I watched “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” last night. The 1978 version.
There are several notable parts that may work as keys to the rest of the film. And, if you don’t mind, in my descriptions I’m going to just use the actor’s names here rather than the names of the roles they play.
– The alien “spider webs” (which descend during a rainstorm) having attached themselves to plants and growing flowers on them, at the beginning we have a teacher guiding children to pluck the flowers, instructing them to take the flowers home to their parents. A priest swinging on a swingset watches from the side with an expressionless but knowing gaze.
– Brooke Adams’ character, an employee of the health department, takes home one of the peculiar flowers and remarks on it to her boyfriend. She says she believes she’s found something rare (not so rare we will soon find), a grex, formed when two species crosspolinate and produce a third unique one. She believes it an epilobic and remarks on the root origins of the word.
“Many of the species are dangerous weeds and should be avoided,” she reads to him.
“Dangerous?”
“In the garden,” she says.
In the garden.
“See? Look how quickly it roots. A characteristic widespread and rapid growth pattern was even observed in many of the large war-torn cities of Europe. Indeed, some of these plants may thrive on devastated ground.”
There already seems something amiss in the relationship between these two, as if they’ve not much in common, he immersed in sports with headphones on his head, and when he takes them off she is irritated with the games, so he resorts again to the headphones. This boyfriend is the first to transform. When she wakes in the morning he is sweeping a soot or ashes like residue and broken glass into a dustpan. He takes out this refuse to a garbage truck which is perhaps already brimming with the dessicated remains of duplicated individuals.
– Next we have Donald Sutherland, also a health department employee (curiously, the health department is located at Grove Street), making an inspection of a French restaurant. Standing over a pot he repeatedly asks what it is that is being cooked in it. He’s told and he asks again, saying he wants to know in English. First it’s divulged that it is calf’s brains cooking in wine. But he persists, because it’s more than just calf’s brains and wine, and he won’t accept that the rest of the ingredients are a secret as there can be no secrets with the Department of Health. He’s told a short list of herbs including capers. Sutherland reaches in with tongs and removes what is presumably a caper. He says no, instead it is a rat turd. The restaurant owner and chef insist it’s a caper. Sutherland asks if they would eat it. They decline. In the background are several assistants looking on, communicating to each other in a manner anticipating what will become commonplace in the film. The hive mind. Though right now we simply think of them as thugs. When Suthlerland goes out to his car he finds that they have broken his windshield. This shattered windshield forms the shape of a web and is repeatedly shown in the film.
The aliens actually don’t look anything like spider webs at the film’s beginning. When first glimpsed on another planet, they look kind of like ghostie plasmatic mostly transparent tubular balloony creatures. When they descend to earth in the rain storm, they look like rain water that then reveals itself as having subtly different properties, but we do see from that water, on leaves, slender tentacles emerge.
The description of the spider web quality is given in a newspaper headline. “Webs shroud the bay area, spider colonies fall from the sky.”
– Veronica Cartwright’s character isn’t introduced until Brooke Adam’s character is experiencing a crisis due to the seeming transformation of her boyfriend into an alien individual devoid of emotion.
Veronica’s husband, Jeff Goldblum, is at an event promoting a new book by a pop psychiatrist who deals with life in fairly simplistic terms. Sutherland has taken Adams to see the psychiatrist who is a friend of his. Goldblum despises the man, his ideas (which he calls garbage) and his lack of care in authorship whereas Goldblum picks each word he writes individually. But they are both friends of Sutherland and thus thrown together here. Eventually, though, Sutherland sends him on his way, telling Goldblum to leave he and Adams alone, that Nimroy is helping her with a problem.
Despondent in a way that seems an excessive response to what has occurred, Goldblum goes to the mud baths run by he and his wife, Veronica. He enters and throws Nimroy’s book on the ground. She asks him if he was able to read his poetry, and understanding he hasn’t, says she’s sorry. As she answers the phone, he continues to the rear of the bath house. A peculiar scene is had where an individual, in a mud bath, asks Goldblum’s help in getting out of it. Goldblum pointedly ignores him in a manner that the camera regards as coldly dispassionate, briefly appearing to align him with the hive mind which, in a later scene, will have a crowd of people looking just as dispassionately upon a man who was struck by a car while attempting to warn, “They’re coming! They’re already here!” But when Goldblum goes into the curtained vestibule where he will undress, we see a tear running down his cheek. It’s at this point that Veronica comes and assists the man out of the mud bath, exhorting him to be careful. While she gives him a massage he asks her to cut off the classical music that is playing and she says no, that it is good for her plants, and tells him that research has shown plants have feelings as well and this music is proven to stimulate their growth. As she gives him his massage, the shadow of a man passes outside, his beard and hat reminding of a Hassidic Rabbi (recall that earlier the priest had been looking over the children collecting the flowers). When Cartwright emerges, he stops her and tells her that “Worlds in Collision” is essential reading. She responds she’s read it many times, but that Olaf Stapledon’s “Star Makers” is also must reading. As she ushers him out she thanks him for a flower he’d given her the last time he was there. It is after this that Veronica finds a flowering humanoid, hidden in one of the vestibules, taking the shape of Goldblum.
