Wholly Inadequate to the Present Moment: Revisiting Meditations on Paranoia
Forty-five years ago this month, my mother took my brother and me to see the newly released remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I was eleven, Pip eight, and we did not usually go to PG-rated movies. Mama made an exception. The film had Leonard Nimoy in a small but vital part, and as a family utterly devoted to Star Trek, the chance to see “Mr. Spock” outside of his familiar role was reason enough to stretch the rules.
(I often cite Nimoy to my clients as someone who knew how to write a follow-up memoir. I am Not Spock followed by I am Spock — that’s marketing! That’s a growth trajectory!)
Mama rarely made errors in judgment, but in Pip’s case, this may have been one of them. Eight was too young for a film about loved ones suddenly turning into strangers, possessed by pods from outer space. In my case, I was just old enough to be captivated as well as unnerved. I’ve watched it again and again over the years, and I know that aging folks always say the music and movies were better when they were kids, but dang, this film ages well. 1978 was a good year in our popular culture.
As it turned out, the scene that has endured longest in my mind does have Mr. Spock in it. Nimoy plays David Kibner, a celebrated psychiatrist who has just written a new book – one apparently filled with affirmations of each person’s goodness. At the book signing, a frantic woman interrupts Kibner – her husband isn’t the same, he’s different, perhaps this isn’t really him. Her husband is there, and he is without affect, nearly mute and stone-faced. The woman’s fears are real. The pod people are taking over. But Kibner, sensing a God-given chance to perform in public, sweeps the couple into his arms, uttering reassuring platitudes with urgency, with love, and with conviction. He tells them they must come and see him tomorrow, that “we’ll talk,” and everything, everything will be okay. We already know it will not be okay, and it isn’t. (It turns out, later that Kibner may have been a pod person all along.)
Here's the scene.
The message was clear to my mother, who explained it to me as we drove home after the movie. It was the 1970s, mama had been through a recent divorce, and she was keenly familiar with the prevailing therapeutic modalities that Nimoy (and director/writer Philip Kaufman) so deftly and devastatingly satirized. In later years, when I’d rewatch Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I’d identify very much with David Kibner. (Even the way they dressed him — preppy, urban Jewish perfection!) I figured out that perhaps as a college professor, my determined liberalism, bordering as it did on the libertarian and the libertine, was self-indulgent and naïve, wholly inadequate to the challenge of the moment. Civility, warm hugs, and heartfelt discussion don’t, in fact, solve every problem.
Everyone and their llama want to claim Invasion of the Body Snatchers as an ideological meditation on the threat that they see, and others don’t. It’s an exceptionally flexible story. Are the Communists the pod people – or the McCarthyites, spouting wild accusations? Are the anti-Semites on college campuses the pod people, and Jews the ones crying out desperate warnings? Are the Woke the pod people? Are the MAGA? No one agrees, except everyone agrees that the David Kibners of the world do not understand the “fierce urgency of now.” David Kibners, with their focus on cordiality, calm, and kumbaya, sometimes get people killed.
A few years later, in high school, I read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which treads the same ground. It too visits paranoia, except that the fear in Body Snatchers is well-founded and in Crucible, it is not. Miller has villains aplenty, but one of his best-drawn is the Reverend John Hale, the veteran witch-hunter. Hale regards himself as one of the few savvy enough to understand the very real threat of Satanic practice that hangs over Salem. He is frustrated that too many in the town insist on not seeing what to him is plain. One of his most famous lines could be a battle cry for activists on any side in our culture war today:
There is a misty plot afoot so subtle we should be criminal to cling to old respects and ancient friendships. I have seen too many frightful proofs in court - the Devil is alive in Salem, and we dare not quail to follow wherever the accusing finger points!
“Old respects” include things like, perhaps a robust commitment to due process, rules of evidence, and a deep reverence for freedom of speech. (Arthur Miller was not an historian. He was writing for a 1950s America.) “Ancient friendships” – Reverend Hale is imploring people to stop believing the best about their friends and family, and instead to interrogate them.
Reverend Hale and David Kibner are two fictional characters. They both play pivotal roles in two of 20th-century America’s best-known meditations on what fear does to communities. Each man is partly sympathetic – we know instinctively why he believes what he believes, and why he responds as he does. Each takes the wrong path; Hale persecutes the innocent, convinced he is fighting a mortal threat. The threat doesn’t exist. Kibner sweeps the victim and the monster into his one embrace, promising that a talk and some tea can solve everything. Kibner thinks a very real threat is merely a hysterical delusion.
Both men’s errors aren’t just character flaws, they are flaws that get people killed. Both men’s errors are character flaws that Americans possess in bulk. If we aren’t ourselves Dr. Kibners and Reverend Hales, we know their type instantly. They are our ex-husbands, our sisters, our cousins.
On college campuses, we find ourselves once again debating the limits of free speech. Emotions, as they usually are, are raw. Reverend Hales abound, warning in ever-more frantic tones that the danger is unprecedented, and it is time to discard those wholly inadequate “old respects and ancient friendships” and get serious about the menace that threatens to topple all that we hold dear. It is easy to mock them, and as someone for whom genial, tolerant, David Kibneresque liberalism is instinctive, sometimes I do mock them. I know where my heart lies: Let the kids march. Let the kids shout their slogans. If they break a window, arrest them; if they block traffic, jail them. A good society permits words and images without limit, but only restricts behavior.
I know enough to know that I see the current crisis through the lens of my priors. If we could just teach people to keep their emotions a bit better under control; if we could just get people to understand that the political requires we be polite (a famously false cognate there); if we could just have some talk and some very good tea in the dean’s office, why, we’d see that all our divisions are superficial. I can force myself out of my Kibnerism, but it is work. It goes against everything I am.
I don’t see a lot of David Kibners in 2023, though. I just see Hales, Hales, Hales everywhere from sea to shining sea, from right to left. Everywhere there is danger, everywhere there is horror, everywhere there is an existential threat to our way of life and for God’s sake why won’t you wake up? My Hale friends, many of whom are reading this, have taken Yeats’ most famous line from his most famous poem and reversed it, at least in their own moral calculations: “The worst lack all conviction, while the best are filled with passionate intensity.”
I know that a hug and a talk are impotent in the face of evil. I know that doubling down on manners and civility will not change hearts and minds. At the same time, those “old respects” and “ancient friendships” have much to recommend them. We disregard them at our… dare I say it… our very real peril.