The Thing (1982) - Two Thoughts
My local theater showed a restoration and this is all I can think about.
The One About Communism.
A standard take on The Thing (1982) finds not a small part of Red Scare in its antarctic paranoia. The alien, like the Soviets, is apocalyptically dangerous: our protagonists realize early on that, if it manages to survive and get out of Antarctica, the whole world is in certain peril. It cannot be reasoned with or controlled with anything but extreme force. Consequently, the first order of business is to destroy it, indeed this must be done even at the cost of one’s own existence. Except that the Thing hides in plain sight. Your neighbors, your best friend, your dog, could be a com— a creature from outer space. On this reading, the ending bleakly suggests that it may come down to mutually assured destruction, and even that may not be enough.
This is a fine enough reading, but we can go a pace further. If The Thing is a Cold War analogy, are we so sure that The Thing is a communist and the Americans, well, American? Getting to this criticism requires perhaps more than the recommended dose of Kulturkritik. Let’s start quite a ways from Antarctica with instrumental reason.
Instrumental reason is a form of practical reason, a way of thinking through decisions, in which one seeks out the course of action, the means, that will best, i.e. maximally, most efficiently, achieve certain desired ends. An individual might employ a bit of instrumental reason to structure her diet: what can I eat today if I am still to come under my calorie count? More significantly, instrumental reason becomes a crucial part of the decision making of institutions: companies employ market research; and government agencies, cost-benefit analyses.
For the critical theorists of the Frankfurt school, the present, industrial era was defined by the dominance and domination of instrumental reason. For these thinkers, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, et. al., this way of thinking constituted perhaps the ill of modern society. For one, instrumental reason never questions its given ends. The Thing never stops and considers whether these humans might have a right to life or if their happiness has any merits: it wants to assimilate everything, damn the rest. Instrumental reasoning further reduces the range of human concern by only considering values insofar as one can quantify and homogenize them. You need to get everything into common units if you are going to add them up. So, for example, if the fact that your car might blow up and kill the driver is to feature in your reasoning, you must assign not only a probability to the explosion but a dollar value to the driver’s life.
In an individual, this might result in a blinkered approach to life, as the dominant mode of organizing social life, it has rather worse consequences. Such reasoning is infectious both vertically — workers of an institution are judged and then disciplined or fired for their measurable productivity with respect to institutional goals — and horizontally — firms must keep ever greater focus on the bottom line to remain competitive. Life down to the marrow is corrupted: as more or less soft forms of control and inducement, e.g. advertising, turn the better part of everyday life over to some institution’s ends. One ceases working for one company only to become a consumer of others. Eventually, even our understanding of humanity succumbs; economists, for example, conceptualize people as maximizers of their own interest.
Along these lines we can note the nonconformity of the American cast. They cuss, they drink, they bicker, they disrespect property, they play their music too loud, they smoke dope. In short, these are, with some exception, hip cats, countercultural washups, the kind of ex-campus protestors that Marcuse would have pinned his hopes and dreams on back in the day. Rather than view this as GI against commie, it’s more a domestic excuse of man against The Man. What gives them a fighting chance, with the blood test, is precisely the Thing’s homogeneity and self-interest — “They’ll sell us the rope,” et cetera. For those who have not seen the film, the Americans figure out who has been taken over by the thing by boiling bits of people’s blood. Since every part of the Thing is alive and trying to stay that way, the blood reacts violently, giving its donor away. And we can recall that the FBI infiltrated radical groups more completely than the Soviets ever managed with the Yanks.
The critical theorists were more or less pessimistic about the prospects of overcoming the system. Marcuse pinned some hope that the forces arational vitality, Eros, could be loosed and kick off a revolution. The Thing has more of Adorno’s pessimism. For the individuality of the researchers does not survive their fight with the Thing, not only in the sense that they win at best a Pyrrhic victory — with (spoilers) two apparent survivors, one of whom may be the Thing, about to freeze to death — but further that they must submit to an authoritative order to pull through. They need a strong man and MacReady, as the baddest motherfucker, steps up and orders people around. Those who resist his rule are disciplined or killed. In short, the survivors must become more like the Thing, submitting themselves entirely to the central goal of survival, i.e. to instrumental reason, in order to have any chance of prevailing.
