Fear
One thing that we talked about this week is fear, a common thread in each of the films. The three films are: Guilty By Suspicion, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Bad Day at Black Rock. Each of the films show a similar type of fear, but not quite the same, depending on how you interpret each film.
In Guilty By Suspicion, it deals with the Hollywood blacklist. In the film, many characters are accused of being a part of the Communist party. Once someone is named as being a Communist, they are taken in and that person has to name who they know that is a Communist or has affiliated with Communists. So friends are betraying their own friends and if a person is friends with a named person, they can't really trust them. This happens in Guilty By Suspicion when David is asked by the F.B.I. if he knows some named Communists. This also goes along with Invasion of the Body Snatchers. People are different and you can't really tell who is who in that film. The characters in that film can't trust anybody, because they don't know who has changed into on of the body snatchers. So there is this fear of not believing some of the people you know best. Another thing that Invasion of the Body Snatchers has in common with Guilty By Suspicion is Communism. Although Invasion of the Body Snatchers isn't about Communism, it still can be taken metaphorically. There is also a fear in that where the body snatchers are like Communists trying to get you to join them.
One thing that I noticed in common with all of the films, was that when the main characters in each film comes into the town, it is different and they are treated as outsiders by most, but only a few people are friendly to them and are on the same team. Especially in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Bad Day at Black Rock. These two films are more similar because they are both set in a small town. Once the main characters of each film go into the town, all but a few are friendly to them. There's a fear, as a viewer, of what these people might do to the innocent people. Both main characters in each film don't do anything to instigate any violence towards them, but people end up trying to kill them(in the case of Bad Day at Black Rock) or take them over(in the case of Invasion of the Body Snatchers).
Hollywood is seen as “the system”, according to Didion. It's this monster that “poisons the soul,” much like how HUAC thought the blacklisted people were doing. But in reality, they were just making films. They weren't trying to brainwash people and scare them into being Communist. Thompson said, “How swiftly the ideal of multitudes and diversity shrank to a haunted hope for conformity.(pg.274)” Also, in Guilty By Suspicion, David says that he isn't a Communist and is only doing his job, or something to that affect. Although he wasn't actually a Communist trying to influence anyone, he still was doing his job.
Fear comes up in many different ways in this week's films and readings. Whether it was actual fear or fear depicted in the films. The fear that actually did occur, seemed to have an influence on some of the films, for example Invasion of the Body Snatchers: with the fear of being influenced by Communism. The flip-side to that would be, does fear depicted in film affect the way we view that subject matter of whats being shown on film?