarterly (February 1979, page 120), “the manifold pressures which life brings upon people to abandon that ambiguous blessing, humanity.”

In San Francisco, lab tech Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) grows increasingly convinced that her boyfriend Geoffrey (Art Hindle) is not himself.  When she brings her worries to her boss, Matthew Bennell (Sutherland), he recommends she see his friend, pop psychologist and relationship guru, Dr. David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy).  Kibner promptly reports that he has seen six similar cases in just one week, and suspects that the cause is the fast-moving 1970s life-style, in which people move in and out of relationships too fast, without really getting to know each other.

But as Matthew, Elizabeth, and their fiends Nancy (Veronica Cartwright) and Jack (Jeff Goldblum) soon discover, the problem in San Francisco is much graver than that.  Alien plants from a dying solar system have arrived on Earth and are rapidly producing emotionless doppelgangers of the human race.  They desire a world of peace, with no hate…but also no love.  

Matthew, Elizabeth, Nancy and Jack attempt to escape San Francisco, but the conspiracy has grown too big, and the human race stands on the brink…

The 1970s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers by director Philip Kaufman primarily concerns shape and form, and the myriad ways that human beings misperceive shape and form, and thus make unwarranted assumptions that fit pre-conceived notions about those qualities. The film itself depicts an invasion of alien “pod people” -- essentially sentient plants -- who secretly  replace human beings (while they sleep…) in a vast 1970s liberal metropolis, San Francisco. 

But unlike its 1950s predecessor, which was either an indictment of communism or an indictment of McCarthyism depending on your personal Rorschach, the remake plays meaningfully against the unmistakable backdrop of an increasing divorce rate in the United States and the ascent of the so-called “Me Generation.”  

Or, as the psychiatrist in the film, Kibner (Leonard Nimoy) trenchantly notes: “people are moving in and out of relationships too quickly,” and therefore never really getting to know people they presumably love. Accordingly, when individuals make discoveries about their intended loves ones that they don’t like, it is easier to disassociate from them, to blame the “other” for being “different” and then just move on.

But if you are so focused on self and can’t get to really know other people, how can you tell if they are even human at all?  They may look and act human -- their shape and form could be human -- but they could be…pods.

In terms of background context, the Me Generation famously consists of Baby Boomers (born 1946 – 1964, generally-speaking) who, because of rising disposable income in the 1970s and perhaps as a direct response to the ethos of the World War II generation, began to place a new importance on “the self” over the well-being, necessarily, of the community. 

In fact, the 1970s was determinedly the decade of the “self,” a fact reflected in the hedonism of disco music, and the blazing ascent in popularity of the “self-help” book genre.  Popular buzz-words of the day included “self-realization” and “self-fulfillment,” yet as the movement of “self” grew, many people saw the new age as merely one of “self-involvement.  The consumption-oriented life-style of immediate gratification soon gave rise to President Carter’s notorious 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech, which warned against judging success on material wealth rather than intrinsic human qualities of character and morality.  Meanwhile, we kept building more shopping malls, and imagined worlds futuristic (Logan’s Run) and apocalyptic (Dawn of the Dead) set at them.

Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers plays meaningfully with the idea of form and shape in its visuals by depicting a world where “disconnected” people can’t distinguish between genuine humanity and invading, emotionless aliens.  This tension between form and reality occurs almost immediately in the film when a health inspector -- the film’s protagonist, Bennell (Sutherland) -- starts a fight in a restaurant kitchen, arguing over whether a small black object is actually a caper or a rat turd.  This debate is actually a metaphor for the entire film.

The only way to know for sure about the caper/rat turd is to eat it…and by then it’s too late, isn’t it?  By then, what you fear is actually inside you, doing you harm…

Forecasting its bleak, terrifying, and legitimately unforgettable finale, Kaufman’s camera proves deeply ambivalent even about Bennell -- the hero -- and his “true” human nature.   For example, when Bennell first appears in the film, he is seen through the restaurant’s door, through a peep-hole, and the audience gazes at him through the filter of what seems like a fish-eye.  Bennell appears distorted and strange, and not fully human.  

Later, at a book party for Dr. Kibner, we see a distorted visual representation of Bennell again.  As he talks on the telephone to the police, he stands before what seems to be a funhouse mirror, and it corrupts his features once more.  

And when Bennell goes to rescue Elizabeth from her boyfriend’s house, he is deliberately lit from below, a visual selection which casts shadows upon his features and makes him look diabolical or sinister. 

All these visualizations of the good guy prove a point in Invasion of the Body Snatchers:  You can’t trust appearances.

That lesson is learned the hard way by Veronica Cartwright’s character, Nancy, in the film’s last moment.

To approach this facet of Invasion of the Body Snatchers another way, the aliens are creatures who do understand, mimic and manipulate form and shape to their advantage.  Late in the film, a pod merges the body of a dog with the head of a homeless man because the host’s genetic materials were damaged during the duplication process.  What emerges is nothing less than an abomination (and one my earliest movie-going experiences with a jump scare, at that).  But that’s okay to the aliens because they don’t possess emotions. They don’t know fear, disgust or horror.

