“Viral Things”: Extended Review

Abstract

John Carpenter's The Thing. Universal Pictures, 1982 Matthijs van Heijningen's The Thing. Universal Pictures, 2011 Now is perfect timing for a re-review of The Thing, John Carpenter's 1982 sci-fi horror classic of alien infiltration of a polar outpost - as Matthijs van Heijningen's 2011 remake has come and already quickly gone from U.S. theaters. Carpenter's The was itself a remake of director Christian Nyby s 1951 Howard Hawks-produced The From Another World, which was itself based on John Campbell Jr.'s 1938 pulp story Who Goes There? Opening in 1982 against ugly-cute alien of Steven Spielberg's E.T., The Thing's unseen yet malevolent alien and its spectacular eviscerations and incinerations was a box office failure for Carpenter. Yet, like its alien protagonist long-frozen in Antarctic ice, The perversely lives on, a viral zombie that has been remade, preserved, dismembered, transformed, and passed on through genres and media that include video game, Youtube homage, fanzine, blog, and documentary.1 As with mode of viral reproduction, phenomenon of no longer necessarily bears DNA of its murky origins in Campbell's pre-World War II United States, when waves of European immigration had triggered xenophobic and isolationist reactions. While alien takeover in original was resolved by a macho glaciologist who takes command over a dithering biologist he dismisses as overly identified with creature he longs to preserve and study, Carpenter's plot line is more classically looping, refusing narrative closure as well as any clean distinction between humans and Things. The basic, shared through-line of The devolves from discovery of a UFO embedded in Antarctic ice and its subsequent accidental thawing, setting off an interspecies competition for survival. Neither species can survive alone on ice; each requires a network of some kind. For humans this network is society, specifically hermetic homosocial world of quasi-military science outpost. The Thing's mode of social and biological survival, however, passes through and among individual bodies as it reproduces through imitation, neither acknowledging nor possessing bodily borders. Even grammatical naming of the Thing is a singular epithet that is always also an undefined plural. In 1935 story, came equipped with standard-issue red beady eyes and loathsome tentacles. But it was Thing's ability to infiltrate dreams and thoughts of men that Carpenter elaborated on in his screenplay of paranoid infiltration or infection of base in which one man after another becomes perfectly, imperceptibly imitated by Thing. In 1935 and 1951 iterations alien threat was amenable to externalization as a monster. It was gleefully incinerated by military flamethrower in 1935, and in 1951 by a DYI-style electrocution clearly staged as a post-World War II populist rejoinder to technoscience and A-bomb. By 1982 nuclear power had become thing to fear itself and Carpenter's final scene is thus aversion of an arms race standoff. The only way that humans - who in all versions have an irrational attachment to their already processed bodies and who cleave superstitiously to fictions of individuality and nation on which heroic resistance only feeds - can outdo Thing's viral reproduction is to deprive of a host, a decidedly Pyrrhic victory. The two last men, who could either or both already be perfectly imitated Things, slowly freeze to death locked in each others' gazes in firebombed ruins of station.2 While a fear of homosexual contact within homosocial groups permeates each iteration of meme, psychosexual fantasies of porous bodies only feed more disturbing realms of geopolitical competition. In 1951 film, Scotty, heretofore useless (read: feminized) journalist, ultimately takes command of base radio to broadcast warning that has become a stock line of Cold War paranoia camp: Keep watching skies. …