image: Wikimedia commons (link).
The 1955 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (which hit theaters in 1956 but which gives its date of production as MCMLV in the actual title and credits of the film) depicts a California town overrun by space-borne spores that grow into plant-like seed-pods capable of replicating individual men and women and children, absorbing their memories and individual characteristics, and then eliminating the original person, leaving only the alien replica.
The original written-text version of the story on which the film was based ran as a three-part serial in Collier’s weekly in 1954 and is in many ways better and more chilling than the 1955 film. Those three segments can be found in the archives of the Unz Review here: Part One (26 November, 1954) along with continuations here (starting on page 90) and here in that same issue, Part Two (10 December, 1954), Part Three (24 December, 1954), and the final section of Part Three which is not included in the previous link, available here. The text-version clears up many of the loose ends that were inexplicably missing from the film itself — details which make the metaphor shockingly urgent for the situation threatening the world today.
Because you and I are living in a very real and deadly version of the Body Snatchersright this moment, and unless we realize the situation we are in and take action, the conclusion of the story will be far less happy and far more bleak than anything described in the text or the movie
In the 1954 version of The Body Snatchers published in Collier’s, author Jack Finney (1911 - 1995) describes the spores that descend to Earth from outer space as growing into seed pods resembling fungal puff-balls, light in weight, enmeshed with a fibrous network of yellowish veins. Inside the pod is a “tangled fluffy substance,” grayish in color, thick and fluffy at first but capable of compressing itself into more solid form as it absorbs moisture and energy from living beings in its proximity.
When living matter comes near, or when the seed pods are placed near living matter, these invaders from space begin to form into a perfect replica of that living matter — slowly robbing the host of its vitality until, at the end of the process, the original organism collapses into dry, dust-like fluff, and the interstellar parasite assumes the form of its victim.
In a gripping scene found in the Collier’s version but inexplicably left out of the 1955 film, Jack Finney has the character of a college biologist and botany professor — who has actually already been replicated and replaced by one of the body snatchers — describe the details of the process to the first-person protagonist, the medical doctor Miles Bennell:
“The pods must fulfill their function [. . .] The function of all life everywhere — survival. Life exists throughout the universe, of course, but under conditions inconceivably different from ours. So of course the forms it takes are inconceivably different too. Some of that life exists on planets immeasurably older than ours. What happens, Doctor, when an ancient planet slowly dies? Well, the life form on it must prepare. For what? For survival, for leaving that planet. To arrive where? And when? There can be only one answer: universal adaptability, to any and all other life forms, to any and all other conditions it might possibly encounter. These pods have achieved it. They are completely evolved life, its ultimate form. For they have the evolved ability to re-form and reconstitute themselves into perfect duplication, cell for cell, of any life form they may encounter, in whatever conditions that life has suited itself for.”During this frightening discussion, the botany and biology professor, who has been replicated by this “ultimate form” of evolved life, reveals that he still retains the knowledge acquired by the professor before being assimilated (and evident in the above quotation by the use of the word “ours” when describing life on Earth), but that he now has the knowledge of the alien life-form that replicated the professor’s former body and turned the original to dust.
As the conversation goes on, the replicated professor increasingly uses “you” and “yours” to describe humanity, speaking from the perspective of the cold and uncaring “completely evolved” life-form that has come to this planet in order to devour it before moving elsewhere:
“Three hundred years ago, you doctors didn’t even know blood circulated. You thought it was a motionless fluid like water in a sack. And brain waves are only a recent discovery. Brain waves, Doctor! Actual electrical emanations from the brain in specific identifiable patterns, penetrating the skull to the outside, to be picked up, amplified and charted! You can sit and watch your own pattern on a screen. And not only the brain, but the entire body, every cell of it, emanates waves as individual as fingerprints, but you don’t believe that, do you? [. . .] Do you believe, though, that equally invisible waves can emanate from a room, travel silently through space, be picked up, and then echo every word, sound and tone to be heard in that original room? Your grandfather wouldn’t have, Dr. Bennell. But you do. You believe in radio. You even believe in television. [. . .] Yes, Dr. Bennell, your body contains its own pattern. All living matter does; it is the very foundation of cellular life. For it is composed of the tiny electrical force lines that hold together the atoms that constitute your being. And therefore it is a pattern, infinitely detailed, of the precise constitution of your body at any moment, altering with every breath you take, and with every second of time in which your body infinitesimally changes. And the pattern can be taken from you. During sleep, the body is at a low ebb, and then the pattern can be slowly transferred, absorbed like static electricity from one body to another. [. . .] And what happens to the original? The atoms that formerly composed you — once the electrical force lines are gone — are static, nothing, a pile of formless gray fluff. It can happen, does happen and rather easily. And you know that it has happened, and will happen to you.”
This disturbing explanation is completely absent from the 1956 film, as is the replicated professor’s concluding statement describing other planets that had been devoured and turned to dust by the space-borne invaders, and his declaration that:
“But just now, it’s the earth’s turn, the pods live again briefly; and when the life on earth is used up, the spores will move out into space once again, to drift for — it doesn’t matter how long, or to where. Eventually, they’ll arrive somewhere. They are the parasites of the universe, and they’ll be the final survivors in it.”
While many theories have been put forward over the intervening seven decades regarding what kind of metaphor might have been intended by these terrifying body-snatchers, Jack Finney himself apparently claimed to have no intentions to make his story a metaphor for anything in particular. In his Introduction to a “revised and updated” version of the original Collier’s story printed in a 2005 edition as part of the Stephen King Horror Library, Stephen King quotes Jack Finney as saying:
“I’ve always been amused by the contentions of people connected with the picture that they had a message of some sort in mind. If so, it’s a lot more than I ever did, and since they followed my story very closely, it’s hard to see how this message crept in. And when the message has been defined, it’s always sounded a little more simpleminded to me. The idea of writing a whole book in order to say that it’s not really a good thing for us all to be alike, and that individuality is a good thing, makes me laugh.”
Was Jack Finney being disingenuous when he proclaimed that anyone who had “a message of some sort in mind” regarding the significance of the body snatchers were doing “a lot more than I ever did”? Does his statement as quoted above really mean that drawing parallels about the story was more than Jack Finney ever thought to do?
Strictly speaking, that statement as quoted could actually be interpreted as meaning two very different things. It could mean what Stephen King implies that it means — that we should be cautious and beware of the tendency “to read deep meanings into simple doings.”
Or, it could alternately be taken to mean that Jack Finney is actually saying that making statements about what the message of the story might be is “a lot more than I ever did.” In other words, those who have given their interpretations have said more than Jack Finney has said. Or, to put it another way, he isn’t saying that he doesn’t have “a message of some sort in mind” — he’s saying that making that message public is “a lot more than I ever did,” because he didn’t want to say, for whatever reason.
He seems to say pretty bluntly that the interpretation that the whole story might be about the idea that “individuality is a good thing” is simply laughable (and wrong). That implies, not that the story doesn’t have a deeper message, but that in fact in probably does!
But what could that message have been?
See the full essay on my recently opened Substack page at undyingstars.substack.com