Pod almighty!; Or, humanism, posthumanism, and the strange case of Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Textual Practice

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 5-22

  Badmington, Neil ^a  

^a CARDIFF UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Body; Deconstruction; Humanism; Invasion; Of; Posthumanism; Psychoanalysis; Snatchers; The

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149159468     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502360010013848     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 28.
2. Ihab Hassan, 'Prometheus as performer: toward a posthumanist culture? A university masque in . ve scenes', The Georgia Review, 31 (1977), p. 843.
3. Cary Wolfe, 'In search of post-humanist theory: the second order cybernetics of Maturana and Varela', Cultural Critique, 30 (1995), p. 33.
4. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 1-2, 54.
5. For a related point, see Fred Botting, Sex, Machines and Navels: Fiction, Fantasy and History in the Future Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 141-3.
6. Moravec's original formulation is to be found in Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1988).
7. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 283.
8. Jill Didur, 'Posthumanism is not what you think: genetic engineering, Sloterdijk's "Human Zoo" and the colonization of life', paper given at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference, University of Birmingham, June 2000.
9. For more on the question of desistance, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
10. Most critics have, of course, sought to understand the . lm as a product of its particular historical moment; I am suggesting that there is something further at stake. For examples of the historical approach, see, for instance: Brian Murphy, 'Monster movies: they came from beneath the . fties', The Journal of Popular Film, 1.1 (1972), pp. 31-44;
11. Arthur Le Gacy, 'The Invasion of the Body Snatchers [sic]: a metaphor for the . fties', Literature/Film Quarterly, 1 (1978), pp. 285-92;
12. Charles T. Gregory, 'The pod society versus the rugged individualists', The Journal of Popular Film, 1.1 (1972), pp. 3-14; Stuart Samuels,
13. 'The age of conspiracy and conformity: Invasion of the Body Snatchers', in John E. O'Connor and Martin A. Jackson (eds) American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (New York: Ungar, 1979), pp. 203-17;
14. Chapter 3 of Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983);
15. Chapter 8 of Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987);
16. Cyndy Hendershot, 'The invaded body: paranoia and radiation anxiety in Invaders from Mars, It Came from Outer Space, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers', Extrapolation, 39.1 (1998), pp. 26-39.
17. Although I am not particularly convinced by its Jungian framework, a useful overview of the genre (together with an excellent . lmography) is to be found in Patrick Lucanio, Them or Us: Archetypal Interpretations of Fifties Alien Invasion Films (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987).
18. Murphy, 'Monster movies', p. 43.
19. Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, 2nd edn (New York: Ungar, 1987), p. 125.
20. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone, 1981), p. 25;
21. emphasis and capitalization in original. Derrida's 'Crisis of versus'
22. is, of course, an allusion to Mallarmé's famous 'crisis of verse'.
23. Don DeLillo, Valparaiso (New York: Scribner, 1999), p. 45.
24. This is not to say that Derrida is only concerned with the marginal, that his gaze never travels beyond the outskirts. The recent 'Demeure: . ction and testimony', for example, not only offers a remarkable reading of Blanchot's 'The instant of my death', but also manages - as it negotiates the twists and turns of Blanchot's haunting story - to quote 'The instant of my death' in its entirety. No sentence of a tale about the escape from a sentence is, it might be said, allowed to escape. Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
25. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 99.
26. George Steiner, 'Dante now: the gossip of eternity', in On Dif.culty and Other Essays (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 165.
27. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 24; emphasis in original.
28. Hendershot, 'The invaded body', p. 34.
29. Al LaValley (ed.), Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Don Siegel, Director (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 25.
30. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1988), p. 175.
31. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 324.
32. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses 1955-1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1993), p. 82.
33. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 205.
34. I have substantially modi. ed Sheridan's translation in this instance. For the original French wording, see Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XI: Les quatres concepts fondamenteux de la psychanalyse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p. 187.
35. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972-1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).
36. Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 61; emphasis in original.
37. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 167; emphasis in original.
38. Even if this is seen as a reactionary example of mindless male promiscuity - the man doesn't care with whom he has sex as long as she is a she; the women have no say in the matter - I would still insist that the . lm at once tells a more challenging story about desire's unruliness. I do not know if Buñuel was aware of Lacan's work; the latter, as one critic has pointed out, was certainly an admirer of Buñuel's . lms. David Macey, Lacan in Contexts (London and New York: Verso, 1988), p. 49.
