Bodysnatchers: Evolution of a monster.

In the track entitled ‘Bodysnatchers’ from their IN RAINBOWS album, Radiohead sing “I have no idea what you are talking about; I’m trapped in this body and can't get out.” Typical of the ironic-paradox-art-gaff we’ve come to expect from Radiohead, it isn’t Bodysnatchers that Thom Yorke is talking about, but Us. No one can ever get outside of their own heads to judge the world on its own terms. We have Subjectivity as a certainty; thus, Objectivity is an impossibility. ‘Meaning’ or whatever you want to call it, it’s a trait of humanity, not the world in itself. To be a Pod Person, however, is to be different. As a Bodysnatched Daniel Craig says at the end of the 2007 version, “In our world, no one can hurt each other or exploit each other, or try to destroy each other. Because in our world, there is no other.”

There have been three film versions (1956, 1978 and 2007) of the 1955 Invasion of the Bodysnatchers novel. Three very different films politically, at their core, the philosophical nugget is the same: people suspect that their sisters are not their sisters, that their children are not their children. People are being changed in a way that the remaining humans cannot explain, but which their instinct cannot deny: “There is no emotion – only the pretence of it. The words, the gestures, the tones of voice, everything else – but not the feeling.” That’s why dogs go apeshit at Bodysnatchers; dogs are made of instinct. Whatever Pod People are made of (at least psychologically) is unknown, but physically they’re “the same in every thought, memory, habit and mannerism, right down to the last little atom of your bodies.” But something’s missing; something we can never put a finger on.

The original 1956 Bodysnatchers film has always been viewed as a comment on Communism, even though it was never written/filmed as such. In post-WW2 America, the fear of ‘Reds under the Bed’ made societies suspicious of socialists and their ideas. The McCarthy party line was that Communism threatened the individual rights on which the United States had based its constitution. But paradoxically, the suspicious paranoia meant the solution was a stifling conformity, a similar suppression of the individual. Perhaps it is this very paradox that has led to the Invasion association, as well as the ambiguity of whether the ‘Snatchers’ represent Communists or the McCarthyites who hunted them out. The film itself is quite anti-authoritarian; the police are the last to believe the stories about Pod People, and among the first to be transformed into them. But the framing story that the film’s producer tacked on just before release goes against this grain. The whole thing is told in flashback and at the end when we return to the narrator who opened the story,  is “Get me the FBI!”, to which Bennell seems truly relieved for the first time. The Bodysnatchers’ biology that is detailed so well in the book is strangely inconsistent in the 1956 film. The film’s central character states it himself upon seeing his first pod, “When the process is complete, probably the original is destroyed or disintegrates.” But in the film’s climax, Miles Bennell has his lover fall asleep in his arms, only to wake a moment later as an inhuman Pod Person. That said, this ambiguity kind of works with the Communist commentary, and ferments the enigma about whether Invasion is pro-or-anti Socialism. We must be perpetually suspicious to the point of paranoia; certainty cannot even be found in a single person.

Certainly the fact that falling asleep is what allows the pods to duplicate you, it stands as a metaphor for the idea that the Commies might get us if we drop our guard. Maybe it says as much about the 1950s as it does about the movie itself, but staying sedated seems to be the order of the day. We’ve found the growing formless body of an alien on our billiard table; we’d better have a drink. Little Billy is freaking out, saying his mother isn’t his mother; better have him pop him a downer pill. The town itself is called Mill Town (Miltown was an over-the-counter analgesic in the 50s, the American equivalent of ‘A cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down’). However, once the invasion becomes certain, once they see their first Pod, the remaining humans are chomping down speed like it’s going out of style. The message here is not so ambiguous: subdue yourself under the banner of Uncle Sam until the socialist threat becomes too real to deny, and then paranoia is the only justified course of action. Just before Dr Bennell sees his first unformed Pod Person, his friend warns him with a question: “Would you be able to forget that you’re a doctor for a while?” Later, the same friend yells at a doubting psychiatrist to “stop trying to rationalise everything”. For the 1956 version, the only rational course of action is to become irrational. But with the 1978 and 2007 adaptations, there are rewards for rationality.

