All My Hippie Friends Have Been Body Snatched By Fascists
I blame the pandemic…
Does anyone remember “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”? There were two versions: the original in 1956, and a 1978 remake. The premise was that a species of alien plant was invading Earth, taking over people’s bodies and turning them into emotionless alien proxies. The only way you found out who was an alien was when they turned around and started to scream and point at you in a nightmarish way.
The brilliance of the film (I think it was the ’78 version I saw as a kid) was the way it captured the archetypal horror of betrayal, the moment when someone that you trust and think you know turns on you and reveals themselves to be something terrifying and alien. The scene at the end of the movie where Donald Sutherland’s character turns and opens his mouth in the horrific alien scream kept coming back to me during the pandemic, as one by one, my old hippie friends started “turning”. I’ll explain — but first let me rewind thirty years to a cafe in Melbourne’s inner north.
Back in the day — the day being the early to mid nineties — I used to be a hippie. Well, hippie “lite” perhaps. After returning from a long sojourn in India, I got about in a Rajasthani vest and loose cotton pants for a while. I did astrology charts and went to festivals where everyone got naked, banged drums, and…
