Invasion of the Snatched Bodies

Thoughts | Megan Ding

Graphic by Catherina Jiang and Elysia Chau

I watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) last week and it was fun to see a young Donald Sutherland try to evade assimilation into an alien hive mind while everyone he trusts turns against him. However, as a chronically online 21 year old who is privileged enough to be obsessed with how I look, I couldn’t help but think about how this Cold War allegory also applies to the increasing prevalence of people with cosmetic alterations and wasting waists. 

When I compare the paranoia in the film to how I currently feel about the body positivity landscape, I notice a lot of depressing parallels. For instance, when I see my fave TikTok-ers  (or more popularly, Ariana Grande) looking thinner than I remember, I get paranoid about if I’m projecting my own body image issues onto these public figures, or if I’m making judgements about people who are getting healthier, or if they’re going through a period of poor health, or if these celebrities are bending to/setting the standard for what’s cool (I could also argue that the last point could be lumped in with poor health). This is comparable to our main characters not knowing who they can trust versus who has been co-opted by the aliens. Furthermore, the whole-body, slimy metamorphosis that the snatched undergo is a great metaphor for how I see the covert, but unsettling weight loss and cosmetic transformations of public figures. It also doesn’t help that the main female character is played by a young, thin Brooke Adams.

But the dysfunctionality of this way of thinking is in placing blame on certain individuals. I don’t have a problem with Grande or Adams as humans, but my learned insecurities are being triggered by their physical appearances. Similarly, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, our heroes can try to fixate on villainizing every possibly snatched person around them, but conquering any single villain does nothing to quell their issues and fear. The main threat of the Body Snatchers, and the beauty industry, is their ubiquity and power that goes beyond any single body. We can be internally saddened by celebrities looking increasingly alien, but it is the capitalistic industries that they feed into that we must shun. 

The irony of comparing the spread of aliens in this film, which is an allegory for the communist “invasion”, to the beauty industry, which is capitalism incarnate, is not lost on me. Increased fear of foreign invaders and tightened beauty standards are a pattern during times of crisis. Think of the 1950s and the 2000s. The foreign policy of the country that is (regrettably) at the center of Western pop culture, the USA, is similar in both of these eras. During these periods, the States increased government surveillance to manufacture fear about foreign powers, Russian communists and Middle Eastern extremists, resulting in extreme xenophobia and distrust among neighbours. At the same times, traditional American beauty standards were thriving in the tragic Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly during the 1950s, and high fashion Slavic Doll aesthetic in the early 2000s resulted from and/or drove the heroin chic era that haunts any dialogue about any body today.

Connecting my (lowkey crazy) comparison of the paranoid atmosphere of the McCarthy era, 9/11, and living in a world of the most alien beauty standards ever, I think that it’s important for us to recognize how personally dysfunctional internalizing the West’s ever distorting visual ideal is. I shouldn’t only be able to console my physical insecurities by picking apart other victims of the beauty industry, or feel tempted to eat less and consider getting jaw surgery every time I consume any form of popular media. And this is where our current beauty standards are arguably more personally dangerous than the federally mandated, xenophobic policies of the Cold War., I feel a pull to sacrifice my body for a new one. The capitalist machine has started to profit less from the simple othering of foreigners (yes, conservatism is arguably on the rise, but loud and defiant supporters of immigration and diversity currently make up a large amount of the general population). Therefore, it seeks to make you alienate your own body, and entice you to give yourself (and a hefty, repeat payment) to the companies that have the power to replace any part of your physique. I truly think that the Western world is making net progress in the public’s broad acceptance of diverse peoples, and, at the same time, we can’t let our individual acceptances of ourselves waste away.