Thing!

Glyph

Glyph is worse than some and better than others. He believes that life is just one damned thing after another, that only pop music can save us now, and that mercy is the mark of a great man (but he's just all right). Nothing he writes here should be taken as an indication that he knows anything about anything.

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61 Responses

  1. I can place 1982 pretty firmly in my mind. Being a military brat, I place the chronology of my youth by where I lived at the time. I started college in 1981, where sexually transmitted disease was a frequent topic of discussion. The disease du jour, however, was herpes. We were starting to hear some rumblings about AIDS, but did not yet associate it with gay men: rather, oddly enough, it was Haitians. I assume that this was due to the early transmission vector into the United States. The full-blown AIDS epidemic, and public awareness of it, came a bit later.

    I suppose that it is possible that we were behind the curve in Santa Barbara, and that down in Hollywood things were already to the point of their producing cinematic metaphors about AIDS. But my money is on coincidence.Report

    • RE: Haitians; interestingly, before “AIDS”, one of the terms being used for the disease was “4H”, because it had been observed in homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users, and Haitians.

      And it may well be coincidence; but more than many, horror films often seem weirdly-reflective of the fear of the day.Report

  2. Kolohe says:

    The version of Tainted Love by Soft Cell was released in 1981 rather straightforwardly, so to speak, as an AIDS metaphor. So it’s certainly possible for there to be avant garde knowledge of the disease among what people would call the creative class.

    It might have been my age at the time, but in my estimation, the widespread knowledge of what AIDS was and is – even the negative stereotypes – didn’t become established until Ryan White and Rock Hudson.Report

    • Chris in reply to Kolohe says:

      I’ve never heard that their version was meant to have anything to do with AIDS, though I know it came to be used as an AIDS metaphor later.Report

      • Kolohe in reply to Chris says:

        You’re right. I misremembered a music post about covers that included Tainted Love. It’s Coil’s cover, released in 1985 (when knowledge of AIDS had permeated the mainstream) that was explicit about its connection with AIDS, including a portion of the proceeds from sales going to AIDS charities per wikipedia.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GUnUGKgWDYReport

        • Chris in reply to Kolohe says:

          I was just reading, and one of the Soft Cell dude’s says that may have been “unentiontionally” about the early AIDS epidemic, whatever that means. So it’s not entirely wrong.Report

    • Glyph in reply to Kolohe says:

      Yeah, that timeline I linked above notes:

      On June 5 [1981], the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publish a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), describing cases of a rare lung infection, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), in five young, previously healthy, gay men in Los Angeles. All the men have other unusual infections as well, indicating that their immune systems are not working; two have already died by the time the report is published. This edition of the MMWR marks the first official reporting of what will become known as the AIDS epidemic.
      On June 5, the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times report on the MMWR. On June 6, the San Francisco Chronicle covers the story. Within days, doctors from across the U.S. flood CDC with reports of similar cases.

      I think it’s possible that amongst the creative class there was word that something was happening, even before June of ’81.Report

      • veronica d in reply to Glyph says:

        Still, June ’82 (the release date) is too early, adding the time for filming, script development, and so on. Really we need to be thinking more about ’81 than ’82. From Wikipedia:

        The final screenplay was written in 1981 by Bill Lancaster, son of Burt Lancaster. Carpenter later recalled that he did not meet or collaborate with any of the screenwriters.

        There was some buzz around AIDS, and the gay community in NY and SF knew something was happening, but not what, nor how widespread. In fact, according to this site, the death toll in ’81 was a shade over 200. However, those are the total numbers that we now know about. At the time any particular person probably had only heard of a few deaths. Some friends were sick and very afraid. But it was just a few friends. Nothing big.

        The fact is, people were very, very, very, very slow to accept what was happening. A few people in public health were making noise, but most were ignoring it.Report

        • Glyph in reply to veronica d says:

          You people are ruining a perfectly good theory with your “facts” and “timelines”.Report

          • CK MacLeod in reply to Glyph says:

            There is, in short, dear Glyph, zero reason to think that AIDS, which was hardly known at all in any form even by the time the movie was released, was even subliminally on or in the minds of the The Thing’s creators when the script was being written and finished, and the movie cast, from ca. 1975 – 1980, except as a template of horror that precedes both horror fiction and real life-and-death disease.

