70 Years Later, We All Still Fear The Pod People

Hi! I have a question for you. What is Invasion of the Body Snatchers about?

It seems like it should be obvious. Jack Finney’s 1954 serial novel has been filmed four times, and stories ranging from The Faculty to The Stepford Wives have borrowed its premise of people secretly being replaced with doppelgangers. Its influence on pop culture is everywhere, so the metaphorical purpose of the “pod people” must be right on the tip of your tongue.

So, what’s your answer? Because when the first film adaptation came out 70 years ago today, no one could agree on one.

In small town Santa Mira, Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) returns from a conference to find several patients who believe that an imposter has replaced a loved one. Their family members still look the same, talk the same, and have the same memories, but they lack, as one concerned citizen says, “that special look in his eye.”

Initially dismissed as mass hysteria (“worry over what’s going on in the world, probably”), things kick into gear when Miles and his beau Becky (Dana Wynter) are summoned to their friend Jack’s house. He and his wife have found a body in their basement that’s built just like Jack, except the fingerprints are blank and the face isn’t quite finished yet.

The local psychiatrist convinces our heroes that they’re delusional, but then the foursome discover oozing seedpods growing the bodies meant to replace them in their sleep. By then, though, the local police and telephone lines are compromised, and for all they know, they’re the only four humans left in town.

The affair is a bit slow and hokey by modern standards, but its growing sense of paranoia is timeless. Watching a pod person be shucked is unsettling, as is seeing the townsfolk assemble to spread the contagion and hunt our heroes as one. Only Miles manages to escape to another town, but when proof of his wild tale surfaces, the police barricade the road to Santa Mira and the day is implicitly saved.

This upbeat finale was mandated by Allied Artists; Siegel’s original intent was to end on the prior scene of our mad hero screaming for help on the highway, dismissed as a drunken loon by people oblivious to the pods being driven past them. The bleak ending of the 1978 remake has since become the more infamous, although Allied’s ending is actually more in line with Finney’s book, where the aliens give up in the face of human resistance.

At any rate, the film ending with the FBI getting called in certainly lends credence to the supposedly obvious metaphor: that the pod people represent the threat of communism. Their promise of an “untroubled world” where everyone is equally unbothered by emotions like desire and ambition fits the bill, and their insistence that their victory is inevitable because their ethos is obviously superior could be any smug Leninist from the ‘50s through to today.

But Invasion has also been seen as a critique of McCarthyism’s totalitarian obsession with those same communists, and the broken Miles’ warning — “They’re after you! They’re after all of us! They’re here already! You’re next!” — could be read either (or both) ways. Further confusing matters is the fact that Jack Finney insisted his novel wasn’t about anything in particular, saying, “I wrote it to entertain its readers, nothing more.” His text, if anything, is ecological; the aliens intend to strip the Earth of its resources, just like, they say, we do.

The theories have only propagated from there. NPR writer Maureen Corrigan sees in Invasion a warning that the loved ones we think we know could suddenly become someone else; whether through dementia, doomscrolling, or mere whim, we’re all a pod person just waiting to upend someone’s life. Philip Kaufman, who directed the 1978 remake, went blunter in 2018, saying that Trump supporters gave him the whiff of pod.

Agree or not, it speaks to the ideological longevity of a film that star Kevin McCarthy and producer Walter Wanger claimed wasn’t trying to communicate any specific metaphor. Director Don Siegel, for his part, only said that a pod person is anyone stumbling through their days with “no passion.” “People are becoming vegetables,” he warned. “I don't know what the answer is except an awareness of it.” In that sense, Invasion reads as a defence of ardour in all its forms. Miles, before he loses his grip, rails against callous people hardening their hearts, and it’s notable that both he and Becky are divorcees looking to try again despite the pod people insisting that life without love will be “so simple.”

If even its creators couldn’t get on the same page, then it’s no wonder that the themes of Invasion and its knockoffs remain so fungible. Communism, authoritarianism, capitalism, conformism —whatever -ism your bête noire happens to be can threaten your sense of self. And not only can that threat reduce life to nothing but rote survival, but everyone who’s bought in will insist that things are better that way. It’s one thing to lose your autonomy; it’s another to be told that it was a mistake for you to have it in the first place.

The 1956 Body Snatchers may not be the best version of the story, but it is the rawest in insisting that something has gone wrong with society. Critic Dennis Lim called it “Rorschach-like” for containing an apparently strong message that its creators claim doesn’t exist, so don’t feel bad if you still don’t have an answer to that question I posed. The allegory will remain up for debate until it’s remade again to obviously be about social media influencers, or big tech, or whatever else viewers see in it. Appropriately enough, the fact that we all respond to Invasion of the Body Snatchers differently is a triumph of the individualism it believes in.