who goes there?

the synth-y mood piece at the beginning of the thing is a good psychologial primer for the rest of the film, in which a foreign life form (ennio morricone) poses as various native forms (john carpenter and his minimalist musical compositions). it effectively draws on what we expect, a few monotonous, repetitive tones, but is arranged  in such a way that we know can’t be quite the same as what we usually get. carpenter’s awkward compositions pale in comparison to the breadth of morricone’s career, but the tonal flattery of the opening theme is thematically important –  a more devious intelligence in a way condescending to a simpler one.

at the base of it, the world that’s threatened in the thing (despite computer metric-assisted paranoia) is an artificial one: a male-exclusive, experimental sentry post/outcast society that poses no particular challenge to a fallen trickster god. its world is exactly like the world of alien, a thoroughgoing, blue-collar boys club where it’s inhabitants are defined by their jobs and their toys. the juxtaposition with the fragility of  the arrangement of the outpost is immediately apparent and very convincing in how it’s conveyed to be so tenuous, despite how rugged and weathered our heroes are (or how we’re meant to take them). the fact that an act of compassion unleashes the thing amongst the americans is meant to heighten the later paranoid and reactionary stance in the same way that the monstrous birth in alien heightens that particular film’s icky yonic terror. this undermining is very present in a lot of john carpenter’s horror work, where men find specific difficulty in coming to terms with the irrational.

the thing is unmistakably a masculine nightmare, then, about the self-determined ideal. this is not an inherently masculine trait, but is unmistakably chauvinist in the way it rejects companionship and community for a stoic and blank watchfulness. consider that at this view of rugged individualism is dispatched during the aforementioned computer scenario. in it, wilford brimley’s character watches the simulated “thing” organism travel from dog, to man, to men, ultimately prefiguring a scenario in which all of humanity is assimilated in an invasion of the body snatchers style apocalypse.  however, the scenario the film concerns itself is the way the organism travels quite vividly from man-island to man-island. what’s undermined is that this coolly rational man (who soon becomes coolly irrational) doesn’t quite grasp is how the organism can so easily travel amongst them. they are, in the social sense, unicellular and competitive.

in other words, there is no genuine bonding. outside of the mortal fear of intimacy, compassionate personal relationships are completely downplayed in this world. any empathy or warmness is a trait of the “weak” men that succumb to the thing, first the dog handler, then the doctors and auxiliaries who are dispatched suddenly and brutally. this doesn’t exonerate the paranoid stance of the “hard” men like childs and mcready, rather, it hastens the inevitable. the themes concerning trust in this film aren’t so much about any reactive stance to fear because that fear was already extant before an extraterrestrial was. this is the subject of all of carpenter’s horror, the more vague and protean, the better. indeed, this is the undercurrent of all horror – especially when the thing (i.e. any and all primitive, universal fears) is external, it is explicitly internal. the thing is a social monster.

the explicit external threat is the changeable female body, the explanation for the performative alienation on the part of the men. this performance is a show for the benefit of each man’s peers; a show of prowess, alertness and also, of total impotence. this threat embodies everything outside the rational because while it can pass for lifelike, it doesn’t want to. its chosen form is goopy and undulating with a man’s face, not because of some failed metamorphosis but because of self-awareness. it is entirely unlike the parasitic spores in invasion of the body snatchers, who just want to reproduce peacefully, the thing wants to sow havoc and discord. unlike other horror animals, who may be misunderstood in their roles as predatory, the thing is entirely malicious and intelligent.

once the threat escalates, the only recourse is in the toys and the bluster; they bully each other around never realizing that the problem worsens because they deliberately estrange themselves. they are not so much confused in communication as unconcerned with persons other than themselves, so they seek personal empowerment in the symbols of dominance: dynamite, flamethrower, etc.  this failure of community is curiously what makes neil marshall’s inverse scenario the descent so good, as a woman-exclusive group (besieged by a very masculine troglodyte cannibal clan) has a breakdown not due to external forces, but hidden feelings and agendas.

the coup de grace of this film is how the third act forces the audience to realize that there was never any hope of overcoming the thing in this way. much as in night of the living dead, which hinges on the fact that the character we most identify with is actually wrong, the expected application of nerve by the hero is folly. as we see earlier, when macready’s party inspects the camp of the norwegians, the thing essentially contrived for itself a game that pit men against one another. they see their own fate and recognize it but don’t recognize anything else. this bleak joke has a punchline: the quintessence of social manhood, on top of the world and obligated to nothing but itself.

you can’t name too many films where the heroes’ big plan involves suicide by implosion. four stars.