Is anyone else sick of living in a reality which is nothing but all the #dystopian #fiction from 50 years ago?

We have #JamesBond villains ( #Musk)

We have #InvasionoftheBodySnatchers zombification ( #MAGA)

Etc, etc.

And now we have #Wargames:

" #AI s can’t stop recommending #nuclear strikes in #war game #simulations

Leading AIs from #OpenAI, #Anthropic and #Google opted to use #nuclearWeapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases"

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516885-ais-cant-stop-recommending-nuclear-strikes-in-war-game-simulations/

Invasion of the AI Oblivion

I was playing with ChatGPT to explore a couple of versions of an essay I wrote back in 1999 during grad school. I was pretty impressed with both the feedback as well as a re-write ChatGPT did. After the machine re-wrote my [[Frederic Jameson]]-inspired conspiracy take on The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), it recommended a quick treatment of a comparison of Invasion with [[David Cronenberg]]’s Videodrome (1983).

If you want, next we can:

Contrast this with another paranoia text (The Conversation, Blow Out, Videodrome) to sharpen the edges

The Videodrome reference made it very hard for me to resist. I’ve spent a fair bit of time playing with the philosophy of Videodrome on this blog, and even tried to “embody” Dr. Brian Oblivion as part of my first online ds106 course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuoOKNJW7EY

So, bringing Videodrome into the equation was a brilliant move on the machine’s part. After having it polish off the Invasion blog post I returned to the Videodrome recommendation:

Earlier you suggested comparing Invasion to another conspiracy film like Videodrome, what might that look like?

After that, the machine was off and running: […]

https://bavatuesdays.com/invasion-of-an-ai-oblivion/

#bavatuesdays

It’s Already Here!

I’ve been digging Mike Caulfield’s deep dives into ChatGPT these days. What’s even cooler is he has gone full-in on the movie theme, which makes it that much more fun. His basic premise is pretty much in line with all his work, avoid joining teams that are simple pro or anti-AI and spends the time and energy trying to figure out how it works. A great recent example is his “book chapter” on My […]

https://bavatuesdays.com/its-already-here/

#bavatuesdays

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" turned 70 this week. See what other movies are celebrating milestone anniversaries in Hotchka's Movies by the Decade!

https://hotchka.com/movies-by-the-decade-289

#Hotchka #MoviesByTheDecade #InvasionOfTheBodySnatchers #Entertainment #Movies #Film #Cinema

Invasion of the Mind Snatchers

I was originally going to call this post “Invasion of the Content Snatchers,” but what’s happening in this process is more than simply “stealing content” (if we can even call it that), but a shift in how we might potentially offload our own cognitive mapping. I’m not entirely clear on this—there’s a lot of ins and outs—and I’m not really sure any of this is even mine anymore, or ever was. It’s a cosmically liminal space, man!

https://bavatuesdays.com/its-already-here/

This post picks up on my last one wherein I took an old grad school paper/presentation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers and ran it through the ChatGPT machine. I mentioned in that post I actually had two version of this paper. I re-wrote the original to try and wrap my head around [[Frederic Jameson]] for a film paper on [[Philip Kaufman]]’s 1978 re-make Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I re-read this one and was definitely not too impressed. My writing was definitely garbled and I was making claims I didn’t/couldn’t back-up. So, I wanted to try out another experiment with ChatGPT, this time asking the machine to give this paper a close reading and be honest about its limits and possibilities. Here is what I asked:

I am going to give you another essay I wrote on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but this time using Frederic Jameson’s post-modern theory on the geo-political aesthetic. Couple of things to consider a) has this research/reading of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a part of the paranoid films of the 1970s [been done]? b) have others used Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic to read Invasion? c) what do you make of the writing? where does it falter and why? Refrain from re-writing this as a blog post for bavatuesdays.com just yet given I have some ideas of how I might want to update this.

A bit of a tripartite ask where I am seeing if others include the ’78 Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the genre classification of ’70s paranoid cinema. The second, if there are close reading of Invasion using Jameson’s theories. Finally, and most painfully, how’s the writing? Here are the results:

(a) Is Invasion read as part of the 1970s paranoid/paranoia film constellation?

Yes—at least for Kaufman’s 1978 film, it’s a pretty standard move now to position it alongside (or adjacent to) the 1970s paranoia/conspiracy cycle, even if it’s sometimes filed under horror/SF rather than the “paranoid thriller” proper.

Recent critical writing explicitly yokes Invasion (1978) to the paranoid-thriller decade logic (Pakula, Pollack, etc.).

Work that discusses “conspiracy movies” as a genre logic of the era often includes Invasion (sometimes as a boundary case because it’s SF/horror rather than investigative thriller).

Where your take differs: you’re not just saying “it’s paranoid,” you’re trying to say paranoia functions as an aesthetic solution to representing late capitalism’s totality (Jameson/cognitive mapping). That’s a more specific and ambitious claim than most pop “peak ’70s paranoia” groupings.

(b) Have others used Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic to read Invasion?

What I found (and what I didn’t)

I did not find a widely-cited, canonical film-studies article whose central project is “Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic reading of Kaufman’s Invasion.” (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist—just that it’s not surfacing as a standard reference point.)

What I did find is a consistent pattern in which scholars:

Use Jameson’s “cognitive mapping / conspiracy as representational workaround”

…and then place Invasion in the orbit of conspiracy/paranoia cinema as an example of “the system” becoming narrativized via an enemy network.

Cite Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic in bibliographies/dissertations that discuss Invasion among other Cold War/postmodern paranoia texts—without necessarily doing a sustained Jameson-on-Invasion exegesis.

Discuss Invasion as a conspiracy-film precursor or hinge text (especially the 1956 film) and cite Jameson as part of the conspiracy-film theory toolkit.

Bottom line on precedence

Jameson is absolutely used to theorize “paranoia/conspiracy cinema” in ways that can include Invasion.

A direct, sustained Geopolitical Aesthetic. Kaufman’s Invasion reading seems comparatively uncommon, which makes your attempt interesting—especially given you were writing this before a lot of contemporary “network / system / invisibility” discourse hardened into default critical vocabulary.

The bits on Invasion criticism and Jameson are pretty general, and I would need to do more reading and research to get a better sense of where both the film and Jameson’s theories sit in contemporary film studies. This is cursory at best, so I’m not sure I trust it very much. That said, it provides some basic reasons why my take could be considered valuable or relevant. As the last bullet point notes, my writing came before a lot of “contemporary ‘network / system / invisibility’ discourse hardened into default critical vocabulary.” I love it when it suggests the paper is ahead of it’s time. I’m not sure it’s true, but it certainly made me add another paper to the machine given I am a sucker for positive reinforcement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaFFZpfxLU

I think the part where I ask it for feedback on my writing is actually the most valuable. After reading its thought and recommendations, I tend to agree: […]

https://bavatuesdays.com/invasion-of-the-mind-snatchers/

#bavatuesdays

‘Bugonia’ Writer Will Tracy On ‘Succession’ Inspiration And His ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’ Tech Bro Remake Idea
#News #Awardsdialogue #Bugonia #EmmaStone #InvasionoftheBodySnatchers #JessePlemons #Succession #WillTracy #YorgosLanthimos

https://deadline.com/2026/01/bugonia-will-tracy-yorgos-lanthimos-interview-1236677804/