            I suspect, but do not know, that the characters in the original novella were also all male, in keeping with its most frequently cited passage:

            The group tensed abruptly. An air of crushing menace entered into every man’s body. Sharply they looked at each other, more keenly than ever before – is that man next to me an inhuman monster?

            So THE THING seems to anticipate AIDS, but, I think clearly, we retroactively read certain patterns of the AIDS plague retroactively into THE THING, magnified by the underlying question or issue of homosexual eros in any all-male “society.” To go much further investigating the movie as uncanny premonition, the ideas burbling up in the unconscious in synchrony with the virus spreading in the population, Struzan’s poster art as in effect a first artist’s rendering of HIV, that will be too much for most people, or spell a different kind of horror (Jung!, Hegel!, theology!) for the empirical rationalist mind.

            For those who could use a re-cap of the film, there’s also this.

            ALSO: there is actually one female “character” in the film – the voice of the computer, by Adrienne Barbeau, the director’s wife at the time (was noted in the “Making of” material I was skimming this AM, during pre-production on this comment…)Report

            • Glyph in reply to CK MacLeod says:

              “Struzan’s poster art as in effect a first artist’s rendering of HIV”

              I’m not seeing it. What about the poster appears emblematic of the virus?Report

              • CK MacLeod in reply to Glyph says:

                Glyph: What about the poster appears emblematic of the virus?

                The image is an “everyman” or “anyman” as angel of death – “that man next to me an inhuman monster.” Interesting that the landscape and the imagery suggesting lethality or “alien terror” have the same color.

                So, AIDS converts “the person next to you,” via acts of intimacy, from source of fulfillment to source of lethal danger. Of course, AIDS is not unique in this respect. In some ways that’s always been “the story of love.” So that’s part of the “horror template” that precedes both the narrative and the disease.

                In this light also interesting the role that “man’s best friend” plays.Report

              • CK MacLeod in reply to CK MacLeod says:

                Or, the ultimate in alien terror is the alienation of identity, which ought to be a paradox – see “the mirror stage” and the recognition of the other as self, self as also other. Struzan’s art also evokes a shattered mirror, suggestively.

                Incidentally, Struzan is probably the most revered, and very likely the highest paid, movie poster artist of our era. For me, he was an acquired taste. He did the poster art for all of the Star Wars films, many of the Indiana Jones movies, Blade Runner, and many other films. I don’t think you can call him influential, however, since few artists attempt to imitate his portraiture. So, what’s especially interesting here to me is that the poster specifically lacks a character portrait or at least a human face, and instead replaces it with the orgasmic explosive refractory white Thingism of Death by Destruction of Identity. So it’s in some ways the least Drewish piece of “Drew Art” I know of – so my favorite.

                More typical Drew Art:https://www.google.com/search?q=Drew+Struzan+posters&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAWoVChMI8ri37qPtyAIVV9xjCh1IwQt3&biw=1823&bih=784

                It’s a google search, so a couple of those posters aren’t Struzan. One or two down the list – like the Brando portrait APOCALYPSE NOW! – were done by some of the few movie poster artists approaching his stature.Report

              • CK MacLeod in reply to CK MacLeod says:

                Consider also the main contender for ultimacy in “alien terror.” This is the much more highly valued – though partly as an effect of its rarity – ALIEN advance poster:

                The ALIEN of Alien is also a shapeshifter, of course, and also carries features of contagious disease. A somewhat notorious critique of the movie, and of the Ripley character, centers around pregnancy and fractured relationship to maternal roles. Ripley is a “strong woman” who, especially, in the sequels, herself shapeshifts through a series of tragic or grotesque “mother” roles (she’s even her own mother, and she eventually finds a kind of satisfaction as mother of an android(. Notably, the disembodied voice of the original Nostromo is referred to as “mother,” which makes the characters “children.” The movie’s most famous and emblematic scene of alien terror is like a nightmare vision of a “new life within” hatching-and-ejecting explosively from an otherwise normal person’s abdomen: psychodrama of the girl confronting the facts of life: blood and danger and alien beings inside her… The underrated Prometheus sustains and expands upon the same theme very effectively, in my view.

