Cinema - A “Thing” of Transformation.i

ABSTRACT

Film has a tendency to mutate and remake itself over time,each of its evolving technologies dependent and growing onefrom the other. The development of technologies both forcechange and reinforce established processes. In film,metamorphosis is able to present the spectator withspectacular representations derived from a sophisticatedorganisation made up of sets of complex experiences andtraditions expressed by signs that are made visible throughcinematic language and its apparatus.

It is clear that many approaches to defining film haveemerged from the plethora of film theories developed overthe years. Some film theorists have used literary, artisticor philosophic models upon which to base their theories,some have seen film as a means of expression comparable tothe semiotics of a language, while others have come up withpurely cinematic theories. There is little doubt that thewildly eclectic realm of accepted theories in film studiesis expansive. And it is also evident that the criticalpractices that have generally dominated the discussions ofscience fiction film are equally broad and elastic, rangingfrom the humanist, ideological, feminist, psychoanalytic,experimental and the post-modern viewpoints, to mention buta few.

This paper will briefly look at the role of John Carpenter’s TheThing, as a symbol of both cinema and its expanding andtransforming technologies and theories. It will alsoconsider the changing attitudes to film and will look atthe film philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who has brought somerelatively new insights into film theory. His hypothesis ofthe time-image can be seen to be of great importance andpertinence to the changing face and identity of cinema.

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Cinema - A “Thing” of Transformation.”

Visual and Aural Keys Unfolding on the Screen in a Few ShortMoments.

The lights dim and viewers watch, as out of the darkness the

darkened screen presents and backgrounds the contrasting white

letters of a credit sequence. The opening credits of John Carpenter’s The

Thing are accompanied by the rising hum of eerie and menacing musical

chords, which creates a sense of foreboding that increases in

intensity as the credits continue to unfold. Tiny minute specks of

white, at first barely noticeable, fade in, shimmering from the

overwhelming blackness of the screen, forming a handful of stars

that establish a connection with outer space, as John Carpenter’s

name fades onto the screen. The name fades out as the moment crosses

from the actuality of the films credits into the diegesis of the

film’s narrative. This instant merges the immediate time, space and

reality of the viewer with that of the credits and the narrative,

while establishing outer space as a mysterious unknown and dangerous

expanse that backdrops the film’s diegesis, while adding to an

already escalating sense of foreboding.

Somewhere out there, in the enormous vastness of space and time,

the music that accompanies the credits melds with the sound of an

unseen engine reeling through infinity. Out of the depths of

darkness, an alien spacecraft emerges from the bottom left hand

corner of the screen. For an instant, it seems as if the craft is

going to leap out of the screen as it advances directly toward the

viewer, securing his/her attention. The sequence moves on as the

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craft crosses and flies off the right of the screen. Thus, drawing

viewers from their own actuality through the veracity of the credits

into the cinematic experience of the film’s narrative, an experience

that entails “crossing over a boundary and entering another kind of

reality” (Kuhn), an imagined reality created through the

collaboration of the filmmaker and his team. The movement of the

spacecraft across the screen augments the viewers’ awareness as it

shifts between realities.

The sequence then cuts to another view of the spacecraft, which

is now approaching a small blue planet. But, the viewer is left to

wonder whether the craft’s initial intentions are exploratory

wishing to merely pass the planet or if the earth is its determined

destination. This is not made clear, but these are the first of many

unanswered questions to be posed by this film before it reaches its

enigmatic conclusion. What does soon become clear, however, is that

this anonymous and ambiguous craft has taken a turn and appears to

be now on a collision course with the small blue planet.

The sequence continues, again cutting to another image of the

spaceship emerging from the left and crossing the screen, but this

time it turns away from the viewer into the depths of the screen on

a collision course with the earth. The collision is registered by an

image of the blazing flames of the spacecraft being pulled, with the

viewer’s attention, into earth’s atmosphere and the narrative of the

film. The sound of the explosion as the craft meets the earth is

heard off screen, as the viewer, “then become a part of that

reality, and that reality becomes part of you” (Kuhn).

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These introductory moments herald the icy blue film title, John

Carpenter’s The Thing, which bursts out of the spacecraft’s explosion and

burns onto the screen. The font and effects acknowledging the Howard

Hawks/Christian Nyby, 1951 film The Thing From Another World, as the

music transforms into a heavy fundamental bass heartbeat that

establishes the leitmotif for the villain of John Carpenters The Thing,

the alien creature that will be simply referred to as the Thing.

