There will be no survivors...
by Michael Parkes
[ opinion - october 02 ]
"Human power has become a simulation... Power now resides in a technology that holds humanity in its thrall. The media are invading, there will be no survivors." [1]
The original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers [2] has had many interpretations placed upon it since its release in 1956. It has been read as a paranoid parable of invasion by Soviet totalitarianism, fuelled by the Red Scare and McCarthyism, [3] and as a indictment of American conformity, and the loss of individualism, that the cold war fostered. [4] These readings are not surprising considering how central the idea of subversion, communist or otherwise, was to American culture during the 1950s. Tales of American POWs coming under the influence of their Korean captors, through brainwashing during the Korean war, [5] and the threat of communist subversion, produced a paranoid society. However, I will argue that the film's paranoia and anxiety is over a rather a more home-grown concern, that of the ongoing invasion of American culture in the 1950s by television and the media.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was based on the novel by Jack Finney, and was also serialised in Colliers Magazine in 1955. [6] Upon reading this publication, film producer Walter Wagner instantly purchased the rights, showed the project to Don Siegel [7] (the film's director) and pre-production began. From day one, however, changes to the film's production altered its initial ideology. An original title suggested by Siegel, 'Better off Dead' [8] reiterated the, "Better off Dead than Red" [9] catchphrase that echoed the predominant fear of communist subversion during the time, and at one stage even Orson Welles was asked to provide a narration to the film. [10] The most important change to the film, however, was its change of ending. Originally, the film was to carry a pessimistic warning to the audience, with Dr Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) shouting "You're Next! You're Next!" into the camera. This was later dropped by Republic Pictures for a more optimistic ending, with Miles informing the FBI, and enabling them to save the world. This confusion over the film's production makes finding the text's true meaning difficult, as no one person appears to have had sole control of the film. Key people in the film's production have also suggested the film's message to be confused. In an interview in 1973, Siegel suggests that the text has a "vegetation" discourse:
"It's the same as people who welcome going into the army or prison. There's regimentation, a lack of having to make up your own mind, face decisions... People are becoming vegetables. I don't know what the answer is, except an awareness of it. That's what makes a picture like Invasion of the Body Snatchers so important. [11]
Here Siegel suggests that the film could be read as a metaphor for people generally becoming mindless "vegetables" to alert people to the "vegetation" effect. It could be argued that this reflects the general vegetation, or 'dumbing down' of culture and society during the 1950s. This included the dehumanisation, materialism and mechanistic depersonalisation afflicting the arts and all sectors of society, particularly in the form of the growth of simple lowest common denomination entertainment.
Jack Finney has also suggested that the Body Snatcher's pods could be read as a metaphor for emotionless regimentation or subservience in a production and distribution system. [12] Finney has claimed: "I was simply intrigued by the notion of a lot of people insisting that their friends, and relatives were impostors." [13] Not, then, any political ideal or subversion process, more so degeneration, vegetation and de-personalisation; as Carlos Clarens observes, "the ultimate horror in science fiction is neither death, nor destruction, but dehumanisation." [14] So to what extent can what LaValley's definition of the central theme of Invasion of the Body Snatchers being a "fear of social conformity, and the loss of the self that results from it" [15] be related to the introduction of television and the media into American culture?
