Total Recall

Total Recall: The Invasion Joins A Long List Of Paranoia Movies

Celebrating the cinema of fear: M, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Conversation.

by Tim Ryan | August 22, 2007 | Comments

Last week,
The Invasion,
starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, hit theaters, spinning a tale of a
world in which an epidemic strips everyday people of their emotions, creating fear in the hearts of the ininfected. Time will tell if The Invasion is remembered as a movie that
captured something about the way we live in the 2000s (though with its 21
percent Tomatometer score, that seems unlikely), but one thing is for certain:
It’s the latest in a long line of films that attempt to grapple with our
collective anxiety in uncertain times.

Perhaps, in this age of domestic spying and alleged sleeper cells, we’re more
anxious than ever. If nothing else, filmmakers have certainly found much to mine
from our collective angst; in 2007 alone, such varied films as
The Bourne Ultimatum,
Disturbia,
The Lives Of
Others, Red Road,
and Civic Duty
have hit screens. Despite profoundly different settings and methods of
execution, what these films share is a sense of unease, be it in the form of
vast machinations exerting greater control over our lives, or a sneaking
suspicion that someone’s watching.

The cinema of paranoia is nothing new; you can expect moviemakers to tap into a
spirit of discontent. In fact, for one of the finest examples of how the movies
can depict a society torn apart by fear, you have to go all the way back to the
birth of the sound era.
Fritz Lang‘s
M, made in
Germany only a few years before the Nazis took power, depicts a nation where
there’s only a thin line between the cops and the criminals, where paranoia and
fear can sweep through the streets like a fever. In the role that made him
cinema’s favorite sketchy character,
Peter Lorre
plays a child killer whose crimes have set the city on edge; when an elderly man
tries to help a lost child, he’s accused of being the killer and beaten for his
trouble. The situation becomes so dire that even the city’s crime bosses decide
to find M, since he’s making it hard for them to do business. Once Lorre is
being pursued by both the police and the underworld, a strange thing happens: he
becomes our point of reference, and we realize we identify with him, partly
because he’s as much a manifestation of collective fear as he is an evildoer.

M is a forerunner to cinema’s most paranoia-minded subgenres (film noir,
serial killer flicks, police procedurals), and certainly
David Fincher
owes a debt to the film; both
Se7en (84
percent) and Zodiac
(88 percent) borrow from its bleak, shadowy palette. As Dave Kehr of the Chicago
Reader writes, "The moral issues are complex and deftly handled: Lorre is at
once entirely innocent and absolutely evil. Lang’s detached, modified
expressionist style gives the action a plastic beauty." It’s at 100 percent on
the Tomatometer.

Many horror and science fiction movies of the 1950s drew from a variety of
postwar fears, from atomic power to the rise of Communism. Though it’s been
remade twice (and The Invasion was originally intended as a straight
remake as well), the original

Body Snatchers retains a potent, disquieting aura, and as a political
allegory it’s tantalizingly hard to read. The plot involves a doctor (Kevin
McCarthy) who finds that many of the citizens of his small town have started
acting strange; they look the same as they ever did, but emit no emotion
whatsoever. He soon discovers plant-like aliens are taking over people’s bodies
when they fall asleep, stripping them of their humanity and spreading out to
claim more victims. Is it a dark satire on the (Joseph, not Kevin) McCarthy era?
A warning of what a Communist future would bring?

However one reads it, there’s no denying Body Snatchers has proven to be
one of the most durable and influential sci-fi films of the 1950s, inspiring
everything from
Shaun of the Dead (90 percent) to
Signs (74 percent). And
it’s at 100 percent on the Tomatometer. "Its title implies that it’s something
you might watch for its campy comic value," writes Audrey Rock-Richardson of The
Tooele Transcript Bulletin, "but it’s flat-out nightmarish.

In the 1970s, the fallout from the Watergate break-in — and the general feeling
that the government was veering into criminal territory — inspired a number of
fine suspense films, from
Three Days
of the Condor (92 percent) to
The Parallax View
(91 percent). But perhaps the finest paranoid thriller from the post-Watergate
era is The
Conversation,
Francis
Ford Coppola‘s taut, haunting reworking of
Blow-Up (85
percent). Gene
Hackman stars as Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who’s been commissioned
to listen in on the conversations of a powerful businessman’s daughter. Caul is
intensely private — he lives alone in an apartment with four or five deadbolts,
and he never gives out his phone number — but he’s also results-oriented to the
extreme, more concerned about making the perfect recording than what anyone’s
saying on the tape. But on his latest job, he can’t help but notice that the
young woman he’s taping seems to be discussing something particularly ominous;
is she in grave danger?

Caul’s attempt to get at the truth result in a chilling embodiment of the old
adage: "Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s not after you."
Featuring hypnotic sound editing from Walter Murch, as well as one of Gene
Hackman’s finest performances, The Conversation "grapples with the moral
issue at stake in a country where technology has outstripped our knowledge of
how to use and control it," writes Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat of Spirituality
and Practice. At 97 percent on the Tomatometer, this "masterpiece of modern-day
paranoia is far more than a simple rehashing of a classic slice of cinema. It
proves to be more prescient now than ever," says Shannon J. Harvey of
Australia’s Sunday Times.

These movies are merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Whenever there’s a
collective unease, someone will make a film like
Panic in the
Streets (92 percent),
The
Manchurian Candidate (100 percent), or
V for Vendetta
(72 percent) that taps into our sense of fear.