The Thing, Part 2

‘The Thing’ (1982) is the sort of the film I start to be able to identify more and more when I grow up. True, E. T. has once been my favorite film of all time, but we all have our past, right? The more I return to the film, the less I see it as a horror film. What happened in ‘The Thing’ does not necessarily happen in another universe – it can just happen in our real world. ‘The Thing’ can be anything, be it a rumor, a disease, or something destructive for our well being. The reason why The Thing is scary is not merely because it was violent and chopped off someone’s arm as if it was nothing; The Thing was a reflection of our dark side – it exposed humanity’s darkest aspect. Carpenter could have changed the ending of the story and given us a happy ending, as an affirmation of human spirit, yet he chose not to do so. He wanted this monster movie to inspire us, to give us entertainment (I know it is sick) and a chance for self-reflection in one package. ‘The Thing’ can just be Carpenter’ most philosophical and intelligent film.

What made this cinematic monster chilling was that, while we had no idea whether it possessed a brain or any cognitive faculties, it certainly was a cunning opponent. The Thing brought out the dark side of human nature – the ego, fear, and suspicion inherent in all of us, and what made us so human and not a mere robot. Rather than physically facing humans one-to-ten – rather like The Matrix or the Kung Fu Master – this monster stirred up the paranoia from the back, and led the humans to mistrust each other and started killing each other in return. If The Thing is a cowboy, it certainly was one that shoots someone at the back!

The American team was doomed from day one. A sense of fatalism was detected – the fact that the American team did not understand or aware what has happened to the Norwegian team meant that history was doomed to repeat itself, the ‘Thing’ scenario would happen to the American team in exactly the same way. It was quite sad to see when MacReady (Kurt Russell) was alone in the room, and did a recording to tell the later generations about the team’s encounter with ‘The Thing’. He certainly understood that they would not survive this ordeal, and sooner or later the remaining members would likely be eliminated one by one. Men might not have the ability to stand up to ‘The Thing’, yet there was something even worse – the fact they could not even stand by each other in such a critical situation.

What paranoia is all about is an irrational and subjective view towards others, especially when at a situation where trust and confidence are more important than ever. In ‘The Thing’, every action, no matter how positive and contributive it may first seem, can be interpreted in the opposite manner.  Even the most objective form of test would be suspected and failed to deliver the promise. When all the men agreed on that the fairest test was to have a blood test to see who has turned into a monster, the next thing they have found was that the blood has already been sabotaged. Another standoff ensued, as now everyone was suspecting that someone among them has already turned into ‘The Thing’ and attempted to skip the acid test. Even the apparently objective evidence could be questioned – when Mac’s torn shirts were found in the wrong place at the wrong time, suspicions all turned onto him, and he has to literally defend his ‘innocence’ by holding the other men at gun point. Everything has to be tied up – which is ironic because it seemed to be only time when they were literally branded together as a team. Even worse are the testimonies by the characters. The trust and credibility of every character was questioned, even if the audience assumed that MacReady was the protagonist and likely to be the hero after all. When someone’s statement is contradicting what others have seen, his credibility was immediately put to question, and the focus was on whether he was ‘The Thing’ or not, even if there is another guy doing some funny business behind to distort the fact.

In the film, there were characters who were just plain unlucky. It could be the case that because one was standing just next to an infected character, he would be infected right away. If we take the meaning of ‘The Thing’ in a more metaphorical meaning, that will be the case if the destructive effect of paranoia, disease or rumor can pass on very effectively – because our dark and often irrational sides are so committed (The Hateful Eight reference) to choose to believe that, without analyzing it beforehand.

At the most stressful situations, people will retreat, and it really is the sad fact of humanity. Some of the members simply walked away, and were never to be found, or their corpse were later discovered, either devoured by The Thing or a suicide. One of the members, Blair was sort of like a ‘wiki’-freak and he just straightly went to the computer and engaged with a bit of dynamical equations – to see if ‘The Thing’ did escape and go to the civilized area, how long everyone on Earth would be infected. When the output stated ‘a few years’, Blair became consumed with awe and paranoia. He went as far to disconnect all the transport and communication for the others to escape. At the point he became the monster, he started building an aircraft, to achieve the aim of infecting the humanity with the nasty Thing.

