Movies today often portray an escape from the real world. However, they also exemplify situations and happenings going on throughout the world in the present as well as past times. The movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, produced by Walter Wagner is very controversial when it comes to situations of the past. Many people believe that this film is a political allegory representing McCarthyism and a time of Communism. Many people believe that this movie is just a horror film, made to scare people. One man named Tim Dirks comments, “A quintessential, black and white B-picture…low-budget film is very effective in eliciting horror with slow-building tension, even though there are no monsters, minimal special effects, no violence in the take-over …show more content…
of humans, and no deaths” (Dirks). Although many people believe that the classic film, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, is simply a horror film, it is truly a political allegory describing the time of McCarthyism and communism around the world. It can even be considered a political allegory to audiences today. McCarthyism is known as, “the term describing a period of intense anti-Communist suspicion in the United States that lasted roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s” (Wikipedia McCarthyism).
To understand McCarthyism, one must know what Communism is. Communism is defined as, “an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization based on common ownership of the means of production. It is usually considered a branch of the broader socialist movement that draws on the various political and intellectual movements that trace their origins back to the work of Karl Marx” (Wikipedia Communism). Communism may look good on paper, yet when it started to be practiced in other countries in the 50’s and such, it proved to be not fair. In the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a man named Dr. McCarthy has had multiple calls about a weird epidemic going around in which people were not acting like themselves. After a few days, McCarthy realizes that something is taking over the town. It appears to be strange “pods” over ruling people’s bodies. Eventually, all of the people are turned into “pod people”, in which they act, talk, and do everything the same. The plot alone shares a big relation with Communism. Communism is aimed at making everyone equal, in a classless society, just like the “pod people”. In a scene with Dr. McCarthy and Becky in McCarthy’s office, McCarthy says that humanity has been drained away. This is a great deal like communism, people have no …show more content…
rights and in essence no humanity. Another point that McCarthy makes in the film is that people are born into an untroubled world where everyone is the same. There is no emotion or a feeling; the only instinct is the stay alive. This is a lot like communism, people do not have any say in the government and if they show any emotion towards anything about communism, they are often killed. They also basically have one instinct, and that is to survive and help their families survive. John Whitehead believed the same saying, “One in particular, Don Siegel’s 1956 classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, captured the ideology and politics of this time period perfectly” (Whitehead). He believed that this movie portrayed the time period of McCarthyism very well as well as the dehumanization of individuals during the war, and post war era. . Another link between this film and McCarthyism is the names in the movie alone. McCarthy was a U.S. senator in the 1940’s and 50’s. He spoke out against communism, and many people were often called out for being sympathizers towards communists. In the film, McCarthy, ironically the same name, speaks out against the “pod people” and frequently points out people for being “pods”. This movie could also be related to times in our recent history, for example, the effects after September 11th. Many people started to call out terrorists, and openly bash people of the Middle Eastern descent. The terrorists were trying to prove a point that Americans were bad, and deserved to be punished. They share characteristics with the “pod” people. They all share one belief, and are trying to get more and more people to believe in the same practices as they do. McCarthyism is a thing of the past; however there are similar things that people speak out against, the biggest example being terrorism.
Our situation today is different, seeing as the majority of people in America do not support terrorism, yet there is still that small percent of people trying to sway our beliefs. Communism was a much bigger threat in the 50’s seeing as many countries believed in it. The belief also started to grow in the United States, which posed a large problem. This system may have looked good on paper, yet it did not work out when it was executed. The government of the United States spoke out greatly towards communism because they knew that it was not a good system to have. People still speak out about it today, yet because many more problems have come about, one does not hear about it as
much.. All in all, the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers is indeed a political allegory defining a time of Communism and McCarthyism in the 1940’s and 50’s. As opposed to what many people believe, it is not just a B rated horror film. This movie, communism, and McCarthyism share many of the same characteristics that make me believe that this movie is a political metaphor.
The McCarthy Era was a period of history that began in the late 1949s and ended in the mid late 1950s. This was also called the Second Red Scare in the United States. The McCarthy Era had many innocent victims and many of them were imprisoned. Several authors, actors, civil rights activists, and physicists were among the many victims that were blacklisted. Due to McCarthy’s witch-hunt many victims’ reputations were destroyed and their families ...
The McCarthy era is very similar to the Salem Witch trials. They are both similar, because they both dealt with hysteria. Hysteria is an uncontrollable fear or outburst of emotion. Both things had to do with people accusing each other of people being communist, and people being witches.
