Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1977) by Philip Kaufman

CINEMA – Invasion of the Body Snatchers is taken from a novel by Jack Finney (1911-1984) entitled Invasion of the Body Snatchers, published in 1955. It is one of those second-rate works very interesting, more so by the theme deployed than by the writing style. 

There have been several film versions of this story: first in 1956 with Don Siegel's version, fairly faithful to the novel, but of a rather summary style. Then in 1977, Philip Kaufman's. In 1994, Abel Ferrara directed Body Snatchers, not very captivating. The last one, in 2007, under the title Invasion by Oliver Hirschbiegel, is quite ordinary.

Best version

The best and most terrifying is therefore that of Philip Kaufman. If he is not an immense director, he has the quality here to push the theme to its ultimate limits and to avoid an optimistic ending while revisiting the original story. This novel should, hopefully, find a filmmaker of magnitude to formally give it a brilliant accomplishment and raise it to the rank it deserves. 

Let us note before entering into the story that Jack Finney must have been inspired by Capgras syndrome, also called “the illusion of doubles”. Joseph Capgras (1873-1950), a French psychiatrist, described in The Illusion of the Doubles this chronic delusion in 1923 where a 53-year-old woman claimed that her relatives and herself had several doubles. 

On this canvas, the film fits into the line of New Hollywood which is inspired, with much more talent, by the filmmakers of the highly overrated French New Wave who deconstructed the story and narration with the use of fragmented shots and cameras on will say “floating” filmed in natural settings.

Despite this flaw, the filmmaker retranslates a captivating climate. This work has a dark vision while diverting the theme to other horizons. Originally, and perhaps it was Jack Finney's idea, it targeted the communists, accused of secretly invading the United States at the time of McCarthyism. They contaminated Americans with a sneaky ideology that wanted to replace the liberal way of life. Don Siegel's film was in this vein. In reality, and this is the contribution of Philip Kaufman and his screenwriter, the theme directly targets consumer society, and more broadly as we will see. 

Spores

The opening credits with its spores leaving a planet to spread across Earth are already worrying. In a few shots, we are shown their dissemination on the leaves of trees among other things where they begin to weave ramifications to make pretty flowers bloom… 

Elisabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), a San Francisco Department of Health employee, discovers strange flowers starting to grow on trees in her neighborhood. Children are picking them. Elisabeth picks one, studies it and tries to identify its origin. She finds her lover, Geoffrey (Art Hindle), a dentist who is passionate about football and explains to him that it is a grex, the cross-pollination of two species that produces a third, totally unique one. He does not seem to pay attention. Elisabeth places a glass with the flower and the next day, she finds that Geoffrey's behavior has changed. Indeed, he has become cold and distant. 

This is the starting point of strange events that will take place and that will threaten the peaceful appearance of everyday life. The garbage collectors who reappear several times of course evoke the consumer society that eliminates its waste, except that this waste here is very particular. 

Elisabeth confides in Matthew Bonnell (Donald Sutherland), a food hygiene specialist and work colleague (the funny scene in an Italian restaurant where he discovers a rat dropping that the chef mistakes for a caper). Matthew doesn't take her seriously when she tells him that Geoffrey is no longer Geoffrey. But the next day, while taking clothes to a Chinese dry cleaner, the owner also tells him that his wife is no longer really his wife. 

Elisabeth is on edge. She talks to Matthew at one point in the car and thinks there is a conspiracy: the city is completely changing. She tells him that she followed her lover meeting strange individuals throughout the day while exchanging strange packages. Suddenly, they witness an accident where a man appears in front of them screaming that it will soon be their turn, that they are all in danger. The man runs away and is run over by a car.

Actor Kevin McCarthy is the one who played the main role in the first version. The film thus distils a paranoid atmosphere by showing several shots with individuals with fixed or strange gazes or by making ambulance sirens howl. 

The lookalikes multiply. Paranoia sets in. Matthew tries to distract Elisabeth by dragging her to a party where his psychologist friend, David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), is to sign a popular book. There, a hysterical woman tries to convince her audience that her husband's behavior has also changed, that he is an imposter. When Jack Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum), a friend of Matthew, visits his girlfriend, Nancy Bellicec (Veronica Cartwright), who runs an ecological bathhouse, they witness the discovery of a body lying on a table, as if in a cocoon, strangely resembling Jack. Nancy is terrified. Matthew is called to the rescue.