Carpenter has placed a lot of clever ellipsis through the films. There are characters that disappeared for a while and suddenly reappeared some moments later, without stating , or showing objectively what has happened to them during their ‘time-off’ – all the characters and the audience can know was the verbal testimonies and reasons the character provided, and there are no ways to see whether their claims are true or not. The effect is that makes both the characters and audience alike more paranoid, because especially for us, we are not even allowed an objective point of view of the real answer to the mystery. Anyone who disappeared without a good reason could already be proof that they have been transformed to the monster. An relevant point I feel was that maybe some audience are over-analyzing the actions of the characters, especially when they tried to identify which character was ‘The Thing’. Statements like ‘Oh, he is not breathing all the way’ could be very subjective, because Carpenter deliberately misled us to follow that way. There is not an answer of who is ‘The Thing’ or not – if some ‘Man-Thing’ tried to pretend to be a human being – it certainly would behave like a genuine human being, and one would be hard to figure it out – except with the blood test or at the point it exposed. The director was playing a mind game with the audience, and to fuel their suspicion through the various ups and downs of the narrative.

At the end, the only 2 survivors were MacReady and Childs. Childs has disappeared throughout the final showdown, and no reasons were provided for his disappearance. Since Carpenter intended the ending to be dark and ambiguous, there were many debates and speculations about the final conclusion of the story - just search for ‘Is Childs the Thing’ on the web and you will be assaulted with loads of hits about the various theories. A very famous fan theory is that, while it appeared that MacReady was sharing a last bottle of liqueur with Childs, it was actually gasoline to test out whether Childs has transformed to the Thing. Since Childs appeared to have no hard feeling about the offer after he has taken a sip, MacReady confirmed that he was sitting next to a bloody monster. Of course, the flip side was that MacReady himself was the Thing (I understand it could be hard for Kurt Russell to be seen as the bad guy).

To me, I feel that there is no point to decide who is The Thing, because Carpenter’s idea is not to give a definite answer. The power of the ambiguous ending is that it would generate a sustained paranoia in the audience’s mind, because the ends will never be tied up properly, and the mystery would never be resolved. The team of men might be facing a powerful alien, yet it was the weakness and dark sides always inherent in humanity that have defeated them, and prevented them from devising more intelligent means to conquer the shadows that have haunted them.

So, any-Thing else to deal with?

-End-

(2/2)

by Ed Law

24/12/2017

Film Analysis

The Thing, Part 1

When you hear the slogan ‘Together we will make it’, will you laugh it off as a joke or a delusion? When you do something for a group out of good will, do you expect your contribution will have exactly the opposite effect? When you place trust on someone else, is it based on any rational foundations or merely a blind faith? Is that a point that the paranoia inherent in all of us will eventually consume all of us in a community? These appear to be very dark, yet relevant questions to us to face, because they lead to a better appreciation of what that means to be human after all. And, these are the questions the great filmmaker John Carpenter explored in his masterpiece, which is celebrating the 35^th anniversary this year – ‘The Thing’ (1982)!! 

 What is interesting about the history of ‘The Thing’ is that the film had its theatrical release at the same week as ‘Blade Runner’, and the fate of the two films have also been very similar. Both films suffered from initial mixed reviews and unsatisfactory box-office results, yet their reputations elevated to the level of the greatest work in their respective genre, and are considered modern classics by today’s standard. The similarities do not stop here – if we look into the 2 films, we can find a lot of common themes in the two great films. Another similar work is of course Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’, which appeared only 2 years before ‘The Thing’, and David Cronenberg’s ‘The Brood’, which the director has stated as his version of ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’. One can have the impression that the style and world view from these films are also very comparable to each other. These films were misunderstood as they were first shown to the audience, because they defied the audience’s expectation with regard to their alleged genre – which were sci-fi and horror – and they have shown something beyond their genres, for which the audience members were not ready for. If the viewer is willing to look beyond the surface, he/she will find the films are not merely about scary stuffs or high-tech wonders, but are about very elemental questions about human nature – that of alienation, identity, family relationships, institutions, and most of all – what makes us to be human.

When I first watched ‘The Thing’, like other viewers I was of course fascinated by the power of horror and the numerous WTF moments that has become legend for the film. The more I looked at it, I found it disturbing because it addressed the reality that we all situated in – and Carpenter seemed to have the foresight to realize what happened in ‘The Thing’ –the paranoia, the faulty interactions and so on- could just happen in the real world, maybe without the monsters itself. I see the film more as a psychological rather than a horror film, as putting the scary bits aside, the film gives you a lot of insights about human nature and how things can go wrong in human interactions. If one is saying that ‘The Thing’ is merely about a monster devouring every human characters he can cross path with during its 2 hours of cinematic life, then I would say the film is more about a potential breakdown of community, or civilization itself. ‘The Thing’ is great because it did not rely on cheap scare tactic to unsettle the audience, it brings out and liberates the innermost, and unconscious fear inherent in all of us. The film is beautiful because Carpenter has painstaking installed a lot of ambiguities throughout the film, meaning that the audience can not jump to simple conclusions regarding the actions and underlying motivations of any characters in the film. An apparent ‘good-natured’ action can just have the completely opposite motivation in the film. Not only this will generate a continued discussion of the film for the years to come , very much like ‘The Shining’ and ‘Blade Runner’, it can generate a tremendous sense of paranoia in the  audience’s mind, as they have no definite point of reference they can focus on when they try to make sense of the film.

