Space and myth in a body horror
(Spoilers ahead!!!)
Strapped To The Couch – space and myth in a body horror
It might seem strange that a mythogeographer would be very interested in an action-horror movie from 1982, panned at the time of its release and largely ignored by audiences. However, behind the splatter of special effects in John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ there lurked an insidious myth-machine, though it took a fabulous book by film critic Anne Billson (The Thing, BFI/Palgrave Macmillan) to precisely describe its mechanics.
In Billson’s BFI Classics commentary she identifies just what an unusual film ‘The Thing’ is. The concluding moments are extraordinary in any context, but in an action movie they are probably unequalled. Despite two preceding hours of mutant eruption and transformation, nothing that comes before them is as dramatically unexpected, existentially thrilling or fundamentally chilling as this very short scene of two exhausted men, drained and huddled, any hope of escape or assistance utterly gone, the temperature rapidly dropping towards the deathly, and yet able in a look and a couple of lines of dialogue to conjure the invisible.
What could be more subversive of ‘action’? For ‘The Thing’ is an action movie. It shows MEN, together, fighting the rampant ‘other’. Yet such is the extraordinary journey of this action film that it ends in stillness, in passivity. The two toughest men on the team, Mac and Childs, the geography of a whole continent stealing icily into their tissues, are just waiting, not acting. And back into the vacuum created by the suspension of the action, the negation of the very form of the film itself, creeps the soundtrack’s heartbeat.
This bass heartbeat, scored by Ennio Morricone, is what begins the film; by the end the notes will be the same, but the music will be very different. It is the genius of this book by Anne Billson to describe and analyse without obfuscation just how that alchemical process works.
Layers
Billson elucidates the different levels at which this film is about copies and is a copy: it’s formally a ‘remake’ with short sequences directly reproduced from Christian Nby’s 1951 ‘The Thing From Another World’, numerous acting ‘doubles’ were employed, Morricone’s soundtrack sounds as if John Carpenter wrote it. As the characterisation of the movie’s central hero, helicopter pilot ‘Mac’ played by Kurt Russell, reaches its climax, the actor replays his performance of Snake Plissken from Carpenter’s ‘Escape From New York’ and the whole movie has, we learn, shortly before been played out just an hour’s helicopter flight away. The characters are ideal copies of their audience; “(W)e like to think that... this is how we might react... The characters are our mouthpieces”.
And copy is at the heart of the movie’s plot, too. Copy of a copy of a copy. The eponymous Thing is an alien lifeform, crash-landed in the ice of Antarctica hundreds of thousands of years previously and thawed out to run rampant among the staff of Unites States National Science Institution Station 4. But this is no man in a monster suit. This alien’s being and growing and identity is entirely carried out through the tissues of other beings. And it has dragged the remnants of its previous media halfway across a galaxy. “Alien replicas”, Billson calls them.
But there is a deeper level of copying that makes this film very special. Billson quotes Kurt Russell crudely summarising the movie “(T)he script pits an outsider against another outsider, the pilot against the alien”. On first viewing we might mistake the alien’s parasitism as a transgressive and transforming proliferation, an eruption of flesh, excess and novelty into the boredom of the repeatedly viewed TV gameshow videos and computer chess games of Station 4. But it’s something far more riveting and bleak; for just, as Billson brilliantly deduces, this alien ‘Thing’ has no fixed and original form to return to, nor does the film. No wonder it is awash with tentacles and special effects gloop. It has nothing previous to fix on. This is mimesis on the loose. This is mythogeography’s worst nightmare – the Spectacle with tentacles.
“It’s In The Keys!”
In ‘The Thing’ materiality itself is emptied out, action is drained of motion, men are exhausted of future and will. And the ice outside creeps in.
At one point one of Station 4’s scientists, Blair, played by A. Wilford Brimley, runs a computer simulation of the effects of the Thing’s escape into the wider world. Billson’s unpretentious deductions from what we subsequently see on screen loops us back to this scene, reflecting on the revelation very late on in the movie that Blair has long been carrying the Thing: ‘where did he get the software to run this programme?’, she asks. In other words: the Thing isn’t only DNA, it isn’t only “two way mental seepage”, it isn’t only able to imitate human subjectivity, it’s a programming language too.
