Invasion of the Body Snatchers/"The Beautiful Stranger"

In a way, it's a nightmare as old as humanity: what if we, or the ones we love, turned out to be imposters? How would we know? What would we do? And who would believe us if we told them?

Although billed as science fiction, most of the real drama of 1953's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is psychological. It opens on an almost bucolic note, as suburban doctor Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) returns from a medical conference and is picked up from the train station by his office nurse. Everything is fine, she says, except for a few strange complaints: Dr. Bennell's once and future flame Becky (Dana Wynter) has one. It seems her cousin Wilma Lentz is convinced that her Uncle Ira isn't really Uncle Ira. When the Doc visits, though, Ira seems his usual, pipe-smoking, grumbly self, by Wilma is unappeased; "There's something missing," she insists, "there's no emotion ... just the pretense of it." Miles does his best to reassure her, but between this and the rest of his patients -- many of whom, though seemingly anxious to see him while he was way, have cancelled their appointments.

Of course, it takes a while for him to realize that people are being replaced by pods placed by aliens in their basements, pods which -- as they mature -- take on the exact form and personality of the people they are to replace, only minus any genuine emotion or personality.

Dr. Bennell eventually regrets his initial failure to realize what's gone wrong -- in the frame narrative (added to the film after audiences found the original, uncertain ending too frustrating) he's explaining his story to an initially skeptical psychiatrist. At one point, in a voiceover, he muses that, as a doctor, he was quite used to people losing their individuality over time, just not so many or so quickly:

In my practice, I've seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn't seem to mind... All of us - a little bit - we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear.

It's this prescient awareness of the 1950's unawareness of itself that has endeared the film to later fans, and has given rise to the phrase "pod people" being applied to social conformists. The 1978 remake with Donald Sutherland in the lead role (and in which McCarthy has a brief but memorable cameo) is also worth seeing, for the same reasons.

With "The Beautiful Stranger," Shirley Jackson proposes a different kind of sudden replacement: for the young woman in this story, things seem to be going well enough, though her husband is hardly the sensitive, supportive type. But once the "beautiful stranger" arrives, we find ourselves sharing in an unexpected and volatile exuberance -- could this be true? There are some shades of another story, The Return of Martin Guerre, an 1982 film based on a far earlier event of a war veteran's unexpected return -- a double one, in fact. Indeed, after enough time, how do we know that a long-lost loved one is in fact the same one we loved so long ago? Jackson's trick here is that it has not, in fact, been "so long" -- in fact, it's only just been yesterday. In a way, it's also an inverse version of Body Snatchers, the sort of snatching that gives a soulless person a soul -- and yet it somehow unhinges the main character, sending her into a strange world where she almost no longer seems ... herself!

William Wilson/Mr. Pelham

Scene from "The Case of Mr. Pelham"

"It's usually considered bad luck to encounter your double, or your doppelgänger as they say in German. Unless, that is, you have an identical twin! The belief that it's unfortunate goes back at least to the Romantic era of the late 1790's and early 1800's, and is associated with many of its leading writers, and indeed Mary Shelley's creature in Frankenstein (1818) may in some ways be seen as Victor Frankenstein's monstrous double. Edgar Allan Poe took up the idea in his short story "William Wilson" (1839), which is also the only one of his stories to be set in his own childhood, at a school he attended in Stoke Newington, outside London. Dostoyevsy's The Double (1866) builds further on this, making his character's double as extroverted and gregarious as the original is timid and shy. And of course even Stevenson's classic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is such a tale, though the "hook" here is that they are, in fact, the same man.

But it's with film, and especially television, that the idea of doubles really takes off; through the technique of masking, it's actually quite easy to put two separate images of the same actor on the same screen. Alfred Hitchcock had great fun with the idea in "The Case of Mr. Pelham" (1955, shown above), and the concept took a comedic turn with the "identical cousins" of the Patty Duke Show. Horror master David Cronenberg elevated the story to new heights in his Dead Ringers (1988), a tale of twin Canadian gynecologists, both played by Jeremy Irons, which is -- almost unbelievebaly! -- based on a true story. And of course the much-awaited "third season" of David Lynch's Twin Peaks revolved almost entirely around the idea, with "good" Cooper -- trapped for a time in the life of "Dougie Jones" -- battles with the bad one. Lynch prefers the term tulpa -- but it comes down to much the same thing, and person.

So give us your thoughts on this story -- and, as with our previous post, feel free to make use of these discussion questions (you need only answer one) if you like.

Us

 It's one of the grimmest takes on the age-old theme of the double or döppelganger -- here, one's replacements stand, zombie-like, at the edge of one's driveway, waiting for their moment, baseball-bats in hand. But it begins, as do so many tales of doubling, with a single uncanny moment, when Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) encounters her double in (where else?) a house of mirrors at a carnival. The mirrors provide an apt scene, but also introduce the critical element of doubt: could it all just be in her head?