The title sequence then cuts to black, directly followed by the

inter-title, “Antarctica, winter 1982,” the same year the film was

released. The vast lonely blackness of space is replaced by the vast

lonely whiteness of the snow and mountains of one of the earth’s

last frontiers, Antarctica. The images of a frontier environment

proclaim Carpenter’s debt to Howard Hawks. The frontier allusions

are reinforced later in the film by the melancholy aloof anti-hero

MacReady with his shabby sombrero, the gun toting station manager,

Garry, and the eerie soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, who is best

known for his Spaghetti Western scores for films such as A Fistful of

Dollars and Once Upon a time in the West. The frontier atmosphere combines

with the hostile, almost alien, landscape of Antarctica, which

serves to emphasise the tininess, isolation and insignificance of

not only humanity but also all life forms, in an infinite universe.

In a sequence that mirrors that of the initial path of the

approaching spacecraft, a helicopter emerges, a speck right of

centre of the screen, dwarfed by the expansive Antarctic landscape.

It will be revealed later in the film that around 100,000 years have

passed since the spacecraft’s impact with the earth. The paths of

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the emerging helicopter and the spacecraft cross in the centre space

framed by the screen, but they are separated by time. This moment of

crossing realities is analogous to the viewer entering a cinema and

watching a film. Through the act of watching, the viewer’s eyes are

touched by the images in the space of the screen. Thus bringing the

viewer into an intimate union with the film, as the act of viewing

meets with projected the images from the screen, images that were

created at another place and time. The intersection of the act of

viewing with the projections of the film draw the viewer out of

his/her own imaginations, time and space, crossing each individual

into the diegesis of the film.

John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Throughout this film, Carpenter draws his viewers further into

the film’s diegesis by taking them on an extraordinarily gruesome

journey to a claustrophobic place-of-no-escape, a theme that recurs

through his work from his earliest 1974 film, Dark Star, to the more

recent 2001 Ghosts of Mars. The Thing’s main place of action is the

American Antarctic Base 31. This is a base station surrounded by a

wilderness as isolated and hostile as outer space. The Base will

circumscribe most of the action, as it becomes an environment of

intrigue and forced change framed by the expansive space of a white

zone of isolated frigidity, suspicion, mutual distrust and fear,

haunted by the encroaching, unknowable presence of the transmuting,

alien Thing.

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In a few moments, through the visual imagery of the credits and

opening minutes of the first scene, John Carpenter sets the mood and

themes for one of his favoured scenarios, an assemblage of a small

group of disparate, ill-matched characters, who are confined within

a vast yet isolating and claustrophobic space and forced to contend

with something terrible. Carpenter’s film continues in this

unsettling vein reflecting a view that expresses the immediacy of a

primeval panoramic picture of the cinematic sensation, revealing

cinema itself to be a spectacularly, emotive medium, both as a

creative process and, as an observed creation, a force that

transports the viewer into the mythic darkness of Plato's Cave, ii

where the cinematic image becomes a mediating force of a mysterious

and unidentifiable realm.

Gunning – Film ist.

In his introductory chapter of Film ist, A Primer for a Visual Worldiii Tom

Gunning notes:

i "This paper was presented to the inaugural School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, Postgraduate Conference, "Rhizomes: Connecting Languages, Literatures and Cultures" on 12 February 2005. It has been peer-reviewed and appears in the Conference Proceedings by permission of the author who retains copyright. The paper may be cited for fair use under the Copyright Act (1954), its later amendments andother relevant legislation."

ii Plato's famous Cave metaphor is often referred to by film theorists. It involves imprisoned spectators viewing shadows on the wall which, not knowing more than this existence, they assume to be “reality.” Today moviegoers may not be chained or fooled by the nature of the images, but often still choose to accept the illusion.

