Why Doesn’t Anyone Talk About Body Snatchers?

by Jeffery X Martin

It’s a story as old as time. Well, at least 1955.

When Jack Finney’s novel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was serialized in Collier’s Magazine that year, the public really didn’t give a shit. Critics panned it for being simplistic and poorly paced. The first film version, however?

That’s a different story.

Don Siegel’s 1958 sci-fi classic turned Finney’s run-of-the-mill alien invasion tale into a chilling Cold War cautionary tale. Alien creatures invade the sleepy town of Santa Mira, CA. They’re plants, and they have arrived on our planet in containers that resemble giant milkweed pods. As you probably already know, they get you while you sleep. The person that you are, your personality, your hopes and dreams, your fears, are all erased. You are replaced by a blank emotionless copy of yourself, bland on two legs.

Siegel’s movie was about Communism, the Red Threat. Anyone could be indoctrinated by the horrible Marxist manifesto. Your neighbors, your wife, your children, anyone could be leading a secret life as a Russian informant. As Kevin Conroy screams at the camera in one of the greatest fourth-wall breaks ever filmed, “It’s too late! They’re already here!”

Twenty years later, Philip Kaufman remade the film, focusing more on the science-fiction aspects of the story. There’s not much allegory to be found, just aliens who want to take over our planet, suck its resources dry and move on to the next world.

Both of those movies were massive hits, though, and they still resonate in the subconscious of our culture. They give us a reason for our paranoia. They give us something to hold on when people change dramatically. Uncle Tom quit drinking; he must be a pod person.

With the obvious impact the story has on us, as a people, why doesn’t anyone talk about the incredible 1993 version, simply called Body Snatchers?

It has a horror pedigree that’s hard to beat. A script by schlocklord Larry Cohen (It’s Alive, Q: The Winged Serpent) and the team of Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli (Re-Animator). It’s produced by Robert H. Solo, who produced the 1978 remake. The director is none other than Abel Ferrara, who has been polarizing audiences since 1977 with movies like The Driller Killer, Ms. 45 and Bad Lieutenant.

If you’re a horror movie fan, don’t you already want to watch this?

Oh, yes, Body Snatchers is definitely a horror film. The pre-requisite science-fiction elements are thrown in, for the sake of brand recognition, but this is a creepshow, through and through.

This iteration takes place on a military base. Already an institution that isolates its people and their families, and demands blind obedience and conformity, it’s hard to tell when someone is being a good soldier, or if they’ve become a pod person. It’s not as heavy-handed of an allegory as it might have been, but Ferrara handles the whole thing with an eye towards subtlety. That’s rare for Ferarra.

The aliens also target the artists. One of the most terrifying scenes involves a daycare class in which all the kids paint the exact same picture with their fingerpaints, except for one little kid. He looks up his picture, his face questioning. What’s wrong with my picture? he thinks. What’s wrong with me?

The aliens hate creativity, they fear it, and seek to quash it out. “It’s the race that’s important,” one of the creatures says. “Not the individual.”

We don’t spend a lot of time these days worrying about the Red Threat. People are slowly forgetting what it was like to grow up with the realization that they could die at any second via nuclear missile attack.

But art is still censored. Record albums come with warning labels and hard liquor doesn’t. There is still a process of weeding out being done. The brave ones who refuse to sell out have gone underground. Society has become so afraid of what it is that as recently as 2007, the US Government paid $8000 for a cloth to cover up the Spirit of Justice statue in the Great Hall of the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.. She had a breast hanging out. Can’t have that, children! Can’t be showing parts of the body, even though we all have bodies! Don’t let the women see something they already possess!

I’m preaching now, but hopefully to the choir.

But maybe that’s why people don’t talk about Body Snatchers anymore. It’s the hard truth wrapped in a gooey horror coating. Even today, over twenty years later, Ferrara’s version of the story serves two purposes.

It’s either a highly effective retelling of a story you’ve grown up with, or it’s a mirror and it’s too late. You’re already here.

Did they get you while you slept?

Review: Hitchcock

– Nathan

Out of the depths of awards season comes the most widely-acclaimed declaration of anti-auteurist sentiments to hit the screen in recent memory, Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock. While the film appears to be a fairly straight-forward biopic, it’s not; it attempts to rewrite the traditionally accepted narrative of Alfred Hitchcock’s career, making his wife the real filmmaker and Hitchcock nothing more than a lusty toddler. Of course, this isn’t to say that she wasn’t an important figure in his life, but the film is essentially a lie, built on a false premise. It claims to tell the story of Hitchcock (the film’s name is even Hitchcock, for crying out loud), but once it moves through the first few minutes the film’s real attention shifts away from Alfred Hitchcock and his perversions and focuses more on his long-suffering wife, Alma.

