It’s morning in America: la invasión de los ladrones de cuerpos como retrato de una sociedad

Abstract

It’s Morning in America: Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a Portrait of a Society

It’s morning in America: a invasão dos ladrões de corpos como retrato de uma sociedade

Fantastic art, like any form of art, can serve as a reflection of a society or an individual. In the specific case of this genre, it is a distorted reflection. The authors analyze Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its successive remakes, all of which have served to show the main risk in contemporary societies; namely, the dictatorship of the silent majority or a single way of thinking. In these films, extraterrestrial seed pods supplant the population and create physically identical duplicate replacement copies of each human, but devoid of all human emotions. With this, society becomes governed by a single principle, a unitary will that eliminates any dissent. Likewise, it is suggested this metaphor works adequately to describe societies after the Second World War, especially those more influenced by the conservative revolution imposed by Reagan and Thatcher. The main novelty of the text lies precisely in that it traces the relationship between societies during the last five decades and the movie series on ultra bodies. The proposal begins with a view of the four films, plus a theoretical base of bibliographic references founded on four key lines: the political situation and political and social theory in recent decades; fantastic cinema and some of its features; the relation between societies and fantastic cinema, understood as a metaphor of those societies; and an analysis of ultra body films. The points of view defended in the reflections are supported by these lines of thought.