Brain-worms

                                      Brain-worms

There are certain works of the imagination which although imperfectly crafted contain an idea, a thought which the mind entertains it, can never be banished. You may be familiar with some of them. The three which come to mind immediately are all Gothic classics of the 19^th century.

Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ – 1818

Her frightening account of the folly of o’er-reaching Science and the monstrosities which ensue. We recall the nobility of Dr Frankenstein’s project: to overcome death. The novel confirms conclusively how the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ – 1886

Ah, the good Doctor Jekyll, a man dedicated to healing the sick and relieving the poor. A selfless physician who has observed at close hand the suffering caused by the evil that lurks in the heart of a man. Surely some potion could excise this heart of darkness and leave only a pure, good-hearted, kindly Christian nature? As we know, Dr Jekyll is diligent in his researches and eventually synthesises the very thing. Alas he brings into being his own evil shadow: Mr Hyde takes over the doctor’s soul with a vengeance. We are left to contemplate how a man’s evil can dwarf and eventually destroy his goodness. And the notion of a split personality is with us for all time.

Bram Stoker’s ‘Count Dracula’ – 1897.

Again, conquering death, achieving immortality is the goal but Dracula’s motives are far from noble. The Count’s existence is laced with bad blood, a study in serology and sin. The fangs, the biting of the necks, the sucking of the innocent blood to sustain the vampire’s conscienceless, predatory lust for life: his at the cost of others’. Like the grotesque figure of the monster, Dracula’s visage, fangs, blood lust cloaked in darkness is imprinted on our imaginations forever.As you will have noted, all three novels are studies in the misuses of Science. All have a Calvinist sense of ineradicable evil in men. All defy the ameliorism of 19^th century thought: Science and Reason will of course eliminate villainy and vice. And interestingly, all feature women solely as victims or bystanders. Make of that you will. Autre temps, autres moeurs. All three, of course, have the same theme and mood: morbidity.

So far we have saluted the great and good of the Gothic imagination. Nearer our own time, a Hollywood film from 1956 has made an equally haunting impression upon me. Although I was only 6 when the film was released and blissfully unaware of it, I became in my teens an avid reader of science fiction and a keen viewer of films of that genre on television. So it was that around 1062 I think I finally watched ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ in black and white on the BBC. A Wikipedia summary of the film, for those unacquainted with it, can be found below.

Why did this SF film make such a lasting impression upon me? Taking the reasons in turn:

1. It was pungently and powerfully of its time: the post-war boom in America, the McCarthy era, the suffocating conformity, the fear of ‘Reds’, aliens in human form, communists all around you in invisible conspiracies. The Cold War, the Arms race, the nuclear bunkers and the four minute warnings. The film portrays the sinister change coming over the citizens of a small town in Middle America. Conformity, agreeing with everyone else, sounding and thinking like everyone else was contagious, a disease passed silently from one to another. Individuality and independence of mind drained away. The town doctor played by Kevin McCarthy is increasingly aware and disturbed by this malaise but the townspeople succumb so rapidly, including the police, medical and emergency services that he soon realises he is the odd one out, he is the outsider, the alien. The irony is razor sharp. There is no happy ending: the final shot is of Main Street, the doctor surrounded by the zombie townsfolk, no help at hand. His expression of bewilderment, fear and horror says it all.

None of this had to do with me as a teenager in Birkenhead in 1962 but . . . it resonated.

Years passed and in my twenties and thirties I’d come across the film again and watch it again. I found it compelling.

• Twenty years on I knew that the extra-terrestrial invasion of the body snatchers was pure metaphor and a brilliant one at that. Director Don Siegal (later to work with Clint Eastwood, ‘Dirty Harry’ et al) turned SF hokum into a deadly, deadpan, ice-cold satire on the suffocating timidity and conformity of American life post McCarthy.

Today I see exactly that phenomenon in every aspect of modern life in the UK and the US. Cancel culture, micro-aggressions, utter intolerance of contrary views, a hatred and fear of debate and argument, a jihadist frenzy in which those who disagree with you are infidels. Meanwhile governments stand idly by, shuffling their feet and nodding sagely, looking away, mouthing empty words or plainly indulging hysterical fanatics. I cannot believe there is a family or town in the land that is not riven by the divide between the ‘woke’ and those who attempt to engage with them in reasoned, evidence-based discussion.

What to do? Watch the 1956 film and follow the doctor on his mission. But don’t hold your breath.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1956 American science-fiction horror film produced by Walter Wanger, directed by Don Siegel, and starring Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter. The black-and-white film was shot in 2.00:1 Superscope and in the film noir style. Daniel Mainwaring adapted the screenplay from Jack Finney‘s 1954 science-fiction novel The Body Snatchers.^[2] The film was released efiction film The Atomic Man (and in some markets with Indestructible Man).^[3]

The film’s storyline concerns an extraterrestrial invasion that begins in the fictional California town of Santa Mira. Alien plant spores have fallen from space and grown into large seed pods, each one capable of producing a visually identical copy of a human. As each pod reaches full development, it assimilates the physical traits, memories, and personalities of each sleeping person placed near it until only the replacement is left; these duplicates, however, are devoid of all human emotion. Little by little, a local doctor uncovers this “quiet” invasion and attempts to stop it.

The slang expression “pod people” that arose in late 20th-century U.S. culture refers to the emotionless duplicates seen in the film.^[2] Invasion of the Body Snatchers was selected in 1994 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”^[4][5]

Wikipedia

Original article by David Kelly                                             23/10/23