So far, so SF. But, this book has something much more interesting to explain.
Throughout her description of ‘The Thing’, Anne Billson points up the absenting of women; there are no women characters on Station 4, and the only representations of women are the female voice of a computer chess game that Mac silences and a gameshow contestant on a VHS tape that is ejected. More than that, these men don’t talk about women; indeed, there is very little sense of their sexuality. They may be ‘manly’ to varying degrees, but hardly sexually so. For sex is the Thing. Close encounters of the gloopy, ejaculating, squirting and writhing kind.
Goo
Again and again the ascetic men and the disembodied libido tangle. Copy after copy is made and destroyed. But then comes a sequence that Billson called “so staggeringly unexpected and outrageous that it ranks with the eye-slitting in Un Chien Andalou or the murder scene in Psycho”: one of the men, Norris, appears to suffer a heart attack, the Station doctor deploys a defibrillator to Norris’s chest, but his body opens up cavernously beneath the doctor’s punch, severs the medic’s arms and sucks them down. “It’s a classic image too, of the castrating vagina dentate... the Thing has thrown off its pawn disguise and revealed itself to be a Queen” – and then here Billson absolutely nails the film – “capable of moving in any direction and taking any action, at any time”.
Through symbolically sexualised horror, Carpenter takes us from action to space. Unlike the monster from Ridley Scot’s ‘Alien’ that erupts out of John Hurt’s chest, this alien opens up, makes space, and removes the future in a single chomp. It stops time, removes its meaning. For this Thing can do anything “at any time” – the copies go all the way back, and the copies will now go all the way forward – there is no plot; only the invasive slicing of geography into time.
And the mythic wallop of the film – and of Billson’s commentary – for mythogeography, the nightmare becomes ideal made geographical, spatial – and material again. For our use, for our mental movie libraries: from deadliness and aridity, from ice, the film, through its fulcrum of mythic excess, suddenly and unexpectedly offers us calm once more. Inside the frenetic events, there is something geometrical and re-deployable.
Giving The Run Around
The de-man-ing of the Station crew is completed by the severing of Norris’s head (intellectual castration) and its re-gendering (the head is upside down) as Arachne, the female spider.
This triggers furiously useless action. The genre spews itself out. But this is not the disappointing running around of the final third of Carpenter’s (otherwise wondrous) ‘They Live’. This is Pan-ic. Nature rampant tearing men to pieces, shredding trust and dirty shorts and subjectivities.
And all the time, to one side of the operatic carnage, is a furious restraint – for this is “a Technicolour film with a predominantly monochrome colour scheme... a chess game between two unevenly matched players: ...a man versus the Thing”. We have known from the very start of the film that John Carpenter has meant this to be so, for he begins with a sequence across the cliffs and ice of Antarctica whose “simplicity lends the film a primal, elemental feel which never quite dissipates”.
And no, it never does. Quite.
Inner Landscape
But we have to work at it. Anne Billson makes very clear that Carpenter loves the “fun” of his genre. So when he evokes the glacial, ascetic, almost Gnostic landscape of his movie, he doesn’t then repeatedly fill his screen with that landscape, as say Werner Herzog does (wonderfully) in his ‘Fata Morgana’. This is a much tougher movie to read than an art film; Carpenter makes us work for our transcendence and our map. We have to hang onto the few scenes of that landscape of the terror sublime, knowing all the time it is out there, getting increasingly dark and deadly cold; and it is that landscape, that space, that geography that at the end of the movie returns to creep icily into the bloodstreams of Mac and Childs; to meet there with who knows what.
Who. Knows. What.
That is the mythic thing of ‘The Thing’, the “primal and elemental” thing that returns in the short final scene from the landscape to meet what comes from within. In other words; mythogeographical relations. As the two men, passing a whisky bottle between them, hard but ultimately fragile creatures, begin to know (have gnosis of) a terrifying, awesome and ultimately origin-less and formless What. The “what” that just “happens”. The Morricone beat returns – not a heartbeat this time, but a beat in search of hearts.