I believe why ‘The Thing’ is so successful is not merely because it is a scary or entertaining film – the real reason is because it brings out some of the audience’s most fundamental concerns regarding themselves, very much like ‘The Shining’ and ‘Blade Runner’. The film itself represents the projection of the audience’s most intimate fear – the interactions with others, the paranoia that drives and leads to mistrust and nasty relationships, and the often futile attempts to stand up to problems that have proven to be too big for them.

‘The Thing’ has influenced many subsequent films in the horror / sci-fi lexicon, and its influence is not limited to these genres. Quentin Tarantino, for example, is a big fan of the film and he has cited influences of ‘The Thing’ in Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight (which can be seen as ‘The Thing’ of the American West).

A quick look at the plot. 'The Thing' is actually an extraterrestrial life form, which is parasitic, and its only drive is to survive, survive, and survive, no matter what destructions it will cause to whatever universe it finds itself fall into. The untimely victim we have got is an all-man team working in Antarctica. When the man rescued a husky from the snowy landscape, they had absolutely no idea that this 'man's best friend' has some unfriendly company - 'The Thing' has always assimilated it and transformed it to a 'Dog-Thing'. When the 'Dog-Thing' has killed all its canine mates in the kernel and transformed into a monstrous being, all the men panicked. The power of this extraterrestrial monster was just too much for the humans - it started to assimilate the team members one by one, resulting in violent death (and spectacular WTF moments for the audience alike). What was worse, however, was that the team could no longer work together because of the unsettling fear and paranoia that has resulted. Who is there to trust? Who is the cowboy with the black hat? Who is the enemy and who is the comrade? And who is the next lucky guy to become 'The Thing'? As the situation became more dangerous and hope became more futile, the remaining men prepared for the final showdown with this monster - or, are they even aware of the fact they have turned to 'The Thing' already? 

The director of ‘The Thing’, John Carpenter has developed a very early interest in cinema since his childhood, and he in particular likes the Western genre and is inspired by the old great American director Howard Hawks. Hawks was sort of an all-rounder of cinema, as he was adept in delivering great work from a variety of genre. Yet, he was most likely remembered for his work in the Western genre and a sub-genre known as screwball comedy. At the surface, Hawk’s films are often about the spirit of working together professionally towards a common aim, yet he also made a slight twist through the introduction of a sort of characters known as ‘Hawksian woman’, a few example being Lauren Bacall, Katherine Hepburn, and Angie Dickinson. It is important first to be clear Hawks himself has no intention to place feminist ideas in his work in the first place. The introduction of ‘Hawksian woman’ is to challenge the way how cinema or the common people’s perception of female characters in culture. Hawksian woman, while situated in an era where the equality of sex was not a common belief, tended to challenge and destabilize the power, and expose the underlying weakness and vulnerability of the male character. That is exactly the reason why ‘Hawksian woman’ worked particular well in Film Noir (which Hawks has made a few great classics) and the screwball comedy, a genre where the writer-director Preston Sturges was famed for. The film noir often required a femme fatale, whom presence would significantly influence and contribute to the fate of the underdog protagonist. For the screwball comedy, which was an extremely common sub-genre of comedy back in the Hollywood 1940s, was about the battle-of-the-sexes, often an (intellectually and spiritually) strong and resourceful female characters versus a more ‘antiheroic’ or mellow male character. 

