The past literally collides with the present in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Protagonists Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams are driving on a busy San Francisco street, attuned to but not entirely aware of the fact that their fellow citizens are afflicted with a spreading invasive organism, when a man jumps onto the hood of the car, taken by frenzy, yelling into the driver-side window that “they’re coming” and that “you’re in danger.” The man is Kevin McCarthy, star of the 1956 film that Kaufman is remaking, picking up where he left off 22 years before: raving in the middle of traffic of the catastrophe that awaits humanity, down to the exact same lines. Yet where in the original he is believed at just the right moment, here he is less fortunate. He runs off, a crowd of private citizens appear to be chasing after him. A crash is heard offscreen, when Sutherland and Adams turn the corner he’s dead.
What looks today like simple fan service is actually thematically perfect. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a film about the familiar being replicated into something alien and sinister. In order to justify the replication of that film, it must demonstrate its own sinister qualities. The main quality being the message that the 1950s are over.
Kaufman’s remake is not that far apart from Don Siegel’s original, and the former is every bit as preoccupied with the fear of its predecessor: the neutralization of the individual. Yet the psychological and political gulfs between those years are so massive that for Kaufman to totally replicate the arc of the original would be laughable even if it was desired. Set side-by-side, the films show how collective fear has a parasitic hold that tends to adapt to rather than recede from a shift in environment.
Siegel’s original struck at the heart of a pervasive paranoia of the Eisenhower era that dreaded, in about equal measure, Communist subversion and McCarthyist inquisition. An America having come into its own as a global power was beset by two existential conditions: its vulnerability to bad actors from without and its need to instill good behavior befitting a budding empire from within. The optimistic ending was actually a post-production amendment. In fact the original was supposed to end less conclusively with McCarthy raving in traffic. But the 1950s were complex. Though existentially fraught, it had not resigned itself to absolute domination. Its people had other things going on: appliances to acquire, trips to take, etc. By the 1970s there was an urge to return to the idea with some corrections that, evinced by McCarthy’s cameo, paid due respect to the original intentions, which was about as much as the film could afford to do.
In 1978, Kevin McCarthy’s doctor becomes Donald Sutherland’s county health inspector, who discovers multiple people in San Francisco undergoing a similar change in their personalities. They become aloof to and isolated from their friends and intimates; in fact their whole humanity seems given over to a new herd-like pattern wherein they convene with people otherwise unconnected to them to undertake unclear, almost conspiratorial activities. It coincides with the appearance of a beautiful yet unfamiliar species of flora all over the city, the effects of which the amateur botanist Adams brings quite literally close to home. I should think I divulge no spoilers in telling of what comes next: discovery of duplicate bodies, mass harvesting and distribution of pods, a far-reaching campaign of a microscopic alien life form to dominate the earth at the cellular level. Once the threat is obvious, Sutherland and Adams, with Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright in tow, run all over San Francisco to escape the steadily enclosing invader.
Character details aside, so far so similar. It seems as if it’s destined not to work. And in fact some critics at the time thought it did not. Yet, quite like the film’s plant-based alien host, that collective fear manages to assimilate convincingly if unsettlingly into the 1970s psyche.
The collective fear of the first film would indeed have its work cut out for it in the 1970s. By 1978, the United States had come out from a succession of battles either won with ambiguous outcomes or abandoned entirely. The Sexual Revolution had been more or less won in favor of the revolutionaries, but the countercultural spirit that propelled it had faded into a polyester-adorned complacency. The country lost both political strength and the moral high ground trying to contain global Communism, which was both spreading and coexisting with a rise in global terrorism. More pointedly, the fear’s primary enablers, competent government and a steady economy, were simply gone. The dread of the 1950s had to go up against exhaustion of incomplete defeat on the one hand and anxiety of total collapse on the other.
The fear also found itself outclassed aesthetically. Cinematic horror ushered in a new generation of filmmakers who had the resources and the imagination to solve a years-long problem: using H.P. Lovecraft. After some very embarrassing attempts by Roger Corman and Rod Serling alike in the previous decade, Lovecraft’s coldblooded antihumanism and the sci-fi/horror hybrid he created to articulate it found not just sympathetic proselytizers, but the special effects innovations to bring them to unprecedentedly vivid life. In due course the resulting hybrids acquired both Lovecraft’s impenetrable aesthetic and his amoral philosophy. Humanity was ever under threat by extraterrestrial invaders, but ones that were far removed from our concerns and limitations, with little commonality or interest in us specifically, and unburdened by culture, ethics, or any higher motivating factor than survival. This dynamic was better insofar as it seemed more realistic. The notion that aliens were “like us” or that our principles and spirit would carry the day against them were naïve conceits best left in the 1950s. And because experiments like Alien and The Thing were wildly successful (if not necessarily in the near-term for The Thing), this attitude prevailed to the point of becoming conventional wisdom.