Crabman (November, 2011)
Strapped To The Couch – space and myth in a body horror
It might seem strange that a mythogeographer would be very interested in an action-horror movie from 1982, panned at the time of its release and largely ignored by audiences. However, behind the splatter of special effects in John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ there lurked an insidious myth-machine, though it took a fabulous book by film critic Anne Billson (The Thing, BFI/Palgrave Macmillan) to precisely describe its mechanics.
In Billson’s BFI Classics commentary she identifies just what an unusual film ‘The Thing’ is. The concluding moments are extraordinary in any context, but in an action movie they are probably unequalled. Despite two preceding hours of mutant eruption and transformation, nothing that comes before them is as dramatically unexpected, existentially thrilling or fundamentally chilling as this very short scene of two exhausted men, drained and huddled, any hope of escape or assistance utterly gone, the temperature rapidly dropping towards the deathly, and yet able in a look and a couple of lines of dialogue to conjure the invisible.
“Why don’t we just... wait here for a little while ... see what happens.”See. What. Happens.
“Yeah.”
What could be more subversive of ‘action’? For ‘The Thing’ is an action movie. It shows MEN, together, fighting the rampant ‘other’. Yet such is the extraordinary journey of this action film that it ends in stillness, in passivity. The two toughest men on the team, Mac and Childs, the geography of a whole continent stealing icily into their tissues, are just waiting, not acting. And back into the vacuum created by the suspension of the action, the negation of the very form of the film itself, creeps the soundtrack’s heartbeat.
This bass heartbeat, scored by Ennio Morricone, is what begins the film; by the end the notes will be the same, but the music will be very different. It is the genius of this book by Anne Billson to describe and analyse without obfuscation just how that alchemical process works.
Layers
Billson elucidates the different levels at which this film is about copies and is a copy: it’s formally a ‘remake’ with short sequences directly reproduced from Christian Nby’s 1951 ‘The Thing From Another World’, numerous acting ‘doubles’ were employed, Morricone’s soundtrack sounds as if John Carpenter wrote it. As the characterisation of the movie’s central hero, helicopter pilot ‘Mac’ played by Kurt Russell, reaches its climax, the actor replays his performance of Snake Plissken from Carpenter’s ‘Escape From New York’ and the whole movie has, we learn, shortly before been played out just an hour’s helicopter flight away. The characters are ideal copies of their audience; “(W)e like to think that... this is how we might react... The characters are our mouthpieces”. And copy is at the heart of the movie’s plot, too. Copy of a copy of a copy. The eponymous Thing is an alien lifeform, crash-landed in the ice of Antarctica hundreds of thousands of years previously and thawed out to run rampant among the staff of Unites States National Science Institution Station 4. But this is no man in a monster suit. This alien’s being and growing and identity is entirely carried out through the tissues of other beings. And it has dragged the remnants of its previous media halfway across a galaxy. “Alien replicas”, Billson calls them.
But there is a deeper level of copying that makes this film very special. Billson quotes Kurt Russell crudely summarising the movie “(T)he script pits an outsider against another outsider, the pilot against the alien”. On first viewing we might mistake the alien’s parasitism as a transgressive and transforming proliferation, an eruption of flesh, excess and novelty into the boredom of the repeatedly viewed TV gameshow videos and computer chess games of Station 4. But it’s something far more riveting and bleak; for just, as Billson brilliantly deduces, this alien ‘Thing’ has no fixed and original form to return to, nor does the film. No wonder it is awash with tentacles and special effects gloop. It has nothing previous to fix on. This is mimesis on the loose. This is mythogeography’s worst nightmare – the Spectacle with tentacles. “It’s In The Keys!”
In ‘The Thing’ materiality itself is emptied out, action is drained of motion, men are exhausted of future and will. And the ice outside creeps in.
At one point one of Station 4’s scientists, Blair, played by A. Wilford Brimley, runs a computer simulation of the effects of the Thing’s escape into the wider world. Billson’s unpretentious deductions from what we subsequently see on screen loops us back to this scene, reflecting on the revelation very late on in the movie that Blair has long been carrying the Thing: ‘where did he get the software to run this programme?’, she asks. In other words: the Thing isn’t only DNA, it isn’t only “two way mental seepage”, it isn’t only able to imitate human subjectivity, it’s a programming language too.