The protagonists further misunderstand the pods because of their “familiar”-seeming forms.  First, the pods are accepted as harmless plants and brought into human homes, where they commence the invasion. Secondly, these plants are not considered a viable “host” for aliens, as Nancy observantly points out.   Why do we expect UFOS to be metal ships?

And thirdly, the heroes operate on incorrect assumptions about plants, and those assumptions prove deadly.  Even though Nancy notes that plants do respond to music, Bennell leaves Elizabeth for a time because he hears music playing nearby, on a boat.  The song he hears is “Amazing Grace,” one of the most moving compositions ever written, and he assumes it must be sign or symbol of emotional, feeling mankind. 

On the contrary, however, the tune emanates from a cargo ship transporting pods.  There is no hope here, no “grace” to speak of.  The pods, though emotionless, listen to music as well, though it is doubtful they would ever compose new music.

Again, we believe that music is unique to us, but this scene proves that it isn’t, and that mistake costs Bennell the love of his life.  He should know better. When he breaks into Geoffrey's house, the pod Geoffrey is also listening to music.

Over and over, Kaufman’s film attempts to trick us or mislead with its visuals, making the case that in this day and age, we can’t really know anyone else.  Sometimes, the director throws the audience a bone and offers up a visual composition that makes the point we need to learn, or provides an important clue, even before the dialogue tells us.  In one scene set at Matthew’s apartment, for instance, a tower bisects the frame vertically, separating Matthew and Kibner on opposite sides of rectangle, a visual representation of the fact that they aren’t working towards a common end.  We get verbal verification of that fact in the very next scene, but the visuals tell us first, and that’s a remarkable and deft achievement.

The 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers also plays deliberately with the lack of confidence Americans felt in their government following the Watergate Scandal.  President Nixon authorized criminal activities from the Oval Office and resigned from office in disgrace, and then his successor, President Ford immediately pardoned him.  Citizens, to a certain extent, were left out of the loop, and Nixon didn’t seem to pay much for betraying the public trust.  So there was a sense that government, and government bureaucracy was not working for the good of the people, but rather to corrupt ends.  Government (Ford) took care of its own (Nixon).  I don’t necessarily agree with that reading, and I believe Ford did what was necessary to begin the healing process in America.  But others felt differently, and throughout this movie, the paranoia of Watergate proves quite pronounced as shadowy figures rendezvous and talk in hushed tones about plots and strategies.  

At one point, the specter of Watergate is directly referenced, when Matthew realizes that he and all his friends are being watched, and their phones are being tapped.  A telephone operator calls him by name before he gives it. This is, perhaps, the most chilling moment in the movie.

To Philip Kaufman’s credit, he orchestrates the conspiracy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers right under our (unaware) noses, much as President Nixon managed to do for a time.  If Watergate had its “plumbers,” then Invasion has its “garbage men.”  Throughout the film, unobserved and unremarked upon, garbage trucks enter the frame and cart off this weird organic-looking soot or fluff.  

The conspiracy's garbage men are here.

Notice the dumpster behind Leonard Nimoy.

Could that body have disappeared into the garbage truck sitting outside the window?

We don’t learn until the end of the film that this grotesque material is all that remains of the human body after the duplication process.  But at four or five different junctures in the film -- starting in the first shots after the opening credits finish – anonymous-looking garbage trucks, garbage men and dumpsters are captured in the frame, along with this mystery substance.  Only in the film’s final moments does the full breadth of the conspiracy -- and its duration -- become plain.  Invasion of the Body Snatchers also makes literal that old proverb “you can’t fight City Hall.” Here Matthew realizes that the invaders (garbage men and aliens) “control the whole city,” just as we learned they ran the country in Watergate.

Between extreme paranoia about the motives of trusted officials, and the lack of connection between citizens in a permissive utopia of “self,” Invasion of the Body Snatchers fosters deep uneasiness about how easily our natures might be mimicked or mocked.  The final scene, which sees Bennell revealed as a “pod person,” is the ultimate exclamation point on that theme.  He does everything that he did before he was an alien, and so we hope, like Nancy, that he could be “hiding” around the other aliens.  But instead we’ve missed the truth again.  We have mistaken form for substance.  He’s been “born again” into an untroubled world that has no need of hate, and no need of love, either.

Tellingly, Invasion of the Body Snatchers proposes that the alien duplication occurs while the original human sleeps.  Sleep is a universal must and biological need among human beings, so the process is both inescapable and inevitable.  Furthermore, how often have we heard from friends and family that that they “just woke up one day” and felt different about someone important in their lives. This Invasion of the Body Snatchers lives in paranoid suspicion of such a revelation.

Pod People Binge: The Body Snatchers (1954)

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.