Although it is instinct that detects a Snatcher, we can fight them with our reasoning. Technically, we could walk among Pod People indefinitely if we simply don’t show emotion; if we don’t sweat from stress; if we mind over matter. At the end of the 1978 film, we see an unchanged human living discreetly amongst the Pod People for so long that leaves have started to fall from the trees. This 1978 adaptation is the best of the bunch, for the fact that it rubs its own subtlety so much in your face. We actually start the film from the plant’s point-of-view, seeing dandelion-like seeds drifting away from a doomed and desolate planet before drifting to earth and taking root on our trees, then sprouting a red flower that is plucked and smelled by the invasion’s Patient Zero. There’s a sinister ambiguous element to the whole of San Francisco in this film, and it’s sinister because it’s ambiguous. Passersby run down the street in the background, fearfully looking over their shoulder. People press their faces up against windows of frosted glass, and we never know if they’re Snatchers or simply strange strangers. We never know how far the epidemic has spread until it’s a certainty, until it’s too late.

Kevin McArthy made a cameo in the 1978 version, repeating his famous line
from the 1956 film: "They're already here!"

Similarly, the system that supports society in the 1978 version may or may not be helping the pods. Police bikes follow crowds who in turn are chasing a single person; when we come around the corner we see the dead body, and the police standing there doing nothing at all. Garbage trucks come at odd hours of the night, or loiter suspiciously. The cool thing though is that it’s all in our head. We know we’re watching a Bodysnatchers movie so we project Podism onto everything we see on screen, benign or not. They totally nail the biology in this one too. When this film’s Dr Bennell has his lover fall asleep in his arms, she crumbles into a grey dust before her naked Bodysnatched duplicate comes out from a pod a stone’s throw away. We even get a glimpse of a crossbreed – a dog with a human face – the result of Bennell kicking a growing pod that was laying next to a bum and his pooch. Once thing the 1978 version has in common with the original, is that you could almost split this film into two distinct parts. When the invasion is uncertain, the brooding mood of the film is so unspoken, smouldering under the surface of whoever may or may not be a Snatcher. But as soon as we see our first pod, and Pod People are no longer singular threats, but more like a force; a collective crowd of shadows that stretches back into the night. Because Pod People aren’t people, they’re a single entity of non-entities. Because they are plants, they are paradoxically like robots. But on the outside, they are just like us. Pod People even listen to music, and in the 1956 and 1978 versions, it is music that draws our heroes out of hiding, to their doom. Human, all too human.

In fact, the only film that doesn’t have Pod People listening to music is the latest 2007 version, and the stark differences don’t stop there. In this film, Pod People no longer come from pods. Instead, a sort of lichen covers your face and body while you sleep: no duplication; only transformation. The shitty drawback is that Snatchers spread the lichen to new humans with an excessive projectile vomiting worthy of Two-Girls-One-Cup. But maybe that’s a small price to pay to see a Snatcher wake up halfway through a transformation, trying to crawl away before vomiting plant pus so intensely that he dies from cardiac arrest. That, and there’s the kind-of-cool metaphor that the lichen first covers our eyes and mouth during sleep. Our most human of organs. Vision and Voice. Those human virtues that we know exist because we can give them to each other everyday, but we can never define or detect them for ourselves.

In the Bodysnatcher’s novel, when Dr Bennell asks a Pod Person why they do what they do, the duplicate responds:

“What do you do, and for what reason? Why do you breathe, eat, sleep, make love, and reproduce your kind? Because it’s your function, your reason for being. There’s no other reason, and none needed.”

Of course, here lies the difference between plants and people. We do more than simply try to survive. We try to thrive, and knowing the futility of our survival, we try to leave pieces of ourselves behind. So in the end, Bodysnatchers, or the difference between Bodysnatchers and us, is that ineffable element of humanity that we’ve all been trying to articulate in cave paintings, tribal music and philosophical essays sever since ‘we’ began.

/mr_metaphor.