sylvia pimentalThrowing The Alien Into Relief pt 2
January 4th 2007 00:00
The foregrounding of the nova in a recognisable setting adds to the science fiction quality ‘…where the novum acts as symbolic manifestation of something, that connects it specifically with the world we live in.’ (Roberts 2000: 16) Essentially it is the familiarity of the background that makes the estrangement - ‘the alienation caused by the novum and its consequences’ (Fitzsimmons & O’Brien 2002: 1-8) - work.
Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is set in a small sleepy 1950s American town called Santa Mira. Santa Mira is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else by name and in theory by identity. It is the kind of place where nothing - let alone anything bad - ever happens. It is also a place where there is nowhere for ‘enemies’ or others to hide. Nowhere eternal that is.
When the protagonist Dr. Miles Bennell returns home from a medical convention he is faced with a bizarre and apparently contagious hysterical outbreak. People are convinced that those that they know and love have been ‘changed’ into unemotional others. Miles and his girlfriend Becky struggle to hold onto their individual identities and each other (and by default their humanity) as one by on the people around them change, losing their individuality while still, unnervingly retaining their external physical identities.
The body snatchers are aliens in the form of seed pods which grow to resemble exactly the person which they are replacing. Exactly that is except for one crucial thing - the replacement people have no individual identity, no emotions, no humanity or character. This omission effectively reduces the replacements to emotionless drones, mere machines or perhaps more accurately mere cogs in a larger machine.
In the beginning of the film the loss of identity is a vague paranoid misapprehension, a collective fear that echoed the anti-communist paranoia of the McCarthy era (illustrated in the invasion of the body snatchers being characterised as a contagious hysteria). ‘Transformation by foreign ideologies, forced subservience to alien powers and the loss of free will were depicted as a fate worse than death. The prospect of the robotisation of family members and the transformation of society as whole into a population of unemotional, cold, obedient humanoids was a fear that directly related to dominant notions about communism.’ (Evan 1998: 118)
Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is set in a small sleepy 1950s American town called Santa Mira. Santa Mira is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else by name and in theory by identity. It is the kind of place where nothing - let alone anything bad - ever happens. It is also a place where there is nowhere for ‘enemies’ or others to hide. Nowhere eternal that is.
The body snatchers are aliens in the form of seed pods which grow to resemble exactly the person which they are replacing. Exactly that is except for one crucial thing - the replacement people have no individual identity, no emotions, no humanity or character. This omission effectively reduces the replacements to emotionless drones, mere machines or perhaps more accurately mere cogs in a larger machine.
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