The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story on October 14th about “the best San Francisco location movie ever made.” That movie is the 1978 remake/reimagining of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Starring Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams, the film is about loss as it is about love flowering as humanity is being replaced with alien facsimiles. The article in the Chronicle does a good job making the case for how the movie captures the culture and geography of The City in the late ’70s, and how its major theme — the loss of humanity — eerily intersects with twin tragedies in November 1978: the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, and the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana by those who followed Jim Jones, the founder of The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ based in San Francisco.
The production of the film took place between February 19th – April 29th, 1978, and was released on December 22nd, 1978. That’s a pretty tight production-to-post-production timeline. Still, this film (even with special effects) wasn’t budgeted for Star Wars-like effects, so Director Philip Kaufman had to find inventive methods to create certain effects. As he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018, “I found some viscous material in an art store, I think we paid $12 for a big vat of it, and then [we dropped it] into solutions and reversed the film. We had no digital capabilities whatsoever back then. I loved doing things that way, in a jerry-rigged, real-time way. Now with digital, you’re into the realm of wizardry, but back then the director could ask to try this or that and [experiment]; the effects were physical.”
Indeed, there’s a kind of gooey grossness that comes across from the early colonization of plant life to the pod people as they are grown. So, it was a good choice to focus on the biological development of organisms from goo.
As far as the plot goes, it’s fairly simple: An alien species migrates to another planet to colonize because their planet is dying. The goo aliens land on Earth, mix with rain and, at first, colonize local plant life. They sprout unique-looking flowers that smell nice. Humans like nice-smelling flowers, and that includes our heroine, Elizabeth Driscoll (Adams). She finds one of the alien flowers at a local park and brings it into the home she shares with her boyfriend. Soon, her sport-loving, but always horny boyfriend goes from “Hey, let’s make love and then go to Vail” to an emotionless person in one night. Turns out, the nice-smelling flowers are pods that spew out an identical copy of humans while they sleep. The scale of this transformation happens in short order as more and more San Franciscans become cult-like pod people.
The film is still a lot of fun to watch, and it’s great to see San Francisco from that era, but what is this film trying to say? Well, if you’re Philip Kaufman — who grew up in the ’40s and ’50s, but embraced the left-libertarian ’60s counterculture — the film is about a resurgence of conformity; the kind of conformity that was dominant in the 1950s. A kind of conformity that had no empathy and tolerance for difference or pluralism. Rather, this alien race seems to blindly follow a soulless life. There’s no individuality, no desire for personal freedom, and no feelings of love. They just kind of exist. And when difference does present itself, they shriek in horror and force humans to conform by getting them to sleep so they can be replaced by their automaton-like doppelgängers. So, in a way, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a lament for the loss of a vibrant San Francisco counterculture. By 1978, that way of life was ending as a strain of conservatism was ascending. Kaufman said in 2018 that Trump rallies remind him of pod people from the film. Their desire to wipe out anyone not like them makes Kaufman’s Body Snatchers a much more contemporary and cautionary tale of loss than the original film — and the two films that came after the 1978 remake.
2 thoughts on “Film Review: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)”
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This is a terrific read of the underlying idea. I think it could go even deeper if you look at the history of American Zoetrope.
This was Francis Coppola’s company, springing up right in San Francisco in the very late ’60s. Not only did you have Coppola, Haskell Wexler, and George Lucas, but a host of writers, producers, editors. Caleb Deschanel (future father of Emily and Zoey – catch that name there) was deep into the works and the mission of the organization was deeply counter-cultural and often personal films that stood outside the big-musical-obsessed Hollywood mindset. They were the non-conformists.
But then an upstart off of Universal’s TV unit started making waves. He did a TV movie with Dennis Weaver that some said was as intense as anything in the theaters. They were upping his profile. By his second feature, one with a rogue man-eating shark, he was ushering in the era of the blockbuster.
And things were changing inside the Zoetrope camp, too. After his second feature did pretty well (American Graffiti), Lucas put his energy toward a western/fantasy/samurai/spaceman mash-up that convinced Hollywood that these were the movies they needed to make. And one of Lucas’ and Coppola’s friends at the time? Phillip Kaufman. If you squint, you could see that creeping conformity “invading” American Zoetrope as Hollywood embraced its new sure thing.
And eventually, Kaufman would embrace it too, to a lesser degree, as a producer of Spielberg and Lucas’ joint venture, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I think Zoetrope is a good example of the kind of A-List talent doing innovative cinema. So was some of the work by John Cassavetes.
The art of cinema and the art of selling out for cinema can be difficult when the money imperative of having to feed yourself by making films that people want to see is so strong. Does it mean it’s all blockbuster/action adventure or toiling away in relative obscurity (and poverty)? Not really. I think Philip Kaufman’s work bounces around enough that he can be associated with Raiders, and also make something artistically interesting as Unbearable Lightness of Being. He also did The Right Stuff, which was pretty good!