                One could go on. Point for this discussion is the intimacy-horror dialectic, in relation to sex, as also in Sam’s recent Hellraiser piece. Some would call it a cliche of the horror genre, though I’d say that in this case cliche is another word for universal and inescapable.Report

              • Glyph in reply to CK MacLeod says:

                It never occurred to me that the same guy was doing all that art – it seemed like a generic poster “style” (though seeing them all together now, it’s certainly a distinctive one).

                I agree that The Thing‘s relative minimalism makes it one of, if not the, best/most-appealing-to-me ones.Report

              • Glyph in reply to CK MacLeod says:

                In this light also interesting the role that “man’s best friend” plays.

                In that MBF plays Judas, sealing the men’s fate with a slobbery “kiss”?

                The missing face in the poster seems more Lovecraft-y to me – suggesting such a blinding incomprehensibility that to behold it drives one mad (as it apparently does Wilford Brimley’s character; there’s a couple other Lovecraftian aspects to the story as well).

                Of course, “a blinding incomprehensibility to behold” describes Old Testament YHWH and some of His peeps as well.Report

              • CK MacLeod in reply to Glyph says:

                Yes! It’s clearly “the Creator”‘s fault that our re-creation/recreation/reproduction/replication goes this way – thus the quest of Prometheus’ stubbornly faithful main character, made possible after she’s seen the simple-normal idea of love and sex set aflame before her eyes, and seen other false versions of the quest destroyed, and has also, very crucially, conducted a desperate but successful self-induced very late term abortion…Report

              • aarondavid in reply to Glyph says:

                “The missing face in the poster seems more Lovecraft-y to me”

                @glyph
                This might interest you then

                The Thing is probably considered the most Lovecrafty movie that is not a pastiche..Report

              • KatherineMW in reply to aarondavid says:

                I just watched it, in response to Glyph’s recommendation in this post, and the first thing I thought was that it came close to an adaptation of “In the Mountains of Madness”. Same location, and the shapeshifting powers of the Thing are equivalent to the shapeshifting powers the Shoggoths are suggested to possess. And in both cases, the aliens are found by teams conducting scientific research.Report

              • Glyph in reply to KatherineMW says:

                Yeah, MoM is the main referent; but it also makes me think of R’lyeh (it’s not a giant sunken city, but it’s a GINORMOUS spaceship, sunken in ice) from which something tentacled is awoken after eons of “dead dreaming”…

                R’lyeh’s not QUITE in Antarctica, but it’s not all that far either:

                https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%27lyeh

                Did you like the film?Report

              • KatherineMW in reply to Glyph says:

                For a horror movie (a genre which I generally don’t enjoy), yes, I liked it fairly well. Watching it and “Thirty Days of Night” in the same weekend made it striking how effective snow, cold, and isolation are as elements in a horror movie; landscapes of ice and snow also add a lot visually. There’s a kind of stark, horrifying beauty to violence against a backdrop of snow (the finale of Kill Bill Vol. 1 being possibly the pinnacle of this).

                Still, neither The Thing or 30 Days have the visual power of Crimson Peak. Whatever you think of the plot (I enjoyed it, although any “surprises” were extremely telegraphed), nobody does visuals quite like Guillermo del Toro. That one I’d class more as fantasy gothic than horror, though.Report

  3. aarondavid says:

    Love The Thing, one of my favorite movies. My son and I watched it not long ago and we felt it held up fine. But to your points. It is a plague tale. A very old, very common trope, that might indeed have given rise to the concept of vampires… As far as no women, I feel that it hightens the sense of being alone, which to me is the central facet of the tale. And in that vein, I don’t feel that Childs and Palmer are in a relationship. At that period of filming, haveing gay charactors wouldn’t really come up in a film like this, as it wasn’t seen as we see it it today. Gay depictions tended towards films like Cruising, as it was not considered normal sexual behavior by the majority of people at that time and it also would distract from that sense of loneliness I mentioned.

