Invasion Of The Body Snatchers: James Ford

Many times the use of an allegory or analogy can better relate a message to the audience than simply speaking it. Allegories accomplish two tasks at which exposition inherently fails: they take an audience’s bias away as well as provide a palpable example. For these reasons allegories are commonly used to convey political messages that would be lost in mere rhetoric. Following in the same vein of movies such as The Crucible and The Matrix, the 1956 science-fiction classic, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, expresses the deep running American fear of forced conformity, embodied at the time by both the threat of communism and the panicked McCarthyism that resulted from it.
As a movie, not much can be said for Invasion of The Body Snatchers. The movies entertainment comes mostly in its cheesy lines, cheesy music, and total inconsistencies. It is a product of its time in more ways than one. But as a message and a warning, Invasion of The Body Snatchers works quite well.
As John W. Whitehead points out in his article, Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Tale for Our Times, the movie can be interpreted in many different ways. It has been interpreted to be anti-communist, anti-McCarthyist, anti-scientific, pro-traditionalist, and as a recognition of the human fear for nature. While I think all of these interpretations have some validity to them, the most obvious theme to the movie is conformity, or the fear of it. This movie was produced during a time when the fear of forced conformity was becoming real for many people, and this fear, like all fear does, simply perpetuated itself to a point where there was no safe standing ground. The movie addresses this in everyway.
As cheesy as this movie was, there was something deeply frightening in the concept of body snatchers. The idea of becoming an emotionless, uncaring conformist solely bent on the propagation of conformity itself is indeed horrifying. It seems to go against all of our natural human instincts, and our desire for individualism, and is made even scarier by the idea that it may be forced upon us. This fear was Americas exact view of communism in the 1950’s. The use of pods as the threatening agent also has connotations towards the popular idea that communism was something that grew and that we must terminate its seeds to stop its growth. The scene were the man giving orders over a loud speaker to the entire town which has assembled in the square, was the “quintessential fifties image of socialism” (Peary). Whether or not this was a correct understanding of communism is irrelevant. It was America’s understanding of communism, and was indeed terrifying to many people. Our reaction to this fear was equally as frightening.
The question of freedom vs. security has always been of great importance to America, because we realize that both are equally important and are bound in a paradoxical relationship. We value freedom in our society more than any other great nation that has ever existed. In the 1950’s the common belief was that communism represented a loss of freedom and forced equality. Our fear of the loss of individual freedom is enormous. So enormous, that in an attempt to secure our freedom from the perceived threat of communism, we lost both security and freedom. The fight against communism, led by Joseph McCarthy, aimed to single out dissidents. A dissident could be anyone who did not fit the “all American” mold, and many people had their lives destroyed because they did not fit this mold. This era began to be described by the term McCarthyism, and is now considered a stain on the integrity and history of America. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is clearly an allegory to this movement as well. In the movie conformity is not encouraged, but forced, and this was also true of McCarthyism. If you were not for them you were against them.
Invasion of The Body Snatchers should not be interpreted as anti-communist or anti-McCarthyist. It should be interpreted as both, because both political ideologies are essentially the same, at least in the eyes of Americans in the 1950’s. Though they may have had different motives both had the same outcome: forced conformity and the loss of individualism. This is innately one of our deepest fears and has been addressed in the form allegories many times during the twentieth century, as that fear has and will continue to recurrently come closer to reality.

Works Cited

Whitehead, John. “Invasion of The Body Snatchers: A Tale for Our Times” Gadfly Online. 13, October 07