The Invasion of the Tombs (1977) by Philip Kaufman

CINEMA – The Invasion of the Tombs is based on a novel by Jack Finney (1911-1984) entitled Invasion of the Body Snatchers, published in 1955. It is one of those very interesting second-rate works, more so due to the theme deployed than the style of writing.

There were several cinematographic versions of this story: first in 1956 with the version of Don Siegel, quite faithful to the novel, but rather crudely crafted. Then in 1977, that of Philip Kaufman. In 1994, Abel Ferrara directed Body Snatchers,very little captivating. The last one, in 2007, under the title Invasion by Oliver Hirschbiegel, is quite banal.

Best version< /h5>

The best and most terrifying is that of Philip Kaufman. If he is not a great director, he has the quality here to push the theme to its ultimate limits and to avoid an optimistic ending while revisiting the original story. This novel should, hopefully, find a filmmaker of stature to formally give it a brilliant accomplishment and elevate it to the rank it deserves.

Let us note before entering the story that Jack Finney must have been inspired by Capgras syndrome, also called “lookalike illusion”. Joseph Capgras (1873-1950), a French psychiatrist, described in L'Illusion des sosies this chronic delirium in 1923 in which a 53-year-old woman claimed that her relatives and herself had several lookalikes.

On this canvas, the film fits into the line of New Hollywood which is inspired, with much more talent, filmmakers from the highly overrated French New Wave who deconstructed the story and narration with the use of fragmented shots and so-called “floating” cameras shot in natural settings.

Despite this flaw, the filmmaker conveys a captivating climate. This work has a dark vision while diverting the theme towards other horizons. Originally, and perhaps it was Jack Finney's idea, it targeted communists, accused of secretly invading the United States during the era of McCarthyism. They were infecting Americans with a sneaky ideology that wanted to replace the liberal way of life. Don Siegel's film was part of this lineage. In reality, and this is the contribution of Philip Kaufman and his screenwriter, the theme directly targets consumer society, and more broadly as we will see.

Spores

The credits with its spores leaving a planet to spread across the Earth are already worrying. In a few shots, we are shown their spread on the leaves of trees, among others, where they begin to weave branches to hatch pretty flowers…

Elisabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), an employee of the Department of Health in San Francisco, discovers strange flowers starting to grow on the trees in her neighborhood. Children pick some. Elisabeth collects one, studies it and tries to identify its origin. She finds her lover, Geoffrey (Art Hindle), a dentist with a passion for football, and explains to him that it is a grex, the cross-pollination between two species which produces a third, totally unique one. The latter does not seem to pay attention to it. Elisabeth places a glass with the flower and the next day, she finds that Geoffroy's behavior has changed. Sure enough, he became cold and distant.

This is the starting point of strange events which will take place and which will threaten the peaceful appearance of everyday life. The garbage collectors who reappear several times of course evoke the consumer society which eliminates its waste, except that this waste here is very particular.

Elisabeth confides in Matthew Bonnell (Donald Sutherland), a food hygiene specialist and work colleague (the funny scene in an Italian restaurant where he discovers rat droppings that the chef mistakes for a caper). Matthew doesn't take her seriously when she tells him that Geoffrey is no longer Geoffrey. But the next day while carrying clothes to a Chinese dry cleaner, his owner also tells him that his wife is no longer really his wife.

Elisabeth is on edge. She talks to Matthew at one point in the car and thinks there's a conspiracy: the city is totally changing. She tells him that she followed her lover meeting strange individuals throughout the day while exchanging strange packages. Suddenly, they witness an accident where a man appears in front of them yelling that it will soon be their turn, that they are all in danger. The man runs away and is run over by a car.

Comedian Kevin McCarthy was the one who played the lead role in the first version. The film thus distills a paranoid atmosphere by showing several shots with individuals with fixed or strange gazes or by making ambulance sirens scream.

The lookalikes are multiplying. Paranoia sets in. Matthew tries to distract Elisabeth by dragging her to a party where his psychologist friend, David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), is to sign a book for the general public. There, a hysterical woman tries to convince her audience that her husband's behavior has also changed, that he is an imposter. When Jack Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum), a friend of Matthew's, visits his girlfriend, Nancy Bellicec (Veronica Cartwright), who runs an eco-friendly bathhouse, they witness the discovery of a body lying on a table, as in a cocoon, strangely resembling Jack. Nancy is terrified. We call Matthew to the rescue.