The film’s plot is fairly simple, attempting to document the making of what is generally considered Hitchock’s masterpiece, Psycho, although I would offer up Vertigo, Strangers On a Train, or Notorious for alternate consideration. But what the film and its makers fail to realize is that any film chronicling the production of a “classic”  will appear sub-par, as it is nearly impossible in most cases to duplicate that level of greatness. It’s the same dilemma faced by a film like Lifetime’s recent Liz & Dick, which attempted to tell the story of one of the cinema’s most beloved couples. Lindsay Lohan will probably never be a greater actress than Elizabeth Taylor, and whats-his-name will never be better than Richard Burton, so the film automatically seems weak. Although Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, and Scarlett Johansson are all potentially better actors than the individuals they portray (although the first two weren’t really actors, only individuals involved in the cinematic process), Hitchcock falls flat from the start, as it is not nearly as good as Psycho.

In addition to its Psycho story, the film attempts to engage in a bit of pointless psychoanalysis, trying to make sense of Hitchcock’s various desires by comparing him to the real-life inspiration for Norman Bates, Ed Gein. This is a trick similar to the recent Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, in which France’s Bob Dylan is paired up with a psychological sidekick, but like the Gainsbourg flick, this device fails to really illuminate the inner workings of Hitchcock’s mind. Unlike Gainsbourg, however, the film’s choice of alter-ego clashes with the overall premise and doesn’t match up with the rest of the film’s visual aesthetic. In Hitchcock, this double personality trick sticks out sorely, especially since the film attempts to be more about Alma than Hitchcock. This little alter-ego bit is one of several referential jokes used throughout the film, the kind common in biopics of this sort.

The inherent lie Hitchcock is built on is extended even further in the anti-auteruism I mentioned in the first paragraph. It sells itself as a celebration of one of the screen’s greatest directors, but ends up diminishing his reputation, acting like he was incapable of doing anything without the assistance of his wife. I don’t doubt her importance to his life, and I acknowledge that Hitch wasn’t without his quirks, but an artist of his reputation couldn’t get to the level he reached without some capability and drive of his own. However, I do applaud it for fighting back against the auteur theory. Not that I don’t generally agree with the auteur theory, but I also think it’s a tad over-accepted in our society For those unfamiliar, the auteur theory is a critical theory which basically states that the director is the true author of the film. It seems like a simple and common-place idea now, but when critics like Andrew Sarris and the Cahiers du Cinema crew introduced it in the late 50s and early 60s, it was revolutionary. But in some cases, I just have to disagree. The director is not always the true author of a film; in fact, I consider visual consultant and title designer Saul Bass to be the true artist behind Psycho, and he only appears for an instant in Hitchcock. One of the reasons why I have always felt Hitchock is a tad over-rated is due to the fact that the best scenes in Psycho, the famous shower and stair scenes, were shot by Bass, a fact over-looked by this film’s makers. Hitchcock has never been one of my favorite directors, although I do think he is a great master of the screen and I love a few of the films that I mentioned earlier as well as many of the individual sequences of his movies. However, there’s always an inherent weakness to them, with sequences that don’t fit perfectly right, disappointing endings (most notably in North by Northwest and Rear Window), etc. In many cases, his films are good movies with a few scenes reaching out and grabbing on to greatness. But I hate to soapbox and sound like a crank.

While I don’t agree with its sentiments in many cases, I applaud Hitchcock for confronting the auteur theory. In many cases this theory is the truth, but in others it’s a lazy excuse for criticism. There’s no one-size-fits-all theorem to answer the question of who truly “made” a film; cinema is an industry and all those involved should be acknowledged. Only a few film artists can truly be considered “auteurs.” I commend Sacha Gervasi for confronting generally-accepted critical theory. This film helps to show the role that individuals like the editor, the crew’s family, and even the censorship board play in shaping a film. But it does so in such a weird, false way that it doesn’t work to the effect it could. Hitchcock can’t decide what it wants to be, a conventional biopic, a revisionist critical film, or an intense psychoanalysis. It’s not sure if it wants to be about Alma or Alfred, causing the film’s true intent gets muddled and lost in all this confusion. It’s an enjoyable enough film, and probably a decent introduction to Hitchcock’s life, but he deserves a better biopic than this.

Hitchcock is directed by Sacha Gervasi (Anvil: The Story of Anvil) and stars Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, and Jessica Biel. Rated PG-13. 98 minutes long.