Donald Sutherland Fights Conformity
In praise of the actor’s essential performance in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The classic 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a Cold War parable about the danger of Communism, with its blank conformist hive-mind attack on individuality. The 1978 remake, in contrast, is a hippie parable about the danger of capitalism, with its blank hive-mind attack on individuality.
There are a range of differences in the films which make that shift from anti-left to anti-square possible. But the big one is Donald Sutherland—the brilliant, lanky, dashingly ugly-handsome character actor and leading man, who died at the age of 88 last week.
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The basic plot of both films is the same. Alien space spores land on earth and grow into pods. The pods create plant bodies which look like whatever human falls asleep near them; the bodies absorb the mind, matter and energy of said sleeping human and take their place. The new pod people then spread the pods further, creating a paranoid double society without emotion, bent only on survival and expansion.
In the first film, the lead is played by conventional Hollywood guy Dr. Miles J. Bennell, who provides a conventionally manly, hearty, virile, predictably individual heroic alternative to the too familiar, togetherness-preaching, dangerously leftish pod people.
Donald Sutherland, though, is something else. He plays, not a doctor, but public health inspector Matthew Bennell. We first see Matthew—elaborately mustached, curly-haired and stoop-shouldered, in fabulous schlubby-hip trench coat and expressively bugged out eyes—as he strides into a pricey French restaurant like an unwelcome one-man underclass. Swerving and sliding around the crowded kitchen, he gleefully fishes a rat turd from a pot and tells the assembled chefs that he’s going to shut them down for foisting crap (literally) on an unsuspecting public. When he returns to his car he discovers a couple of the workers have smashed his windshield—a capitalist conspiracy against the health of the people.
Director Philip Kaufman fully realizes that his film’s emotional and thematic core hinges on Sutherland’s funky charm. A key scene, early in the film, is set in Matthew’s kitchen at home. Matthew’s colleague, Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) is terrified because her dentist boyfriend Geoffrey (Art Hindle) is acting oddly—which is to say, he’s working too much, holding too many meetings and behaving like a boring old square/pod person.
Elizabeth is panicked and distressed, but Matthew doesn’t tell her she’s being hysterical, or try to talk her down. Instead, he quietly continues his gracefully angular food preparation and gets Elizabeth to help him, telling her to cut this and sprinkle that. Sutherland dices away, glancing at Elizabeth slyly with those big eyes from under that big hair. He’s not fooling her; she knows he’s distracting her, and he knows she knows. It’s a conspiracy not of conformity, but of intimacy and care. The snooty industrial kitchen with its uniforms, its faux elegance, and its rat turds is indifferent and corrupt; Sutherland as Matthew is all elbows, authenticity, and heart.
In the kitchen conversation, Sutherland keeps his tone soft and almost inaudible. Despite the stress of the alien invasion, he rarely raises raises his voice in the rest of the movie either—or for that matter in the rest of his career. Many performers chew scenery by bellowing, but Sutherland always makes you lean in. It’s a stark contrast with the psychiatrist David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy) whose forceful projection at first seems like ego, and later takes on the sinister authority of the pod. It’s a contrast, too, with post-pod, completely nude Elizabeth’s steely declaration of fealty to the alien conquest. Matthew cajoles and chuckles and begs when he asks Elizabeth to come into work early to run tests. Elizabeth, under corporate pod discipline, speaks with the ringing accents of impersonal command.
Kaufman tosses in a lot of clues that the pod people are the coming neoconservative backlash which will turn laid back hippies into drab corporate climbers. Matthew (quietly) jokes that Geoffrey has suddenly transformed into a Republican. Matthew’s friend Jack Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum), a cranky poet who loathes Kibner’s best-selling pop psych books, abandons both irritability and his critique of corporate sell-outs when he’s been taken over. The final scene, is set in a pod distribution factory, with everyday people (including Elizabeth) conscripted in the global manufacture and distribution of conformity.
But what really makes the metaphor work, and turns the film from good to great, is the way Sutherland functions as an iconic marker of offbeat oddity, and how that oddity is finally, painfully turned against itself.
In the last half of the film, Matthew, running, is increasingly disheveled—tie loosened, suit rumpled, hair mussed. It’s as if his very clothes rebel against capitalist conformity…until they don’t. The last sequence of the film shows Matthew finally transformed. He has a new, darker, boxier, unrumpled outfit. His tie is tightened. He is not just quiet but silent, and he walks without his familiar bob or shuffle or slump. Elizabeth is in the same office, her hair pulled back in a bun, but he doesn’t acknowledge her. He’s an office drone—an extra, not a character actor. The Sutherland has been drained out of him.
Matthew does have one sort-of final line. Nancy Bellicec (Veronica Cartwright) a hippie spa owner friend who has been passing as a pod person, approaches him thinking he’s still human. Her hope is our hope; the first time you see the movie, you’re uncertain whether Matthew is just pretending in order to fool the pods.
But he is not pretending. When he realizes Nancy is human, he points at her and shrieks, mouth wide, mustached quivering. Quiet, reassuring Matthew is no more. Now he’s a cog which grinds on loudly to drown out and crush all defects in the name of production and assimilation.
That last famous image of Sutherland isn’t “normal,” of course. Early in the film Sutherland embodies the appeal of comfortable idiosyncrasy—all ectomorphic improvisation and easy offbeat charismatic homeliness. At its end, he’s turned into an icon of uncanny valley wrong—his long limbs stiff, his silly moustache dank with menace. Sutherland would go on to play many appealing heroes and numerous menacing villains, but few films capture and depend upon the range of his clunky, easy grace and graceful menacing clunk like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Matthew is arguably the actor’s most human, most alien, and most brilliant doppelganger.
I will be watching Body Snatchers again, as I have not seen it since I was a young teen in the mid-80s. For me, Sutherland climbed into my consciousness with Animal House. I was about to head off to college after graduating from a fundamentalist Christian high school. Is that what college professors would be like? He was both awesomely cool and a complete and utter jackass of a man.
Ordinary People, and specifically Sutherland’s character in that movie, touched me. I identified with him somehow, much more so than with the son (Timothy Hutton) who was around my age. I'm like look kid, if you think you have problems, take a look at your dad who married a sociopath. Sutherland figures this out during the movie, carrying and projecting grief through every scene. It is an extraordinary performance.
One bit in the movie I love is when person on the other end addresses his character, Matthew Bennell, by name even though, as he keeps repeating, "How do you know my name? I didn't give you my name...!" It's like his brain's momentarily frozen as he realizes just how deep and wide what's going on is....
As he aged Sutherland played more Lawful Evil figures, but occasionally somebody would remember the younger, appealingly rumpled man he was when he was younger—as in the not-very-good International Cop series CROSSING LINES where he played retired International Criminal Court judge Michel Dorn(!—"Today is ze good day to judge") as a charmingly eccentric old man who seemed to be more at home feeding pigeons in the park than in the offices of the ICC's fictitious "special crime unit" which he ran. (I think—it was never very clear what his position was.)
I think it was a rule for him—the better-dressed and -groomed he was, the more likely he was to be a villain.