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!