Through the 1940s and 1950s, America was beleaguered with anxieties about the menace of communism arising in Eastern Europe and China. Profiting out of such worries of the nation, young Senator Joseph McCarthy made an open charge that hundreds of "card-carrying" communists had penetrate in the United States government. Although his allegations were found ultimately to be false and the Senate reproached him for improper ways, his ardent shakeup heralded as one of the most tyrannical era in 20th-century American politics. While the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAA) had been made in 1938 as a body to resist communists, McCarthy's charges enhanced the political nervousness of the epoch. The suspicious chase for moles, scandalously known as McCarthyism, made the life and work of a number of important cultural names in the U.S difficult, being branded as champions and supporters to leftist causes. By 1954, the zeal had subsided. These short trials remain one of the most disgraceful times in modern U.S. history (McCarthyism, pbs.org). There are researchers and critics who still find the shadow of McCarthyism looming on the present history of the Unites States. About two years ago, in a Presidential Address George Bush, pleaded the Congress to ratify legislation that would prolong the time-bound terms of the notorious anti-terror law, originally planned to end on December 31st, 2005 and later extended. Advocated by Attorney General John Ashcroft and accepted by the Congress in the scared upshot of the 9/11 fanatic assaults, the Patriot Act has been depicted by its critics as the utmost warning to U.S human rights since the Alien and Sedition Acts or the postponement of habeas corpus during the Civil War. The Alien Registrat...
One of the biggest fears of the American people is that the concept of communism contrasts drastically from the concept of capitalism, which the United States was essentially founded upon. The United States, as the public believed, was not a land of perfect communal equality, but rather a land of equal opportunity. However, what made communism so dangerous can be succinctly described by Eisenhower who compared the spread of communism as the domino effect. As his secretary of state, Dulles, put it, the propagation of communism “would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and independence” of America (Doc B). In addition, the Cold War also planted the seeds of rational fear of a global nuclear war. As Russia caught up to the United States in terms of technological advancements, they successfully developed the atomic bomb as well as the hydrogen bomb, which caused Americans to believe that the USSR would use these weapons of mass destruction to forcefully extend their ideologies to the USA. In fact, Americans were so frantic about a potential nuclear disaster that it...
Although the Red Scare made McCarthy who he was he did not make it any better. Document 6 shows us a cartoon of 2 men driving in a car saying “It’s okay--- we’re hunting communists” This cartoon shows us the fact that people who thought they were doing the right thing ,such as McCarthy, were running their own people over in the process and still thinking that everything they were doing was justified because they were so scared. People running over others just made those people get up and wonder why they weren’t doing as much or why they weren’t as scared as those guys were, so naturally they tried harder. McCarthy was intensified by the Red Scare but his actions only made it worse. He was a state senator. A government official working for the good of our country. Citizens tend to have respect for people of his position and they also tend to listen. Document 4 states “While McCarthy is the worst sort of demagogue, many people listen when he yells, screams and sputters, because they are afraid.” This statement says it all. He may be wrong in his doings but people still look to him out of fear because he is a leader, a respected man, and also an excuse. Document 4 says “In addition to the persecution of many innocent people by this man, the greater danger lies, as you point out, in that those who should be eliminated from public life as being unfit or subversive, can now defend themselves by stating that it is merely
The McCarthyism refers to any chasing of people accused for any porpoise. McCarthyism gets the name from the Senator Joseph R. McCarthy; he was a republican from Wisconsin.
What is McCarthyism? It is the public onslaught of an individual or an individual’s character by means of baseless and uncorroborated charges, basically the repudiation of a person’s reputation. Joe McCarthy was the Wisconsin senator that evoked this era of fear and paranoia by inflaming the current fear of world domination by the Communist party that enveloped the Nation. He did this by announcing that he had discovered “57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.” (McCarthy, 1950, p. 2), later the amount of implicated individuals rose to 205. These accusations launched McCarthy into the national spotlight where he then began his smear campaign against many well-known Americans, which was commonly referred to as “witch-hunts”. Because of McCarthy’s actions, up to 12, people lots their jobs hundreds were incarcerated. He then turned his sights to book banning because he claimed there were 30,000 books written by all shades of Communists. After his lists were made public all were removed from the Overseas Library Program. But he was not finished yet, he then assailed members of the entertainment business. He had writers and actors brought to trial. Many of these people were blacklisted and worse, all without a single shred of evidence. When people spoke out against McCarthy they were thrown onto the communist train, until enough people came forward to rebuke McCarthy’s unprecedented tactics. At this point he fell from political power into dishonor on December 2, 1954. This ended the McCarthy era, but not the atmosphere of paranoia that lingers in the nation today.
