Body Snatchers: The Evolution of a Mind Virus
Pluribus & the Beast with Many I’s, Part 3
(Audio at the end)
Pluribus Influences
One influence that seems certain regarding the show’s genesis is that of The Twilight Zone, specifically the 14th episode of the first season, with its main character, Sturka.
Sturka is an apparent human being who escapes mutually assured destruction by fleeing the planet in a space ship to seek refuge on another world. The twist is that he is in fact an alien, and the planet he is fleeing to is Earth. There’s been speculation that Carol Sturka is, therefore, the descendant of this Sturka, and some clever dot-joining of Easter eggs in Pluribus points to a hidden storyline as a continuation of the Twilight Zone episode (watch this video if you want to know more about it; the most interesting things about this analysis are not really related to the TZ episode, however).
Beyond this, the clear and present template for Pluribus is the alien invasion story as seen throughout modern media, at least since H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, and the corresponding psyop of Orson Welles. The most obvious forerunner is The Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956, with its many remakes. This was a seminal work, and no other sci-fi movie is quite as on-the-nose, in terms of this particular theme and story: that of turning human beings into the avatars of alien consciousness.
Beyond all the remakes, there have been countless imitators. It is an idea that was emerging in the 1950s, as it were through the Zeitgeist, pertaining to something going on culturally in the US at that time: McCarthyism, a reaction against the idea of the Communist infiltration of American society.
In subsequent decades, McCarthyism was seen as a kind of mass hysteria. In more recent years, it is being widely reevaluated and seen (again) as based in something real, regarding a socialist plot to take over the world (the Fabian society, to give one example). This makes it quite topical today, in terms of once-hidden values being more and more revealed as running deep through the infrastructure of Western culture.
The idea of the takeover of human bodies by alien consciousness runs through movies from the 50s all the way to the present, and had its apotheosis with Alien in 1979, a Lovecraftian version of the story in which the human being is only a temporary host that is destroyed once the alien emerges from it, as something very far from a replica of humanness. (The xenomorph alien does take on certain anthropomorphic qualities, with two arms and two legs; but beyond that, there’s really nothing left of the human.)
The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was seen by critics as a metaphor for cognitive infiltration by propaganda, whether that of Communism or of McCarthyism—or both. It was designed, cunningly, to be read either way. Those who were fiercely anti-Communist could look at IBS and see it as an accurate metaphor for what they feared, while others—not necessarily pro-Communist but anti-McCarthy—saw the opposite ideological warning.
This is perhaps another, subtler way in which Gilligan’s Pluribus uses that film as a template, as an ideological Rorschach. We can see whichever demonic “other” we want to see in its schemata.
If so, it goes to show that we are here looking at something much deeper than ideology, something that both Communism and McCarthyism (wokism and conservatism) are themselves symptoms of: ideological possession in all its different forms.
This much larger theme has to do with the individual itself being subsumed into a group-mind, a basic fear for which alien invasion has always been a handy metaphor.
Woke 2.0
Another key text would be Quatermass and the Pit, in which (as with Pluribus), the alien invasion comes into and through human consciousness itself. An ancient alien craft is dug up, and has the power to infect the human race due to an atavistic memory in the species. Humans are the descendants of this same alien race, and once the ship is disinterred, it reactivates ancestral memory and humans become possessed by their ancient progenitor. The alien hive-mind, in an opposite scenario to Pluribus, turns humans into a violent, destructive herd.
Quatermass and the Pit (the original BBC TV show, written by Nigel Neale) is quite explicit in terms of how the group mind leads to mimetic violence and can potentially destroy the entire species, if taken to a global level. This takes us back to the original Twilight Zone episode that allegedly inspired Pluribus, in which aliens who are indistinguishable from human flee their planet, because of the mutually assured destruction that is about to occur.
Looking back at the last twenty years, “wokeism” can be seen as a kind of new McCarthyism, while also, both paradoxically and ironically, being a socialist, progressive, egalitarian, anti-religious mindset that is closer to Communism. But really, these are two sides of one coin. The kind of sensibility in Hollywood and the TV industry that was seemingly being persecuted by McCarthyism has certainly prevailed, in any case, and is now celebrated for having done so.
It is today seen as a bold pioneer of values that are considered the most positive and advanced, especially as compared to the right-wing, anti-Communist values of McCarthy (or the populist right). Paul Buhler and Dave Wagner’s Hide in Plain Sight (Palgrave MacMillian, 2003), for example, describes in nigh-eulogistic terms how the (frequently Jewish, often homosexual) leftist writers who were blacklisted in the 1950s went underground, only to slowly re-emerge in the 1960s and create some of the most “groundbreaking” TV shows and movies—media that incepted the culture with progressive values regarding race, sexuality, gender, and so on. By the time of the 2000s and the 2010s, these values had fully metastasized into “woke culture.”
Woke culture, then, can be seen—and by many people is seen—as the final realization of everything McCarthy was fighting against, albeit in an oversimplified (and clearly counterproductive) way. Certainly, we have been witness to a rapid takeover of social consciousness that involves values either implicitly or explicitly opposed to traditional family ones, and even actively hostile to them (whether nominally Marxist or not, usually not).
This is the current context for the IBS blueprint that Pluribus is developing into new forms and expressions.
The Tradition of the Internal Alien Invasion Story
The following is taken (reworked to match my current style) from The Blood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery (volume one):
This particular subgenre is more like a supergenre. It has immense mythic dimensions. It arose in the ’50s and served as an effective bridge between the sci-fi and the horror film, and it amounts to the ultimate culmination and realization (thematically speaking) of both genres. It is the fulfillment of paranoia on an all-consuming, global level.
It depicts the Id, or the Other, emerging so utterly and undeniably that it swallows civilization whole. At the same time it is as if our souls were coming back (from outer space no less, or in the case of the horror film, “from Hell”) to abduct and devour our bodies; as if the invasion—coming from within as much as without—were by the gods themselves. The “extermination of the human race” thereby starts to look like nothing more nor less than a cosmic “mercy killing.”
The evidence was there from the start. The Greek word for soul, daimon,1 was adapted into the English “demon,” to denote an accordingly hostile, invading force. On the other hand, the word devil derives from the French diable, which is linked etymologically to double, making the devil none other than our own reflection, our doppelganger.