This week, the film class took on the last of the "classics" on the syllabus. (Also the last of the B&W films!) A film that can be read as
an indictment of the Red Scare and/or the dark shadow of the American dream, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a fascinating film to watch
with a little background of the 1950s.
Often, when people think of the America of the 1950s, they think of an
idyllic time captured in Leave It to
Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show,
conveniently forgetting that those television shows were not
documentaries. Life in the 1950s was as
messy and complicated as any other time and America was wrestling with
itself. Conformity was prized and people
chafed against that. Racism was rampant,
tranquilizers were prescribed at an alarming rate, states tried to regulate the
content of comic books, and the consumer culture was booming. At the same time, we were engaged in a messy
not-quite-war in Korea and there was a growing fear that Communists were trying
to take us over from within. Don Siegel’s
Invasion of the Body Snatchers tapped
into the common fear that our society was being undermined by secret agents who
looked just like us, but didn't feel emotions like us.
Set in the fictional California
town of “Santa Mira” (which has been used in several other film projects),
Invasion holds up well all these years
later. (It should – it’s been remade at
least three times in the decades since it was first released.) Who can you trust? How do you know? In a world in which even sleep is deadly, these questions become crucial to answer. Invasion
isn’t gory-scary, but it still packs a psychological punch that may leave
viewers as restless as many Americans felt in the 1950s.
COMING SOON: We leave our study of classics behind and
dive into a brave new world of genre mixing with Ridley Scott’s Alien.
While more violent and gory than anything we’ve seen up to now, Alien is justly renowned for its mastery
of what you THINK you saw. Cramped
spaces, an entirely new sort of female character and a horror that is truly
horrible – Alien has it all!
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