Monday, November 30, 2009

pod - identities

Saturday there were good movies on Turner Classic Movie channel all day long. In anticipation of "Casablanca" coming on at 5pm our time, turned on the channel in the a.m.: watched one I had always heard of but had not seen -- "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Quite amazing. "Losing our humanity" was the concern. I actually came in about half-way through, so should say watched only half.

Apparently somebody gives you these pods -- you get stuck with them, basically the way many folks have got stuck with Amway products over the succeeding decades!

You have a pod -- one for each person, I guess. And somehow the pod absorbs your thoughts & memories and then you are gone and there's a new you whose eyes are sort of unnaturally wide open and calm, and people don't get psyched up about anything.

"Love, desire, ambition, faith" --
those were the things the pod-people are free of. And once they become like that, they think it's better. And they want the people who still are human to get their pods and be like them -- free of human feeling, and sort of robotic.

It seemed to me this film was made post-WWII (late 1940s or 1950s). That's how it looked. And it had the pared-down, black-and-white, almost simplistic shooting style and plain, simple musical effects, used sparingly. Reminded me of Hitchcock's "Psycho" in that way.

I think the pods represented people's literal fear, at the time, of losing their humanity. I think this was brought on by issues current at the time:

communism
reaction against communism -- creeping McCarthyism
modern technology
atomic bomb

Now I've organized my own thoughts (guesses) about what the movie's alluding to -- and next (tomorrow) will look it up at library, to see if I'm right or not.

-30-

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