He worries about Elisabeth, breaks into her apartment without his companion's knowledge, and discovers his double germinating. He kidnaps his sleeping friend and runs away. Returning to the bath, he is told that Jack's double has disappeared. At Elisabeth's where the Police are present, twice as many have also evaporated. The paranoid climate increases, because little by little, the whole city seems contaminated, witness the collusion between the inspector and Geoffrey. Soon, San Francisco falls prey to genetic mutations that spread panic throughout the city. The threat appears in the film not only invisible, but invincible and insidious.

Metamorphoses

Elisabeth gradually understands that plants metamorphose into human beings and replace the people around her. We find the questions of the time concerning the industrialization of civilization after May 68. Flowers can also bring to mind the flower-power movement of the hippies, because the flower was one of the symbols of their non-violent ideology.

The turning point of the film is when the small group is gathered at Matthew's house at night. After a bitter discussion, the latter goes to rest in the garden. He lies down in a deckchair and falls asleep. Little by little, the plant takes possession of it and copies it. It is the nightmare that invests reality itself. It is in this sense that the idyllic world is not as innocent as we believed and which blossoms here in what has been called the New Hollywood, where criticism of consumer society gives birth to benefactor monsters , standardizing all beings.

Horrific and sticky scene of replication as if we were witnessing a second instantaneous birth opposed to the usual one , benefactor and happy. Nancy manages to wake him up and everyone realizes that a manhunt is taking place: they are being pursued by “replicants”. Matthew hesitates to destroy the clones of his friends, a significant moment of hesitation where he has difficulty eliminating the duplicates of his friends by their disturbing resemblance. However, he does not hesitate to destroy his clone in the process.

If we stick to a superficial reading, it is only a banal science fiction film with a conspiratorial or paranoid aspect. Yet, behind this story, it reveals unsuspected possibilities.

First of all, in the middle of an ecological period, spores invade the Earth, develop into magnificent flowers, casting a sort of curse on nature. These pretty flowers are picked innocently by the locals, and that is precisely the trap. Placed near sleeping people, they weave a stringy mesh around them and replace them with a totally identical double that emanates from a pod. The idea is that this change takes place without the sleepers knowing, transforming them into an emotionally cold being, no longer having classic human reactions. They are cannibalized, devoured or vampirized without their knowledge. Old theme of sleep where the human being loses consciousness of himself, governed by a world that he does not control, but which lives inside him like a stranger.

Eaten by his clone

Magnificent theme of the double: the similar is no longer different from the original. He absorbs it and yet, he is not the same. It is this confusion that is terrifying. It is not the appearance of monsters that frightens, but the original which has lost its own qualities, replaced by a duplicate without being distinct from the original. And this loss is felt by the fact that human beings have the impression that their fellow human beings are no longer really themselves. And even more terrifying, these are their loved ones, people who live with them every day and who, suddenly, are strangers to them. The human devoured by his clone. The book and the film then ask this crucial question: what makes someone really someone in our eyes ? What is this mysterious singularity that we have chosen, and which, there, disappears in the to the point that, while retaining his carnal appearance, his authentic identity has disappeared. Where is the border between what is human and non-human, between singularity and impersonality ?

The initial theme implements the fantastic reality of the world. Let us repeat: what is terrifying is the friend, the lover, the mistress, the neighbor, etc., in short the known and the everyday which become strangers, unknowns which change completely without changing appearance. Dizzying wobble. They pass to the other side without being able to really be distinguished at the moment. It only took a few hours to make them switch between the moment when they were fleeing the mutants and the moment when they found themselves as cultists pursuing their loved ones. Twinning of doubles. The twin brothers devouring each other to lose themselves in the undifferentiated.

We inevitably think of Eugène Ionesco's play, Rhinoceros, whose characters, possessed by the desire to imitate and be similar to each other, transform into rhinoceroses. Spreading from a small provincial town, this rhinocerocification takes on such proportions that it contaminates, like a pandemic, the entire world. In the end, only one man remained, Berenger, who decided not to capitulate.

We also notice the relationship with virality, here, monstrous which seizes its host, the pirate from the inside as viruses sometimes do: either by surviving in its host while infecting it, or by committing suicide by the same occasion upon the death of the latter. Here, he does it in these two ways: he kills him by making him reborn completely differently. We can rightly ask ourselves how Nature can produce such a thing. But as we are an integral part of it, such a process is global and we cannot escape it. Strange, difficult to explain mechanism of Nature promoting both life and death in the same general movement.