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Film has an agonistic relation to theory; this

goes beyond the usual opposition between theory

and practice, or between words and images. It

goes to the core of what cinema is, and the

difficulty of defining it. We might say that

cinema is by definition indefinable (except in

the most inessential denotative manner). As

Andre Bazin (or his editors who gave the title

to his collection essays) understood, the task

of film theory is to ask — continually — "What

is cinema?" and allow for a continuous

transformation in the answer. (Gunning)

While it could be said that, other, in fact all 'things' might

also be said to be "indefinable,” the ambiguous nature of cinema is

different from that of other systems. Cinema must be somehow

definable in its mode of indefinability, making the cinema (however

defined, or difficult to define, however bounded by theoretical

practices) distinctive in some fashion, which ultimately means that,

it in some ways it is bounded and finite. Gunning, however, is

expressing an awareness that is becoming more accepted – the idea

that cinematic boundaries are fluid and that cinema is an

integration of various understandings and approaches that have

evolved over the years. Integrations that mutate and interact with iii Film ist (7-12) is an assembly of 'found footage' put together by the Austrianfilmmaker, Gustav Deutsch, mostly of material from different kinds of scientific and educational films (http://www.artfilm.sk/film2002/filmist712.html). "Film ist may be thought of asthe first film theory done entirely in film" (Gunning 2004).

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changing times and technologies such as the developments in film

stocks, lenses, cameras, rostrums, editing techniques, special

effects (SpFx), the introduction of computers and so forth.

No film can be looked at in isolation or stand alone as an island

of innovation in a world of innovation, change and censorship. Each

individual film or work of art belongs to a time and place, drawing

from inherent traditions and spheres of knowledge. The process of

renewal and change cannot be constant since its rate, direction, and

degree are reliant upon the forces that happen to be at work, at any

given time, within the larger social context. “In any society the

carriers of tradition … are so numerous and interwoven in their

effects as not to be readily detached from the total

context”(Spencer). Islands of isolated cultural or cinematic

development are increasingly difficult to find as the technological

accompaniment and cultural fluidity associated with the film

industry intensifies its cultural diversity. Conservative forces of

history and tradition, however, are also major players in defining

behaviour that is less the product of new ideas than the effects of

old ideas operating in new or changing contexts, creating an

evolutionary process that maintains the vigour of mediums like film,

giving each fragment of its history a special and specific identity.

Coinciding old values are used to adapt and extend structural change

in terms of ideas and attitudes already held.

Carpenter has consciously and unconsciously taken ideas from

other films and filmmakers, exploited recent technological advances,

exaggerated and used them expansively while peppering them with his

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own sense of irony, in an attempt to create his own style and

tradition. He brings his own creative vision to The Thing, which

results in nauseatingly seductive sensations that are strangely

alluring, while physically shocking to view. The extreme tacticity of

the visualisations make this a visually viscous and grotesquely

intriguing film, which combines the isolation of the frozen wastes

of the South Pole, with paranoia and fear of difference. Yet, to

measure how different an individual film is from other films is a

more than difficult task.

This evolving phenomenon associates the cinema with other arts

and fields of culture and almost all forms of human endeavour. This

association makes film an excellent example of an amalgam of

evolving technologies that represents the spectre of changing

tradition moving through time and space. Tradition is not a mere

repetition of the work of the immediate past, rather tradition can

embrace all culture, philosophy and scientific advances from the

formation of thought to the present moment. Difference or novelty

evolve out of past realities and traditions, which are themselves

ever changing syntheses of experience creating new traditions;

“Novelty as empirically found doesn’t arrive by jumps and jolts, it

leaks in insensibly... change is continuous: novelties leak out of

previous situations, which do not contain them”(Passmore). This is

particularly true for new and technologically based art forms like

cinema. An artist, or more particularly a filmmaker, may make his

own tradition or rework another’s tradition by borrowing materials

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from any past or present period while exploiting recent

technological advances.

Each moment of evolving tradition of cinematic history or

transformation is forever arriving but never completing its

becoming. Rather it continues to become, through changes that never

vanish. The new remains at a turning point, a movement subordinated

to time and change. Caught always at the turning point of the

transformation, like the Thing, being both that it will become, that

which is becoming, both present, and past held in a Deleuzian time-

image containing his concept of becoming.

Fluid Elasticity.

Among the more familiar theories to dominate discussion about

cinema and the science fiction genre are the cognitive,

psychoanalytic and experimental film theories, each of which

emphasises different aspects of film and filmmaking. Even before

World War II, Walter Benjamin spoke ambivalently about the

implications of mass reproduction of works of art in his article The

Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction. “Even the most perfect

reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its

presence in time and space,”(Benjamin). Since then Virilio (Virilio)

has discussed how, when we are crippled in the world, the

technological form can re-present an image of our former mobility.