Science fiction has always articulated responses and fears of new technology, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers is no different. The technology represented in Invasion of the Body Snatchers is, like the pods in the film, a technology that appeared in American households overnight and slowly sank its teeth into the nation's sub consciousness. As television began its take-over of America in the 1950s, it used a utopian promise to re-unite America, re-enforcing and cementing a post war nuclear family ideal. As it entered American culture, it began to draw people away from other forms of individualistic and artistic entertainment. People moved away from the piano and the fireplace and found a new pastime, in front of the electronic hearth. [16]
Between 1948 and 1955, television was installed in nearly two-thirds of the nation's homes [17] and became the mythic and ideological unifier of the fragmented post-war family, as an indication of technology's domestication, and as a sign of suburban achievement. Television technology became ideologically identified with the home and was therefore sold as an essential element of the utopian suburbia of the 1950s. However, critics saw this technology as a threat. As Campbell and Kean observe, "The potential for television is to also unsettle the mythic American hearth and home... its greatest power is to expose the order of the domestic and private world, to the disorder of the public sphere." [18] Television was criticised for its roboticising capabilities, and new media technology became associated with the forces of modernity, the rapid change and alteration of traditional social institutions and structures, and therefore deemed a threat to the fabric of society. [19] Charles Gregory has noted on the period:
"In the middle of a decade, peopled by men in grey flannel suits, the silent generation, the status seekers, senator Joseph McCarthy and lonely crowd, Siegel's science fiction thriller was a cry of frustrated warning against the conformity and uniformity of a society that was blissfully living in the best of all possible worlds." [20]
The threat in Invasion of the Body Snatchers appears to be alien, but it is questionable to what extent it is alien to American culture. The pod's origins in Santa Mira, where the battle for the nation's mind is played out in small-town USA, [21] are home-grown. The anxiety in the film, therefore, is not an alien ideology like communism, but rather a home-grown anxiety of Americans losing their national identity, through a form of cultural transformation. As David Seed acknowledges,
"The real power of [the invasion narrative] is carried by their transformations of humans... Their fracturing of the nuclear family, or local community where the human becomes robiticised into a acquiescent member of an alien group aiming at total takeover." [22]
The film's dramatisation of fears of the impersonal and evolutionary change [23] suggests an alien product entering American culture, but subversively; no pods were placed in houses, but television sets were. The arrival of television into the home caused problems of where to place it. Lynn Spigel observes that often the bunker or cellar of many homes was the obvious choice of place for the television receiver. [24] However, in this text it can be argued that not even the bunker is safe. Ironically, the one place where people should be safe when the bomb drops, has already been invaded by the pod menace - Becky's (Dana Wynter) pod was discovered there, in a state of growth.
Television's affects on the service industry of America was immediate and harsh. The leisure sectors were the worst struck - bars and cafés slumped into decline. Invasion of the Body Snatchers deals with this concept when Miles takes Becky to a local cocktail bar, the Sky Terrace Night Club. The bar is empty and has been for weeks, as Miles acknowledges. "What happened to the crowd tonight?" The proprietor has had to replace the band with a jukebox. He replies: "Whole business started falling off, so I had to let them go. There's a jukebox though." In this instance, the human replacement discourse leans towards the technological; humans, deemed redundant, are being replaced in this bar by a technological simulacrum. The artistry and individuality of the original band has been "snatched" and replaced by an inferior technological substitute. This discourse seems to reiterate fears of personal replacement in the workplace by technology and modernity.
Artificial simulacra of human artistic form is a re-emerging discourse in the film. Towards the end of the film, Miles believes he has found escape from the Body Snatchers when he hears a human chorus. As he goes to investigate the music's origins, he is alerted to the fact that the music is a copy, a simulation of a human chorus playing from a pod-owned automobile. This can be seen as a symbol of the Body Snatcher's ability to transform human artistic endeavour into an artificial form, as all methods of communication under the control of the alien are duplicated, not original.
The human replacement theme appears in regard to the film's anxiety over modern forms of communication. It is through modes of communication that the film relates paranoia over human replacement, and the artificial and stifling effects communication systems have on the inhabitants of Santa Mira's lives. Miles and Becky find themselves constantly chased, not only by the aliens, but by communication devices. Miles' inability to alert the correct authorities is due to a breakdown in the telephone network, which has fallen under the control of the Body Snatchers. "They've got the phones," Miles calls out, as one by one, all of Santa Mira's communication networks fall under alien control.