Control and assimilation of others

The goal of these extra-terrestrials (which we will never see, a simple pretext obviously) is to build a harmonious society, without war, without conflict, without economic crisis, but also without love and without hatred, as for achieve a form of purity. It is no coincidence that the film dangles this idyll where humans would finally be freed from humans. Like these pretty flowers that hide complete evil behind an innocent appearance. Anyone who is likely to succumb to the mirage, to be part of the friendly lynch mob, to repudiate their personality and their singularity, their task, to point out the culprit without ever understanding anything.

Everything that was human, beautiful and imperfect, is erased, denounced, accused by some tribunal with a raised finger. This shows that the theme, in this version, really takes off to criticize the consumer society of this era which “manufactures” individuals similar to each other (something even more true these days!), but all ideological system, religious or not, democratic or not, politico-economic which attempts to erase this human singularity for a mythical paradise where Man would become purified of his initial task, of his shadow side to be similar to all the others , freed from his malaise. “Nostalgia for paradise is man's desire not to be a man”, wrote Milan Kundera wonderfully in The Unbearable lightness of being. We then realize that the theme has incredible resonances to indicate what has always ruined human societies.

There is a formidable mechanism here where the human mind attempts in a brutal or gentle way to take hold of others, to assimilate them, to control them in order to either destroy them or integrate them without leaving them any more control. small autonomy or the smallest singularity. And to close it all, being convinced that he is doing this for good, to denounce or lynch while designating the other as being the enemy of total evil. René Girard analyzed all this very well about mimetic desire in his most famous book Romantic lie and romantic truth. 

The discovery of the film is this terrible cry like a dirty cough that the mutants let out while pointing the finger at the human being who betrayed himself by an emotion, designating him for vindictiveness and pursued relentlessly. From then on the manhunt is on… Mimetic crowd where everyone imitates everyone else. Lynching mob pointing a vengeful finger at the supposed enemy. Adulterinous women in The Scarlet Letterof Nathaniel Hawthorne to whom a red letter is affixed to their clothing, religious people condemning atheists as in the old days, Stalinists pursuing religious people, peasants or traitors, up to the present day where as in China with the credit system social which displays bad individuals, sidelined, ridiculed by good students. Or even the community tribes (feminists, LGBT, Queer, etc., other contemporary symbols, which attack beings “in the norm”. The theme is reversible everywhere and all the time, crossing all borders, and in everyone the world, because everyone believes themselves to be unharmed or believes themselves to be untouchable, pure. The philanthropic manhunt. The hunted of yesterday will become the persecutors of today.

Mask

Even if the film is not completely accomplished in its style, it touches on something essential. The 2007 version will highlight this problem, poorly studied in its narration and its staging, in the last sentence of the film:

We therefore understand the terror of people who want to keep their uniqueness, but who find themselves persecuted by the right-thinking people of the moment. In this regard, the mechanism nowadays has been perfected. It has been reversed into its opposite since it is done in the name of Good, love and equality.

The rest of the film is terrible. The small group is on the run and decides to separate, Matthew remaining with Elisabeth. The latter try to reach the airport by taxi, but the driver denounces them. They are forced to flee again and find refuge in the office. There they are quickly spotted and David Kibner and Jack arrest them. David gives them a sedative when Matthew manages to overpower his former friend and kills Jack.

It is Nancy whom he meets on the stairs who gives them the solution: ironically, to go unnoticed, normal human beings must imitate mutants by not letting any of their emotion show, a warning sign of their future transmutation. But if the ruse works for a moment, it has a flaw at the slightest emotion: the symptom image of the film is that of this horrible dog with a human face which makes Elisabeth jump, as if the mask of these mutants was finally falling. Nancy manages to escape, but Matthew and Elisabeth are chased again. They find refuge in a truck which takes them to the town's pod factory.

After a moment of absence, Matthew witnesses Elisabeth's metamorphosis in his arms. Her clone gets up and tells her that she is free. While Matthew flees again and again, and manages to ransack the shed where the pods are grown, Elisabeth designates him as the enemy to be defeated, she who was so kind and so gentle.

The ending is totally dystopian. One by one, the characters in the film have given up their being, their personality, in their sleep. One by one, they are swallowed, engulfed to transform into an inessential and impersonal being. Even Matthew, who fought tirelessly against mutants, becomes one, pointing with his finger and his terrifying cry to the only person who has remained intact, human. The last image where we see him, finger outstretched and bellowing, the camera tightening on his face then on his mouth, is a horrifying cinematographic image, always present in my memory, and which refers to the oldest human impulse which destroys all civilization.

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