So far, so SF. But, this book has something much more interesting to explain.
Throughout her description of ‘The Thing’, Anne Billson points up the absenting of women; there are no women characters on Station 4, and the only representations of women are the female voice of a computer chess game that Mac silences and a gameshow contestant on a VHS tape that is ejected. More than that, these men don’t talk about women; indeed, there is very little sense of their sexuality. They may be ‘manly’ to varying degrees, but hardly sexually so. For sex is the Thing. Close encounters of the gloopy, ejaculating, squirting and writhing kind.Goo
Again and again the ascetic men and the disembodied libido tangle. Copy after copy is made and destroyed. But then comes a sequence that Billson called “so staggeringly unexpected and outrageous that it ranks with the eye-slitting in Un Chien Andalou or the murder scene in Psycho”: one of the men, Norris, appears to suffer a heart attack, the Station doctor deploys a defibrillator to Norris’s chest, but his body opens up cavernously beneath the doctor’s punch, severs the medic’s arms and sucks them down. “It’s a classic image too, of the castrating vagina dentate... the Thing has thrown off its pawn disguise and revealed itself to be a Queen” – and then here Billson absolutely nails the film – “capable of moving in any direction and taking any action, at any time”.
Through symbolically sexualised horror, Carpenter takes us from action to space. Unlike the monster from Ridley Scot’s ‘Alien’ that erupts out of John Hurt’s chest, this alien opens up, makes space, and removes the future in a single chomp. It stops time, removes its meaning. For this Thing can do anything “at any time” – the copies go all the way back, and the copies will now go all the way forward – there is no plot; only the invasive slicing of geography into time.
And the mythic wallop of the film – and of Billson’s commentary – for mythogeography, the nightmare becomes ideal made geographical, spatial – and material again. For our use, for our mental movie libraries: from deadliness and aridity, from ice, the film, through its fulcrum of mythic excess, suddenly and unexpectedly offers us calm once more. Inside the frenetic events, there is something geometrical and re-deployable.
Giving The Run Around
The de-man-ing of the Station crew is completed by the severing of Norris’s head (intellectual castration) and its re-gendering (the head is upside down) as Arachne, the female spider.
This triggers furiously useless action. The genre spews itself out. But this is not the disappointing running around of the final third of Carpenter’s (otherwise wondrous) ‘They Live’. This is Pan-ic. Nature rampant tearing men to pieces, shredding trust and dirty shorts and subjectivities.
And all the time, to one side of the operatic carnage, is a furious restraint – for this is “a Technicolour film with a predominantly monochrome colour scheme... a chess game between two unevenly matched players: ...a man versus the Thing”. We have known from the very start of the film that John Carpenter has meant this to be so, for he begins with a sequence across the cliffs and ice of Antarctica whose “simplicity lends the film a primal, elemental feel which never quite dissipates”.
And no, it never does. Quite.
Inner Landscape
But we have to work at it. Anne Billson makes very clear that Carpenter loves the “fun” of his genre. So when he evokes the glacial, ascetic, almost Gnostic landscape of his movie, he doesn’t then repeatedly fill his screen with that landscape, as say Werner Herzog does (wonderfully) in his ‘Fata Morgana’. This is a much tougher movie to read than an art film; Carpenter makes us work for our transcendence and our map. We have to hang onto the few scenes of that landscape of the terror sublime, knowing all the time it is out there, getting increasingly dark and deadly cold; and it is that landscape, that space, that geography that at the end of the movie returns to creep icily into the bloodstreams of Mac and Childs; to meet there with who knows what.
Who. Knows. What.
That is the mythic thing of ‘The Thing’, the “primal and elemental” thing that returns in the short final scene from the landscape to meet what comes from within. In other words; mythogeographical relations. As the two men, passing a whisky bottle between them, hard but ultimately fragile creatures, begin to know (have gnosis of) a terrifying, awesome and ultimately origin-less and formless What. The “what” that just “happens”. The Morricone beat returns – not a heartbeat this time, but a beat in search of hearts.
Crabman (November, 2011)