The One About Aliens.
A few days back, I talked about Solaris. Solaris brings instrumental reason to its limits. The scientists on Solaris Station do not understand the strange planet they orbit, despite decades of investigation, and do not know what to do about it. The planet, or rather the vast, almost godlike, alien lifeform that inhabits and controls the planet, seems not to be sure of what to make of them. Perhaps to study them, it conjures doubles of people they have known and lost. This is all existentially unbearable; should you accept a near-perfect replica of your dead lover as a miracle or a monstrosity?
The imitations of familiars in The Thing, by contrast, are existentially worrying only in the most straightforward way. It is obvious how to treat them. Blow them the fuck up. Even though the Thing itself is somewhat mysterious — we do not know where it came from, how it works, or what it is like — it is not an object of curiosity for the characters. It is too dangerous to ask questions.
The Thing has been thought of as a Lovecraftian story. After all, Lovecraft wrote his own story, “At the Mouth of Madness,” about scientists discovering terrible aliens in the South Pole. Indeed the Thing bears definite resemblance to the shoggoths of that story, amoebic, alien monsters capable of assuming any form. The Thing takes not only its beast, but a central warning: if only we had been content not knowing, we might never had discovered such horrors. Lovecraft strikes a combination of the previous notes, in that the dangers of discovery are both psychological and physical.
Deep curiosity about the Thing is left mostly to the viewer, but it is a clear object of curiosity. After all, the Thing imitates humans well enough that they cannot be detected even by those who know them. Despite this, humans puppeted by the Thing serve its rather than their purposes. This suggests that the Thing itself, like the planet Solaris, is a kind of scientist, achieving a value-free understanding of its subjects, able to predict, but not to empathize with, human behavior. In the moments in which it is uncovered, the Thing is a being of pure animal instinct — violent, angry, mutable flesh — and yet it is remarkably intelligent, capable of interstellar planning.
“The Things” by Peter Watts is an attempt to wrestle with this inhuman combination. It tells the story of the film from the perspective of the Thing. Its Thing is a weakened, frightened thing; after all, it has just barely survived a crash landing and millenia of being frozen. Furthermore, it is as confused with us as we are with it. While its physical mutability and collective consciousness strike us as grotesque and unsettling, our fixed, decaying bodies and private minds horrify it. After all, being a hive-mind offers a connectedness and a near-immortality impossible to humanity. Indeed, the mind of the Thing is not too far from certain models of enlightenment.
In John Carpenter’s film, no consideration of the Thing’s point-of-view is given. There is thus a fan-fictiony fun to Watts’ story, an opening of the original to new possibilities. In truth, though, I think as much is lost as is gained. The Thing’s perspective is one that it is actually impossible for us to imagine. One cannot occupy or unify entirely different consciousnesses simultaneously. The best we can do, the best Watts can suggests, is a kind of security-cam flicking through of different perspectives. The ecstasy of the Thing’s “communion,” then, is something at best indicated rather than depicted.
“The Things” depiction of assimilation is both interesting and evasive. It answers the question of how the Thing can take over not just the form but the voice and behavior the humans. It integrates their consciousness into itself. It gains their knowledge. There is something, to my mind, intriguing and unsatisfying to this answer. Such integration, “communion,” sounds like it should be reciprocal, the Thing becoming correspondingly more human as it assimilates a human mind. But it is depicted more as a ghost fading into static.
Nevertheless, the story adds back an element of psychological horror to The Thing. The Thing’s assimilation is not anymore simple murder and puppeteering, but a mental breaking down. One’s thoughts cease to be one’s own and become part of a larger intelligence. Here, the horror of the Thing’s imitations joins with that of Solaris’ mimics: upon realizing that they are creations of the planet, the creatures are horrified with themselves, they want to be destroyed.
To bring our two halves together, we may suggest that much the same is true of creatures of the industrial society. Indeed, the situation might be much worse: it is not like you were ever anything else.