Inversion of the Body Snatchers

Apparently the scariest thing Kevin Williamson ever encountered in high school was a naked teenage girl. Moreover, it was obviously a white teenage girl because apparently there was not much race-mixing at the place where Williamson went to school.

Okay, none of that is necessarily true, but if you wish to do a quick penny-ante analysis of Willamson based solely on his screenplay for the 1998 sci-fi film The Faculty, it’s tempting to come to that conclusion. Of course, it wasn’t Williamson who came up with the original story for The Faculty; that dubious credit goes to two others fellows named David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel. Williamson only wrote the screenplay.

Thus there are a lot of references to sci-fi movies and literary science fiction -- more so than I usually expect to see in a movie like this, where all too often sci-fi references seem to begin and end with the inevitable shout-outs to Star Wars, Star Trek and The Matrix. Plus there are the inevitable celebrity cameos including a quick glimpse of cybercritic Harry Knowles and a slighter longer view of my beloved Salma Hayek as the school nurse, not to mention a view of an early Jon Stewart as a science teacher in a part which must make Jon Stewart foes rub their hands with glee.

The result is not the most watchable science fiction b-film I have ever seen. In fact, I suspect this film actually played better on DVD instead of the big screen because of its slow pacing.

Nor does it help that neither director Robert Rodriguez nor Kevin Williamson seemed quite sure whether to stick with the same parody style that worked so well with Williamson’s previous effort Scream or to try something new. This last part was a shame because halfway through the movie, I got the impression that the movie had great potential to become a lot more than yet another mediocre Invasion of the Body Snatchers parody, especially when it starts subverting the usual B-movie tropes by, say, implying that alien possession might actually improve some people. For example, the football coach became less of a type-A personality and more of a “I’m o.k.-you’re o.k.” type of guy. The repressed English teacher suddenly started expressing her sexuality. The school nurse suddenly lost her cold and even the most emotional teenagers stopped acting out so much after becoming possessed.

A line in the script blamed these changes on the havoc the local climate played with alien neural systems and the way it thus made the alien-possessed humans more open to expressing their most repressed impulses. Yet I could not help but wonder what would have happened if Williamson had further explored this theme instead of sticking with more tired horror tropes like surprise murders and disappearing corpses. If only he had had the chutzpah to hint at a world in which alien possession might actually seem like a tempting alternative to the status quo rather than just another rival system of conformity to be stamped out, this might have been quite an intellectually provocative movie.

For that matter, I also couldn't help wondering why some obvious impulses -- for example, ones involving interracial romance and same-sex affection -- never seemed to get acted upon. One could argue that this movie was set at the one American high school where such impulses did not exist but that would require a greater suspension of disbelief than alien possession. Besides, it seemed strange that a movie which seemed to be about a group of outsiders proving their worth by defending the school against an alien foe seemed to approve of some real-life outsiders more than others -- and that the group of outsiders it did approve of just happened to be all white heterosexuals. (What? None of the nonwhite or gay students had enough school spirit to fight back against alien invaders?)

After seven seasons of Buffy and a single season of Freaks and Geeks, any movie kvetching about the hellishness of American high school cannot help but seem a bit obsolete. Yet I found myself liking The Faculty more than I expected. True, it is more the type of affection one feels for a runty little puppy but then not every B-movie can be the equivalent of the award-winning show dog and some of the ideas hinted at in Williamson‘s script showed great potential.

I just worry that Williamson might have learned the wrong lesson from The Faculty. That in the future, he might feel more comfortable pandering to his fans with another Scream sequel like the one he is supposedly working on now rather than taking a chance on a story which has not been done before. That would indeed be a shame if that happened. Yet, short of an alien invasion, I do not really see things turning out differently.