“...Interest in a presumed political allegory has dominated critical response to the story, as in Harry M. Benshoff’s observation that the “human-looking monsters have been thought to reflect a paranoid fear of both mindless U.S. conformity and Communist infiltration, wherein a poisonous ideology spreads through small-town USA like a virus, silently turning one’s friends and relatives into monsters.” No specific ideology fits the story exactly. Rather, the snatched bodies of an American small town register the uncertainties raised by social and political transformation and scientific and medical discoveries in the postwar world.
Benshoff’s metaphor picks up on the viral features of the pods that run subtly from Finney’s novel through the films, becoming explicit in Cook’s version, in which the human beings succumb to an aggressive alien virus implanted in primordial DNA. In all versions, Body Snatchers recounts the story of an ecological invasion that turns willful and even malicious with the incarnation of the pod people. The pods’ viral features fleshed out the viral agency emerging in the medical literature and mainstream media and helped to develop the conventions of the incarnated virus and the epidemiological struggle over the fate of humanity that characterized the outbreak narrative.
The Body Snatchers offered a mythology for the moment: a story about the uncertain nature of human being conceived as a struggle for the future of humanity. Finney’s protagonists experience the terror of utter estrangement when they find themselves suddenly certain that everything is different despite the evidence of their senses, which tells them that nothing has changed. It is a story about carriers, spawning one of the few films of the genre, as Benshoff notes, in which the monsters physically resemble human beings.
While Burroughs encourages inspection of the nature of human beings, Finney forestalls any such inquiry. “Humanity,” in his novel, is at risk, but never in question, and although it seems precarious, it proves finally indestructible. The novel chronicles the gradual discovery by the doctor narrator, Miles Bennell, of the source of his patients’ disturbing insistence that close relatives are not who they claim to be in the personality theft perpetrated by the intergalactic pods. Of the uncle who raised her, one woman puzzles, “He looks, sounds, acts, and remembers exactly like Ira. On the outside. But inside he’s different. His responses . . . aren’t emotionally right. . . . There’s something missing.”
The difficulty of detecting the pod people’s subtle loss of humanity makes those who notice it seem delusional. Naturally, the experts consulted in this case assume that they are witnessing a psychological phenomenon, what Miles’s psychiatrist friend Mannie Kaufman calls “the first contagious neurosis” he has ever seen, “a real epidemic” (23) of an imagined disease, panic spreading “like a contagion” (98). The problem, of course, turns out not to be in the minds but in the snatched bodies of the residents.
Having isolated Santa Mira from the rest of the world, they are invasive and colonizing: actively determined to spread. Miles and his girlfriend, Becky Driscoll, watch in horror from Miles’s office while three farm trucks loaded with pods drive up to the town center and begin to distribute the pods to townspeople with “families or contacts” in surrounding towns (147). They are also transformative, leaving no one “what he had been, or what he seemed still, to the naked eye. The men, women, and children in the street below . . . were something else now,” Miles explains, “every last one of them. They were each our enemies, including those with the eyes, faces, gestures, and walks of old friends. There was no help for us here except from each other, and even now the communities around us were being invaded” (149).
Humanity is negatively defined by the pod transformation: they become automatons, lacking passion, compassion, and emotions of any sort. They also lose their uniqueness in the display of a hive mentality. Depictions of mass hypnosis and mental control had long preceded Cold War science fiction. David Seed identifies a gothic tradition that associates a horrifying loss of humanity with the state’s aggressive manipulation of its citizens.
Through the conventions of horror, the loss of humanity becomes a loss of individuality and is configured through features designed to provoke disgust, such as the decaying body and oozing innards of the zombie. By the 1950s, horror and disgust were implicit in the idea of mind control. Finney’s novel conjoined these associations with contemporary technological innovations and scientific theories to dramatize the possibility of a transformational loss of humanity and the threat that imperceptibly changed human beings could in turn pose to the state.
While Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate pointedly showed how mind control could turn a human being into an assassin, Finney’s novel depicted the disturbing biological mechanisms of mental contagion, and virology supplied the vocabulary through which Finney explained the metamorphosis. When Miles, Becky, and their friends Jack and Theodora Belicec begin to piece together the phenomenon, the pod people become viral.
Following an odd clue in a daily newspaper, Jack, an author and attentive reader, has led them to the index case, the former botany professor Bernard Budlong, who explains the pod phenomenon in language that might have been lifted from a virology textbook: the pods are a life-form, although not in a conventional sense, and they have arrived on earth “by pure chance, but having arrived, they have a function to perform. . . . The function of all life, everywhere—to survive” (152).