He worries about Elisabeth, enters her apartment without his companion knowing, and discovers his double germinating. He kidnaps his sleeping friend and flees. Returning to the bath, he is told that Jack's double has disappeared. At Elisabeth's where the Police are present, her double has also evaporated. The paranoid climate increases, because little by little, the whole city seems contaminated, witness the collusion between the inspector and Geoffrey. Soon, San Francisco becomes prey to genetic mutations that sow panic throughout the city. The threat appears in the film not only invisible, but invincible and insidious.

Metamorphoses 

Elisabeth gradually understands that plants metamorphose into human beings and replace the people around her. We find the questions of the time concerning the industrialization of civilization after May 68. Flowers can also make one think of the flower-power movement of the hippies, because the flower was one of the symbols of their non-violent ideology. 

The turning point of the film is when the small group is gathered at night at Matthew's. After a heated discussion, the latter goes to rest in the garden. He lies down in a deckchair and falls asleep. Little by little, the plant takes possession of him, and copies him. It is the nightmare that invests reality itself. It is in this sense that the idyllic world is not as innocent as we believed and which blooms here in what has been called the New Hollywood, where the criticism of consumer society gives birth to benevolent monsters, standardizing all beings.

Horrific and sticky scene of replication as if we were witnessing a second instantaneous birth opposite to the usual, benevolent and happy one. Nancy manages to wake him up and everyone realizes that a manhunt is taking place: they are being pursued by “replicants”. Matthew hesitates to destroy the clones of his friends, a significant moment of hesitation where he has difficulty eliminating the duplicates of his friends by their disturbing resemblance. However, he does not hesitate to destroy his clone in the process. 

If we stick to a superficial reading, it is only a banal science fiction film with a conspiratorial or paranoid aspect. Yet, behind this story, he reveals unsuspected possibilities. 

First, in the middle of an ecological period, spores invade the Earth, develop into beautiful flowers, casting a sort of curse on nature. These pretty flowers are innocently picked by the inhabitants, and that is precisely the trap. Placed near the sleeping people, they weave a stringy mesh around them and replace them with a totally identical double that emanates from a pod. The idea is that this change occurs without the sleepers knowing, transforming them into an emotionally cold being, no longer having classic human reactions. They are cannibalized, devoured or vampirized without their knowledge. Old theme of sleep where the human being loses consciousness of himself, governed by a world that he does not control, but which lives in him like a stranger.

Devoured by his clone 

Magnificent theme of the double: the similar is no longer differentiated from the original. It absorbs it and yet it is not the same. It is this confusion that is terrifying. It is not the appearance of monsters that frightens, but the original that has lost its own qualities, replaced by a duplicate without being distinct from the original. And this loss is felt by the fact that human beings have the impression that their fellow human beings are no longer really themselves. And even more terrifying, these are their loved ones, people who live with them on a daily basis and who, suddenly, are strangers to them. The human devoured by his clone. The book and the film then pose this crucial question: what makes someone really someone in our eyes ? What is this mysterious singularity that we have chosen, and which, there, disappears to the point that, while keeping its carnal appearance, its authentic identity has disappeared. Where is the boundary between what is human and non-human, between singularity and impersonality ? 

The initial theme implements the fantastic reality of the world. Let us repeat: what is terrifying is the friend, the lover, the mistress, the neighbor, etc., in short the known and the everyday who become strangers, unknowns who change completely without changing their appearance. Dizzying wavering. They pass to the other side without being able to be really distinguished at the time. It only took a few hours to make them switch between the moment when they flee the mutants and the one where they find themselves as followers pursuing their loved ones. Twinship of doubles. Twin brothers devouring each other to lose themselves in the undifferentiated. 

One inevitably thinks of Eugène Ionesco's play, Rhinoceros, whose characters, possessed by the desire to imitate and be similar to each other, transform themselves into rhinoceroses. Spreading from a small provincial town, this rhinocerocification takes on such proportions that it contaminates, like a pandemic, the entire world. In the end, there is only one man left, Berenger, who has decided not to capitulate. 

We also notice the kinship with virality, here, monstrous which takes hold of its host, pirates it from the inside as viruses sometimes do: either by surviving in its host while infecting it, or by committing suicide at the same time when the latter dies. Here, it does it in both ways: it kills it by making it reborn completely different. We can rightly wonder how Nature can produce such a thing. But since we are an integral part of it, such a process is global and we cannot escape it. Strange, difficult to explain mechanism of Nature promoting both life and death in the same general movement. 

