Hollywood Utopia

1993 version 25 casts the military as persons in whom impassive conformity elicits
body snatching’ (Trushell 1996: 99). Anderson confidently affirms that during
more recent times the growth and consolidation of environmentalism helped
‘stimulate radical questions about the ends of personal and social life and in so
doing, warns of the crucial problems facing complex societies’ (Anderson 1997:
207). At one level the nascent ecological critique of human nature explored in the
original Body Snatcher became more reflective and critical with the later 1970s
paranoiac texts, having first gone through the countercultural and explicit
environmental awareness of the 1960s.
Yet, as Michael Sragow suggests, while the equally successful 1970s Body
Snatchers version ploughed the same thematic ground as the original version, it
produced a lack of humanity and especially emotion. Sometimes 1970s science
fiction films thematically reverted back to what’s ‘out there’, (re)creating a
spurious sense of unity via a common enemy which threatened the very survival of
‘man’ and often reaffirming the Cold War consensual polarisation of positions
emanating from 1950s science fiction. 26
Endangered Species
These apparent contradictions can be illustrated by a contemporary film which
connects back to the DDT chemical wars first highlighted in 1950s films and
illustrates how a surfeit of ‘scientific realism’ and paranoia permeates the narrative
and sets it apart from its ancestors. Endangered Species, directed by Alan Rudolph
(1982), was reviewed as ‘a strangely stylish, bizarrely eclectic conspiracy thriller’.
Out in the rural American mid-west, cows are found slaughtered and mutilated,
the crimes having been perpetuated by UFO-like flashing lights in the sky. The
film was structured around published contemporary ‘facts’ connected with
documented illegal tests conducted into the effectiveness of germ and chemical
warfare.
The overtly green agenda of Endangered Species dramatises the detrimental
effects of pesticides and is framed by a textual introduction using evocative red
lettering to affirm that the film is a dramatisation based on available facts and
evidence. This informs the reader that in 1969 the US Congress had officially
banned any further testing of chemical and germ warfare. The typographic font
used and the manner in which the text is typed across the screen help to signify the
journalistic process of filing reports and thereby reinforces its legitimacy as a form
of scientific documentary evidence. After the resolution of the classic narrative, the
cause/effect relationship involving pesticides is concluded by the textual coda that
reintroduces a lingering conspiratorial residue, affirming that ‘since the 1969 ban
there has been 10,000 recorded incidents of cattle mutations in USA’. Such
journalistic ‘facts’ serve to question and even undermine the hegemonic
4 Conspiracy Thrillers and Science Fiction 165