The United States was in a state of scare when they feared that communist agents would come and try to destroy our government system. An example of this scare was the Cold war. During the cold war the U.S. supported the anti-communist group while the Soviet Union favored the communist party. Many people who still supported the communist party still lived in the U.S. When the U.S. joined the Cold war, trying to rid the communist party from Europe and Asia, the U.S. were afraid that the people living in the United States that still supported communism were spies that would give intel back to the Soviet Union to try to destroy their government. If anybody was a suspected communist, if somebody just didn’t like somebody, or if they were even greedy they could accuse the person of communism and the person would be thrown in the penitentiary, thus, starting the second red scare.
From 1949 to 1954, the citizens of the United States were overcome with terror of the possibility of being accused of Communism. Joseph McCarthy was an anti-communist zealot obsessed with rooting out perceived Communist spies and activities in the United States. Common opinion showed that McCarthy was a bully and a liar. The Senate condemned him for it because at the time, there was no evidence to support him. However, in recent years, evidence has come out that confirms the basis of what McCarthy said. There were Communists infiltrating America, and it seemed McCarthy was the only one who actively trying to find it. McCarthy governed the U.S. people with fear for three year, was censored, and now is being proven correct, despite people trying to hide the truth.
There is a strong connection between McCarthyism and the Salem With Trials, which are what The Crucible is based on. Arthur Miller immediately recognized this link, and displayed a great example of an abuse of power, and people going to great measures to get what they want (Brater). The desire for power, unsubstantiated accusations, and the detrimental effects of these accusations are the ways in which The Crucible is connected to McCarthyism. Power and selfishness can destroy the lives of those that possess it, and the lives of people around them. Humans are easily influenced by what others do and say, which is why people can gain power so easily. It is the choice of the powerful to use their power in the correct way. When power is misused, paranoia and chaos, as well as many other negative effects result.
McCarthy was elected senate after becoming a lawyer in his sate of Wisconsin. During the first few years of his term nothing major really happened until 1950. In a speech to the Women’s club of wheeling in West Virginia he stated that he had a list in his hand of about 205 known members of the communist party working for the United States department. President Harry Truman had signed an executive order that said that all communists or fascists could not obtain a United States government job. The FBI played a big role in the investigation of this list McCarthy contained. McCarthy’s friend j. Edgar Hoover, which was a violent ant-communist in the federal government, could not wait to expose the people McCarthy accused of being communists. McCarthy’s list created a nationwide scar among the people of the United States. Everything McCarthy said was a lie and he had no evidence to show that the people he accused were really communist but, because of the start of the Korean War and the arrest of two American soldiers accused of spying on the Soviet Union American citizen...
being a Communist, with the only source being a report on how his father reads a Serbian newspaper. (Clooney) Without genuine evidence from a credible source, an argument is as good as a blatant claim. McCarthy’s “evidence” is in fact unsubstantiated in itself. Therefore, his accusations contain no basis, and lack the foundation needed to provide solid and subs...
McCarthyism is a term used to describe the American fear of communist spies during the Cold War. The original airing of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,”
The attitude of the citizens of the United States was a tremendous influence on the development of McCarthyism. The people living in the post World War II United States felt fear and anger because communism was related with Germany, Italy, and Russia who had all at one point been enemies of the United States during the war. If the enemies were communists then, communists were enemies and any communists or even communist sympathizers were a threat to the American way of life. "From the Bolshevik Revolution on, radicals were seen as foreign agents or as those ...
Among of all these things that can be related to McCarthyism a more recent one is the scandal of steroids going on in the MLB. The scandal in the MLB is many players have been found taking enhancement drugs to help improve performance on the field. Some of these players even pleaded guilty of taking enhancement drugs in court. The way this scandal in MLB is related to McCarthyism is by how now every time a good player has many home runs hits in a season or makes a lot of great plays that person will be accused of taking enhancement drugs or be under investigation. These people accusing these players of taking steroids though have no evidence to back up their argument. Just like how McCarthy accused there being communists in the State Department, when he had no evidence to prove his argument. McCarthy announced “I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” When McCarthy was asked about evidence to support this list he