It becomes a symbolic form, which sustains a deterministic worldview

yet structures humanity’s relationship with progressive technology.

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However, there seems to be a growing general agreement that

cinema, the original time-based dynamic multimedium and the most

important popular art form of the twentieth century is being

superseded by what Lev Manovich has dubbed the new media. Manovich’s

book, The Language of New Media looks at the histories of cinema in

relation to new media and the large number of rising trends,

aesthetics and cultural forms that have emerged in contemporary

culture. Manovich also gives what he calls A Brief Archaeology of Moving

Pictures (Manovich), which is an overview of cinema’s past given as an

indication of cinema’s ever-changing face and to introduce the

various developments that have led to digital and computer media.

Clearly according to Manovich, the cinema is again evolving or

becoming something new,

The directions which were closed off at the

turn of the century when cinema came to

dominate the modern moving image culture are

now again beginning to be explored. Moving

image culture is being redefined once again;

the cinematic realism is being displaced from

being its dominant mode to become only one

option among many.

(Manovich)

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As can be seen through the work of Manovich, along with the radical

changes that are redefining the identity of cinema, film theories

shall also undoubtedly be reassessed.

Film theory itself sometimes appears like a nebulous progression

of ever expanding, terminologies and debates coursed with a fluid

plasticity reflecting the changing thought patterns, politics,

philosophies, and scientific and technological advances since the

beginning of cinema. Some film theorists have seen film as a means

of expression comparable to the semiotics of a language, others have

used literary, artistic or philosophic models to base their theories

on and some have tried to come up with purely cinematic theories.

Each theorist emphasises a different aspect of a film and filmmaking

technique, using his or her own particular jargon to support his or

her argument.

Both the psychoanalytic and cognitive film theories, as is well

known, revolve about the premise of viewer identification and point

of view. Psychoanalytic theory generally centres on ownership of

“the look” or “the gaze” and the integrity of point of view. Thus,

for most psychoanalytic theorists, e.g. Christian Metz, the nature of

the cinematic signifier makes cinema a primarily visual, rather than

verbal or linguistic communication system.

Metz’s writings emphasise that the “language” of film is not a

language of words. It is primarily in the qualities of its images

and sounds that the expressivity of the cinema must be sought. The

eye of the camera like any human eye sees not objectively but is

subject to systems of power, one might even argue, violence, derived

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from philosophy, ideology, and a provisional knowledge that is

constantly being re-evaluated. The eye both sees and looks; it is

capable of receiving and delivering acts of violence, truth, or

lies. No matter how passive or neutral it tries to be, the eye

culpably interacts with what is happening on the screen, sometimes

without actually seeing. Metzian psycho-semiotic models understand

the image as a representation “to disengage the cinema from the

imaginary and win it for the symbolic, in the hope of extending the

later by a new province” (Metz). Cinema is assigned, a function, in

the non-real that references the real, while concurrently rejecting

or subordinating experience with the image.

Psychoanalytic critics such as Constance Penley and Vivian

Sobchack often seek to discover in the imagery of the science

fiction film reflections of cultural fears or anxieties, and have

looked for “personal and social repressions that speak to the power

of the cultural machine that is the movie industry”(Telotte). While

both the psychoanalytic and cognitive theories rely heavily upon

points of view, the psychoanalytic, which is based chiefly on the

work of Freud and Lacan, attempts to draw in and on the human

dimension through character and directorial/camera point of view and

identification. The cognitive theory revolves about the idea of

editorial manipulation and an omniscient camera point of view.

Throughout his writings, the prominent cognitive theorist David

Bordwell for instance, attests that editing gives the viewer cues,

which allows them to read and construct the story of the film in

their mind. The cognitive theory breaks the integrity of individual

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character points of view, by giving the viewer an impossible

seemingly omniscient, god-like point of view.

