Invasion of the Body Snatchers- (Director Don Siegel) 1956
In the exciting opening prologue with extended narration, dishevelled physician Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy), distraught and seeming to be psychotic and mad about alien invaders, shouts to an unbelieving group of nurses, interns, psychiatrists (including Whit Bissel as Dr. Hill), and doctors (including Richard Deacon as Dr. Harvey Bassett) in the emergency room of the city's Emergency Hospital where he has been brought by a police car, that seed pods are taking over the planet:
Doctor, will you tell these fools I'm not crazy? Make them listen to me before it's too late.
The theme of the cautionary, politicized film was open to varying interpretations, including paranoia toward the spread of a harmful ideology such as socialistic Communism, or the sweeping mass hysteria of McCarthyism in the 1950s and blacklisting of Hollywood, the spread of an unknown malignancy or virulent germ (read fear of annihilation by 'nuclear war'), or the numbing of our individuality and emotional psyches through conformity and group-think. Yet its main theme was the alien (read 'Communist') dehumanization and take-over of an entire community by large seed pods (found in basements, automobile trunks, a greenhouse, and on a pool table) that replicated and replaced human beings. And it told of the heroic struggle of one helpless but determined man of conscience, a small-town doctor (McCarthy), to vainly combat and quell the deadly, indestructible threat.
I have been trying to understand the current events of this nation, the current rise of a despot, the current craze to hate, the ongoing emergence of an underlying malaise which has always been stagnant, but like the mysterious diseases hidden below the ice caps, with the coming of Global Warming have arisen to possibly infect and destroy the environment in which we live. I grew up in the 50’s a period of turmoil and insecurity where science fiction movies were more than tales of monsters, but the actual prophecy of a future, if unchecked, could lead to disaster. From my father taking my sister and I to colossal movie palaces, watching a double bill of scary movies, to Chiller Theater on a Saturday night, with only a blanket to protect yourself from invading creatures, to the Twilight Zone, always asking the question of is this hour real or imagined…from all of that I realized that the one monster from which terror is the most dangerous is the human being.
In the age of Trump and the mobs of people demanding to lock someone up, or kidnap innocent kids, or permit guns to solve every issue…In the age of Trump and the disregard for morals, values, civil and human rights…In the period of Trump where suddenly there is an emergence of fake news, or good Nazi’s, and the assumption that free speech is anti-American…I must turn to the themes of the brilliant writers of the past who, via science fiction predicted and pointed out that WE ARE the ones to fear the most. I write my blog in protest, I want my voice heard as a form of an SOS, but like the lead character in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers I repeat his anxious voice when he demands: “Tell these fools I am not crazy! Make them listen to me before its too late!”
