Five Reasons to Love Invasion of the Body Snatchers

I like to watch movies,  and of all the movies I have ever liked to watch, the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers ranks in my personal top five. (The list changes daily, but Invasion invariably stays up at the top.) Today we got the news that Kevin McCarthy, the handsome actor who starred in the film as Dr. Miles Bennel, died at age 96. It was Bennel who, in the movie's famous final scene, gave America some sound advice about communists, right-wing demagogues, sub-prime mortgages, bed bugs, Internet porn stars, and Sarah Palin's family:




Here are five reasons to love this movie:

1. PODS
The malevolent monsters in this monster movie came from something growing in the back yard. How scary is that? The pods hatched zombie recreations of nice locals (not that Mrs. Grimalldi's son seemed very worried that his mom was acting even weirder than usual), were hard to kill, and had astonishing  reproductive capacities (like the Palins!). Poor Miles pitchforks one in a greenhouse, only to find more growing in the trunk of his car. Frighteningly, they emerge from native American soil. Let Alice Waters explain that!

I grew this myself!

2. PAJAMAS
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that American men in 1950s movies and TV shows spent a lot of time padding around the house in pajamas and robes. I suppose that after sleeping in tents and trenches through World War II and Korea they simply wanted a bit of comfort during the evening hours. But this film warns us that we should not be asleep to the dangers all around us, including the attic.

Now where did I put the Christmas tree lights...doh!

3. POLICE
They're great to have around...until they aren't. In this movie, which came out during a period of U.S. history when trust in government (and authority figures in general) was fulsome and widespread, we learn that even kindly police chieftains can be corrupt. Of course we already knew that from older Westerns, in which local sheriffs are very often on the payroll of rich cattlemen. But at least in those movies we could secretly admire the rapacious cattlemen for their tough individualism: They knew what they wanted—as much land, money, and political power as possible—and did whatever was necessary to get it. A cop fronting for pod-zombies has no excuse for himself whatsoever.

Keep a lookout for headless bodies in the desert!

4. PARANOIA
Science fiction movies exist to scare us, but the best make us worry, too. And Invasion was the best of the best. There is very little violence. There are no giant ants crunching unlucky citizens with their mandibles. In fact, no one really dies in the film...they just change. And change is scary. Ultimately, it is normalcy itself that is done in by the pod people.

Crystal Bowersox didn't win? It's rigged!

 5. POLITICS
Every real film critic worth his or her salt has had a go at Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Was it a Cold War film about the dangers communism seeping into American society? Or was it a warning about the conformity of American society during the McCarthy era? It always works, this plot, no matter what frightens us, which is why filmmakers keep remaking it, with varying success. (Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake, which takes places in Me-Decade San Francisco, is the best of these.)

We never stop fearing that we may be replaced on our own land by aliens of one kind or another. How else to explain the pungency of Arizona Senator John McCain's claim that illegal aliens are known to intentionally cause car accidents. (I'm still unclear about why they would do this, since many illegals work very hard to stay under law-enforcement radar, and most people simply dislike being in auto accidents, but undoubted it made perfect sense to McCain at the time he said it. )

Likewise, the governor of Arizona famously declared on FOX News in July that headless bodies were turning up in the desert because of rising violence related to illegal immigration. Actually, the pod people were sort of headless, in a way.

Of course, we all feel the paranoia we deserve. I felt a twinge this morning, because shortly after reading about Kevin McCarthy's death I got a Tweet from Texas journalist Evan Smith, who reported that 31 percent of Texans now identify themselves as Tea Partiers. I'm sure they look just like normal Texas voters used to look, but I know they're different. Listen to me, please, you have to listen:

You're in danger! Can't you see? They're after you! They're after all of us...they're here already!

 

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What I Was Trying to Say

Alyson Low by Suzanne CeChillo

Two days ago I spent a good deal of time trying to carefully render, in the space of a blog post, what I feared I would see during the 9/11 anniversary events, and what I thought the anniversary should be all about. As usual, I was too elliptical in my verbiage and utterly failed to nail my point. The woman in this picture, however, makes the point perfectly.