Deleuze

A different approach to film theory is currently being put

forward by much of the work done in continental philosophy commonly

referred to as the critique of metaphysics’ that can be found in the

writings of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Kristeva, to name only a

few. In particular, the prominent film philosopher Gilles Deleuze

has argued for a philosophy of difference, for a philosophy that

does not reduce difference to identity, but attempts to understand

difference in itself. Deleuze in his two books on cinema, Cinema I and

Cinema II presents film theorists with a break with the history of the

semiotic and psychological principles. In the first volume, Deleuze

discusses the movement-image, or the cinema of identity in which the

movement-image acts as a fundamental unity and identity. In the

second volume, Deleuze discusses the cinema of the time-image, or

the cinema of difference in which the time-image acts as a

fundamental dis-unity and difference. In Cinema II, Deleuze argues

that cinema “produces an image of thought in relation to time and

movement”(Rodowick). His is a cinema of imagined human thought,

thought which Deleuze believed changed dramatically after WWII.

Deleuze saw cinema as a development of “a theory of signs from

material the cinema has historically produced” (Rodowick), in which

the relationship between the spectator and image is neither neutral

nor determined, rather appearing as an aberration, in which “each

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era thinks itself by producing its particular image of thought”

(ibid). Cinematic cues for Deleuze, therefore, deliver historically

specific images of thought.

Through these beliefs, Deleuze developed a philosophical film

theory of ambivalence in which the time-image is central. This

philosophy revolves about the perception that cinema was an indirect

representation of the time-image based on movement, until the advent

of modernism and quantum physics with its re-evaluations of time and

space, after which Deleuze believed cinema, became “direct image of

time” (ibid). Deleuze rejected the concept of present in cinema,

believing “present, past and future are aligned on a continuum”

(Rodowick). Deleuze saw the image within a grouping of temporal

relations, with time being measured in relation to the movement

image, “Time itself is affirmed in relation to movement” (Deleuze).

While movement does not vanish from the cinema it no longer

‘measures’ time but is folded into time. Movement thus subordinated

to time narrows perception so that the familiar metamorphoses into a

pure potential. Further, Deleuze discarded the idea that cinema is a

language system, considering film to be an event showing “how we

inhabit time” (Deleuze) through optical and sound images rather than

a representation.

“The image itself,” writes Deleuze:

Is the system of relationships between its elements, that is,

a set of relationships of time from which the variable

present only flows … What is specific to the image … is to

make perceptible, to make visible, relationships of time

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which cannot be seen in the represented object and do not

allow themselves to be reduced to the present.

(qtd in (Rodowick)

Carpenter

Carpenter on a similar note, puts this into more musical terms,

when he states, “movies are pieces of film stuck together in a

certain rhythm, an absolute beat, like a musical composition. The

rhythm you create affects the audience” (Carpenter " The John Carpenter

Web Site") – a sentiment that can be noted throughout The Thing, a

sensually overwhelming experience in which the violent rhythms of

editing, SpFx and cinematography are stylistically and rhythmically

choreographed into the film’s narrative. Like many filmmakers

working in this genre, Carpenter creates moments of banality

contrasted with the discords of excessive violence, to reveal the

extraordinarily metamorphic nature of the film’s feature creature,

the Thing, as violent ruptures become a rhythmic augmentation of

suspense.

One such rupture occurs when one of the men, Bennings is taken

over by the Thing. An alarm is set off as a sequence cuts to a long

shot of men hurrying toward a figure, of what most of the characters

believe to be Bennings running outside the buildings. It is clear to

the viewer that, the being the men are running towards is not

Bennings, but a Bennings form of the Thing. However, the

transformation is not complete. The false Bennings collapses onto

the ice as the other men approach. MacReady lights a flare and there

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is a cut to a medium shot from behind the Bennings/Thing creature.

The creature appears to the others to resemble the human Bennings in

all respects. Doc approaches the being he believes to be Bennings as

knowingly MacReady’s voice booms, “It isn’t Bennings!”

There is an urgent cut to an overhead medium shot of the

creature as it slowly rises to reveal crustacean like claws similar

to those of the lobster-clawed Selenites created by Méliès. This

creature is both Bennings and Thing, both present and past, a

Deleuzian beginning in an unfinished continuity. Reproducing in this

new creature all of Bennings’ qualities the Thing fabulates a

Bennings/Thing, a thing of time that remains perpetually

contemporaneous with the present and the past being a thing of time

that perpetually divides into possibility, present and past. Neither

Bennings nor Thing, it is the autonomous pre-existence of both.

