Invasion of the Body Snatchers

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I Introduction Invasion of the Body Snatchers sounds like the least political, and least historically accurate, movie ever made. However it is a key document to understanding major themes from the Cold War period. The Cold War was most prominent in the 1950s. It began with the two huge post WWII powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, having two very different views on how the new world should be run. The Soviets strived for communism, where everyone, at least in principle, had equal shares and no one was above another, while the United states wanted to spread their values of democracy to re-developing countries across the globe. Communism was seen as such a threat to the United States because they believed the Communist Party wanted to spread and take over the entire world and the U.S. insisted that they were a force that must be stopped. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a key film, made during this time period that reflected greatly on the themes of the Cold War. In the film the protagonist, Miles, is a once sane, intelligent doctor who has been strung out, by many strange events that indicate an alien invasion is happening into a hysterical man. It starts out with relatives and children accusing loved ones that they’re not really themselves, that they have no emotions. We later discover that they are, in fact, pod people who are taking over the minds of the innocent people in this small town of Mira. Soon Miles is the only human left and frantically tries to escape to warn others. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers reflects the paranoia of the Cold War world because the film shows the mistrust families and friends held to one another and the film was an anti-communist piece of propaganda because the pod people, the enemies, wanted everyone to conform to be exactly like one another with no emotion, love, or pain. II Conformity A. Communism,
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