The United States of Paranoia (9 page)

As Miles and Becky watch in horror, the invaders gather in the center of town and plot to bring more pods to more cities. After Becky falls asleep and is replaced by a pod person, the distressed Miles runs out onto the highway and tries to warn the drivers about the invasion. They whiz past, doing their best to ignore him. Miles climbs onto the back of a truck and realizes with horror that it’s full of pods. Turning to the camera, he shouts a final warning to the audience: “You’re next!”

The studio deemed that ending too frightening, and it insisted that director Don Siegel add a prologue and epilogue implying that the invasion would be defeated. Siegel reluctantly agreed, grumbling that pod people had taken over the film industry. The change blunts the picture’s paranoid vision: Though the director’s cut shows us a world where the agents of psychiatry and law enforcement are completely malevolent and untrustworthy, the studio version ends with Miles breathing a sigh of relief as a psychiatrist alerts the FBI to the invasion. But in either incarnation, it is a harrowing and disturbing film. The story may be science fiction, but it’s rooted in a familiar experience. “I’ve seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away,” Miles mulls to Becky in one scene. “Only it happens slowly instead of all at once.” The film’s star, Kevin McCarthy, proposed an alternative title for the film, which Siegel liked but the studio rejected:
Sleep No More
.
50

So while middlebrow America was taking in tales such as Arthur Miller’s play
The Crucible
, a heavy-handed allegory in which the Salem trials stand in for McCarthyism, you could find much more potent visions of the Enemy Within in disreputable genre fare.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
is the most memorable example, but it was hardly the only movie engaging those anxieties. It wasn’t even the only movie about extraterrestrials disguised as human beings.

It Came from Outer Space
, for example, subverts the formula by making the aliens benign: They don’t intend to invade Earth; they crashed here by accident, and they plan to leave as soon as they’ve repaired their spacecraft. They have adopted the forms of the people they’ve encountered not because they planned to replace them but because they didn’t want to alarm anyone by appearing inhuman. “We cannot, we would not, take your souls or minds or bodies,” one of the intruders informs us. “Don’t be afraid.”
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In this film, fear itself is the Enemy Within, possessing people and leading them to do destructive things. “How do we know they’re not taking over?” a paranoid sheriff exclaims. “They could be all around us and I wouldn’t know it!” Moments later, he’s raising a posse and chasing the alien into the Arizona desert. (You thought you were watching a science fiction flick, but that was just a mask: It was a western all along.)

The movie sounds like a response to
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, but it came out in 1953, three years before
Body Snatchers
was released. Let me repeat that: Three years before
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
appeared in theaters, stories about aliens possessing or impersonating Earth people were familiar enough that a movie could play with viewers’ expectations by presenting extraterrestrial imposters who turn out not to be invaders at all.
Invasion
may be the best of the body-snatching stories, but it wasn’t the first.

Tales about possession and imposture have been around for centuries, of course. In a science fiction context, the trail goes at least as far back as Harl Vincent’s “Parasite,” published in 1935, in which invaders from a doomed world transform themselves into “microscopic energy charges” that can reproduce their minds in the bodies of their human victims.
52
Weird Tales
published H. P. Lovecraft’s novella
The Shadow Out of Time
a year later, though it was written before Vincent’s story appeared; it too dealt with inhuman beings possessing human bodies. In England, H. G. Wells’s 1937 novel
Star Begotten
toyed with the idea that extraterrestrials are manipulating us via cosmic rays, so that new babies who appear to be Terran would actually have Martian minds. Back in the United States, John W. Campbell, Jr.’s, influential 1938 novella
Who Goes There?
featured an alien with the ability to adopt the appearance of the people it consumes.
53
A variation of the idea even appeared in the ongoing series of sequels to
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, which continued to be produced by other hands after L. Frank Baum died. In
The Magical Mimics in Oz
(1946), written by
Weird Tales
veteran Jack Snow, supernatural creatures capture Dorothy and the Wizard, adopt their physical forms, and take the opportunity to engage in espionage within the Emerald City, searching for the spell that will allow their race of monsters to invade Oz and subject the rest of its people to the same fate.

