I first read Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1978, shortly before the second movie adaptation came out. Like most readers, I get pretty annoyed when movie makers change the story - especially the ending! Why, why, why? wondered my 15 year old self. The 1993 adaptation was more disappointing; although I had to concede its glimmer-of-hope ending was a step in the right direction, I wondered why movie makers cannot simply state their story is "inspired by" rather than "based upon" a book - for the only resemblances this movie had to Jack Finney's 1955 (revised in 1978) novel were the title and the basic premise: extra-terrestrial seed pods replace humans with emotionless, soulless beings. A perfectly scary enough concept without throwing out hope.
Five, maybe seven years later, I finally got around to watching the first movie adaptation, made in 1956. This was more faithful than the subsequent adaptations, and it too had a more hopeful ending, if considerably different from the book. In later years I rewatched the 1978 version and can appreciate it on its own merits. In those years I've also accepted the truth that "based upon" generally means "Hey, what a cool title, let's use it." Movies and books are different storytelling mediums, so I don't expect a completely "faithful" adaptation, and indeed that might be dull and uninspiring. A wholly different story ought to be billed as such, such as 2007's The Invasion, which is considered the fourth adaptation of the novel even though the makers intended it to be a different storyline. In this they succeeded and ironically ended up capturing more of the spirit of the novel, if none of its plot.
This year I decided it was high time I reread the novel. Why it took me nearly forty years, I do not know. It's not a perfect novel. There are places where the narrative drags; in other scenes too much happens in too short a time, such as streets that fall into disrepair much quicker than the pod people take over. Perhaps this was intentional, to show that complacency happened by degrees even before the alien visitations.
Although I don't demand happy endings in my reads as I did forty years ago, I still ask for hope. This time around I felt the ending a bit too pat and too quick. It seems the aliens gave up rather easily, although it was implied (rather than shown) others besides the main protagonists had refused to be taken over. Yet the hope was there, the hope that fighting for life, liberty, etc is actually worth it, that you might actually succeed. Life isn't all lollipops and rainbows, but it doesn't have to be about despair and fear.
Where I think the novel's strength lies is in the subtlety of the horror. Little things taken for granted, unacknowleged and underappreciated until they are gone. All that was lost was lost by degrees, much without notice, and even when noticed, there wasn't a sense of urgency to act until it was too late.
Without implicitly doing so, the story asks what it is that makes us human. It's what each of the movies got right: the hardships of life, disease and greed and hate and war - these are all things the alien entities tried to convince Miles and Becky humanity would be better off without. It's a tempting thought. But while those things are inescapable, they need not be embraced. So long as their counterparts exist - love and friendship and laughter and charity - creativity and the will and desire to serve and to better your world - these too are part of the human condition. If the movies suffered from a lack of hope, the book perhaps suffers from a little bit too much idealism. But is that really a bad thing? In the book (spoiler alert!) the aliens left because they realized humans would not give up so easily. But the danger was there. It was complacency, and the erroneous belief that individuals cannot have a positive impact, that nearly lost the battle.
That is a message worth paying attention to. We might not need to worry about pod people. But perhaps we should be concerned about closing our eyes to the subtle dangers of people and philosophies that tell us all is well when our guts say all is not. Thus the enemy isn't always without. Sometimes the enemy is within.
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<div id="prodcontain"><a href="https://www.tatteredcover.com/aff/yerffoeg/book/9781501117824"><img src="https://images.booksense.com/images/books/824/117/FC9781501117824.JPG"></br><div id="title">Invasion of the Body Snatchers</div></a></div>
