How ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ Explains America

In America now, it seems, everyone has been snatched. If you haven’t been snatched by some invader or other, you’re nobody.

America has undergone a toxic transformation in which many seem to have been taken over by ideas, slogans, conspiracy theories, lies and emotions, to the point that they have become unrecognizable, even to those close to them. They are running in gangs, crowds and mobs, with an increasing abdication of the responsibility to think for oneself, surrendering to whatever germ is in the water. There’s no calm, no deliberation, no chance to change your mind about anything. Just a collapse of individuality, the very trait the country was founded on.

The 1956 horror movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” with Kevin McCarthy, conjured one of our deepest fears as humans, one with particular resonance for the American ethos: Your humanity is replaced by something similar but frighteningly different, your self erased. In the movie, aliens invade a California town; their plant spores grow into “pod people” that duplicate humans and subsume their identities. The replicants look exactly the same, except without emotions.

When the movie came out, some reviewers thought it was an apt metaphor for the spread of McCarthyism, while others thought it was a parable of tyrannical conformity in Communist countries. But like many good horror stories it plays on fears that are timeless.

When Donald Trump was president, the movie was cited by several writers as an apt analogy for the Trump takeover of the Republican Party. It still called itself the G.O.P., but it was eerily different: It had no shame or decorum. The party that once played videos of fighter jets at rallies now was led by a man with an aversion to sending troops to war; the law-and-order party did not seem to care about the police officers who got battered at the Capitol by Trumpian invaders on Jan. 6. Many Republican lawmakers — Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz — seemed startlingly like pod people, spouting Trump praise in response to Trump insults and Trump transgressions. As president, Trump alarmed us not just because of the damage his policies caused but also because he seemed to threaten to unmake the country itself, to render it unrecognizable.

The fear of invasion reverberates through American life. Covid made us realize we were still vulnerable to nasty microbes, the most ancient of invaders, while remaking public life as we tried to avoid it. Social media is a very powerful pod, blurring the real and the fake, manipulating teen and adult minds, with profound and often deleterious consequences. The algorithms encourage certain kinds of behavior, pushing them from their true selves until those selves are snatched. A.I. is a new and unprecedented danger, the one most like alien takeover. It is replicating what we can do at terrifying speed, and some tech leaders have warned that it may not just replace us but also seek to destroy us.

“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” has been repeatedly adapted because the fear it plays on is one at the core of the American self-conception. We see ourselves as a country of defiant individualists bound together by common ideals. “Invasion” captures our sneaking suspicions that this isn’t true.

As (the good) Kevin McCarthy says in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “At first glance, everything looked the same. It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.”