During the transformation it is pure maybe, not a real pre-supposed

someone or something, but rather a moment of exposure. When the

Thing/clone of Bennings is discovered, it seems something of

Bennings’ soul still exists, or the Thing may be trying to

communicate its frustrations, as it lets out a soulful banshee-like

cry. This gives the impression of a futile attempt at communication,

a cry for pity, help or understanding from the creature. At this

moment in the film, it is possible for the viewer to have sympathy

for the Thing through this mostly human form as it cries out in an

indecipherable cry of anguished pain for a reason beyond human

understanding. It turns toward the self-preservationist, MacReady,

in whom it seems to recognise its foremost rival or maybe the human

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most like itself. MacReady mercilessly tips a can of petrol toward

the creature, and the dramatic extreme close up of the petrol

spilling onto the ice cuts to a long shot from the creature’s point

of view. The camera circles the watching men, stopping at Gary after

which it cuts back to MacReady, who throws a flare and ignites the

creature in the centre of the circle. The creature is seemingly

looking around the circle of beings, asking the men for compassion

for Bennings, or maybe it is looking for help from those who are its

own kind. The flare ignites the petrol creating ravenous flames,

which engulf the creature and its potential. The sequence concludes

with a lingering sense of the brutality in MacReady’s act of killing

a creature with such a plaintive cry.

Who Goes There?

Film is seen by many as an attempt at copying reality, like the

Thing, its apparatus pregnant with a potential that must reproduce

to find meaning. As Slusser and Rabkin attest in their introduction

to Shadows of the Magic Lamp, “film is the most mimetic of artistic

media – copying what is there and documenting its reality in the act

of presenting it […]”(Slusser and Rabkin). Like the Thing, on a

surface level, some cinematic reproductions can appear to be copies

of reality, but no matter how perfect a copy may be or how closely

it is linked to the signifier, clearly it is still not the original.

Similarly, John Carpenter’s film has often been critiqued as a

remake or copy of the Hawks film. But, despite some similarities, it

is quite different to the Hawks film, which digresses from the

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original 1938 John Campbell short story Who Goes There? Carpenter’s

film is less a remake of Hawks’ The Thing From Another World, than a

readaptation of Campbell’s Who Goes There? Carpenter reverting to the

original Campbell short story, with added moments of homage to the

Hawks’ classic.

John Carpenter’s 1982 “hypergeneric” (Crogan)iv

science-fiction/horror spectacle, The Thing, revolves about a mimetic

alien entity that has the ability to absorb and reproduce apparently

perfect copies. The Thing and its creature, like Gunning’s explanation

of film, “cannot be defined, because its limitations are those of

existence itself” (Gunning 2004). As such, it is among the many

reflective science fiction films to emerge over the years that

capture the nature of film. John Carpenter’s The Thing was produced when

Computer Graphic Imaging or CGI was first being seriously looked at

for use in producing SpFx in film. While no CGI graphics are used in

Carpenter’s film, technology is featured in the films mise-en-scene,

and through the film’s monster effects.

The fluid metamorphic nature of the alien Thing creature can be

seen to parallel the morphing of these many film theories, the film

industry itself and its special effects and technologies from

traditional optical effects film technology such as stop motion

photography, optical printing, creature effects, and matting to the

more recent outburst of digital effects. The cinema, a chameleon

iv In his paper, Things Analog and Digital, Patrick Crogan discusses the termhypergeneric. He describes a hypergeneric film as “a film, which consciouslyincorporates elements from diverse genres in a reflexive play that is acentral part of its textual strategy and its appeal to spectators”.

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medium, often integrates many of societies’ representations into a

melded union, almost pre-empting itself, while often highlighting

its newest technological advances. This is demonstrated in The Thing

through Carpenter’s use of the then cutting-edge Commodore-64 colour

computer simulation of the Thing attacking its host on a cellular

level; this type of computer was not available until 1983. This in

conjunction with, the Chess Wizard, computer game and the VHS VCRs

that appear throughout the film, are displays of what were then

pioneering technologies.

