Politics and Hollywood in the Post War Period

1. The film community has been active in politics since the beginning, and it continues to be so. Think of the obvious: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Governator, Ronald Reagan becomes President, Fred Dalton Thompson goes from films to the Senate and then to Law & Order. George Clooney is perhaps as good an example of a politically engaged film person as we have now.

2. Just as the film community has been engaged in political activity, so too have people in power been intent on monitoring the political influence of Hollywood. Remember Joe Lieberman who sided with the Republicans in their desire to control the products of the film industry.

History:

Let’s begin in the 1930s and run through 1947 when things really began to heat up.

The Depression

The New Deal and Roosevelt

The Screen Writers Guild and unions generally

-familiar goals: higher wages, fewer hours, regularized hiring practices, standardized contracts, and arbitration.

Red baiting and the Dies Committee 1938

-Martin Dies (D-Tex) chaired the Dies Committee, a branch of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities – later known as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)

1939 and the Anti-Nazi League

-the war years saw an abatement of pressure on the unions.

-Russia was an ally

-1944 and the creation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (Sam Wood, Adolphe Menjou, Walt Disney)

1945 and renewed suspicion

-the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Daughters of the American Revolution, Knights of Columbus, etc. actively work to expose Communist influence in America.

- J. Parnell Thomas and HUAC

-Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 – a sort of early Patriot Act.

-October hearings and the Hollywood Ten: Edward Dmytryk, Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz, Herbet Biberman, Adrian Scott, Lester Cole (Bertolt Brecht)

-renewed hearings in 1951

- the famous McCarthy hearings from 1950 and 1954 had nothing directly to do with HUAC because McCarthy was a Senator (from Wisconsin) and HUAC was a Committee of the House of Representatives. However, both the McCarthy campaign against Communists and HUAC are manifestations of the same paranoia..

-Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Trial in 1951 and Execution in 1953

The Blacklist (and Graylist)

-lives ruined, freedom of speech checked, fear and paranoia.

-dovetails with Cold War mentality and fear of nuclear devastation.

American individualism versus communist collective thinking surfaces in films such as High Noon and Silver Lode.

Noir reflects something of the paranoia of this period. We have a time of great optimism and surface cheerfulness (“What, me worry?” Alfred E. Newman).

-look back at advertisements of the 1950s and see the glory of new appliances, suburban neatness, shiny cars (cars began to have shape and colour), and fancy duds. Ostensibly, this was a Happy Hour – a time of upbeat feeling.

The Jungle:

-films such as Blackboard Jungle, Kiss Me Deadly, The Big Knife, The Asphalt Jungle, High School Confidential, The Big Heat, Creature From the Black Lagoon, Touch of Evil, etc. revealed the fear of social disintegration and corruption.

-films such as Big Jim McClain (1952), I Married a Communist (1950), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) fed the fear of communism. We have seen touches of this in Johnny Guitar and Pickup on South Street.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

-‘Body snatcher’ is an old term for someone who robs graves. As Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) observes in the film, people had begun to lose their humanity before the strange epidemic began in Santa Mira (‘mira’ means ‘look’ and it reminds us of ‘mirror’). People have not looked at themselves for some time; rather they have allowed a sameness to take over, a taking for granted that results in a Borg-like homogeneity.

-today, such homogeneity is sometimes attributed to consumerism, that is, to the very forces that set out to stamp out communist sameness in the 1940s and 50s.

-‘invasion’ suggests both warfare and alien attack. In the film, Miles speculates that something may have come from outer space. Science fiction had postulated, at least since the time of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898), the possibility of alien invasion.

-another of Miles’s speculations is that the strange epidemic results from some nuclear fallout. This is mild, but nevertheless telling. The film does take place in the mid fifties when the fear of nuclear devastation was real and visceral. Note the town siren that sounds near the end of the film. This is a reminder of the sirens placed strategically in many North American urban centers (including in the schoolyard of the school I attended when I was a boy).

-ultimately, the film posits some strange seeds from outer space generating the pod people. The notion is spurious, or at least silly. This is the point. The idea of seeds falling from space is difficult, if not impossible, to accept. Consequently, the viewer can look for another source for the pod people.

-we might say the same of the apparent “holes” in the plot: the arrival of a new body and the disappearance of the old one, the need for sleep to accomplish the full takeover. Why such silly oversights hardly matter is that the pod people are actually the same people who existed before the arrival of the pods. In other words, the pods are a device that signals the change from life-style to another, from life under capitalism to life under communism.

The Birthings:

-we have at least two images of “birth” in the film, one associated with the pods and the other associated with Miles and Becky. I doubt that we should make too much of this, but it is worth noticing.

-pod-birth: the scene in the greenhouse makes it clear that the pods are a sort of womb from which a forming body emerges. The connection of a re-birth into an emotionless existence with plant life is interesting. On one level, the connection with Soviet farming methods might be implied; on another level, the image associates soulless life (communism) with nature. The idea might be that communism is life in a state of nature (in all its ultimate brutality), whereas life under capitalism and democracy is human life, life that cultivates not natural tendencies but human ones such as family and love and relationship.

-we have two other “pod-births” in the film – one associated with Jack Belicec (King Donovan) and one associated with Becky. We see Jack’s pod body on his pool table and we see Becky’s pod body in a coffin-like box in her father’s basement. The pool table is a masculine image (more about this table later), but the coffin-like box in which Becky’s look-alike lies is a reminder of death.