The Body Snatchers are alerted to Miles' and Becky's "human-ness", by a police radio. A description of their car goes out and they become the pursued. Even the reason Dr Bennell is back in Santa Mira, fighting the Body Snatchers, is a telegram he received. The film's narrative follows the course of communication's ability to help (when a human uses it to reach Miles), and its ability for subversion (when the aliens have control). It is also interesting to note that the communication network is one of the aliens' first conquests. This paranoid discourse of the communication networks of America being controlled by alien forces suggests an anxiety over media technology, its ability to be controlled by a group, and that group's ability to control the message that is communicated. This can be seen as a reply to advertisement companies, sponsorship and biased control of television output in the early 1950s.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers appears to form an anti-media discourse which in itself is contradictory, as the film itself exists within the media. Dwight MacDonald argues that an intense fear of media imperialism has a history going back to the post-war period. He saw television as a "direct threat to high culture", that "mass culture was imposed from above" with audiences who were "passive consumers", amid material that "mixes and scrambles everything together, producing what might be called homogenised culture", the effects of which homogenising produced "narcotised acceptance." [25] The method for spotting the copy against the original in Invasion of the Body Snatchers is through the alien's "narcotised acceptance." As Wilma (Virginia Christine), Uncle Ira's niece notices, "He's lost that special look in his eye". The Body Snatcher's vegetable-like, unemotional appearance could easily be assumed to be the appearance of someone who has spent too long in front of a television set.
The operative metaphor in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is invasion as a form of disease. Cancer had become a catch-all term for any kind of insidious and dreadful corruption in the 1950s. [26] The long-standing belief was that this metaphor was concerned with the spread of communism. Psychologist Dr Danny Kaufman (Larry Gates) describes the invasion as "a strange neurosis, evidently contagious." This metaphor of vegetation and growth of disease can also be assumed as what Baudrillard argues as "A viral endemic, chronic, an alarming presence of the medium... dissolution of TV into life, and the dissolution of life into TV." [27] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer comment that, "televisions products, encourage conformity and consensus, which ensure obedience to authority." [28] This can be attributed to how the Body Snatchers exist as a regimented group, obedient to authority and each other. They carry out their orders through consensus to spread their pods through their distribution network.
Critics in the 1950s were concerned by the media's ability to bring the world, and all its problems, to the everyday American. In a 1944 advertisement for DuMont televisions, the company claimed to make the viewer an "armchair Columbus, sailing with television into exciting new worlds". [29] This concept of the world in your living room is reflected in the text as Miles' reply to Becky's question about what causes the body-snatching epidemic: "worry about what's happening in the world." He notes, "In my practice, I've seen how people let their humanity draw away, although it happens slowly, not all at once, and they didn't seem to mind."
The advertisement campaign for television the early 1950s mirrors the Body Snatchers' manifesto with a promise of an untroubled world: "You'll be born into a untroubled world," explains Dr Kaufman. The film's suggestion that utopia can only be achieved when the (inherently violent) human spirit is extinguished, suggests that the dystopian nature of the world is due to our own consciousness, humanness and individuality. Utopia can only be achieved if we lose our individuality. Human nature, by default, is dystopian. The Body Snatchers have achieved utopia by their ability to duplicate everything but humanness, as Biskind argues: "The pod society is the familiar mechanistic utopia" [30] where "There's no need for love, no emotions, no feelings, only the instinct to survive".
