Invasion Of The Body Snatchers Comparacion

Table of content

1. Introduction p. 2

2. Feminism p. 4

3. Representation of women in films p. 6

4. Invasion of the body snatchers (1956) p. 8

5. Invasion of the body snatchers (1978) p. 11

6. Conclusion p. 13

7. Bibliography p. 14

1. Introduction

The Body Snatchers is a novel written by JackFinney. The story was first serialized in Colliers Magazine in 1954 and a year later it was published in book form. It is a story about a doctor, Miles Bennett, who notices some strange things occurring in his fictional hometown, Mill Valley in California. It is a story about seedpods coming from out of space and descending on earth. These seedpods duplicate human beings while they are asleep andas such try to replace the entire human race. These duplicated humans have no feelings or emotions, but they do preserve all of the memories and characteristics of the original human. The story has been interpreted in several ways, but the usually accepted reading in the spirit of the fifties is that the seedpods represent communists. The story would be a representation of the “red scare” that wasoccurring in the fifties during the cold war in the United States and McCarthy’s witch hunt that was the result of this fear. Another more general message that is read into the story is that it would be about the loss of individuality or freedom. The pods take over and humans have no choice, they have to conform to their way. The novel was often criticized for the inaccuracy of thescientific aspect and the lack of incoherence. However, the novel was popular enough to be adapted to the screen several times. Only a year after the publication of the novel, Don Siegel directed a movie called Invasion of the Body Snatchers based on the story with a screenplay developed by Daniel Mainwaring. The movie was received very well and now it is considered as a science-fiction classic and one ofthe best movies made in 1956. This movie is interpreted in the same way as the novel as it was also produced in the atmosphere of the fifties and the Cold War. In 1978, Philip Kaufman decided to create a remake of Don Siegel’s movie, also called Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He slightly changed the characters and their mutual relations. Kaufman’s film is placed among the best film remakes. It isinterpreted differently from the novel and the first movie as it is set in a different socio-cultural environment. The film would be a representation of the conspiracies that were surfacing during the seventies, such as the Watergate scandal and the stories about brainwashing during the Vietnam War. Those scandals revealed that the government systematically withheld important information for thepublic. During this decade there was also a scare of the concept of conformity, which could be linked to the general message conveyed in the novel, namely the loss of individuality. Later, two more film adaptations were produced, one in 1993 and one in 2007. Both of these movies are of a lesser quality and were not received very well by critics.
This paper focuses on the first two filmadaptations. It investigates how gender-roles are dealt with in both movies and especially how women are represented. The representation is very different in both films as one is set in the cultural environment of the fifties and the other in the seventies. There is a gap of over twenty years between both movies and during these two decades the role of women in society changed significantly. Firstof all, this paper presents a survey of feminist movements during the twentieth century. It explains how women gained more rights and equality through the concept of feminism. After this section a short outline of how women have been represented in films is portrayed. Then, the representation of women in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is investigated and linked to the socio-cultural...