Control and assimilation of others

The goal of these aliens (who we will never see, a simple pretext for the obvious) is to build a harmonious society, without war, without conflict, without economic crisis, but also without love and without hate, as if to achieve a form of purity. It is no coincidence that the film holds out this idyll where humans would finally be rid of humans. Like these pretty flowers that hide complete evil behind an innocent appearance. Anyone who is likely to succumb to the mirage, to be part of the friendly lynch mob, to repudiate his personality and his singularity, his task, to designate the guilty party without ever understanding anything.

Everything that was human, beautiful and imperfect, is erased, denounced, accused by some court with a raised finger. This is to say that the theme, in this version, takes off truly to criticize certainly the consumer society of this time which “manufactures” individuals similar to each other (something even more true nowadays!), but any ideological system, religious or not, democratic or not, politico-economic which tries to erase this human singularity for a mythical paradise where Man would become purified of his initial task, of his dark side to be similar to all the others, delivered from his malaise of being. “The nostalgia for paradise is the desire of man not to be a man”, wrote wonderfully Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. We then realize that the theme has incredible resonances to indicate what has always ruined human societies. 

There is here a formidable mechanism where the human mind tries in a brutal or gentle way to seize others, to assimilate them, to control them in order to either destroy them or integrate them without leaving them the slightest autonomy or the slightest singularity. And to close it all off, being convinced that it is doing this for the good, to denounce or lynch while designating the other as being the enemy of complete evil. René Girard has analyzed all this very well about mimetic desire in his most famous book Romantic Lie and Romanesque Truth. 

The discovery of the film is this terrible cry like a dirty cough that the mutants let out while pointing the finger at the human being who has betrayed himself by an emotion, designating him for vindictiveness and pursued relentlessly. From then on, the manhunt is open… A mimetic crowd where everyone imitates everyone else. A lynch mob pointing the supposed enemy with a vengeful finger. Adulterous women in The Scarlet Letterfrom Nathaniel Hawthorne who has a red letter on their clothes, religious people condemning atheists as in the old days, Stalinists pursuing religious people, peasants or traitors, to the present day where as in China with the social credit system which displays bad individuals, sidelined, booed by good students. Or community tribes (feminists, LGBT, Queer, etc., other contemporary symbols, who attack beings “within the norm”. The theme is reversible everywhere and all the time, crossing all borders, and in everyone, because everyone believes themselves to be unharmed or untouchable, pure. The philanthropic manhunt. The hunted of yesterday will become the persecutors of today. 

Mask

Even if the film is not completely accomplished in its style, it touches on something essential. The 2007 version will highlight this problem, poorly studied in its narration and staging, in the last sentence of the film:

We can therefore understand the terror of people who want to keep their singularity, but who find themselves persecuted by the right-thinking people of the moment. In this respect, the mechanism of our days has been perfected. It has reversed itself into its opposite since it is done in the name of Good, love and equality. 

The rest of the film is terrible. The small group is on the run and decides to split up, Matthew staying with Elisabeth. The latter try to reach the airport by taxi, but the driver denounces them. They are forced to flee again and find refuge in the office. There, they are quickly spotted and David Kibner and Jack arrest them. David sedates them when Matthew manages to overpower his former friend and kills Jack.

It is Nancy, whom he meets on the stairs, who gives them the solution: ironically, to go unnoticed, normal human beings must imitate mutants by not letting anything show of their emotion, a sign announcing their future transmutation. But if the ruse works for a moment, it has a flaw at the slightest emotion: the symptomatic image of the film is that of this horrible dog with a human face that makes Elisabeth jump, as if the mask of these mutants was finally falling. Nancy manages to escape, but Matthew and Elisabeth are pursued again. They find refuge in a truck that takes them to the city's pod factory. 

After a moment of absence, Matthew witnesses Elisabeth's metamorphosis in his arms. His clone gets up and tells him that she is free. While Matthew flees again and again, and manages to ransack the shed where the pods are grown, Elisabeth designates him as the enemy to be defeated, she who was so kind and so gentle. 

The ending is totally dystopian. One by one, the characters in the film have abdicated their being, their personality, in their sleep. One by one, they are swallowed, engulfed to transform into an inessential and impersonal being. Even Matthew, who fought relentlessly against mutants, becomes one, pointing with his finger and his terrifying scream at the only person who has remained whole, human. The last image where we see him, finger outstretched and bellowing, the camera closing in on his face then on his mouth, is a horrific cinematic image, still present in my memory, and which refers to the oldest human impulse that destroys all civilization.

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