Sutherland-Scream.jpeg

Is someone using a ballpoint?

😉😄

Hi Mercian,

I was going to use the ballpoint joke, but Sandy beat me to it. 😄

 

It's from the '78 version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

 

- Sean 🐯

Indeed it is, being the horrifying climactic moment at the end of the film 👍

 

The seventies was perhaps the decade that produced the most films based on dystopian nightmares.

Yes. Soylent Green is one of my favorites of that genre... and we can see how it's becoming a reality today.

 

In fact, IIRC, this is the scene where he throws away all of his principles and becomes a "squealer"; for that scream is how they pointed out real humans... it also shows how he became "one of them."

 

- S.

12 minutes ago, corniche said:

In fact, IIRC, this is the scene where he throws away all of his principles and becomes a "squealer";

I’ve always perceived it as a demonstration that he has already been captured & absorbed/copied/replaced by one of the alien pod-creatures, and that his friends (perhaps the final humans) are now, as pod-Donald has spotted them, about to be captured & subjected to the same fate.

 

Other 1970s dystopias include Logan’s Run, The Andromeda Strain, and Phase IV. Iirc some of these, like Soylent Green, are based on novels from the 1960s. Then there’s Coppola’s The Conversation… 😬

 

There’s nothing quite like the constant impending threat of nuclear annihilation to inspire ‘cheery’ novels & films, eh?

I know "Invasion" is often seen as an impossible to happen sci-fi movie, but I think it runs deeper than that. It was originally written at the height of the red scare... and I think the story really shows what happens when you give up your rights and freedoms and become autonomons like the Pod People.

 

The Cassandra Crossing is another good one... a mysterious plague like virus escapes from a top secret lab... like that could ever really happen. 😵‍💫

 

It's spooky how art can imitate life... BEFORE it happens... like that 1898 novel about an unsinkable ocean liner named Titan, that only has a third of the lifeboats it needs... and hits an iceberg and sinks. Or the book, White Noise, written in the '80s; which mirrors the toxic train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio... about 70 miles north of me. 🤯

 

Very spooky stuff. Makes for great entertainment, though.  Until it becomes reality. 

 

- S.

4 hours ago, corniche said:

Very spooky stuff. Makes for great entertainment, though.  Until it becomes reality. 

Ain’t that the truth! ☹️

4 hours ago, corniche said:

I think the story really shows what happens when you give up your rights and freedoms and become autonomons like the Pod People.

Undoubtedly 👍

 

It’s like the Absurdist play ‘Rhinoceros’ by Ionescu - an entertaining and ‘unrealistic’ fiction that is actually giving an urgent warning about something really, really important.

I'll have to look for Rhinoceros; thus far, it has eluded me.

 

- Sean