Body Snatching 101: Up to our eyeballs in pods

Body snatching isn’t the same business it was 55 years ago.

That’s no surprise. Society isn’t the same place it used to be, so naturally the aliens who invade it have had to adapt a bit over the years. Things that worked well in 1953 are counterproductive  now, and vice versa.

When the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers came out, subtlety was the watchword of the day. Aliens slipped silently into Small Town America, looking to take over before anyone even noticed they were there. They were vulnerable in the light of day, able to replicate our bodies and replace us only if we were dumb enough to fall asleep next to their pods.

This fit McCarthyism to a tee. We needn’t fear large-scale assault from outer space. One way or another, we’d find a way to put a stop to that. The Thing from Another World was easy enough to snuff once we drew it into an ambush. Even the Martians in The War of the Worlds succumbed to a little unintentional biological warfare. In a stand-up fight, nothing beats the U.S. of A. Even our germs kick ass.

What we really needed to worry about was becoming what we feared. The Soviets might never get past the DEW line, but democracy made us vulnerable to Marxism from within. Too much live-and-let-live would soon have us living with monsters from outer space, beasts that thrived on our tolerance. And we knew we couldn’t count on their tolerance in return. If they got a toe-hold – or worse, managed to seize control – they’d forcibly make each of us one of them. Scary stuff.

Fast-forward 25 years. The Commies aren’t gone, but they don’t seem to be our number one concern anymore. In their place, we find ourselves haunted by a more general sense that things are going wrong. We can’t quite put our fingers on it. Our respect for society’s institutions – particularly government and religion – had eroded. In its place, many took up alternative belief systems – cults, if you want to use the pejorative – or turned to pop psychology. In this environment, one can scarcely plead surprise when our friends and neighbors point their fingers at us and make the spooky noise-from-hell. Must have been our engrams showing.

Clearly the time had come for a different kind of invasion. The decades since the first one improved the shock-meisters’ craft a bit. The dog with the human head was a nice touch. And of course there’s the ending. Several years after the first time I saw this go-around, Mrs. Lens wanted to visit the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker amusement park. I declined, fearing (and rightly so, I still believe) that the pointing and hissing would commence the moment we set foot on the property.

The 90s version – like the 90s themselves – didn’t leave much of an impression on me. To the extent that I recall it at all, it registers only as the basic pod-people rules grafted onto a cheap thriller fit for the Sci Fi Channel.

And now the body snatchers are back, and this time they’re serious. They’ve got a big budget and some pricey stars (particularly Nicole Kidman in the lead). And this time around, they’re different.

Some of the differences are purely mechanical. For example, now the invaders are a virus. They don’t need to bother with the complicated process of luring us into sleeping next to pods. A scratch, bite, or even some spit will do the trick. That’s only natural. In the age after AIDS and Richard Preston, everyone’s afraid of infection.

But they aren’t just more virulent this time around. They’re also smarter. They don’t waste time puttering around Smallville. One of the first people they “convert” is the head of the CDC. That puts them in a great position to lie to us about their existence, and things progress naturally from there.

That’s very much in keeping with what we know about the pods who run the country in the real world. Up through the end of the 20th century, we still had enough lingering democracy left to impel the evil assholes in charge to at least pretend not to be evil assholes while dealing with the public. For example, Ronald Reagan – arch-pod of the 1980s – might have been slaughtering AIDS victims by the thousands while blithely giving aid and comfort to our enemies in Iran, but on TV he was everyone’s smilin’ granddad.

But no longer. One of the great failings of the Manchurian Candidate remake was that its plot depended on the need for a sinister corporation to maintain a veil of secrecy over its seizure of the Oval Office. That might have played a decade or two ago, but we’d recently openly elected a ticket that filled the two highest offices of the Executive Branch with corporate executives. Everybody knew it. Nobody seemed to care.

So when the pods in the new “Invasion of” movie do little or nothing to conceal their nature. It’s like they’re riffing on Treehouse of Horror: “Yeah, we’re evil asshole monsters from outer space. What are you going to do about it? Vote Libertarian?” Indeed, the only surprise in the whole picture is that anyone doesn’t want to be a pod. Resistance isn’t in keeping with the go-with-the-flow attitude that prevails in the new millennium. And of course that makes the happy ending all the more implausible.