Mar

2

You’re Next.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

March 2, 2007 |

It’s one of the most lasting images in all of cinema: Kevin McCarthy, in the middle of a busy highway, surrounded by cars, screaming, “You’re next! You’re next!” at us.

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Originally it was supposed to be the end of the 1956 film Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, but the studio executives worried that this ending was too depressing. Normally when the stuffed shirts want to monkey around with a story to make it, in their opinion, more commercially viable they ruin it (such as the battle to delete the ending from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, or, as I’ve heard, one executive wanted to cut “that rainbow song” from The Wizard Of Oz). In the case of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, though, the normally brainless brass got it right. The opening and closing with Dr. Miles Bennell (McCarthy) in a hospital insisting that he’s not crazy nicely frames the story, and makes it even more effective.

There’s been a lot of debate about what Invasion Of The Body Snatchers “means”, and I’ve heard contradictory statements about it being intended as a criticism of both McCarthyism and communism. Both Don Siegel, who wrote the screenplay, and Jack Finney, who wrote the original novel, insist that it wasn’t about anything other than giant pods from space taking over people in their sleep. And in the end what the film meant to its writer, director, actors, or the person in the seat next to you doesn’t matter as much as what it means to you.

To me it’s about urban sprawl. It’s about what I saw happen to the neighborhood where I grew up, where tree-covered hills were shaved down to bare dirt so rows cookie-cutter condos could march across them. And it’s what I see happening where I live now. There used to be a wooded area just up the street. Since it was private property I never went past the old rock wall, held together by gravity, that separated it from the street. It was an old farm that had gone back to the wild, and was probably like most wild areas you find in middle Tennessee: plenty of cedars, a few oaks, maybe a tulip poplar or two. There may have been some exposed areas where moss and star flowers grew on limestone outcroppings. According to the Cherokee legend of the beginning of the world the cedars, and all evergreens, were the only trees who were able to stay awake all night for seven days, and their reward is that they keep their leaves through the winter. The legends don’t say anything about chainsaws, backhoes, or parking lots. Also lost, or displaced by the construction, were the animals: squirrels, field mice, lizards, snakes, hawks, possums, buzzards, and even coyotes. An amazing variety can thrive in a small area, and now that it’s gone the coyotes are sniffing around our backyards and trash cans. And there are also the owls, who, like the cedar in the legend, stayed awake for seven days and nights and feed on those who sleep. Some nights I hear the owls speak to each other behind my house, or, one night, in the tree right outside my front window. The places the owls have to hunt are becoming smaller and smaller, as is their number. The Cherokees didn’t live on this land but only used it for hunting. Most of them willingly gave it up to European settlers in a pre-Revolutionary War treaty. According to some sources a Cherokee leader named Dragging Canoe called this “dark and bloody ground”. He didn’t want to give the land up to the whites. Perhaps he saw them as pod people.

When the owner of the small piece of property up the street died the residents of the community had little warning about what was coming. Big decisions about our neighborhood were made by outsiders while we slept. It had been a buffer between the neighborhood and the highway, but now we can see the endless string of cars and trucks even over the giant chain stores that are going up where there used to be trees. It used to soak up the rainwater that now has to be collected in deep concrete trenches that run like scars alongside the road. What could we have done to prevent it? If we’d protested, if we’d screamed in the streets, people would have thought we were crazy. Maybe they’d be right.

Toward the end of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers McCarthy and love-interest Mary (Dana Wynter) are chased by a mob of former neighbors, now pod people. This in itself was a major shift: in Frankenstein and Dracula the monster was chased by angry mobs; the majority, the people, are fundamentally good, while the minority, the monster, is inherently evil. In Invasion Of The Body Snatchers the mob is the monster. McCarthy and Wynter escape by hiding in a cave, but are drawn out by beautiful music. Wynter says, “Miles, I’ve never heard anything so beautiful. It means we’re not the only ones left to know what love is.” In fact the music comes from a radio in a truck parked outside a greenhouse where the pods are being mass-produced. As an announcer comes on the truck driver simply switches off the radio, leaving an eerie, heavy silence. Love and beauty, like everything else, have become commodities: transportable and disposable. And they have to be imported from somewhere else.

The film ends by returning to McCarthy in police custody. Another police officer comes in and announces that a truck full of giant pods has turned over on the highway. Suddenly the ravings of an insane man are true, and one of the doctors who was trying to treat McCarthy picks up a phone and starts asking to speak to the governor, the National Guard, and Washington. McCarthy leans back against the wall. His fear has turned to exhaustion. This ending was meant to reassure us that everything would work out all right, but we, like McCarthy, are overwhelmed by a quiet sense of futility, the only sane response to an epidemic of insanity. Epidemics are difficult to stop once they’ve started, and in this epidemic the only fatality is the ability to feel. Since feelings can be mimicked, distinguishing the pod people from the real people would be almost impossible. Once the first seed was planted the end was inevitable, and the end comes with a whimper, not a bang.

It is, of course, my favorite movie, and it doesn’t always make me so gloomy. Some late nights when I’m home alone I pull my copy of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers off the shelf and lose myself in the story, in the wonderfully sweeping music, in the creepy greenhouse scene where the pods open and froth, in the moment of pure horror when McCarthy realizes he’s lost Wynter, along with everyone else, to the pods. Then, once the credits roll, I turn over and go into deep, dreamless sleep.


Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. James on March 13, 2007 1:10 pm

    Hey the comment thing works now! Was there really an Indian called Dragging Canoe? Who comes up with these names? I thought most of them were English translations of actual Indian names, but I am getting suspicious that some times whitey had some fun an injun joes expense….

  2. Christopher Waldrop on March 13, 2007 3:23 pm

    According to at least one book I have there really was an Indian (or Native American) named Dragging Canoe. I definitely think something is lost in translation and that these names may have had idiomatic significance that can’t be interpreted outside of the original language. See, for instance, Benjamin Whorf’s work on Hopi language–but that’s really another story.

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