39. Jacques Derrida, Points . . . Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 83; ellipses in original.
40. Antony Easthope, The Unconscious (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 166.
41. Probably because of the Hays Code, Miles and Becky simply mention recent visits to Reno, where divorces could (and still can) be obtained quickly and easily. As Al LaValley has noted, earlier drafts of the screenplay opened with a chance meeting between Miles and Becky at the railway station, where she informs him that she has just returned from Reno, having thrown her wedding ring into the Truckee River. This scene was dropped when the Hays Of. ce objected to a reference to divorce at such an early stage in the proceedings. See Al LaValley, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, pp. 112-13, n. 1.
42. Tracing the text's evolution from Jack Finney's serial and novel to Don Siegel's . lm, Glen M. Johnson observes that, whereas the . lm attributes Miles' divorce to his work schedule, Finney's texts intimate that marriage itself is a form of invasion and dehumanization, and that the emotionally unstable protagonist is incapable of romantic commitment. Glen M. Johnson, '"We'd . ght . . . we had to": The Body Snatchers as novel and . lm', Journal of Popular Culture, 13 (1979), p. 8.
43. For the original three-part serial, see Jack Finney, 'The body snatchers', Collier's, 26 November 1954, pp. 26-7, 90-4, 96-9;
44. 24 December 1954, pp. 62, 64-5, 68-9, 71-3. For the subsequent novelization, see Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1955), further revised and amended as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (London: Sphere, 1978) in order to tie in with Philip Kaufman's remake of the same year. I thank Emma Mason for providing me with a copy of the serial.
45. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Athlone, 1981), p. 52.
46. Jacques Derrida, 'The Villanova Roundtable: a conversation with Jacques Derrida', in John D. Caputo (ed.) Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 9.
47. Neil Badmington, 'Introduction: approaching posthumanism', in Posthumanism (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 9-10.
48. See, in particular, Jean-François Lyotard, 'Rewriting modernity', in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 24-35;
49. 'Answer to the question: What is the postmodern?', in The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. Julian Pefanis et al. (London: Turnaround, 1992), pp. 9-25;
50. 'Note on the meaning of "post-"', in The Postmodern Explained to Children, pp. 87-93.
51. Derrida, Positions, p. 12.
52. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. unnamed (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 387.
53. It is perhaps worth remembering at this point that a passage from the . nal paragraphs of Foucault's book forms one of the epigraphs to Derrida's critique of antihumanism, 'The ends of man', in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), pp. 109-36.
54. Five years before writing this essay, Derrida had, of course, mounted a calculated and lengthy attack upon Foucault's belief in the possibility of writing a history of madness from an entirely irrational, or extra-rational position. See Jacques Derrida, 'Cogito and the history of madness', in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 31-63.
55. Sigmund Freud, 'A note upon the "mystic writing-pad"', in Angela Richards (ed.) On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library, volume 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 427-34.
56. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1983), p. 11.
57. Jacques Derrida, Sur parole: instantanés philosophiques (Paris: Éditions l'Aube, 1999), p. 23; my translation.
58. I am alluding to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's description of their own work given in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1985), p. 4:
59. This memorable phrase comes, of course, from the .nal monologue of The Thing from Another World.
60. See, for instance: Judith M. Kass, 'Don Siegel', in Stuart Rosenthal and Judith M. Kass, Tod Browning/Don Siegel (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1975), p. 119;
61. David Lavery, 'Departure of the body snatchers', p. 387;
62. Johnson, 'The Body Snatchers as novel and . lm', pp. 11, 12-13;
63. Gregory, 'The pod society', p. 8;
64. Cyndy Hendershot, 'Vampire and replicant: the one-sex body in a two-sex world', Science-Fiction Studies, 22.3 (1995), p. 395, n. 26;
65. Sumiko Higashi, 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers: pods then and now', Jump Cut, 24/25 (1981), p. 4;
66. Samuels, 'The age of conspiracy and conformity', p. 214;
67. John Brosnan, The Primal Screen: A History of Science Fiction Film (London: Orbit, 1991), p. 78;
68. J. Hoberman, 'Paranoia and the pods', Sight and Sound (May 1994), p. 29;
69. Mark Jancovich, Horror (London: Batsford, 1992), p. 68;
70. Le Gacy, 'A metaphor for the . fties', p. 286.
71. Philip Kaufman, 'Are we pods . . . yet?', interview by Ralph Appelbaum, Films and Filming (April 1979), p. 11.
72. Although it is never mentioned, it seems to me that Kaufman's . lm is a particularly . ne example of the 'incoherent' . lm identi. ed by Robin Wood in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
73. Kaufman, 'Are we pods . . . yet?', p. 13.
74. Lavery, 'Departure of the body snatchers', p. 389.
75. Hoberman, 'Paranoia and the pods', p. 31.
76. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London and New York: Verso, 1996), p. 229.
77. R.L. Rutsky, High Techne-: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 21.