    Calling Norwegians Swedes might just be more along the lines of McMurtry not knowing there is a difference…

    And finally, “I know you have a lot on your mind, and important things to do, but I would rather not spend the rest of the winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!!!”Report

    • Glyph in reply to aarondavid says:

      The couch bit that had me laughing wasn’t just that line, but when three of them are still tied to it while McReady is fighting the monster, and they are all screaming and trying to escape while still tied to the couch.

      If Simpsons has never parodied that scene at the start of their show, they should.Report

      • aarondavid in reply to Glyph says:

        There are so many great lines in that movie, that it really boggles the imagination

        “Whatever it is, its weird and pissed off”

        Then when the head pulls itself off of the body, tounges itself away and then grows spider legs “You have got to be fuckin’ kidding…”Report

    • Glyph in reply to aarondavid says:

      Also, it’s interesting that The Thing, somewhat like The Shining and Blade Runner, was not that critically-well-received upon its initial release, but over the years has gained a much better reputation. The common pattern I see is: huge downer ending (see also: A.I., which I think is amazing).Report

    • Alan Scott in reply to aarondavid says:

      aarondavid: haveing gay charactors wouldn’t really come up in a film like this, as it wasn’t seen as we see it it today

      Well, having (non-villainous) characters explicitly or obviously depicted as gay would be pretty unusual, but the Hollywood tradition of getting crap past the Radar via subtle implications had been well established by this point. Remember that in Hollywood in the 80s, you’re basically dealing with a population of creators for whom homosexuality is normalized and accepted making films for a population for whom it isn’t.Report

      • aarondavid in reply to Alan Scott says:

        All of that is true, @alan-scott but Carpenter tended to be fairly deliberate in his movies at this point. Meaning that its not something that would be in there casually, there would be a point to it, much like Chekovs gun. As there is no point to them being LGBT aluded to in the script or on screen, I am going to stick to my initial thoughts on this.

        In much the same way as the African American actors are played against convention I feel that having the charactors be gay, when the movie was filmed, would be to make a specific point, or to play against our expectations. Just not seeing it.

        Carpenter could be very subversive, but he always had a reason for it.

        Then again, Doc Copper has his nose pierced in the movie to which I have never figured out why and most people don’t notice it, so I am open to any good line of thought.Report

  4. Burt Likko says:

    Great callback; I remember enjoying the crap out of this movie. I was a bit young to get the sex analogy, and would likely still have dismissed the “Why is the guy putting on his pants” thing as a continuity error rather than a subtle indication of a “more than just friends” relationship.

    There were other STD’s well-known in 1982, of course, and linking sex and death is as old a motif as art itself.

    But my favorite John Carpenter film will always be Dark Star.Report

    • Glyph in reply to Burt Likko says:

      I admit I may be reading way too much into it.

      There are a couple of spots where they really make the “infection” motif blatant – one is when Wilford Brimley’s Dr. Blair is performing an alien autopsy, and pointing out features on the corpse with a pencil – then absentmindedly touching the eraser of the pencil to his mouth as he thinks.

      When Thing-dog first meets the men, it jumps up and licks one’s face.

      And before it becomes clear that they are well and truly screwed, they decide that all the men should each prepare their own food, and eat canned goods only.Report

  5. DavidTC says:

    …how would *both* of them be infected? Why would they be acting like that?

    I don’t think I’ve ever heard that theory before.Report

    • Glyph in reply to DavidTC says:

      Well, we never find out who ripped/planted McReady’s jacket outside…if it was planted at all, and he’s not a Thing.

      And one question implied by the film is, does a Thing always KNOW it’s a Thing (when McReady tests Nauls’ blood sample and it’s negative, Nauls is visibly relieved, suggesting that up until then he wasn’t sure if he was a Thing or not).

      So it’s at least possible they both are, and just haven’t figured it out yet.

      Waiting to see what happens.Report

      • Glyph in reply to Glyph says:

        Also, after Nauls cuts McReady loose outside (because Nauls found the ripped “McReady” jacket, and so thinks McR must be a Thing), Childs claims that no human could have found their way back without a guideline, as McReady (or “McReady”) does.Report

    • Glyph in reply to DavidTC says:

      As far as the “Childs is a Thing” theories go, they mainly revolve around:

      In the final scene, we see McReady’s breath, but not Childs’. Pretty sure this is just a lighting quirk, since earlier, we see Bennings-Thing breathe, so there’s no indication that Things don’t breathe.

