Capgras Syndrome

It seems interesting to note that the idea of others being inhabited by or replaced by impostors is based on an actual psychological syndrome: The Capgras Syndrome. What happens to an individual with Capgras is that they suddenly believe that their loved ones and friends (usually just focused on one in particular) are no longer themselves, and have been replaced by an imposter. Despite their loved one's exact appearance and behavior, they do not recognize them as the same person and insist that they are a fraud. The person afflicted with Capgras even recognizes that the 'imposter' looks the same and acts in familiar ways, but cannot recognize them as the person they love.
As Shelina points out in her post, one excellent interpretation of the doubles in the film replacing their originals, is that of 1950's Americans losing themselves to McCarthyism. Further, the idea of communism infiltrating American society as these pod people and living among originals as normal. This relates to the Capgras Syndrome quite well. However, it is mental illness on the side of the people who perceive these pod people to be imposters. This seems to complicate Shelina's idea that it is the people who are losing themselves to ideas like McCarthyism and Communism. Could it be that this is a comment on McCarthy himself and the people surrounding him who had the idea that Soviet spies were replacing Americans? It seems that he and his committees are the ones who are being afflicted, as Capgras affects the beholder.
With this idea, it is interesting that the Capgras Syndrome can be spread with force. Indeed, McCarthy would compel people to list suspect people. In many ways, the fact that he and the committee forced people to inform on their friends, relates to this idea of the Capgras Syndrome.

Paranoia

In the book I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, Walter Mirisch writes: "Neither Walter Wanger nor Don Siegel, who directed it, nor Dan Mainwaring, who wrote the script nor the original author Jack Finney" saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers as an allegory for McCarthyism. The film's star, Kevin McCarthy, also dismissed this analogy in an interview with the Bangor Daily News in 1997, saying, "There was no assignment of political points of view when we were making the film." These denials raise two interesting questions about the movie. If it was only intended to be a sci-fi thriller, why are viewers and critics so eager to read allegory into it? And if it was intended as an allegory, why would the creators deny this?

I wonder if The Invasion of the Body Snatchers can be read as a practical joke on the viewers who are eager to read allegory into everything. One of the movie's major themes in paranoia, experienced not only by the characters on screen, but also by the audience, who must also wonder at every moment who is real, and who has become a copy. In fact, this paranoia appears to summarize reactions to the movie as a whole, both in the immediate viewing experience, and in the criticism regarding it. "Think about it, and then you'll know that the trouble is inside you," Miles tells Wilma, after she tells him that her uncle isn't really her uncle, and the line suggests a new way of looking at the movie: that the problem is inside the viewer. The "trouble" is their own fear and paranoia that others are not who they appear to be, that their community has been infiltrated, that something indistinct and almost inexpressible is wrong with the people around them. If the film can be read as an indictment of McCarthyism or as fear of a Communist infiltration of America (and the fact that critics have read it as both suggests the weakness of the supposed allegory), it can also be read as a teasing attack on paranoia itself. Although this analysis could be used to support either side of this debate ("It's an attack on McCarthyism because it mocks the fear of infiltration!" "It's in support of McCarthyism, mocking the fear that it is dangerous to Americans!"), it could also be said to mock both camps by invoking their mutually exclusive fears simultaneously. The same movie has been considered an allegory for two perspectives that are, by their very nature, utterly contradictory. At least one group of critics must be paranoid, projecting their own political concerns onto this fantastical horror movie.

The film leaves many questions about the pod people unanswered, bringing their very nature into question. If they can take on any form they like, why would the pod people need to copy bodies? Why do they need to replace the original? Why does the replacement have all of the original's memories? What happens to the original bodies? The transformation of Becky was particularly troubling, as it was unclear (at least to me) when the replacement took place. On first viewing, it looked as though Becky fell asleep on screen and was replaced as Miles kissed her. However, this does not make sense if the originals are actually replaced by the pod bodies. I was also troubled by the scene immediately preceding this, when Miles discovered that the pods were capable of beautiful singing. Becky says that the singing "means we're not the only ones left to know what love is," assuming that only someone human, someone with emotions, could produce such a sound. When they discover that the "inhuman" and "unfeeling" pod people produced the singing, does it therefore suggest that they are not as "inhuman" as Miles has believed? Could it in fact suggest that the whole idea of the pod people was paranoia on the part of Miles, a paranoia that the audience then fed upon, bringing it to reflect political problems they saw in their own lives?

The Influence of Media on Society in The Time Machine

The First Time Traveller - Edison & the Phonograph

tags: media theory, technology & war, manipulation of media, socialism vs. capitalism vs. communism, McCarthyism

“From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I, a series of sweeping changed in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space.” (Kern 1)

In 1877, Edison invented the phonograph, and in doing so, changed the history not only of communications and media, but also the history of consciousness itself. Suddenly for the first time, a voice could be recorded at one point in time and played back in a completely different time. Through the phonograph, and the recording of sound, even the dead could speak, and many during the time period wrote of the uncanny sensation of hearing voices from beyond the grave. An entirely new conception of time came about as the phonograph (and soon after, in 1887, the gramophone) allowed people to preserve a moment in time and space, and bring that moment back later on. In some ways then, Edison was the first Time Traveller – the first inventor able to take people into the future.

 It’s perhaps no surprise then that by 1895, H. G. Wells’ Time Traveller asks his audience (as Cooper notes, both the diegetic audience of his friends, and the extra-diegetic audience of the reader) to reconsider the very nature of time itself, and to reexamine the question of whether human beings are truly locked in a specific time –humans had already achieved the ability to travel to the future via the recorded sound of their voices!