In 1923, a French psychiatrist named Joseph Capgras co-authored a paper with Jean Reboul-Lachaux that described a bizarre condition which would eventually become a disorder named Capgras Syndrome. The disorder is characterized by just one dominating symptom: the sufferer is convinced that loved ones have been replaced by imposters who are exact physical duplicates. The idea that each of us has exact double out there has long been used as a literary trope known as the “doppelganger.”
Doppelgangers have been at the center of stories by writers ranging from Poe to Dostoevsky and from Charlotte Bronte to Stephen King. Typically, however, the doppelgänger is limited to a single character, thus enhancing the dramatic tension of being the only one who knows the truth while everyone else thinks him crazy. What Jack Finney did with the doppelganger trope in The Body Snatchers is often relegated to a generic categorization; the novel is either science fiction or a horror or some hybrid of the two. By expanding the individual into the collective, however, what Finney really created with his novel is more akin to a new mythology.
The story is simple: aliens from outer space launch an invasion of earth using the majestically creative conceit of transforming the native inhabitants into their weapons of destruction. They arrive in pod form, create a duplicate while the real human sleeps and when they wake up become emotionless automatons stripped of all individuality and serving the good of the collective. Very science fiction-y and more than a little horrifying, but not particularly deep or profound. Or so it seems.
The overwhelming number of those who have actually been diagnosed Capgras Syndrome share more than just the obsessive belief that those around them are mere doubles of those they love; an essential part of the delusion is that the first person to be accused of being an imposter is someone whom they idealized in the past, but who eventually did things to tarnish that idealization. The psychological underpinning is that they have sought to explain the tarnishing or create hope that things can go back to how they were before by inventing a simple explanation: this person is not the person they idealized at all; he’s a monstrous simulation.
At the heart of Finney’s seemingly simple story is the exact same psychologically applied to a much larger scope. The body snatchers in Finney’s novel have transcended that alien explanation for their existence to become a modern myth that speaks directly to any sense of loss of the ideal and the resentment that builds up in the face of that. The movie made from the film in the 1950’s is far more famous for being either an allegory of Communist infiltration of America or McCarthyist tactics taken against those merely suspected of being communist infiltrators. At the heart of both interpretation was the underlying sense that something primal about America had changed; the vision of the idyllic small town in the movie being overtaken by people who seemed to be familiar, but weren’t quite resonated across many American small towns in the 1950’s that had undergone major changes resulting from the Great Depression and World War II. The ideal of the small town as it seemed in the nostalgic memories of childhood had been altered and the resentment at this change stimulated search for a cause. There had to be a cause. Maybe it was the communists. Maybe it was the McCarthyists. One thing for sure: someone was to blame because things were not the same.
The legacy of Finney’s novel is that it gave the world a reference point that had not existed before. The doppelganger motif previous limited to an individual could now be applied to any group of people with just words and everyone would understand what you meant. In fact, the words “body snatchers” doesn’t even have to be used. Say something like “the pod people have taken over” while watching the evening news and the meaning is abundantly clear.
The rise of the doppelganger literary trope, the discovery of Capgras Syndome and the immediate ability for everyone to relate to The Body Snatchers all indicate the existence of some sort of deep-seated archetypal fear of the existence of a double. That fear speaks to issues related to self-identity, of course, but it also connotations of a fear of investment in the image projected by others. The doppelgänger is never exactly the same. The double only looks identical, but almost always he is either worse—the Evil Twin—or he is better. The double is either a tarnished or idealized version of the original. And who is to say that if Finney’s aliens created an improved version of the body they snatched that the reaction would not be completely different?