      I watched an analysis that claimed that since Childs’ coat is dark blue earlier in the film, but appears lighter in the final scene, that this apparent costume change is meant to indicate Thing-ness.

      While I think it’s possible Childs is a Thing (his “went out alone after Blair, got lost” story seems implausible given what we know of him), to me the coat looks lighter just because it’s dusted with snow/frost. Report

  6. aarondavid says:

    “Funny things. I hear funny things out here. . .”Report

  7. Rufus F. says:

    There’s an old rule in Hollywood that “there’s gotta be a woman in there somewhere”. A film without any female characters whatsoever is supposedly box office poison. Carpenter might have been purposely violating the rule to show he could and as a sort of provocation to the audience, as when he has the child get killed early into Assault on Precinct 13- another age old rule that is still rarely violated.Report

  8. Rufus F. says:

    Incidentally, David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly, which was an intentional AIDS metaphor, came out in 1986.Report

  9. Roland Dodds says:

    Great piece @glyph, I always like these posts about science fiction movies/novels. This was a film I loved in my teenage years but have not seen in some time; maybe my wife will want to watch it later tonight.Report

    • Glyph in reply to Roland Dodds says:

      It had probably been that long since I had seen it; I bought the Blu-Ray a couple years ago because it was super-cheap, but no one ever wanted to watch it with me (my wife doesn’t care too much for scary/gory films, though every once in a while she caves). So on the shelf it sat, shrink-wrapped, until last night.Report

  10. LeeEsq says:

    The Thing was based on a short science fiction story called “Who Goes There?”, which I think is a much spookier title than The Thing, by Joseph W. Campbell that was originally published in 1938. According to Wikipedia, it sticks closely to the story so I doubt that it was an intentional reference to the moral panic around AIDS.Report

    • Mike Schilling in reply to LeeEsq says:

      John W. Campbell, the magazine editor who created the Golden Age of science fiction over the next few years. Howard W. Campbell, in Vonnegut’s Mother Night, is reported to be an unflattering portrait of him.Report

  11. LeeEsq says:

    Speaking of “contagion as a monster”, Dracula wasn’t supposed to be a sex symbol in the original story. Bram Stoker intended him to be a walking and talking symbol for STDs, which nobody really finds that fun. If you read the actual book Dracula, you’ll notice that he is never described as an attractive figure. Book Dracula is an old, decrepit man with a bushy mustache and hair all over his body.Report

    • Alan Scott in reply to LeeEsq says:

      I would be very surprised if Dracula was an STD metaphor. I think Dracula is very much a sex symbol, but in the sense that a 19th century heterosexual man would view male (hetero)sexuality. And, of course, women’s response to it.

      Dracula doesn’t actually spend the whole book looking like an old man. After he feeds on Lucy (if I’m remembering my timing correctly), he regains a vigorous youthful look. Now, mind you, the description of that more youthful look isn’t something I as a gay man would classify as attractive, and I think the same would be generally true of heterosexual women. But again, it could very well be the sort of thing that a 19th century heterosexual man might assume would be attractive to his female contemporaries.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to Alan Scott says:

        Mustaches were quite the thing in the late 19th century as I understand.

        I’ve always read Dracula as being a personified form of syphilis rather than a sex symbol. Bram Stoker was a theater person with the body of a football hooligan so it’s really difficult to determine what he was thinking.Report

        • Alan Scott in reply to LeeEsq says:

          Possible, but it seems to go against the stereotypical Victorian narrative of syphilis, wherein the disease was given to men by loose women. A transylvanian nobleman as its face doesn’t jibe with that, though of course it could just be Stoker working against a stereotypical view.Report

  12. North says:

    I’ve never watched the Thing but it clearly inspired this most excellent video and thus has my gratitude.
    (trigger warning: Imitation Sinatra)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8faq5amdK30Report

  13. Zac says:

    If there are any of you that haven’t read this short story, stop whatever you’re doing right now and read it. You can thank me later.Report

  14. Glyph says:

    Also, I recommended it a while back, but if the thought of Twin Peaks crossed with The Thing appeals to you, watch Fortitude.Report