Science-Fiction Film Is Unwitting Allegory Revealing Popular Axieties on Communism

...When McCarthy (is this name coincidental, too...

...Daniel Mainwaring's screenplay from Jack Finney's magazine serial never interpolates clues to an analogy...

...The denouement is of the familiar kind in which the audience is drawn into the fiction...

...As ever, the modern fantasies refract political concerns most frequently in treating matters of government in outer space, or the problems raised for the public safety here on earth by horrific attacks...

...But here we may see that the film becomes the more remarkable if the correspondence to Communism is unintentional...

...The film is not futuristic, but of the type that achieves its principal impact from introducing a single outlandish factor into a commonplace, recognizable world...

...The people whose bodies are "snatched" by the imperialistic vegetable forms from space do not change in appearance...

...The words of love songs may be the anthem of American loyalties, after all, and the clinch before rosy fade-out may be a dream of political community...

...It is relevant to inquire just how much of the correspondence between the fearful fiction of the film and the real fear of Communism is deliberate...

...Fantasy can be viewed as a critique of the actuality we share whether deliberate, as creators of allegorical Utopias have demonstrated at least since Plato and novelists at least since Swift and Voltaire, or unwitting, revealing fears or fulfilling wishes for the waking world in strange new worlds of imagination...

...Sex is not proscribed, as in Orwell's science-fantasy, but disappears, as in the cult of unattractive costumes of the Red Chinese...

...Predictably, the deliberate political contrivances are not as significant as those which are implied as in the arrangements within futuristic societies in which men of ideals and learning are subordinated, as a matter of course, to those of security and action...

...The protagonist, Kevin McCarthy, relaxes at the fade-out, knowing he is believed at last...

...But it is the crew-cut space cadet, ray gun in hand, whose orders finally have to be obeyed in order to overcome disaster...

...The currents in present-day science-fiction which flow from them carry their ancient conceptions of man's nature as primordially evil...

...His job is to soothe the dubious until they can be enfolded as if the suspicion of self that is generalized in the symbolical approach of depth psychology may be turned to prepare people for accepting what they have not the self-assurance to deny...

...The real theme of the film, however, is Communism...

...But the conclusion itself is meant to seem a beginning...

...Those currents out of the 19th-century maelstrom of scientific and technological change join the older streams, depositing their weight of meanings around the newer anxieties...

...This device is especially suggestive, as the force so perfectly implies the popular notion of Communism...

...We are left to imagine the total mobilization of the nation which must follow, and the desperate measures in which we must join to halt and overcome the invading force...

...In terms of an analogy to Communism, however, it is actually a supporting factor, appearing to correspond so easily to that unending ideological roundabout: the historical predestination of the proletarian revolution biting the tail of a perennial need for agitating so that the inevitable can occur...

...realizes that his beloved has lost all normal feeling, and has become another representative of offensive peace of mind, the terror of seeing relatives, friends and neighbors become agencies of a hostile power is instantly focused...

...The pessimism of the earlier horror stories seems almost reassuring...

...The ultimate evil of the film is thus conceived in terms of an ideological transformation of the traditional romantic ending...

...The Gothic horror stories of the 18th century and after, with their simple purpose of chilling us for our own entertainment, perhaps had secularized the diabolistic terrors of traditional religious moralities...

...But, terrifyingly, they no longer care for liberty or the pursuit of happiness: the freedom to express the force of creative life that is symbolized in the romantic view of erotic love...

...The climactic horror is the succumbing of the hero's sweetheart, Dana Wynter, despite a prolonged resistance made through the will to love and feel loved...

...In literary fiction, comic books, television shows and films, the science-fantasy genre has a special way of revealing popular attitudes toward profound problems in symbolic form...

...It may be that the popular image of Communist penetration is of a kind of toxic lovelessness...

...At least, it offers a precise analogy, in terms of fantasy, to popular conceptions of the problem of ideological infiltration...

...The forces for evil personified in the new mythology make Pandora's demons appear as friendly household gods...

...The long-hair scientist may invent the machines or discover the danger...

...The film closes as the forces of right have finally been convinced of the reality of the danger...

...For this reason, the conception of the nature of the menace of the "Body Snatchers" and their manner of conquest is more interesting than if there had been careful contrivance of analogues...

...An added refinement of infiltration technique, showing a shrewd intelligence appraisal of what Americans or particularly Californians are likely to accept without question, has the local psychiatrist involved as one of the first and leading "converts...

...The Invasion of the Body Snatchers exemplifies the attack-upon-Earth theme, but its political implications are unusual...

...Director Don Siegel develops the drama within its own architecture yet, with an economy that itself suggests the familiarity of the theme...

...The change is that they have lost their "emotional and spiritual identities...

...Their voices, manners, memories remain those of the persons whose features they inhabit...

...As each person is taken over by the vegetable "pods," he becomes an absolutely obedient agent of the new force, working to spread the millennial peace in which all participate, spiritless and free of love, hate, sentiment and responsibility yet relentlessly dedicated to the new barrenness...

...On SCREEN By Martin S. Dworkin Science-Fiction Film Is Unwitting Allegory Revealing Popular Anxieties on Communism The invasion of the Body Snatchers seems to be about the innocuous possibility for science-fiction that human beings could have their minds and spirits usurped by mysterious vegetable organisms from outer space...

...Above all, the tales of life on other worlds, invasions by fanciful horrors, and wondrous inventions running amuck express fears of man himself...

...This inconsistency between the "pod people's" lack of feeling and their concerted activity to foster their invasion isn't a serious difficulty for science-fiction plotting...

...It is as if the public is having a nightmare, the elements of which may be unreal yet represent the deepest terrors of daylight...

...What Americans fear most of all, however, from the suggestive imagery of the film is loss of love particularly as it is manifested in the form of romantic sex...

...The menace in the movie is a kind of play-model of popular comprehension of ideological insinuation, and of the terrors of total alienation of the loyalties of friends and neighors...

...To be sure, the "pod people" seem to have a strategy of priorities in taking over the police, telephones and other vital services first as if they had been indoctrinated not too far out in space, after all...

...Their souls, and their desire and ability to care about anything more than an aggressive survival, have disappeared...

...The "pod people," like the spies and conspirators who may be all around us, are not recognizably different in features and behavior...