: Study Questions: Week Five

Watch the Skies: Alien Invaders, the Enemy Without

The Thing (1951) and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

1. In The Invasion of the Body Snatchers the 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?

2. 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.

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

4. 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?

5. 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?

6. 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?

7. 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?

8. In what ways is Invasion a nightmare version of the American Dream? 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?

9. 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" prized in Cold War America or a warning about the dangers of Soviet communism? Or both?

10. 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?

11. 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?

12. 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?

13. 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?

14. On to a different form of alien vegetables. What social or political forces might be symbolized by the UFO and its alien passenger in The Thing? How does his radio activity help invoke one of the Cold War's most frightening threats? In what ways does the behavior of the giant carrot further reflect attitudes toward the Soviet Union?

15. What is the dramatic function of Scotty (Douglas Spencer) the journalist? How does he function as the observer who defines the films point of view, that is the perspective from which viewers observe and interpret the action? Is he a reliable observer? Does his profession ask us to believe him? Why? Why not? What is the significance of having him issue the film's closing warning, "Watch the skies"? How are his attitudes toward military authority, censorship in the interest of national security, and the nature of aliens to be understood by viewers?

16. What is the narrative significance of the romance between Capt. Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) and Nikki Nicholson (Margaret Sheridan)? Is it central to the film's central concerns, or is it simply gratuitous, way of making an essentially all-male film more attractive to women movie-goers?

17. Consider the ways in which Dr.Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite), the head scientist, is the opposite of Capt. Hendry. What are his weaknesses, and what do they suggest about the capability of intellectuals as leaders? Who, does the film suggest, are best suited to lead? How does Dr. Vorhees (Paul Frees) embody the sociaslly responsible scientist/intellectual? In what ways is Carrington reminiscient of the figure of the scientist who appears in many sciencefiction and horror films? Think, for instance, of Dr. Frankenstein.

18. The horror genre has tended to depend on two basic narrative patterns. In the first, the central characters journey into a world separate from everyday reality where the ordinary laws of nature do not seem to apply. In the second, the central characters discover that their everyday world has been invaded by the uncanny and the alien. How do the films in this week's assignment serve as examples of each type of the horror meta-narratives at the same time that they embody the two threats posed by the Soviet Union?

19. Why might the horror and science fiction genres be regarded as particularly well-suited to dramatizing Cold War ideas and attitudes?

20. Why is it a bad idea to thaw out invaluable scientific discoveries with thermite grenades? Why is it an even worse idea to hide ugly frozen aliens with electric blankets? And, why is it worst of all to walk up to a blood-sucking alien and say, "I'm your friend"? Finally, why do the plots of so many science fiction and horror narratives depend on such manifestly stupid acts?