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Article Excerpt
Broadly approached, the concept of genre--especially for film and most especially for Hollywood movies--raises questions located in the pull between repetition and variation, and it functions primarily for the containment of difference. Whether viewed from a taxonomic, ideological, semantic, or syntactical perspective, genre films, as Barry Keith Grant cleanly puts it, "tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations." (1) Furthermore, genre theory raises questions about the system of production, distribution, and consumption--about, that is, the complex processes that lead to clusters of films. With their homologous narratives, the seven Invasion of the Body Snatchers--three in prose, four on film--can be examined in terms of genre's pull-and-containment dynamic, particularly for the films, where just a slight shift in tone moves us from film noir to science fiction, from science fiction to horror. The upshots of these tonal shifts are best found in the works' last pages and final reels . As Thomas Sobchack observes, "in the genre film the plot is fixed, the characters defined, and the ending satisfyingly predictable." (2) His Aristotelian analysis can be supported, challenged, and enriched by considering this sequence of Body Snatchers, 1954 to 1993. For each work, we need to ask, What makes an ending "satisfyingly predictable"? And what accounts for these seven strikingly different endings that run through a full gamut of predictability and cathartic powers?
The seven versions, especially numbers one through six (Finney to Kaufman), share a basic narrative: Extraterrestrial entities with the ability to assume the shapes and the memories of human beings have landed somewhere in California (where else?). Before the Californians are absorbed into the aliens' synergetic collective, a few struggle to defeat the invaders. Whether or not the people avoid becoming absorbed into a parasitic symbiotic system with the aliens--that is, whether or not they stay human--is each narrative's most telling genre signal.
The invasion tale has a long history, stretching back at least to the Iliad. Its modem, jingoistic, and stereotypical variant becomes recognizable by 1871, with Sir George Chesney's The Battle of Dorking. I'm lingering for a moment over the word invasion even though it does not appear in the title of Jack Finney's 1954 Collier's magazine serial or in the title of his 1955 Dell paperback novel, which is based on, and twice the length of, the serial. Both are simply The Body Snatchers. Instead, it was Walter Wanger, Don Siegel's producer, who added The Invasion of in late 1955. In the Cold War era especially, the invasion tale found its way into the pages of pulp science fiction magazines and onto many a drive-in theater screen. These works oftentimes expressed-via metaphor, indirection, or spectacle-a fundamental double-bind, namely, the deeply conservative faith, on the one hand, that ever-new technologies will keep your side safe and, on the other hand, that you must expect the worst behavior from your enemi es. Even without the word invasion, Finney and Siegel bring this fantasy (?) of Realpolitik home to small town America, to a Thorton Wilder-ish Santa Mira, California. For his 1978 remake, director Philip Kaufman moves the action to a contemporaneous New Age San Francisco, and thereby effects a number of significant changes in mood and message (and costume). Lastly, Abel Ferrara sets his 1993 re-remake in the isolated, self-contained community of an Army base in rural Alabama, just alter the Gulf War. Ferrara's defarniliarizing shifts introduce the greatest changes in mood, message--and messengers. These changes are more extreme and more numerous than all those that came before, in versions two through six, combined. Nonetheless, Ferrara's movie depends, more than the other remakes and revisions, on its audience's knowing--via cultural osmosis, at least-the basic narrative and themes common to all seven texts?
My point is not to apply marketing labels to the three prose texts by Jack Finney and the four movies based on them (and, for the second, third,...
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