Some of those stories are close to the
Body Snatchers
model. Others are more distant. Lovecraft’s intruders are more interested in exploration than invasion. The tone of the Wells book is more ironic than paranoid, with a narrator who’s clearly dubious about the alien force that the characters think they perceive. (Nor do all of those characters imagine the incursion as a body-snatchers scenario. Some see something closer to those Coming Race stories where we’ve got to make way for the
Homo superior
.) But all those tales established a set of plot devices that invaded Hollywood in the middle of the twentieth century. Besides
Body Snatchers
and
It Came from Outer Space
, fifties films that feature aliens impersonating or controlling human beings include
Invaders from Mars
(1953),
Killers from Space
(1954),
It Conquered the World
(1956),
I Married a Monster from Outer Space
(1958), and
The Brain Eaters
(1958). Body snatchers continued to appear on the printed page as well, the most notable examples being Robert Heinlein’s
The Puppet Masters
(1951) and Jack Finney’s
The Body Snatchers
(1954). Finney’s novel was the direct inspiration for Siegel’s film.

Since these stories involve extraterrestrial invaders, they may sound more like tales of the Enemy Outside than the Enemy Within. But although that’s arguably true of a few of them—
The Puppet Masters
, for example, is obviously an allegory for the Cold War—most of them locate their horror not in the skies but in the suspicion that anyone you encounter, even your own spouse or parent or child, might secretly be something else, and in the possibility that you too might be made alien. In
The Brain Eaters
, outer space is a red herring: The invader turns out to come from the interior of the earth. In
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, the invading seeds may have drifted to our planet from space, but they took root and grew on Earth’s own soil. In several other films, the aliens set up their base in a cave or under the earth’s surface. The most famous British version of the story, the 1955 TV serial
Quatermass II
, ends with the hero defeating the enemy by riding a rocket to an asteroid. But in Hollywood, meeting the monster behind the invasion is more likely to require a trip underground. To encounter this enemy, you don’t aim for the stars; you descend into Hell.
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It is often said that
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
can be read as a critique of either communism or McCarthyism. The flip side is that the opposition to both communism and McCarthyism fed on the same dread that animated the movie, a horror at the thought of being swallowed by the conformist collective. That was one of the core fears of the 1950s. It surfaced in the work of writers as diverse as William Burroughs, Ayn Rand, and Jean-Paul Sartre; it appeared in intellectual critiques of “mass man,” in uneasiness about subliminal advertising, in worries that suburbia would become a ticky-tacky nightmare.

It was especially visible when the topic was mass culture. When the leftist psychiatrist Fredric Wertham testified to Congress in 1954 about the alleged evils of comic books, he warned that “the sinister hand of these corrupters of children, of this comic-book industry” might prevent the distribution of his book
Seduction of the Innocent
.
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(The book was distributed without incident.) Television was seen as an instrument of thought control, the means by which the next “War of the Worlds” panic might be incited. Conservatives, such as the ex–FBI men who published the 1950 report
Red Channels
, probed TV for Communist propaganda. Liberals, such as the filmmakers behind the 1957 feature
A Face in the Crowd
, fretted that far-right demagogues might broadcast their way into power.

If mass culture was supposed to be a potential prelude to fascism, advertising was imagined as mass-market mesmerism. In his 1957 best seller
The Hidden Persuaders
, Vance Packard warned that “many of the nation’s leading public-relations experts have been indoctrinating themselves in the lore of psychiatry and the social sciences in order to increase their skill at ‘engineering’ our consent to their propositions.”
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There’s an echo here of the nineteenth-century critics who saw religious revivals as episodes of mass hypnosis. (Indeed, Packard added, “Public-relations experts are advising churchmen how they can become more effective manipulators of their congregations.”)
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In
A Face in the Crowd
, a villain who uses his powers to sell mattresses and energy supplements then goes to work for an ultraconservative senator.