-earth-birth: late in the film, Becky and Miles flee from the townspeople (and by the way, the filming of this chase with the two fugitives situated in relief high on a hill is reminiscent of all those horror films from the 30s in which the townspeople chase the monster. Here, the monsters are clearly not the fugitives – a reminder that something similar is at work in the ‘Frankenstein’ films.), and they take refuge in an old mine shaft. Here, they hide under some loose boards below the floor of the mine. They are in a sort of coffin. They emerge from this reborn, as it were, Becky soon to be a pod person and Miles soon to travel miles to find help. The birth here is something of a contrast to the pod births.

Setting:

-small town of Santa Mira. This America at its best, the small town where everyone knows everyone and where community rests on mutual trust and shared values.

-we see the railway station, main street, streets of clean, well-kept houses. This is Main Street, USA.

-family: Miles and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) have both been to Reno (i.e. they have both been divorced). This places them, to some extent, as outsiders in this small tight town. The word ‘divorce’ hardly appears in their conversation; they avoid using the word. In this world, divorce is a sad reality; the ideal is the close family. When a son thinks his mother is not his mother or a grown woman thinks her uncle is not her uncle, then something is truly rotten in State and Main.

-rural feel: This town has something of a rural feel with fruit and vegetable stands and a main square where farmers’ trucks gather, and where mowing the lawn is a regular activity. Back yards have green houses. This is not the urban jungle; it is pastoral. This is the kind of setting we see in such Spielberg films as E.T., Poltergeist, and Gremlins.

-people here are just “regular” people: family members, doctors, nurses, the cop on the beat, fathers and mothers.

Significance of rural setting:

-these people are the proletariat, close to the land and to labor associated with the land. We see late in the film, the extensive farm work just adjacent to the town. This may remind us of the clunky 5-year plans for both industrial and agricultural progress in the Soviet Union at this time. From the point of view of the west, these plans were dismal failures. Inefficiency was the order of the day when it came to collective organization and government run business.

-so let’s return to that fruit and vegetable stand we see right at the beginning of the film. Here is evidence of the failure of communism. Obviously, we have to suspend a bit of disbelief here. The good doctor has been away all of about 3 days. When he left, the fruit stand was in full flourish; when he returns, it is in disrepair, a mess. The point is that once these people have been “snatched” by the communist body (politic), they no longer can run an efficient and successful business.

-we also have care-givers: doctors, nurses, psychiatrists. The audience gave a laugh when Dr, Bennell gave Jimmy Grimaldi (Bobby Clark) a friendly pat on the bum. This gesture may be out of touch with the realities of 2010, but in the context of the film, it communicates affection and community and care. It suggests just how trusting this community is.

Alfred E. Newman

-let’s return to “What, me worry,” for a moment. The setting reflects a “what, me worry” world, as we have seen. This bright optimism is also apparent in the various mise en scenes. Interiors – living rooms, family rooms, kitchens – are neat, clean, bright, and ordered. Signs of prosperity are just about everywhere. This is the progressive fifties. What the film does is show the other side of this bright picture. It shows the “noir mirror.” In the still below we have the tight circle, men protectors on the outside, women inside. They inhabit a world of light and books, but all the light and all the books will not lift their burden.

Style:

-the style of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers owes much to expressionistic techniques by way of film noir. Note the sharp upward or downward angles, the shadowed rooms and corridors, and the crane shots. The camera follows characters like a surveillance officer. Often, we see them from above, an angle that accentuates their vulnerability. One noteworthy aspect of the filming is Siegel’s manner of shooting corridors. I’m not sure how he gets the effect, but when Becky and Miles are in the corridor outside his office, they are like trapped animals in a confined space. The corridor looks so narrow that two bodies sided by side are hardly possible. As the film moves from beginning to end, Miles and Becky find themselves more and more confined by walls, ceilings, and even floors (in the mine scene). Avenues of escape are few, even though Santa Mira is not far from Los Angeles.

-the noir lighting and camera angles signal the corruption at the heart of this world. Miles, like a noir hero, is trapped in a world he does not comprehend. He is incapable of controlling this world, and hence he becomes frantic. He is in danger of losing his sanity, and we have another instance of a theme we saw in Shock Corridor. The world is so frightening in its inhumanity that it can drive one crazy. (A side-note: often when we have shots of the main street of Santa Mira, we see the local drugstore. This is a “drugged” culture.)

Politics:

-Siegel never spoke of HUAC or communism when he talked of this film. He claims the film is an indictment of conformity and smallness of mind. The pod people, according to Siegel, are people without imagination or daring.

-perhaps the pod people are refugees from fear – the fear of nuclear war or of political tyranny. This reading might suggest the film is a comment on modernity (the post war fears of another war or of encroaching fascism or communism, both of which were considered obnoxious forms of mind control).

-but as we saw earlier, the real fear is the fear of a spreading plague of communism. The pod people are living zombies, human in everything but heart. They constitute a collective; individuality is ruled out in their world. They have no need for such things as emotion or faith. As we saw earlier, the dilapidated and neglected fruit and vegetable stand indicates their lack of initiative. We also know that they have little use for enjoyment; when Miles and Becky go out to dinner, they find a restaurant without any customers. Here is a place that used to have live music, but now can afford only a jukebox. The restaurant is on the verge of closing for lack of customers. Communists do not go out to dinner!

-on the surface, this film is another anti-communist statement. But might we not turn this reading of the film upside down and see the growing mindlessness as a result of consumerism (the bright kitchen appliances, the pool table and basement bars, the cars, the suburban houses and gardens)? Can we see what happens in Santa Mira as the result of an ideology that places all its interest and value in product rather than in the producer? We have that haunting moment near the end of the film when Becky and Miles hear music, what Becky refers to as “the most beautiful music” she has ever heard. When Miles goes to investigate, he discovers the huge pod operation at e nearby farm. As he watches from the hillside, a pod person goes to the cab of a truck and switches off the radio. The music dies. These workers have no need for music (i.e. for beauty or art or imagination).