Philip Kaufman

Fallible Perception and Trust

Shepard anchors what is essentially an ensemble piece and one of the greatest cinematic examples of a collective protagonist. Roger Ebert was right to point out in his four-star review that “the new American heroes are team players,” contrasting them with Yeager: “The cowboy at the beginning of The Right Stuff is Chuck Yeager, the legendary lonewolf test pilot who survived the horrifying death rate among early test pilots (more than sixty were killed in a single month) and did fly the X-1 faster than the speed of sound” (49).Unlike Hollywood’s traditional star vehicles, in which the hero—usually male—saves the day, films like The Right Stuff acknowledge the insufficiency of the individual and our struggle towards community. “Living in this more collective time, we are trying to redefine the hero,” Kaufman said in 1995. “We’re so used to believing there’s one way to confront things; but in a complex world, there are a lot of ways. It’s not so clear that one person can have all forms of heroism” (qtd. in Insdorf, “Team Players,” G5). Films with a collective protagonist depict group dynamics rather than the linear tale of a noble male. Tom Wolfe proposed that the 1970s were the “me” decade, and one could add that the 1980s turned into the “me-get-rich” decade. But the film version of The Right Stuff looks further back and creates a model that would be emulated by future filmmakers, as in the homage to Kaufman’s film at the end of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001). By the time it was released on DVD twenty years later, the prevalence of ensemble pieces suggested different priorities, celebrating not only independence but interdependence. Kaufman was in a sense rewriting Descartes’s famous dictum as “we coexist, therefore I am.” Fallible Perception and Trust Invasion of the Body Snatchers Kaufman is hardly the only filmmaker to make use of unreliable narrators , but his cinematic storytelling is deepened by an interrogation of what we trust as viewers. Whether he presents a gradual revelation or a twist in perspective, there is an inherently political component to his narrative strategy of disorientation: because his films often lead us to look more closely and critically at the images surrounding us, we see how easy it is to be duped, and how vigilant a viewer—or a citizen—must remain. An Eye for an “I” | 101 Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) is a taut and effective contribution to the genre of science fiction. It is less a remake of Don Siegel’s 1956 classic than a new take on the original novel by Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers. First published in 1954 by Collier’s magazine in a shorter version, the novel appeared in 1955 in an expanded edition and then again in 1978 as a “revised and updated” work entitled Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Working with the screenwriter W. D. Richter, Kaufman moves the action to San Francisco, making a contemporary metropolis as appropriate a backdrop for “pods” as the quiet countryside. Each character is menaced by an alien takeover, the internal transformation into an emotionless physical double. Gelatinous spores take root in the city, blossoming into flower pods— a kind of fetus large enough to replicate a sleeping person. The first to suspect something amiss is Elizabeth (Brooke Adams), who works for the Department of Health. Her boyfriend Geoffrey (Art Hingle), an egotistical, horny lout, suddenly becomes an even less desirable placid zombie in a suit. She confides in her boss Matthew (Donald Sutherland ), who is evidently attracted to her. Then others complain that their spouses are “not the same,” leading the rational popular psychiatrist David (Leonard Nimoy) to interpret the trend as “unstable relationships .” The only ones we can trust besides Matthew are his flaky friend Jack (Jeff Goldblum) and his wife Nancy (Veronica Cartwright), whose business is mud baths. They are pursued by the emotionless clones, resisting even after Elizabeth falls asleep and is transformed. But by the end, the new society of replicants has triumphed: when Matthew meets the still-human Nancy in the street, we are stunned to hear him emit the alien scream of denouncement. The films opens with creative sound and imagery that introduce a poetically askance universe. The eerie music and rumbling sound track— which led Pauline Kael to write that the “roar suggests how God might have started the Creation if only He’d...