John Carpenter's The Thing

I caught a showing of The Thing on the big screen in a movie theater in New Jersey, of all places, about two weeks ago.

There’s a bleakness to the film that comes from the setting. It tells you a couple things right away. The first is that help isn’t going to be coming for these guys anytime soon. They’re as alone as people can be and still be on the same planet. If there’s no help coming, then they obviously have to rely on each other for help in solving the problems that come up. They’ve got no one but each other. Except, once they figure out how The Thing operates, they can’t even depend on the other people around them. It makes me wonder how The Thing sees from behind the eyes of the victims it emulates. It’s only interested in hiding long enough to escape, but what does it learn about being human from its time spent as one of us?

This movie, like Alien, is great because it doesn’t bother beyond a certain level to explain the monster. What we learn about it comes to us slowly, as the characters learn it. It’s a very Lovecraftian monster in a few ways. The first being that contact with it is eventually completely destructive, both to human life and the social fabric of the men at the polar station. Any problems they might have had with each other are amplified as they deal with the stress of trying to figure out where the Thing is hiding and trying to eliminate it. The bleak ending also fits in with Lovecraft, in that while they may have defeated the creature, they will not survive their encounter with it. 

We don’t know beyond a certain level what exactly the creature wants. We know it’s after a means of escaping the cold, but what will it do out there in the world beyond the ice? Will it try to take over everything like the body snatchers of the Fifities, or will it just go into hiding and try and rebuild the space ship that the men destroyed?

I didn’t feel like the film needed to try and answer these issues though, because they weren’t the questions raised by it. The Thing is a monster with a mission, and once it accomplishes the mission, we’re not sure what its goals and desires will be. In some way, though, they don’t matter. The important part about this monster is the reaction of the people it comes into contact with, and I’m not sure humanity comes off looking so good. Once the trust between people decays to a certain point, they become obstacles rather than human beings. We see that when Macready kills the guy who’s sneaking up behind him, and then finds out its not The Thing, then he becomes a murderer, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Macready’s goal isn’t survival anymore by that point, he just wants to stop the creature from escaping, so anything that needs to be done to accomplish that is acceptable.

The end is dark and Lovecraft-ish. Having met and perhaps defeated the creature, Childs and Macready sit and drink whiskey and wait to freeze. There’s the chance that Childs is the creature, but both are too exhausted to fight on any further. My take on it is that Macready really did manage to get the Thing, and that Childs is just another human being. I don’t have any real evidence for this beyond my feeling that if the Thing had Macready, the man who thwarted its escape right there, then I don’t think it would have anything to lose by taking him out.