Before long, just as the flowers had wildly populated the trees and bushes, there will be everywhere, sometimes even in gardens, these humanoids being birthed out of pods, dopplegangers assuming every aspect of life of the individuals they duplicate, except they have no emotions and lack individual volition, all that they do being in concert via the hive mind. As one of the transformed individuals attests, it is all about “survival”. Survival is the function of life.
I love the movie. It’s well done. But it’s also nice to sort out some of its mysteries.
Such as the caper which is instead a turd.
The Talmudic midrash reads:
Rabban Gamliel sat and taught: “Woman is destined [in the Messianic time] to give birth every day, as it is written [Jer. 31:7: ‘She shall conceive and immediately bear child.’” But a certain disciple scoffed at him, quoting Eccles. 1:9: “There is nothing new under the sun.” Rabban Gamliel replied, “Come, and I will show you an example of this in the world.” He went out and showed him a hen. Again R. Gamliel sat and taught: “Trees are destined [in the Messianic age] to yield fruit every day, as it is written [Ezed. 17: 23]: ‘And it shall bring forth twigs and bear fruit’: just as there are twigs every day so shall there be fruit every day.” But that pupil scoffed at him, saying: “It is written: ‘There is absolutely nothing new under the sun.’” R. Gamliel replied: “Come, and I will show you an example of this in this world.” He went out and showed him a caper bush.”
Source: The Pursuit of the Ideal, Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarschild
I read that the reason the caper was used as an example by Gamliel was because of its rapid growth, able to daily produce new flowers.
Not unlike the alien flowers and pod people.
I also read that one of the esteemed characteristics of the caper was it’s ability to survive, that the Babyloniana Talmud described it as “the persevering among trees”.
Just as Sutherland’s character distinguishes between the caper and the turd which is passed off as a caper (resulting in the shattering of his window shield into the spiderweb) we have those with emotions and individual desires seemingly represented by the movie as the authentic self, while the alien flowering duplications (who rise not from mud, as Adam, but descend from the sky in the rain, attaching themselves to plants but not initially plant-like) are something else entirely: the rat turd.
Olaf Stapledon, who I’ve not read, only scanned, wrote at length of this hive like mind, collective intelligence and networks. In his book, “Star Maker” is a chapter “Stars and Vermin”, on good and evil, his ideas on evolution and how the “evil” spirit sought to “equip some lowers species with special weapons for the destruction of the pioneers of evolution, so that they should succumb, either to some new disease, or to plagues of the vermin of this particular cosmos, or to the more brutish of their own kind.”
Towards the end of the book is this passage:
In imagination I saw, behind our own hill’s top, the further and unseen
hills. I saw the plains and woods and all the fields, each with its
myriads of particular blades. I saw the whole land curving down from me,
over the planet’s shoulder. The villages were strung together on a mesh
of roads, steel lines, and humming wires. Mist-drops on a cobweb. Here
and there a town displayed itself as an expanse of light, a nebulous
luminosity, sprinkled with stars.Beyond the plains, London, neon-lit, seething, was a microscope-slide
drawn from foul water, and crowded with nosing animalcules. Animalcules!
In the stars’ view, no doubt, these creatures were mere vermin; yet each
to itself, and sometimes one to another, was more real than all the
stars.Gazing beyond London, imagination detected the dim stretch of the
Channel, and then the whole of Europe, a patch-work of tillage and
sleeping industrialism. Beyond poplared Normandy spread Paris, with the
towers of Notre-Dame tipped slightly, by reason of Earth’s curvature.
Further on, the Spanish night was ablaze with the murder of cities. Away
to the left lay Germany, with its forests and factories, its music, its
steel helmets. In cathedral squares I seemed to see the young men ranked
together in thousands, exalted, possessed, saluting the flood-lit
Fuhrer. In Italy too, land of memories and illusions, the mob’s idol
spell-bound the young.Source: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601841.txt
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Some fun tidbits, no?
And that’s as much time as I want to spend on these musings this morning.
If you’ve not seen the film, the performances by all are equally fine. Unlike many suspense/horror films, the time and effort is taken to construct fully-fleshed characters.
I have only seen the film twice, the first viewing I don’t recollect when but it was a long time ago and the ending startled the bejesus out of me and I won’t divulge it here because it would be a complete spoiler if I did.
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