the perfect society
by Douglas Messerli
Daniel Mainwaring (screenplay), Don Siegel (director), Invasion of the Body Snatchers / 1956
“I’m not mad! I’m not mad!” shouts actor Kevin McCarthy at the very beginning of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With glazed eyes (we soon discover he has not slept for days), unshaven face, disheveled appearance, and crazed shouts, he certainly gives one the sense that he may be quite crazy. And once we, along with the doctor, hear his story about an infection of the citizens of his small California town by extraterrestrial pods which replace people with exact duplicates of themselves, it is hard not to shout out, “lock him up!”
Despite denials from the director and writer, many viewers and
commentators have long read this grade B movie, blessed with the grade A
direction of Siegel, as a metaphor of the McCarthy (as in the Wisconsin senator,
not the film’s major actor) hearings. Certainly, presented with a world in
which otherwise normal and friendly people seemingly turn against their
neighbors, informing upon them to the authorities, and attempting to conform
them into a society with limited viewpoints and no apparent free speech, one
might be tempted to read it this way. But I think that is a mistake. The source
of the evil presented here comes from outside the society—outside the known
universe—not from within, as did the homegrown American fanaticism of
McCarthyism. Moreover, the “heroes” of this would-be parable—the doctor Miles
Bunnel, his would-be girlfriend Becky Driskoll, and their friends Jack and his
wife, have no high ideals, no particular values at all—except their love and
devotion to each other. Of course, many who suffered the purges of McCarthy’s
hearings were perhaps no higher idealed than these folk, but there is no
attempt to connect them with any values whatsoever, let alone membership in or
association with members of an political organization such as the Communist
Party.
Indeed, I would argue that—with its implications of outside intruders
and presentment of a society in which the group ethic dominates and wherein,
having shed themselves of individualistic goals, people work as units—that the
target of this film is, not the right, but the left in the form of communism,
which it presents as being so pernicious (I remember the myths of the day in
which it was suggested that communism discouraged love between individuals)
that even the Wisconsin senator might have embraced the movie.
But Siegel gets away with it simply because he does not let the modest
science-fiction yarn become a political statement. The film seldom loses focus
of its four, later two, and finally one, individual(s) at war with the world at
large.
Yet there are hints that the world with which they war is not totally
bad. Jack, Miles’ friend, argues that he would find everything to be much
better if only he’d embrace the new order. And in the midst of Miles’ and
Becky’s most terrifying moments, they hear beautiful music from nearby. Surely
love and imagination cannot have died. Miles checks it out only to discover it
comes from a shed in which workers are cultivating the deadly pods, and by the
time he returns to his beloved Becky, she has joined the “living dead.”
His race to the freeway is a run for the larger urban culture and away
from the single-mindedness of his small town. It is a society which functions,
it appears, as he has had to, without sleep. Perhaps he has gone mad. The new society he has entered seems to be a bit
crazed in finally believing his tale, agonizing him as one of them, a doctor
and a man of conscience and truth. Evidence has been found: a truck full of
pods. The doctor orders the military and the police to block all highways in
and out of the area. We are left a bit uneasy at the very least. For what do
they—all these restless authorities—intend to do, shoot and kill the
normal-seeming citizens of Santa Mira and environs? I’m not sure I wouldn’t
prefer to return to the perfectly functioning world from which Miles has just
escaped.
October 2004, Los Angeles
Reprinted from My World 2005
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