Week 3: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Film #3: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), dir. Don Siegel

In the small California town of Santa Mira, several patients of Dr. Miles Bennell (played by Kevin McCarthy) claim that their loved ones have been replaced by impostors. Bennell initially diagnoses those patients as suffering from a mass delusion. Soon, however, he discovers that Santa Mira is really being quietly invaded by aliens who grow in seedpods and take over people’s bodies while they sleep. The extraterrestrial intruders look and sound just like their victims except that they are devoid of any human emotion or feeling. The film, made at the height of the Cold War, has been interpreted as an allegory for Cold War paranoia and fear of McCarthyism to the alienation felt in mass society to the tyrannical egalitarianism and loss of personal autonomy stereotyped as taking place in communist societies.

• While the film does not feature any major characters of color and has been interpreted as expressing anxieties over foreign ideological invasions, largely pertaining to Soviet communism, how would you describe the vision of American society that the film portrays as being threatened by potential contamination? Is it a group of racially and culturally diverse, working class people? As film scholar Rashna Wadia Richards states: "the absence of people of color doesn’t imply the absence of a racial discourse. I remind them that this was the era of white flight, prompted by the migration of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latino Americans to cities, particularly to California’s urban centers."  https://www.thecine-files.com/teaching-invasion-of-the-body-snatchers/