We fast-forward to adult Adelaide, still haunted by this childhood trauma, on vacation with friends. She's still cautious about large public places, and the beach is no resort for her, especially after she catches a glimpse of a man on a stretcher carried by paramedics, and -- soon after -- a seeming double of that man, bloodied and strange.

And then the fun begins: the lurking menacing mute gathering of the döppelgangers, a little closer to home in each shot. When they come, their resemblance becomes still creepier; we see them mimic the actions of their 'originals,' but in a weirdly clumsy manner. Then the killing begins.

We learn that these doubles are the "tethered" -- creatures linked to those they so resemble, and seeking to free themselves by killing the originals and severing the  ropes that tie them to them. It's a strange sort of linkage in which -- at least in one sense -- their murderous rampages are almost a cry for freedom. Adelaide, of course, is the only one who really understands all this, and it's her struggle -- and her final battle with her own tethered replicant -- that brings the film around to its final denouement.

So what does Us add to the long tradition of doubles? Are its concept of the "tethered" and its "science experiment" explanation any different from the usual suspects? And is its ending somehow creepier or more meaningful than that of earlier such tales? And do you sense the political undertones of this film, perhaps agreeing with Jordan Peele that, untimately, "all horror films are political"? (see his interviews here and here).

Your thoughts here.

Charles Chesnutt's Conjure Tales

Charles W. Chesnutt was one of the most prominent African-American writers and community leaders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  He and I share a hometown -- Cleveland, Ohio -- which was, in his day, a powerful engine of industry and social mobility; by mine it had become a much-reduced city better known for its burning river than its cultural output. Still, Cleveland has always had a sort of attitude -- a 'tougher than the rest' outlook that has kept its place on the map secure,

Chesnutt thrived, like Poe, in a journalistic era, one where excellence in short stories and essays could win one a precarious place in the public eye. And, in his "conjure" stories, he actively reclaimed African-American traditions, folklore, and humor, from a time when they had been largely re-appropriated by white writers. Prominent among these was Joel Chandler Harris, who collected genuine Black folktales featuring such recurrent characters as "B'rer Rabbit," "B'rer Bear," and "B'rer Fox," and then re-cast them through the imagined voice of an older Black man he created and called "Uncle Remus." In that guise, told to a young white boy, tales that might otherwise have been deprecated became iconic -- for decades, Uncle Remus was the bestselling children's book in America; Theodore Roosevelt read it to groups of children and invited Harris to join them at the White House.

But of course this was a problem, especially given that the tales were written in exaggerated "Black" dialect -- which is where Chesnutt came in. Well-aware of Harris's tales and their popularity, he decided to work to "signify" upon them, creating an alternate interlocutor -- one "Uncle Julius" -- who, though seemingly aiming to please his presumptively white listeners, was in fact taking them all for a ride -- by turning his seemingly "quaint" tales against their white hearers. It was an effect greatly appreciated by his readers, and which led eventually to a collection of tales that rivaled Harris's own. Chesnutt very ably mimicked Harris's mimicry -- in almost a sort of "SNL" spirit -- and showed how, in a very essential way, all stories are about power -- that of the speaker as well as that of the listener. 

In 1946, twelve years after Chesnutt's death, the Walt Disney Company decided to turn Joel Chandler Harris's versions of these folktales into a feature film, Song of the South. It was an unrepentant version, full of the sort of magical Black figurations that, while seemingly celebrating that tradition, turned it into a muted and cartoonish version of itself. It's now kept securely under lock and key, though bootleg versions exist, and Disney's own "Splash Mountain" attraction retained the characters -- though this is soon to be replaced by "Tiana's Bayou Adventure."

The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

It's one of the foundational tales of the Romantic movement, an exemplar of horror ('the nightmare life-in-death was she') and grim irony ('water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink'). Its also one of the few of the Lyrical Ballads to actually be a ballad (there are a few others in ballad stanza, but only one or two -- perhaps "We are Seven" -- that really embody the ballad's mixture of lyricism and repetition). And it's proven very durable, still an engaging read in an era in which the combination of the words 'narrative' and 'poetry' elicits a sense of dread -- not of the horror of the tale but the tedium of the form.

Coleridge originally wrote the poem in mock-antique orthography, with "ancient" spelled old-style as "antient," and "mariner" with a completely unnecessary final e as "marinere." Happily, he abandoned this in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, and added helpful side-notes, an early instance of a poet annotating his own work. He chose for its setting the extremes of the ocean, evoking both the Sargasso Sea (a mid-ocean area with much floating vegetation where ships were often becalmed) and the Antarctic -- the mariner's headlong careening south is a journey similar to what we read from Poe  in "MS. Found in a Bottle." The natural sublime, in the form both of the sea's teeming with unknown life, and the sterile and hostile cold of the realm of ice, is perfectly framed here, and the supernatural elements are perfectly integrated into the natural ones. And of course the mariner shoots the albatross, which is later hung about his neck by the superstitious sailors -- giving us a metaphor that's still in political use today.

