At the American Cinema Foundation I have interns—every time you listen to a podcast, the work putting into audio editing &c.—that’s done by interns. Since we are looking to teach not merely technical skills, I asked myself: What can the podcast teach film students? How can I introduce these kids to writing about movies? Here’s the answer—a series of reflections on movies & podcasts both!
Hello everyone! My name is Chris Charpentier and I am currently a college senior at Biola University studying film production. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been in love with film and the multitude of discussions that can spawn from it. Films like The Godfather gave me the inspiration to pursue a career in film in hopes to one day become a screenwriter & director. Wherever I get in life, I will always love sharing my thoughts on the films I watch as a way of learning from the masters.
The Thing
John Carpenter, in his 70s, is the most famous horror director in Hollywood. His career spanned more than four decades. He was most influential in the 1970s & 1980s, when he made cult movies like:
Millions of people have been fascinated by Carpenter’s visions, the most famous of which is 1978’s slasher Halloween, which started a franchise still going in its fifth decade, since it gave a generation its most infamous nightmare. But it is his 1982 film, The Thing, where he truly shows his vision of horror.
As most cult movies, The Thing was not initially a hit. Two weeks prior to its release in the summer of 1982, Steven Spielberg’s released E.T., which became one of the highest grossing movies of all time, a vision of a friendly alien, pure, with none of the violence or suffering plaguing humanity—the opposite of Carpenter’s vision. So The Thing released to mixed reviews. Both critics & audiences were put off by the massive amounts of gore in the detailed practical effects helmed by Rob Bottin. Critics also blamed Carpenter for lack of characterization. What they missed is something more sinister & horrifying at the core of The Thing: A small team of men in an Antarctic scientific station face madness, because life itself turns monstrous. In interviews, Carpenter tried to point people in the right direction, noting that the creature itself can be a metaphor for a disease like AIDS. The horror, after all, isn’t just about disgusting violence, but it’s psychological, it comes in the form of the team’s dynamic & how they react to the creature. In the ACF podcast episode, Titus recalls the Lovecraftian outlook on scientific advancements to comment on the team’s mindset at the beginning of The Thing: To paraphrase, The Thing reflects a unique type of horror that we face in the real world, because our advancements in science are not the objectively beneficial developments that we hope for within our society. The more we find out about our universe, the less we as humans seem at all important. For example, there’s a scene where George & Windows debate burning the remains of The Thing. They reject the idea saying, “We can’t burn the find of the century. That’s going to win somebody the Nobel Prize.” Humanity’s obsession with scientific discoveries & Progress leads to death & destruction later on.
This leads Scott Beauchamp to ask Titus: In a world that is purely natural & beyond any control that we put upon ourselves, is there any value to being human? The film offers examples that can assist both answers to this question. If we say no, we’re doomed, then we can point to the two main scenes where a character trespasses the confines of human decency: The scene where the Norwegian scientist tries to kill the The Thing’s dog form & the scene where Dr. Blair destroys the helicopter & the base’s communication services, to prevent the creature from escaping Antarctica & destroying the world. Both characters are eventually killed & subdued respectively, which shows the group defense of human decency against hysteria. But isn’t that hysteria at all justified? What does the violence say about humanity? If we say yes, however, there is at least a little bit of hope we can latch on to. The ending is open to interpretation—maybe the two survivors, Childs & MacReady, are human, maybe humanity defeated The Thing. But isn’t the ambiguity of the film’s ending in itself evidence of Beauchamp criticism, that Carpenter is nihilistic?
Faced with The Thing, the little community loses all trust & turns paranoid. It doesn’t help that the team’s dynamic was flawed from the start, with little arguments creating rifts between characters like Garry & Windows or MacReady & Childs. These little moments prepare their downfall later in the film, as The Thing, disguised first as a dog, took advantage of these divisions, feeding them & feeding on them, we can say. We the audience share that perspective—we also become distrustful & question everybody’s motives. It’ll even make you second guess whether what you saw & assumed throughout the film was real. The Thing is horrifying not because of its practical visual effects, but because it’s cinema asking whether we really are human & whether we can live with our weaknesses.
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