The 1978 Invasion shares many of the broad strokes of Alien and The Thing. It has the former’s pod-delivery system, the latter’s species replication, and the tenacious will of resistance found in the protagonists of both. From there it starts to break down into what could be seen as old habits. It presents the amorality of its antagonist, but it does not go so far as to embrace its coldly scientific perspectives in tone or philosophy. While fan theorists will forever debate the exact outcome of The Thing, it is still ambiguous compared to the conclusion of Invasion. And that conclusion, too, is not valueless. Lytton Strachey wrote of what he called “a time of Hobbes, whose half-medieval, half-modern mind” had dominated an intellectual life that was leaning toward the rationality of astronomy while still convinced of the reality of astrology. You could think of Kaufman’s film in the same terms, of holding onto old morality in an emerging amoral world. Or you could see the film as doing something darker: taking that 1950s collective fear, morals and all, and turning it on its head.
You could choose to see the film as a condemnation of the time in which it is set. The old enemies are the same, but the contemporary mentality is unprepared to defend against them. The central characters all seem to be Laschian bugbears. Sutherland and Adams are bureaucrats who love their work, Cartwright and Goldblum are bohemians managing a spa, Leonard Nimoy is a celebrity therapist. They lack the action-based heroic element of a Sigourney Weaver or a Kurt Russell. An alien invader has carte blanche in Carter’s America. The “heroes” will make careful inquiries into the matter (Sutherland, believer in civil society that he is, spends a comical amount of screen time phoning other institutions) until it is too late to do anything else but run. This, anyway, is the horror film of right-wingers’ dreams. But Invasion of the Body Snatchers carries too much of its predecessor’s Cold War liberalism to be effectively polemical.1
There was a time when liberalism appeared not only to be dominant, but capable of enduring. It emerged out from the New Deal and World War II to cast society in its coldly realistic self-image. This was the liberalism of Lionel Trilling, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Richard Hofstadter, who in one way or another propagated a political vision in which Good Government mediated the extremes of the right of the individual conscience and mankind’s certain imperfectability. In 1956, such a liberalism rejected whichever conformity the original Invasion was plausibly concerned about, and it was viable; so viable in fact that just a year earlier, William F. Buckley launched his 25-year insurgency against it. But by 1978 it was at the end of its rope. Its promises were unfulfilled or broken, and it had lost the will and probably the ability to function. And because the film believed in this liberalism, the only alternative was catastrophe.
“We come here from a dying world,” the podded Nimoy preaches. “We drift through the universe, from planet to planet …. We adapt and we survive.” When I first watched the film, I misheard the first line as “We came to a dying world.” And it didn’t offer much to correct me. There was nothing of the chaos of the 1970s in the film. No stagflation or unemployment or looming gas shortages or political disarray. But it does offer a vision that few ever want to contemplate: a successful takeover of Earth. Nimoy makes a lot convenient promises to his fleeing former friends. Submission to this species is not domination, but assimilation. Your conscience may be gone, but your memories and skills are still useful. You are being “born again into an untroubled world” where neither hate nor love have any dominion over them, and hence anxiety, disappointment, the need to compete with others for pointless gains or otherwise distinguish themselves are obsolete along with them. You need the pods more than the pods need you. You will carry out a simple but very important purpose in service to a more deserving civilization.
There’s a fine line in human history between the death throes of a sick age and the growing pains of a healthy age. The alien invasion narrative was designed in part for presumably healthy human ages to process this repeatedly demonstrable reality. John Carpenter made this explicit in They Live!, released 10 years after Invasion. “They're free-enterprisers,” a character tells Roddy Piper and Keith David. “The earth is just another developing planet. Their third world.” But even Carpenter takes the optimistic, if somewhat subversive, way out. Subsequent attempts at remakes of Invasion in 1993 and 2007 went with respectively open-ended and positive conclusions. They are also forgotten.
Kaufman’s Invasion is justly remembered for the punch it refused to pull. Even people who haven’t seen the whole film will recognize the memetic image of Sutherland having succumbed to pod assimilation. But that single image also abbreviates its impact. It ignores his scene partner Veronica Cartwright, in the hysterics that made her famous, realizing that she has no one left. Moreover, it ignores the preceding sequence showing a post-pod world taking shape just as Nimoy had promised it would. It is automatic and emotionally neutral, but it is also orderly and seamless. It has a serenity perhaps not seen on this planet since before man discarded his natural impulses for social graces. It was brought about by coercion; but like all coerced peaces it is viable and resolute. The conclusion is still tragic, but the tragedy shifts away from Sutherland’s failure to preserve his own sick society and over to Cartwright’s failure to adhere to the healthy one. The age of Hobbes indeed.
Contrast Invasion with the 1973 exploitation film The Baby, which is also centered on an enthusiastic civil servant, and so preoccupied with emasculation at the hands of a welfare-addicted all-female single-parent household that you would not be blamed for thinking that Daniel Patrick Moynihan and James Q. Wilson had written it.