Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
The citizens of a California town are being turned into emotionless automatons! The body is snatched when the victim is asleep; an alien seed pod births a rubbery replica in hissing foam. If you go to sleep you will never wake up again. An agile allegory, like the Matrix, it may be applied in nearly any situation of mass social change. And yet also, like the Matrix, its politics are on its face because the cops are in on the snatching. This is the ACAB school of film criticism. is your movie allegory pro-cop or anti-cop? This movie, responding directly to the McCarthy era—in which the law was used to enforce the Hollywood blacklist—is an anti-cop movie. Yet its focus on sleep/awake gives it a still more current application in our own time of restlessness, where “wokeness” is not a performance on Instagram but rather having woken up into a systematic nightmare that has been going on for some centuries—and that is modernity itself; a catastrophe that is only accelerating, so that you cannot go to sleep again; especially if sleep means that you become one of them: an unfeeling pro-cop consumer, blithely oblivious to all the blood, torture, death, and terror that is the basis of our society. Given the horribleness and exhaustion of being awake, it should come as no surprise why some people today—in fact a great many people—not only do not want to wake up, but would coerce you to join them in their mindless dreamworld, patrolled by men with guns.
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