The cast present a good range of masculinity from Kurt Russell's frontier machismo to Richard Masur's strong silent type to T.K. Carter's funky urban to Donald Moffat's military ruthlessness to Wilford Brimley's civil, grey haired science, and more. It is easy to see this as being film about male competitiveness and develop a commentary on the extremity that forces cooperation. The fear of penetration by a colonising other is there on screen all the time. While I doubt that considerations like this were too far away from Carpenter's thinking as he put this one together it strikes me that they were subtexts he used for the drama, not the other way around. They're still there, just not doing the job they usually do.
The body horror of the mutative fusions, the sudden extremity of the violence responding to the appearance of alienness and the great featureless white of the world around them make for a sobering meditation on the isolation, the shared loneliness of despair. If anything felt like the nuclear threat back in the early '80s it was this. Carpenter's action is dependably compelling and here, with the best practical effects he ever worked with, his weird scenes push so hard against what his viewers might have feared (at least the ones in the early '80s) that he had one character watching a severed head sprout spider legs and walk away say what the audience was thinking: "You gotta be fucking kidding."
John Carpenter's Thing ditched the carrot suit of the '50s version, went back to the source and amped up the paranoia of an alien that could adopt any appearance and intelligence it needed. Just enough backstory is delivered through action and reasoning and the rest of the tale is about fear of the familiar. Is that thing he said the truth or what the Thing needs us to believe? Characters that, through elegant writing economy are rendered potentially terrifying simply for acting like themselves. The worse this gets the more it points to a scorched earth solution. Is that what it will take?
Carpenter had begun his feature film career less than a decade prior to this. It was also science fiction (Dark Star) but its alien character was a barely disguised beach ball. With scant means but great style he fashioned the action classic Assault on Precinct 13 and the and the immortal slasher Halloween. By the time The Thing came up he was dealing a big studio budget that included a massive allocation for practical effects. Other directors climbing from cash-strapped indy to the major label clubhouse can fall on their faces just in the execution let alone the success of their mainstream works. Carpenter, gave us a magnificent imaginative movie with a score by Morricone (who did a kind of cover version of Carpenter's own film music) where the scariest notions were extended into advanced level practical effects and the scope felt as big as the continent it was set on. And then it fell on its face.
Common wisdom puts the blame for The Thing's failure in cinemas on Carpenter reading the room all wrong. Alien was a few years back. This was the year of E.T., the loveable off-worlder that everyone wanted to cuddle. Carpenter had already added scenes to The Fog to bring them up to 1980 and, armed to the teeth with money for everything and a big warm go ahead to helm a project that had been left a long time in turnaround, he threw everything he could at the project and emerged with a bona fide genre classic. But the problem was that everything else was getting warm 'n' fuzzy endings. Even Poltergeist with Tobe Texas Chainsaw Hooper in the chair felt like a Spielberg movie (some accounts say it was one) I don't even have to spoil the ending to write that the course of events in The Thing at the halfway mark prevent the question of the situation reversing into happyland. The question of how much worse is a better one. To a culture in the scariest phase of the Cold War yet, the notion of mutually assured destruction was not the stuff of cuteness.
John Carpenter has enjoyed a rich career making genre films that stand up to time and continue to be justly celebrated. There are enough and there is distinction enough to pick and choose, to be a Halloweenite or an Escape From New Yorker (I'm increasingly a Prince of Darkness-zen) but his own stated favourite is this one. Like many things that didn't blow up the box office The Thing rose to furtive life and perennialism on the then new home video market and remains one of the essential spines on the shelves of any physical media collector.
And for its grimness it is still a welcome watch forty years later. If the mutations look increasingly plasticky the higher your resolution (I saw it in 4K for this) the brooding silence and the humming spaces of the station still generate a fight or flight in us. But the more I see it the more I understand how wearying it felt to people living under the ICBM flightpaths with a cowboy in the Whitehouse and a Cossack in the Kremlin. The negotiations that will lead to the worst mutuality didn't even have the relief of a wisecracking Arnold Schwarzenegger. For all the snappiness of the dialogue and the engaging procedural language I'm just brought back to the threats: Trumpism, climate change, pandemic, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy cookers on parade and I think as the credits roll that I just had fun watching a great movie but I also feel exhausted. Not exhausted as after the catharsis of a well told tale but from one that refused to sing a sad song to make it better. It's Throbbing Gristle not Joy Division. It's Threads not The Day After. It's Come and See not Saving Private Ryan. It's The Thing not E.T. And it's completely bloody wonderful. Pass me some of that whiskey, now.
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