As I mentioned in class, it's an excellent poem to hear read aloud -- one my favorite versions is by Sir Richard Burton -- though Ian McKellan also does a reasonably good turn, and says "greybeard loon" with real feeling.

Whistle and I'll Come For You, my Lad ...

Everyone likes a good old-fashioned ghost story -- and no one wrote them better than the British author M.R. James. Although he had a very successful academic career, eventually becoming the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and later the Provost of Eaton, his little side-career of writing ghost stories has proven to be his most lasting legacy.

Although varied in their subjects, a good many of them involve professors and antiquarians, either conducting research or else on holiday, who stumble upon some ancient text, cryptic stained-glass window, or mysterious artifact. The whistle at the center of "Whistle and I'll Come To You" is perhaps the most famous, with its two inscriptions in Latin: Quis est iste qui vent ("Who is this who is coming?") and Fur fla bis fle ("Thief, blow twice, go mad"). But wait -- saying anything more would ruin the story!

One of the reasons that James's tales have had such staying power is that their brief, economical structure made them ideal for adaptation to the new medium of television, with nearly fifty separate versions of various tales, including episodes of Night Gallery, Mystery and Imagination, Omnibus, and Ghost Stories for Christmas (with Christopher Lee). "Whistle and I'll Come To You" has actually been done twice by the BBC. The first was in 1968 starring Michael Hordern (a veteran character actor whom some may recall as Vincent Price's first victim in 1973's Theatre of Blood); the second, made in 2010, features John Hurt. The different ways in which each is handled tell us something about the durability of James's stories, as well as the way a director's mind works -- what's the essence of the story? Is there another angle which could open it up to a fresh treatment? And for the actor, who has the challenging task of portraying a rational, educated man faced with something no rational mind could grasp, there's certainly a lot of great material in James's Professor Parkin; personally, I think Hordern captures it best -- a man perpetually on the edge of knowing what to do, shunned a little for his awkwardness, brilliant but easily perplexed. In this class, though, it's you who will be the judge!

Please choose one of these discussion questions and post your answer below:

The Sandman

A generation before Poe, when the idea of a gothic horror story was decidedly more a German than an English or American notion, E.T.A. Hoffmann was widely regarded as the master of the genre. Not all of Hoffmann's stories involved horror as such -- but they were all "tales," in the sense that they set aside, for a moment, all the particularities of everyday life and took place in a generalized, imaginary realm halfway between moralistic parables and frightening fancies, where children were quite often in the thrall of cruel and unpredictable adults, and fears took palpable form. His tales in many ways resemble those of the Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, which were first published just four years before "Der Sandmann."

Hoffmann was also a musician and a stage director, with the result that his tales often have  a theatre-like three-act structure, with powerful visual imagery and strong atmosphere. These have led them to be frequently adapted for stage, and later for screen; among the more notable versions have been Arthur Saint-Léon's "Coppélia" (1870), Offenbach's opéra fantastique "Tales of Hoffmann" (1881), Powell and Pressburger's 1951 film based upon it, and Paul Berry's 1993 Oscar-nominated stop-motion animation "The Sandman." Most recently, the young German director S. Andreas Dahn has brought out a relatively faithful period version, one which -- alas -- is not yet available on disc or streaming; the image above is of "Bela B." Felsenheimer in the title role.

But there's much more to this story than its dramatic touches, and vivid imagery. There's the primal scene of a child excluded from the adult world, the implicit threat of the Sandman, stealer of eyes (Freud read this as a displaced threat of castration), and the peculiar charms -- or lack thereof -- of an automaton woman. We often think that we today -- with our Terminators, cyborgs, replicants, and other semi-human robotic figures -- have invented the uncanny notion of a non-human human being, but in fact the idea is far older, going well back into the eighteenth century. Some of the automata built then still exist today, such as Maillardet's writing automaton. This small boyish figure, designed to sit at a writing desk and draw, was hard to identify when it was deposited at the steps of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute many years ago. Under patient care, its mechanism was restored, and a pen placed in its hand -- after which it produced six drawings, one of which the machine itself "signed," declaring, "I am the automaton of M. Maillardet" -- and so it identified itself (the idea was incorporated by David Selznick into his graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which was adapted as a film by Martin Scorsese.

So read -- start with the introduction, the section on The Sandman, then the story, then the notes. I suspect you will soon join the ranks of those haunted by its peculiar, shadowy scenes. Then choose one of this week's discussion questions, and post your answer below.