Brooke Adams Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Brooke Adams (born February 8, 1949, New York City) played Elizabeth Driscoll in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). She was 29 when the film was shot.
Body Snatchers and Days of Heaven came out within months of each other
Adams had finished Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven in 1976 and spent two years watching Malick recut it. Body Snatchers opened in December 1978. Days of Heaven opened two months earlier, in September. For a young actress, 1978 was a hinge year — two films with two directors who couldn't have been more different, released back to back. Before that, Adams had been mostly a television actor whose best-known feature was the low-budget zombie picture Shock Waves (1977). Cuba, opposite Sean Connery, followed in 1979.
Malick told Kaufman to put the eye-twirl in the movie
The single most-quoted Brooke Adams moment in the film — Elizabeth rolling her eyes in opposite directions at the dinner table, as if to prove to Matthew that she's still herself — came over the phone from another director entirely.
"He had apparently called up Phil Kaufman before we did the movie and he said, 'Get her to twirl her eyes in the movie.'" — Brooke Adams, The Film Stage (2023)
Malick had discovered Adams could do the trick on Days of Heaven and hadn't found a place to use it. He passed it to Kaufman on the way in.
"I can, yes." — Brooke Adams, The Film Stage (2023)
(asked forty-five years later if she could still do it)
Philip Kaufman (in Body Snatchers, as director) seized on the gesture as the film's operating definition of humanness.
"Often people on the set or at the studio are so worried about just getting content, and content is not necessarily going to make the scene full of humanity or feel compassion and amusement and humor." — Philip Kaufman, The Hollywood Reporter (2018)
The pods can't do it. That's the point of the shot. See The Eye Twirl and the Or Love Exchange for an extended reading of this moment and its relationship to Elizabeth's conversion scene.
Elizabeth is the first person in the film to name the wrongness
Most of the first act belongs to Adams. Elizabeth sees the change in her boyfriend Geoffrey before Matthew will believe her, walks through San Francisco clocking all the conversations that don't quite add up, and spends the middle of the picture dragging the rest of the cast toward the conclusion she reached early. The film's paranoia starts with her noticing.
Pod-Elizabeth delivers the film's seduction speech
After Elizabeth is taken, Adams returns to the screen as the pod version of herself — same face, same voice, none of the affect. The speech she gives Matthew is the pods' pitch at its most intimate:
"There's nothing to be afraid of. They were right. It's painless. It's good. Come. Sleep." — Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), dialogue
The line works because Adams has spent the whole picture playing a woman defined by her emotional specificity — the eye-twirl, the alarm over Geoffrey, the attachment to Matthew. The pod version keeps the cadence but removes the need.
The seduction speech happens at the waterfront, after Elizabeth has been taken. But the film's most devastating exchange comes earlier, at the Health Department, when Elizabeth is still human. Cornered by pod-Kibner, she says the only thing left:
"I hate you." / "We don't hate you — there's no need for hate now. Or love." — Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) and Dr. Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), dialogue
It's the last thing Elizabeth says as a character who still has a position. See The Eye Twirl and the Or Love Exchange.
Adams around Body Snatchers
| Year | Film | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1977 | Shock Waves | Low-budget Nazi-zombie horror |
| 1978 | Days of Heaven | Malick; shot in 1976, released 1978 |
| 1978 | Invasion of the Body Snatchers | Elizabeth Driscoll |
| 1979 | Cuba | Opposite Sean Connery |
| 1981 | Tell Me a Riddle | Lead |
| 1983 | The Dead Zone | Sarah Bracknell |