The sky is falling!
The recurring theme in the movies we watched tthis week was extreme xenophobia. Invasion of Body Snatchers could be summed up as “polite, white, society vs. evil, villainous, outsiders.” The villains are purely evil with no redeeming qualities. Their motivation is only to remove all joy from the universe and destroy all other life. On the other hand, the hero fights diseases by day and alien conquers by night. He seems only motivated in showing affection towards his girlfriend while he tries to save the world.
In Guilty by Suspicion the committee assume that communists have nothing better to do but corrupt people just for the sake of corrupting people. The committee also assumes that if someone is a communist they must have every other bad quality such as being an unfit mother or morally bankrupt. They also assume that anyone who listens to a communist’s views will be instantly converted into a communist as quickly as a napping person gets turned into a pod person. It’s odd that they didn’t assume this was because the ideas were likable not the communists were insidious.
In Bad Day at Black Rock, a one-armed man tries to solve a mystery in a town that hates him. The town members are initially hostile for no apparent reason. Perhaps they assume he’s some kind of Hershel of Ostropol type trickster who earns his living traveling from town to town destroying the the (fabricated) lives of corrupt authority.
The irony is that in Guilty by Suspicion Day at Black Rock the antagonist's paranoia is their ultimate undoing. In Guilty by Suspicion the government is so focused on tracking every liberal in the country they ignore the actual communist spies. By accusing US troops of being traitors and/or gay all HUAC did hurt our own armed forces.
In Bad Day at Black Rock, Smith and his cohorts don’t understand that if they start arbitrarily antagonizing someone it’s only going to raise his suspicions. If they just said blamed Kumoko’s death on a fictitious person who died or escaped, they could have avoided being arrested or set on fire. Of course if they hadn’t been paranoid, they wouldn’t have killed Kumoko in the first place. Bad Day in Black Rock is partially a movie about keeping cover ups which is why it is probably so popular in the White House.
Moving onto the reading, in "I Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind", Didion claims that the producers are irrationally biased against controversial movies. Perhaps why the lead character from Guilty By Suspicion was not actually a communist and that’s also why Guilty by Suspicion is just “‘slick shit’ again.” When movies take millions of dollars to make they represent the views of millionaires