This photograph, taken by Suzanne DeChillo for the New York Times, shows Alyson Low, whose sister, Sarah Low, was a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11.

Sunday, 9/12/10: NFL Season Begins

The New York Times Magazine kicks off the 2010-2011 season with a story featuring the New York Jets and their larger-than-life head coach, Rex Ryan. The piece's exciting photographs, by Levon Biss, create a heroic fiction—the only kind of story telling that true NFL fans will submit to. Biss is an expert at this kind of photography. (See his website.)

I'm guessing Biss was using HDR (high dynamic range) photography, which digitally combines several separate exposures to capture a greater range of tonal detail than a single exposure could. Since we started seeing HDR a few years ago it has gone from awesome to way overused. But if ever there were subjects worthy of HDR, it would be Jet linebackers David Harris and Bart Scott and safety Jim Leonhard.

High-dynamic defense men Harris, Scott, and Leonhard

Or am I mistaken? What do you think the effect is here? And do you think it works? At any rate, let's try to enjoy the season, because the sports-talk media is full of chatter about a lockout next year as owners try to bust the NFL players' union.

Did Photos Transform 9/11 From Fact Into Symbol?

9/11 by Steve McCurry

This morning, 9/10, I was looking at photographer Steve McCurry's wonderful blog, where he posted a number of the pictures he shot in downtown New York on September 11, 2001. Accompanying the shot above, Steve wrote, "I had just returned from Tibet the night before. I had not unpacked my luggage or camera bag. Shortly after nine o'clock when I heard of the attack, I went up on the roof of my apartment building and watched both towers billowing smoke."

I looked at Steve's photos with a sense of uneasiness—not because of the memories they activated, but because I knew I was going to be seeing quite a lot of 9/11 over the next couple of days. The ninth anniversary will bring with it plenty of archival imagery, and I'm fairly certain much of it will be used as symbol, not history.

I'd be interested in hearing from people whether they are eager (or not eager) to review the imagery of 9/11 now, and why.

Here why I'm wary: A few weeks ago I saw a FOX News story about the controversy over the proposed mosque "at Ground Zero," as the anchorperson intoned with aggrievement. Behind her big hair was a cartoon graphic illustrating the crumbled facade of the twin towers--the smoking structure that looked so much like a cathedral. (James Nachtwey's memorable photo below captured the actual facade shortly after the buildings collapsed.)

Twin Towers by James Nachtwey

The choice of emblems by FOX framed the debate without much subtlety: This is Holy Land. Decisions as to what should reside in its general vicinity should be made accordingly.

On 9/11—the real one, not the one in infographics—it wasn't a holy place at all. It was a horror. It was something that New Yorkers lived (and died) with--the ultimate live news story. And it was a local story, that morning. You could watch on TV, or you could look out your window and see the smoke blowing toward Brooklyn. You tried to phone your family, and you tried to get home.

Very quickly, it all changed. The local New York story became the local story in every city and town in the U.S. People said, "We are all New Yorkers today," and they meant it. Residents of Missouri and Montana claimed a heartfelt citizenship of the big city, each taking ownership of a piece of the 9/11 story. They sent money, they sent help. And today, not surprisingly, they want a say in what 9/11 meant.

It was pictures that brought that sudden change: pictures by McCurry and Nachtwey, Richard Drew, Angel Franco, David Handschuh, and many others who weren't watching it on TV but up close. In the weeks after 9/11, the photo magazine I worked for joined with Dirck Halsted and the Digital Journalist to put together an oral history of that day, as remembered by those photographers. We called the piece "The Facts on the Ground," because that is what we felt those journalists were capturing.

Pictures are not just facts, however. They don't work that way. People everywhere took emotional ownership of the images, as they had the city. By the time Thomas Franklin's photo of three firemen raising an American flag on the Ground Zero rubble appeared on the cover of Newsweek—an image compared repeatedly to Joe Rosenthal's picture of the flag raising on Iwo Jima—the facts were becoming legend. So print the legend.

