invasion of the body snatchers: no, seriously, what's with the half-glove?

I spent all of my last post criticizing Room 237 for proposing many untenable theories about the hidden meanings behind The Shining. Today, to completely contradict myself, I'm going to propose my own untenable theory about the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

(BTW, I watched Body Snatchers this week specifically because director Edgar Wright mentioned that it was a big inspiration for his new movie, The World's End.)

To wit, my theory is that you can read almost all of Body Snatchers as the protagonists' shared paranoid delusions and not an actual alien invasion. I'll just say up front that I know perfectly well it's a bit of an awkward fit to the movie, but it explains a surprising amount. More importantly, if you read the film this way, it explains a lot about the tone.

Before I get to that, a quick summation for those who haven't seen it: Invasion of the Body Snatchers posits an alien attack in the form of some gauzy stuff that floats to Earth, where it manifests itself as flowers. The flowers put out more of the gauzy stuff, which wraps around us humans while we sleep in order to produce perfect copies of us in plant-like birthing pods — thus the epithet "pod people." The upshot is that we're replaced by somewhat duller versions of ourselves, and only the four people we take as our heroes in the movie seem to realize this or care to do anything about it. (Spoilers abound below, of course.)

So my theory is that the whole movie essentially takes place inside their heads, generally, but mostly in the mind of Matthew, played by Donald Sutherland. This would explain the weakest part of Body Snatchers: The threat it presents is always nebulous, largely inferred from various clues even as the pod people begin to take over the entirety of San Francisco. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the the insidiousness of the invasion never really coalesces into one super-creepy individual. This is especially odd, since in a movie that could easily have made the main characters' loved ones act like sinister agents of evil to the nth degree, you'd think that movie would be really unnerving and personal. But, well, no. Janet Maslin nailed it in her 1978 review:

If there were just one character in Invasion of the Body Snatchers who successfully conveyed that kind of menace [a menacing kind of menace], the entire film would take place in a more intimate arena, and cut closer to the bone.

Maybe the movie is trying to personify the threat with either Dr. Kibner (played by old-school Spock) or Elizabeth's boyfriend (whose characterization prior to being replaced is about as extensive as that single relationship, though his name is "Geoffrey" if you care). If these guys are supposed to be menacing, I think it's a fail. The boyfriend is the first "pod" we see (that we know of). Elizabeth's certain realization of his switch comes, it seems, when she tries to hug him from the back and suddenly, inexplicably, it doesn't feel right. Now, I don't know what you do when hugged from behind, but as the huggee I think you'd be very limited in the range of emotion you could express in the five nanoseconds that Elizabeth dorsal-hugs Geoffrey. Nevertheless, that evening Elizabeth goes to Matthew's house to tell him that "Geoffrey isn't Geoffrey" anymore — "anymore" meaning within the last 24 hours, it appears. Later, when Matthew comes to rescue her from the duplicate boyfriend's clutches, it should be the perfect opportunity for him to seem ominous and dark, but he's just mildly standoffish, which is understandable given that Matthew has stolen his girl.

Later, Doctor Kibner counsels the group and talks to Matthew about how wide the body-snatching conspiracy is, and they agree to talk again soon. Then we follow Kibner as he leaves and discover that he is actually one of Them. Evil, right? But think about the implications: In an extended conversation with Matthew, Kibner was able to pass himself off as a regular person. In other words, you can't really distinguish the pod people from regular people other than by knowing that they are pod people. (Okay, and maybe their interest in over-sized eggplants.) It's the classic distinction without a difference. Pod people are "different"! Why? Because they are pod people and not "regular" people!

(By the way, what is that odd leather half-glove that Kibner has on in this shot? I really want to know what that's for. Also, you sort of wonder, did it offend Leonard Nimoy at all that none of the other characters in the scene realize that Nimoy's character is any different, even though Elizabeth could tell something was wrong with her boyfriend in the span of about five minutes? I mean, doesn't that imply that Nimoy as Kibner is just naturally incredibly stiff?)

What I think Janet Maslin wants, and what I definitely want, is a character analogous to Ash from Alien. Alien already had on its payroll just about the vilest looking extraterrestrials imaginable, but on top of that, Ian Holm's replicant/cyborg/whatever doubles the degree to which Alien is scary by showing that the unfeeling corporation running Ripley's ship (and instantiated brilliantly in Ash) would sacrifice the crew for their own gain.

Body Snatchers never adds this sort of bonus, however, and it never had the nasties of Alien to begin with, although its special effects are effectively disgusting.

In addition to the lack of pointed, anthropomorphized threat, another scene supports in a different way my thesis here. It's the montage where Matthews attempts to contact the authorities, mostly via the phone but also in a meeting that we don't see, oddly. Matthew is never, as it turns out, directly turned down; no one gives him a flat, emotionless voice that suggests a complete lack of human affect. Instead, he mostly gets the run around and various requests to keep quiet.

It's not even clear to me that the people he's interacting with are pod people or just public officials in denial — one even points out that Matthew has no tissue samples or even real solid evidence about what's happening, and I found myself agreeing with the skeptic. Maybe, in truth, Matthew is just next in line at the tinfoil hat factory. The culmination of the montage is a shot of Matthew walking down a busy street, turning around and looking a little nuts, as voiceovers of his phone calls play. The camera swoops and wobbles, and it's meant to feel subjective, like we're in the mind of a madman, not like we're receiving objective information about the world.

So that's my prime evidence. As ridiculous as it is to think of the whole thing as the collective delusion of the four lead characters, this explanation of the movie actually manages to explain a couple of other funny incidental details. For instance, it makes it more obvious why the central foursome is able to deduce the existence of the pod people on the scantest of evidence — it's easy to figure out because it's in their fevered imaginations, which will take random happenings and incorporate them into a master conspiracy.

The first real proof that Something Is Wrong in the movie (besides Elizabeth noting that her boyfriend has had a lot of meetings that day) is a slimy body that shows up at Jeff Goldblum's mud-bath business. As a viewer, it's hard to be objective about what conclusions one would come to upon seeing such a thing, but in real life I don't think I would guess that this body was growing into a duplicate of Goldblum, as Matthew et al. do all too quickly. I think I'd at least consider the possibility that this was just an acute case of Fuzzy White Stuff on Me and call the CDC.

The paranoid delusion theory is even more fruitful if you consider the scene where Matthew awakes in his garden to find himself surrounded by growing pod people, including the one that will take his own form. He hesitates to kill two of them, but then, when he comes to the one that looks like him, he smashes it to a bloody pulp, targeting the head, which I read as his symbolic rebellion against a brain that is producing his nightmares.

Of course, there's some stuff that just seems terribly objective and hard to explain away, like the giant pods that people are carrying around, but I like to imagine that this is just a health-food craze in a movie that is, after all, set in the San Francisco of the 1970s, a place and time where a main character can run a mud-bath spa without getting funny lucks. Also in the contra column is the completely inexplicable (and undeniably disconcerting) tendency of pod people to shriek hysterically (which, come to think of it, is kind of at odds with the characterization of them as cold and unresponsive). I can't put that in terms of my theory.

But you don't need this theory to work to acknowledge that the movie doesn't really develop any psychological force, or that its threats are kind of watery and unclear. So leave me to my theories, lest I write the film off entirely.