The persuaders’ power was expected to grow. “Eventually—say by
A.D.
2000—perhaps all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old-fashioned,” Packard wrote. “By then perhaps the biophysicists will take over with ‘biocontrol,’ which is depth persuasion carried to its ultimate. Biocontrol is the new science of controlling mental processes, emotional reactions, and sense perceptions by bioelectrical signals.”
58

When Packard described the effects of ads, he used such words as “we” and “ourselves,” but the impression left by most anti-ad rhetoric (and by films such as
A Face in the Crowd
) drew a line separating the dupes from the elect.
You
might not have been brainwashed by those Madison Avenue Mesmers, but the pod people around you aren’t so strong.
59

Body Snatchers
wasn’t the only fifties film open to both left-wing and right-wing readings. To see how easy it was to reimagine a rightist conspiracy as a leftist conspiracy, watch the 1951 picture
The Whip Hand
. The movie was originally going to tell the tale of a reporter stumbling on a Nazi plot in an isolated Minnesota town. After the film wrapped, studio chief Howard Hughes decided that the bad guys ought to be Communists instead, and with a little rewriting, a little redubbing, and a few brief additions and subtractions, the switch was made. The central villain was still a Nazi scientist, but now he had disappeared behind the Iron Curtain after the war and offered his services to the Reds. It’s a funny sort of communism that he’s embraced: The first time we encounter one of his goons, the guy warns the reporter that he’s “on private property.”
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But communism isn’t the point here, any more than Nazism was; they’re just convenient costumes.

More subtly—and more strangely—there is
I Led 3 Lives
, a TV drama that ran from 1953 to 1956. Inspired by the experiences of Herbert Philbrick, an advertising salesman who had infiltrated the Communist movement for the FBI, the series was a vivid example of anti-Communist popular culture. It was also sometimes scripted by the victims of the Red Scare.

The show, the historian Thomas Doherty has pointed out,

speaks to the blacklist with suspicious frequency: to the moral dilemma of the informer, to the problems of the prodigal politico, and to the plight of the duped liberal smeared by his past associations. As Philbrick’s party comrades might put it, this is no accident. According to producer Frederick Ziv, blacklisted screenwriters wrote for the show under assumed names. Likes moles burrowing from within, they commented on their own dilemma, doubtless savoring the irony of using the premiere anti-communist series on television to critique anti-communist paranoia. In another episode, when Philbrick is assigned responsibility for party security, his lesbian-coded cell leader, Comrade Jenny, orders him to hunt for subversive elements. “I needn’t remind you that one of the greatest threats to communism is internal—from the party itself. Diversionists, traitors, opportunists, social patriots, reformers—you’ll make every effort to discover these enemies and report them to me.” The camera holds tight on her severe face as she tells him to name names: “And should you fail to report them—I’ll be forced to conclude that you’re one of them yourself!”
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In another episode, the Communists quiz Philbrick “about his pre-‘communist’ anticommunist past. What about the anticommunist rallies he attended? The anticommunist petitions he signed?”
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The line between Left and Right is even blurrier in Richard Condon’s 1959 novel
The Manchurian Candidate
, a satiric thriller in which the Communist conspiracy and a Joseph McCarthy–like senator are secretly on the same side. The story turns on the idea of brainwashing, a word that entered the language after U.S. POWs broadcast propaganda messages for the Communists during the Korean War. The soldiers had been subjected to intense indoctrination sessions, and the idea took hold in Washington that their captors had reprogrammed their minds.
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The term might have been new, but the animating anxiety goes at least as far back as the Indian captivity narratives, stories that drew much of their power from the possibility that an enemy could remake Americans as something alien.