American History and Film

Question for Discussion: How did McCarthyism,
anti-Communism, and the pressure to conform
affect Americans in the 1950s?

Reading: Mintz and Roberts, pp. 195-202;
“Nightmare in Red” (web)

Video: Seeds of the Sixties

McCarthyism and Conformity in the 1950s

Even acute observers, noting the numerical
weakness of the Communists, have taken false
hope from this fact. Such people fail to
understand that the Communists are able to
rally into their service multitudes who are
completely unaware that they are serving the
Communist cause. Our purpose here is to study
those attitudes which transform well-meaning,
patriotic, Christian people into the allies of
Communism.
Dr. Fred Singer, You Can Trust the the Communists
(to be Communists)

But Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not about
McCarthyism. It is about giant seed pods taking
over people's bodies. Indirectly, however, it is a
statement about the collective paranoia and the
issues of conformity widely discussed in the
period.
Stuart Samuels, (p. 222)

"Film is one of the products, one of the languages,
through which the world communicates itself to
itself.  Films embody beliefs, not by a mystic
communion with the national soul, but because
they contain the values, fears, myths,
assumptions, point of view of the culture in which
they are produced."
  Stuart Samuels, "The Age of Conspiracy
                            and Conformity"

1. Do you agree with Brian Koller when he
argues that "While the plot has these people's
bodies possessed by alien pods from outer space,
the screenplay may be a thinly disguised jab at
cold war paranoia in the U.S., and the general belief
that communists were around every corner and
out to subvert the country."

2. What are the psychological and emotional traits
of the "pod people"?3. Do you agree with Tim
Dirks who argues that "the disturbing theme of
the film [The Invasion of the Body Snatchers] was
open to varying interpretations, including paranoia
toward a harmful ideology such as Communism
or the sweeping McCarthyism of the 1950s, the
spread of an unknown malignancy or virulent
germ, or the numbing of our psyches through
conformity." Is one of the strengths of this film
that the larger symbolic cause of this "epidemic
mass hysteria" and paranoia isn't clearly
revealed?

4. Do you think there is any symbolic significance
in the residents of Santa Mira no longer attending
a once popular night club? Does this help us
better understand the nature of the pod people?

5. Is the real fear at the center of The Invasion of
the Body Snatchers the fear and paranoia that
there are larger forces in our society trying to
take over our minds and stunt our humanity?

6. What does Miles mean when the tells Becky:

In my practice, I've seen how people have
allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it
happened slowly instead of all at once. They
didn't seem to mind...All of us - a little bit - we
harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when
we have to fight to stay human do we realize
how precious it is to us, how dear.

7. What is the relationship between Miles'
observation about the pod people-- "It's a
malignant disease spreading through the whole
country"--and the director of the FBI J. Edgar
Hoover's statement that "Communism is an
disease, and just like in an epidemic, a
quarantine may be necessary"?

8. What is the significance of Miles trying to
call the FBI when he first discovers the larger
plot of the pod people? Does the contacting
of the FBI at the end of the movie represent
a possible triumph over the pod people?

9. What is the larger significance of Miles' losing
Becky to the pod people? How does Miles
discover that Becky isn't Becky anymore but in
fact a pod person?10. Why don't the people on the
highway believe Miles when he tells them: "Look,
you fools. You're in danger. Can't you see? They're
after you. They're after all of us. Our wives, our
children, everyone. They're here already. You're
next!"

11. How is madness, hysteria, paranoia, and
suspicious contained by mental health and
psychiatry in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
Does the film want the audience to believe that if
there is anything wrong with these people that it's
probably all in their minds?

12. Do you agree with CGK who argues that "using
the police and the psychiatrist, who is supposed
to understand the human mind and its desires, as
the main propagators of the pods' logic adds a
degree of insidiousness to their conspiracy and
seems to suggest that authority, physical and
intellectual, cannot be trusted"?

13. Does Stuart Samuels' characterization of
podism as "a malignant evil, as a state of mind
where there is no feeling, no free will, no moral
choice, no anger, no tears, no passion, no emotion.
Human sensibility is dead" also ring true for the
people in the town Pleasantville in the movie Pleasantville( 1998)?

14. Do you agree with Stuart Samuels that
instead of being a "metaphor for communism...
podism spoke to a society becoming more
massified, more technological, more standardized"?