24-hour pod people

Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) and Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) are on the run in the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (Allied Artists/Getty Images)

His face filthy with dirt and sweat and his features haggard from exhaustion, our hero slips away from his pursuers and into a potentially worse predicament. A smalltown doctor who has discovered an alien invasion, Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) ends up on a busy highway at night, frantically trying to wave down cars. He tries to explain what has happened but the drivers, feeling comfortably protected and ignorant in their steel boxes, only honk their horns and shout at him to get out of their way. Undaunted, our hero still tries to warn his fellow humans yet his words seem to be directed more at the movie’s viewers than anyone on the highway. “They’re already here!” he cries. “You’re next! You’re next!!”

It’s hardly the subtlest moment in cinematic history, but the final scene of Don Siegel’s 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers – or rather, what was intended to be the final scene before the studio opted to add a framing device that ends the film on a more reassuring note – retains great power. The most iconic scene in any of the film adaptations of The Body Snatchers, Jack Finney’s 1954 science-fiction story tells the tale of a small town whose citizens are gradually replaced by emotionless facsimiles bred from pods. Director Philip Kaufman acknowledged its importance when he cast McCarthy for a cameo in his 1978 update. The actor again bolts into traffic to cry a warning, this time at our new hero, a San Francisco health inspector played by Donald Sutherland. Judging by McCarthy’s shambling, he may very well have been careening across America for the intervening two decades.

Although McCarthy – still working at the age of 93 – does not appear in the fourth and latest adaptation that arrives Aug. 17, The Invasion does refer back to his big scene, twice. The first comes when Nicole Kidman’s character – Carol Bennell, a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist who slowly gets wise to the threat – sees a desperate woman trying to flag down cars in a tunnel. Later, Carol herself runs into traffic in hopes of finding help.

Both attempts are about as effective as The Invasion is on the whole.

Incoherent and bombastic, the new film may be the least satisfying of the lot. Yet, even in this diluted form, the movie retains some of McCarthy’s strange fury, as well as many of the anxieties that made Finney’s tale so terrifying to readers of Collier’s magazine, where it originally appeared in serial form. And like every film version of The Body Snatchers, The Invasion reflects the era in which it was made, the story adapting to each age much as the alien virus adopts the mannerisms of its hosts.

Leonard Nimoy, left, Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams starred in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Perhaps the biggest reason Finney’s story has such staying power is how dramatically it allegorized the pressures that many feel to conform to societal norms, creating a potential loss of identity, even humanity. The political and social elements of the parable are expressed most strongly in the original novel and in Siegel’s movie. As products of the mid-‘50s, both are inevitably influenced by the Cold War. It’s easy to see them as two-fisted allegories of the Red Scare, with Bennell’s neighbours falling prey to a foreign threat that offers a sense of common purpose at the expense of individual autonomy. Like “commies”, these alien intruders may seem normal, yet under the surface they’re anything but red-blooded Americans.

The aliens are equally potent as symbols of modernization, reducing the once-rugged citizenry to a bland, depersonalized mass of conformists. Furthermore, Siegel’s film can be regarded as an overblown parody of the America envisioned by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who raged about the communist threat that lurked within its own populace. Miles’s cry of “They’re already here!” was already familiar on Capitol Hill. 

It’s interesting to note that actor Kevin McCarthy’s big scene was not in the original book. Its addition, however, not only emphasized the sociopolitical elements but also the psychological ones. The movie explicitly portrays Bennell’s transformation from upstanding citizen to someone who displays the symptoms of full-blown paranoia, which would not be unknown to an audience of the mid-‘50s. The book and the first film are full of psychiatry terms just entering common parlance – Bennell’s psychiatrist friend Mannie even calls the invasion a case of “contagious neuroses.” Siegel’s characters ride a fine line between sanity, delusion, justifiable paranoia and outright psychosis.

Director Kaufman’s update in 1978 furthers this shift from the political to the personal and the psychological. Psychiatry plays a more prominent role, largely thanks to Leonard Nimoy’s presence as a psychiatrist friend of Sutherland’s character, Matthew. A bestselling writer of self-help books, Nimoy (playing Dr. Kibner) fatuously attributes his patients’ belief that their loved ones have changed to the eroding state of modern morals. “The whole family unit is shot to hell,” he grouses. The Cold War rhetoric of the ‘50s has given way to the Me Decade prattle of the ‘70s and the aliens have adapted accordingly. After the pod-ified Kibner captures Matthew, he describes the transformation in glowing terms: “You will be born again into an untroubled world, free of anxiety, fear and hate.” Maybe alien replication works even better than Zoloft.

What Kaufman’s adaptation portrays is the slow death of individualism. It’s no accident the setting has been moved from a Rockwellian small town to the cradle of America’s counterculture. The film is alarmingly prescient about the waning ideals of the ‘60s and the coming wave of Reaganite conservatism.

More recent adapters of Finney’s tale have looked out into the world again and not liked what they’ve seen. Body Snatchers, Abel Ferrara’s 1993 version, emphasizes the notion that our environment is becoming toxic, causing mutations that will change us irreversibly or finish us off altogether. But it’s weak fare, lacking neither the brute force of Siegel’s film nor the subversive wit of Kaufman’s.

Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig appear in the latest body snatcher movie, The Invasion. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

What makes it timely is its emphasis on the original story’s latent environmental themes. Terry Kinney plays an Environmental Protection Agency scientist who comes to the base to investigate possible contamination. There is dark talk of “biological and chemical weapons.” Forest Whitaker plays an army doctor who suspects there’s something going wrong and asks the scientist if these contaminants “can alter a person’s perception of reality.” Though we learn the aliens arrived as spores that floated here from space, there is the suggestion that our pollutants aided in their growth.

Ferrara’s aliens speak in much the same language as ecological activists in enviro-docs like An Inconvenient Truth and The 11th Hour – “The human race left to its own devices is doomed,” says one pod person. The invading species, whose only mission is to replicate, are bound to triumph over the weakened humans. “It’s a matter of survival,” we’re told, and the aliens just want it more than we do.

Indeed, the latest version is almost perversely pro-alien in its stance. This adaptation is by screenwriter David Kajganich and director Oliver Hirschbiegel, though how close the finished product is to their original intentions is impossible to tell. When Warner deemed Hirschbiegel’s original cut too slow and artsy, they hired the Wachowski Brothers and V for Vendetta director James McTeigue to reshoot scenes and add new ones, most of which involve feeble fake shocks and hilariously gratuitous car chases.

However, there are a few provocative ideas amid the mess, including one that likens the alien virus to increasingly virulent strains of the flu. And the film makes us clearly aware of the downside of humanity, such as its capacity for inflicting cruelty and violence on its own kind. Being emotionless, the aliens don’t go in for that kind of thing. “Our world is a better world,” says one former human. He’s got a point. But since the infected people here are zombie dullards, I’m staying on Kevin McCarthy’s side – he seems like more fun.

Jason Anderson is a Toronto-based writer.

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