Stressing their lack of malevolence, he concedes that “the pods are a parasite on whatever life they encounter. . . . But they are the perfect parasite, capable of far more than clinging to the host. They are completely evolved life; they have the ability to re-form and reconstitute themselves into perfect duplication, cell for living cell, of any life form they may encounter in whatever conditions that life has suited itself for” (153).
Understanding how the pods work entails coming to terms with a new conception of human being, Budlong explains, as he cautions Miles not to be trapped by his limited assumptions about life. Noting that Miles’s grandfather would have been dubious about radio waves, Budlong anticipates that Miles will be similarly skeptical of the insights that the human body “contains a pattern” that “is the very foundation of cellular life” (155), that “every cell of [an entire body] emanates waves as individual as fingerprints” (155), and that “during sleep . . . that pattern can be taken from [the sleeper], absorbed like static electricity, from one body to another” (155–56), which is precisely what the pods do.
This description recasts individuality: every human being is unique, but also predictable, conforming to a pattern. Every individual can be reducible to patterns of “information” and can therefore be “snatched.” Budlong’s explanation rehearses the version of information theory that Norbert Wiener had popularized in The Human Use of Human Beings. Wiener had declared a “pattern . . . the touchstone of our personal identity. Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. . . . We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”
Noting that a “pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message,” and drawing, like Budlong, on the patterns of sound and light that make radio and television work, he contemplates “what would happen if we were to transmit the whole pattern of the human body, of the human brain with its memories and cross connections, so that a hypothetical receiving instrument could re-embody these messages in appropriate matter, capable of continuing the processes already in the body and the mind, and of maintaining the integrity needed for this continuation by a process of homeostasis” (96).
If Wiener suggests that the human body is information that could conceivably be transmitted (a sort of human fax), The Body Snatchers represents the potential abuse of that information—the alienability of the human personality. In response, Finney’s story insists that humanity consists of something at once intangible and physiological that cannot be reduced to information. The pods in The Body Snatchers do not exactly reproduce the human beings whose information they steal.
Like viruses, they replace that alienable information with themselves, something distinctly not human. While their initial introduction into the earth’s ecosystem was accidental—an “invasion” in the ecological sense—their mandate to survive turns them into willful carriers: “From the moment the first effective changeover occurred, chance was no longer a factor” (160). Family members and service providers, “delivery men, plumbers, carpenters, effected others” (160).
The effected changes seem initially passive, brought about with the least sense of conscious agency it is possible to convey. Effected, however, invokes the more expected infected, which implies the deliberate spread of a disease. When the pods take human shape, they evolve into unmistakably sinister, cunning, and conniving beings, a conspiratorial race of carriers. The concept of an invasion, which was added to the title with the 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, becomes more pronounced with each version.
Like any viral invasion, it comes from without and proceeds to take over the host’s bodily functions and mechanisms to reproduce itself. The animation of this viral agent is a stock feature of outbreak narratives, and it shows how and why they readily generate narratives of bioterrorism. The scale of the danger escalates rapidly to a species-threatening event. Budlong explains that the pods have used up the resources of every planet on which they have landed and will use up the earth’s within about five years and then move on.
Miles and Becky are not convinced by his justification that human beings similarly have used up many of the earth’s resources. “You’re going to spread over the world?” Miles asks in disbelief. And Budlong maps out the conquest of “this county, then the next ones; and presently northern California, Oregon, Washington, the West Coast, finally; it’s an accelerating process, ever faster, always more of us, fewer of you. Presently, fairly quickly, the continent. And then—yes, of course, the world” (163).
Budlong’s five-year forecast resembles the Soviet’s Five Year Plan, summoning the predictions made in the United States about the industrializing Soviet state and explaining readers’ temptation to read the novel as a simple political allegory, despite Finney’s demurrals. The wasted police state that Finney describes offers readers a glimpse into the effects of Communist infiltration on prosperous small-town USA.
But the pods are more generally colonizers, and the apocalyptic vision of world conquest and rapidly expended resources expresses colonizing anxieties in environmental terms, linking a global exhaustion of resources to a terrifying loss of humanity; social and political transformation becomes a threat to “humanity” that shades into an ecological catastrophe.”
- Priscilla Wald, “Viral Cultures: Microbes and Politics in the Cold War.” in Zombie Theory: A Reader
