: Study Questions: Week Three

Uncle Ira's Not Himself Today

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Psycho (1960).

The Threat of Resident Aliens

The good life envisioned in the American Dream was beset by doubt and anxiety throughout the post-war years. And these fears were often embodied in the popular film genres of the era. This week we will examine the ways in which the science fiction and horror films reflect not only fears that the Dream could be endangered by outside social and political forces but that the Dream itself might have a dark side which found expression in the form of alien invaders and murderous family members. Let's see what sort of anxieties can be found in the appearance of the pod people and Norman Bates.

1. How do the images and the credits which introduce Psycho anticipate the story which follows?

2. What, in your estimation, is the significance of setting the film in Phoenix (a small isolated city in 1960). Is this particular city important or is the fact that it resembles so many middle-American cities important? What is the reason for your choice?

3. What does the film's long opening shot moving over the city and creeping up to a hotel window tell us about Marion Crane (Janet Leigh)? What is the thematic significance of the subtitles indicating the time and place?

4. What is the trap in which Marion finds herself. How is it related to the American Dream? Why is the sense of being trapped and excluded emphasized by Cassidy ( Frank Albertson) bragging about his daughter's upcoming marriage?

5. In what ways do her decisions bring her to the Bates Motel driven by her desire to claim a portion of the American Dream?

6. What is the thematic significance of the Bates Motel being placed on a road that has been bypassed by a new highway? How does this location mark Norman (Anthony Perkins) and Mother (????) as among those left behind by contemporary America?

7. Why does Hitchcock take pains to establish both Marion and Norman as outsider who inhabit the margins of their culture? Why are they associated with hotels and motels rather than the homes seen in previous films?

8. If you has just stolen $25,000 and were on the run, would you stay in a hotel run by someone twitching uneasily in a room full of stuffed predatory birds, or would you continue on the the nearest Howard Johnson's Motor Inn?

9. How does Norman's ostensible filial piety and moral righteousness suggest that what we call "traditional family values" might give birth to murderous rage?

10. In what ways is the Bates family a reversal of the family relationships idealized in Best Years and Gray Flannel? Do Norman and Willie Keith (Caine) have a similar mother problem? If so, how does Willie escape Norman's fate?

11. What is the significance of the Freudian explanation of Norman's behavior? Is it meant to be taken seriously or as a satirical comment on psychotherapy?

12. Turning to The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If camera style and settings help interpret a film's narrative, what do the dark, shadowy images and the narrow constricted settings of the film noir say about life in Santa Mara?

13. How are Miles Bennel (Kevin McCarthy) and Jackie Driscoll (Dana Wynter) different from the rest of the townspeople, and how does her strapless dress serve to point up these differences? Consider their martial status, their having traveled, and their families.

14. Is any connection to be implied between the facts that he lives alone and that he escapes the pod people?

15. What significance would you attach to the fact that parents (or relatives with parental status) are instrumental in their children (including their grown children) becoming pod people?

16. The transformation of typical Americans into emotionless automatons without altering their physical appearance is the most frightening (or at least the most unnerving and symbolically significant aspect of the film. How would you interpret this motif. What does it imply about the dangers facing Santa Mara, a microcosmic version of 1950s America?

17. Why is a writer, Jack Delachuck (King Donovan), the character who first reveals the presence of the pods? What does his function suggest about the importance of the intellect and the imagination?

18. The pods, as they split open and give birth to the bodies which replace their human hosts, seem to be associated with a destructive fertility. What might these huge seed containers imply about the domestic, child-centered aspects of the baby boom years?

19. In Best Years Frank Derby wishes for "a mild future." In what ways is Invasion a nightmare version of that "mild future"? Why, for instance does Sally (Jean Willes), Bennel's nurse, believe that "there'll be no more tears" for her child who is about to become a pod? Bennel observes that he's "seen how people let their humanity drain away. They don't seem to mind." In the context of the film, what does he mean by humanity?

20. In encouraging Bennel to cease resisting and join the pod generation, the psychiatrist Dr. Kauffman (Larry Gates) says the pod people live in a world where "there's no pain, no need to love, only the instinct to survive." And Bennel adds, "where everyone's the same." Is this to be taken as warning about the togetherness at the center of the American Dream or a warning about the dangers of Soviet communism? Or both?

21. Considering the popularity of simplified versions of Freud's psychoanalytic theories in the years following World War II, what is the significance of making psychiatrists either witless (Psycho) or a villain (Invasion) in these films?

22. How does the frame tale, which opens and closes the film, tend to negate the pessimistic future envisioned in the flashback recounting Bennel's experience? How does the role of the FBI promise liberation from the threat of alien pods? What does it say about the respect for governmental authority?

23. Becky Driscoll asks the film's crucial question: "Where do they come from?" Bennel suggests atomic ratiation of a strange alien organism. How to the anxieties raised by the Cold War figure in these explanations?

24. Finally, the big question. What, in fact, do the pods represent? Is that representation genuinely ambivalent or merely evasive, a way of pleasing an audience with widely divergent political and ideological views?