Discourses in the media during the 1950s drew upon and magnified the more general obsession with the reconstruction of family life and domestic ideals after World War II. The 1950s was a decade that invested an enormous amount of cultural capital in the ability to form a family. [31] As Elaine Tyler May observes,
"Television during the post-war gap monopolised on the emerging basic social construct of the nuclear family. Affordable track housing and affordable television sets paved the way for building a new future for family life, this was a hyperbolic form of "domestic containment" built on the assumptions of cold war logic." [32]
In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the notion of the family is arguably central to the text. The victims of the Body Snatchers (Uncle Ira, Mr Driscoll, the Grimaldi's) are all parts of the nuclear family construct, Biskind's observation of the film suggests: "the family is no longer what it seemed; traditional bonds have eroded." [33] Wilma says that her Uncle Ira "was always like a father to me" and "Now there's no emotion". The victims are family people, but Miles and Becky are divorced and have no family, and therefore are immune to the Body Snatchers' plea that "Love, desire, ambition, faith - without them life is so simple". Other reasons for immunity from the Body Snatchers comes in the form of individuality through personal artistic expression. Jack Belicec (King Donovan) initially appears to be immune from the Body Snatchers because of his occupation as a writer; his individual artistic talent prevents him being taken over by consensus.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, like all other science fiction, criticises science and technology, and reiterates fears over modernity (particularly in regard to modern communication technology) against traditional values of social institutions and the post-war family ideal. It could be argued that the text's anxiety and paranoia is one of traditionalism versus modernity, a debate that the heightened paranoia of foreign war technology during the Cold War brought to American culture. As Peter Biskind comments, "The film is suffused with a nostalgia for the past.... for the pre-technological rather than the newfangled." [34]
Although modern media technology was at first feared, the media's representation of reality was of a traditional nature, as its conservative images and values of gender, class and race were suppressed and conventional. The preference for the traditional over the modern was integral to Cold War culture. The nuclear family ideal, frontier values, and a respect for authority and status, were integral to the national psyche, and any threat to these was challenged. The change of ending to Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an obvious example of the text's response to a foreign ideology: "Get on your radio and sound an All Points Alarm! Block all highways, and stop all traffic, and call in every law enforcement agency in the state!".
Notes
1 Jean Baudrillard, "Forget Foucault", trans Nicole Dufresne, New York: Semiotext 1987 p11, cited in Who Programmes You: Science Fiction of the Spectacle, cited in Kuhn Annette, (Ed) Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (London:Verso,1990) p199. [Back]
2 Siegel Don, (Director) (1956), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Film). [Back]
3 Al LaValley, (Ed) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1989) p4. [Back]
4 Ibid. [Back]
5 David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999) p133. [Back]
6 La Valley p4. [Back]
7 La Valley p4. [Back]
8 George Turner, "A case for insomnia: pod people become a chilling metaphor for the Cold War in sci-fi's ultimate paean to paranoia, Invasion of the Body Snatchers" in American Cinematographer, V78 no#3 (March 1997) p79. [Back]
9 Ibid. [Back]
10 LaValley, p135. [Back]
11 Cinefantastique, vol 2, No 3, 1973, cited in John Brosnan, The Primal Screen: a History of Science Fiction Film (London & Sydney: Orbit Books, 1991) p78. [Back]
12 Le Gray 1978: p287, Letter from Jack Finney (12 July 1993) cited in Seed p134. [Back]
13 J Hoberman, "Paranoia and the pods" in Sight and Sound Vol 4 no 5 (May 1994) p31. [Back]
14 Carlos Clarens, An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, (New York: Capricorn Books, 1967) p134, cited in Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1998) p123. [Back]
15 LaValley, p4. [Back]
16 Ceclia Tichi, Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), cited in Neil Campbell, and Alasdair Kean, American Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1997) p274. [Back]
17 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) p1. [Back]
18 Campbell and Kean p275. [Back]
19 Ibid. [Back]
20 Charles T Gregory, "The pod society versus the rugged individualists" The Journal of Popular Film, (winter 1972) 3:4, cited in Sobchack p122-3. [Back]
21 Seed p132. [Back]
22 Seed p132-133. [Back]
23 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, (London:1987 p220-1) cited in Seed p133. [Back]
24 Spigel p1. [Back]
25 Dwight Macdonald, cited in J Storey, An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) cited in, Campbell and Kean p282. [Back]
26 Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) p189-90, cited in Seed p133. [Back]
27 Jean Baudrillard, "The precession of simulacra", in Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman,(New York: Semiotext(e),1983) p54-5, cited in Kuhn p200. [Back]
28 Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to the Theory's of Popular Culture, (London: Routledge,1995), cited in Campbell and Kean p283. [Back]
29 Ceclia Tichi, in Campbell and Kean p273. [Back]
30 Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: Or How Hollywood Taught us to Stop Worrying and Love the 50's (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001) p141. [Back]
31 Spigel p2. [Back]
32 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, p20, cited in Spigel p24. [Back]
33 Biskind p142. [Back]
34 Ibid. [Back]