Evoking Religion and WWII

 As others have noted, New Yorkers seemed to move on from 9/11 in a way that people in other parts of the country did not. Some said it was because New Yorkers are tough survivors. But I think it was because 9/11 was a fact for New Yorkers, not pictures in magazines and on TV. It was part of daily life that clear blue morning when we walked to work and looked down the street and saw the smoke.

How Mad Men Rewrote Sports Photo History This Week

Lots of people told me the Mad Men episode that aired last Sunday was one of the best of the entire series. I missed it because I was traveling, but got around to watching it on DVR late last night. Yes, absolutely, it was one of the best, an emotional saga condensed into the events of one long day's journey into night....and morning. (Or should I say mourning?) The night in question was May 25, 1965, which boxing fans will recognize immediately as the date that  Muhammad Ali knocked out Sonny Liston in the first round of a much-heralded rematch in Lewiston, Maine. The episode revolves around that fight and ends with  a wonderful payoff—one of those tasty pieces of set design that Mad Men is famous for: It shows the front page of the New York Daily News from the following day, next to a sketch of an ad campaign for Samsonite luggage as conceived by main character Don Draper after an excruciating binge of alcohol and suffering. Here it is (shot by me from my TV screen):

The visual  distills the episode's train-wreck of emotions into a kind of comprehensible equation about  knock-out blows and perseverance, loss and redemption. (See this fulsome Mad Men analysis.)  And I think it works so well, in part, because of the iconic photograph seen on the Daily News: The shot of of Ali standing over Liston, arm raised in a taunt, is at once distant and familiar, like the world of Mad Men itself.

In fact, the photograph seen on Mad Men is probably not the icon that many viewers thought it was. There were two great pictures of that indelible moment, one of which has become a cultural touchstone, the other more or less overlooked except by photo and sports aficionados. The difference between the two? A couple of feet, color film, and the relative elegance of magazine paper over newsprint.

Corinne Day, 1945-2010

Last week I was traveling through a remote part of California where it was damned difficult to use a cell phone, and you could just forget about the Internet. So I missed the news that photographer Corinne Day died on August 27th, quietly, after a very long fight against cancer. 

Day is known as the photographer who discovered Kate Moss and ushered in "grunge" fashion photography—a too-easy label, probably. This, from a piece about her in the Guardian:

"Corinne had a very ambivalent relationship with what she had achieved," says photography curator and writer Charlotte Cotton, "Nothing was straightforward for her, not the fashion world or the art world that she tentatively moved into the 90s. She saw the inherent ridiculousness of both and instinctively reacted against it."

(Note: the Guardian article says Day died at age 48, but Day's official website gives her birth year as 1965.)

Day herself noted that that her ideas about what photography could be were shaped by Nan Goldin, whose Ballad of Sexual Dependency opened up new possibilities for photographers who felt like opening up a vein or two and letting the hurt flow. What I was stunned at, when Day's work began to appear in The Face in the early 1990s, is how quickly and thoroughly her type of imagery replaced the neo-Hollywood glamour photography of the late 80s.

The change came as a reaction to the past, the way fashion upheavals do. But the consequences were important and long lasting. Day's images were not only anti-fashion and anti-celebrity, but also opposed to the tradition of photography as iconography. The shimmering idolatry of  "Hollywood photographers" like Herb Ritts, Matthew Rolston, and Greg Gorman was not meant to be real, but quite the opposite, and it was meant to last for the ages. ("We didn't have dialog," says the faded silent-screen star Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. "We had faces.")

The people in Corinne Day's  pictures were meant to be real, and being real they were entirely tenuous.

Her fashion images didn't capture people, as photography had always done; Day's subjects seemed merely to move past her camera, to be remembered or forgotten, as the viewer wished. In the Guardian article, Juergen Teller, another photographer who emerged in the early 1990s, describes Day's early pictures of Kate Moss as having an "end-of-summer feeling." Now summer is over.

The End of Summer

The Gators

 A championship team, from some few summers in the past. The Gators were their name. There have been champions since, and there are champions yet to be born. In this picture, a personal memento gladly shared, the Gators are still celebrating, flowing cups freshly rememb'red.