Why do I bother to talk so much about an old-school filmmaker? Well, Carpenter has cited Hawks as an influence for his filmmaking, and one can easily see that in many of his films, not just limited to ‘The Thing’. Indeed, Hawks have also made a film about a monster based on the same source of ‘The Thing’ back in the 1950s. Both films seemed to deal with some form of paranoia, in Hawks’ version, the allegorical paranoia of the Communist or the Red power that haunted many Hollywood filmmakers in the 1950s, and in Carpenter’s case, some people believed ‘The Thing’ served as an allegory for the cultural concern of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s (If we see ‘The Thing’ in a biological perspective, its mechanism is very much like a biological virus), and more obviously, the paranoia of suspicion and mistrust of others inherent in all of us.   In a number of films, Carpenter did agree to the Hawksian vision that one should face challenges and problems with courage, and work together professionally to combat the avalanche of problems that arise, like in ‘Assault of Precinct 13’, which was considered as a remake of ‘Rio Bravo’ in the modern setting. Yet the power of ‘The Thing’ is that Carpenter has struck the most intense deconstruction of the Hawksian ‘teamwork and community’ value, and while in the films all the characters (it is a rare all-men film) were at least shown to be reasonably courageous and willing to get their hands on problems, Carpenter questioned whether the idealistic belief of ‘working together to a good end’ would break down.

Many critics also believed that Carpenter’s film, like Hawks’ older version, addressed the cultural concerns of his era, albeit with different emphasis. In Hawks’ version, he was illustrating the paranoia of the political climate in the 1950s –  the Communist paranoia and so on. In Carpenter’s version, he was addressing a pathological transformation of the individualism back in the 1970s – people became more self-interested, self indulgent and willing to strive for personal gain, and falsely asserted this is a sort of individualism. Any senses of group or community, or the pledge of co-operation or collaboration, were merely appearance. Everyone wanted to be number one, and they had to shoot someone from the back – indeed the taboo of classical Western film. ‘The Thing’ was delivering a possible vision that everyone was so alone with themselves that they would be no beneficial relationships with others around, and the only interaction possible was mistrust and paranoia.

Let’s now focus on the visual aspects. Carpenter, while famously known as a great director for the Horror genre, has a stunning gift for cinematic composition. I believe this is an aspect being overlooked by much audience because they often place their focus on the thrilling aspect of Carpenter’s work. While the theme of his films is often about the horror both inside and outside of humanity, the cinematic images from Carpenter’s widescreen films can be of a tremendous beauty, and his unique vision regarding the composition of cinematic images also addresses the themes he often tried to convey through his films. This aspect is particularly illustrated in ‘The Thing’, making it one of Carpenter’s signature films.

While Carpenter preferred the use of anamorphic composition, which often gave a nice and photogenic shallow depth of field for the final cinematic image, he often made efforts to stage the set so that everything in the frame is in sharp focus. While he tended to emphasize the horizontal vista in the wide screen, the composition is often sparse and not filled with a lot of details and people, as opposed to the original intention of widescreen films – to show epics and large scale activities. It afforded a sort of emptiness in a vast area.

Carpenter’s composition relied on a lot of claustrophobic framing, in contrast with the widescreen scope format he always preferred to employ. He also did a lot of nice close-up shots of the character’s faces – an attribute which was advantageous for anamorphic telephoto lenses, and the shots were held so tight on the faces that they provided an intense atmosphere for the narrative. Ennio Morricone’s sparse and minimalist score also contributed a lot to the atmosphere – the notes were so simple that nihilism could be detected, yet it was warning us that the truth was so deep that there was always something beyond surface appearance.

It was also noted that Carpenter has used another of his favorite camera techniques – a subjective, point of view and mobile camera (in some cases, a Steadicam). What was interesting and quite frightening was that this point of view belonged to none of the characters. It therefore seemed like a ghostly vision, exploring around the complex the men lived in, ready to stalk on any unlucky victims. 

I feel that Carpenter's visual approach served a number of purposes in terms of addressing his theme. First, this type of antagonistic composition generated a very high contrast feel for the audience, and the visual impact would defy expectations from the audience, and generate tensions both in the scenes and the audience alike. Second, these arrangements illustrated the fact one could not see things from the surface. Indeed, the whole point of the film was about the sad fact that you could not figure out who was The Thing and who was not, including the fact that you have become the monster. The idea that a different arrangement would lead to a different impression from the audience would induce fear and urged the audience to look beyond the appearance. When two faces are held very close in a shot, it could suggest intimate and heart-to-heart relationships, yet it could just be a very tight face off. When audience expected a lively environment from the vista provided by widescreen, all they saw were snow and lifelessness. Carpenter has successfully staged effective scenes and used innovative photographic style to generate unease from the audience, even before they encountered The Thing. Finally, the preference to stage in depths would illustrate the power struggle between different parties, and it was quite like the cowboy films, and The Thing has clearly drawn influences from the Western genre. This would certainly increase the tension in these scenes.

To be continued!

(1/2)

by Ed Law

16/12/2017

Film Analysis