Serving as a lens or microscope, John Carpenter’s The Thing, comments

on what is happening technologically to the cinema as its history

unfolds. Some of the remarkable issues that make The Thing significant

include its placement in the development of cinema, the nature of

the alien entity, and the complex and violent visuals that

articulate the amorphous nature of the creature. Carpenter’s

creature, is an entity, which has no “self” or identity in the normal

sense, its identity and nature being that of change, mimic repetition

and imitation. A being, that appears to be forever in a state of

searching, for a selfhood it already owns, but can never realise, it

is a shapeshifter, in both image and essence. As such, it is the

ultimate essential change, a being forever in a state of

transformation.

Following Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), Joe Dante’s The Howling

(1980) and John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London (1981), The Thing

was among a new wave of science fiction films dealing with a

“monster from the Id” (McLeod)v to appear in the 1980s. Each of these

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films was highlighted with extravagant real time SpFx. Effects,

created through the introduction of groundbreaking technologies, in

the form of animatronics, electronics, puppetry, latex, and

prosthetics. Effects that produced astonishing experiences of

spectacle, while maintaining, not always brilliant, but rather

sound, and sometimes, excellent narratives and characterisations –

narratives in which character development is principally contained

by the visual spectacle of the style and mise-en-scene of the film.

Through such things as colour coding, acting styles, cinematography,

editing, SpFx and so forth (a characteristic that is revealed by the

massive amount of information presented to the viewer during the

title sequence, opening moments of the first scene and SpFx

sequences of The Thing).

The budding tendrils of both the film The Thing and the alien

creature called the Thing are products of a continual ongoing

process of absorption, metamorphosis and reproduction. Both absorb

other things, while reflecting, not only their own identity and own

technology, but like cinema itself, as suggested by Stephen Neale

throughout his 1990 article ‘You've Got To Be Fucking Kidding!’ (Neale)

presents viewers with an impression of their own evolutions. Neale

argues that The Thing is at some points “violently self-conscious”

v The sub-conscious contains as described in Forbidden Planet (1956), theinternal monsters of the Id. Thus, "the unconscious itself is internal alienresidue" Kwai-cheung Lo, "Feminizing Technology: The Object a in Black CanonIncident," Significant Others: Gender and Culture in Film and Literature Eastand West; Selected Conference Papers, eds. William Burgwinkle, Glenn Man and &Valerie Wayne (Hawaii: College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature, Uni ofHawaii & the East West Centre, 1993).

21

(Neale) and determined not only to display the latest special

effects, but also to display an awareness that they are the latest,

as part of science fiction film’s fondness for highlighting its

effects and production technology.

This opinion has been particularly pertinent to science fiction

film, a point noted by Albert La-Valley when he states: “the history

of science fiction and fantasy movies is as much a statement about

the development of movie technology as it is about the themes the

movies ostensibly treat” (La-Valley). In other words, the shifting

form of this ever-changing, ever-expanding, ever-becoming alien Thing

with its ability to become “All” within its particular thingness is

a suitable metaphor for the morphing of cinema, and its expanding

apparatus, forms and theory.

Perfect and Mysterious Moments

The body mutations and transformations in The Thing, which occur

either off camera or in real-time, do not form sequentially isolated

experiences; rather they produce an enduringly accumulative

visionary nightmare of the mind. The first image of the metamorphic

nature of the Thing is presented to the viewer as a frozen and

static image of metamorphosis soon after the viewer has been

confronted with a shocking frozen image of the suicidal death of one

of the Norwegians. The frozen Norwegian cadaver has already

presented a sickeningly graphic image of the exact moment of death

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to the viewer; a frozen snapshot of the life force meeting the death

force.

The alien creature, revealed after this gruesomely macabre

confrontation with the frozen embodiment of the fears and frailty of

humanity at the point of death, is also repugnantly encapsulated in

its frozen inert state – presented as a captured frame, a gesture, a

moment of time frozen in a single image of grotesqueness and

apparent death. The charred remains create a static spectacle, a

transitory rupture of shock that strengthens the rhythmic energies

of the narrative and intensifies the moment by adding emphasis

through this frozen mangled image of metamorphosis. Creating a break

through the direct representation of change, that shatters the

linear, empirical continuation of time. The frozen remains are that

of a transforming Thing, comprising an interrupted history contained

by the empty and unfolded form of time, which contains images of

death and memories of past lives and incarnations together with

future possibilities. A force of continual becoming and disappearing

arrested in a state of stasis.

The creature in its frozen inert state found as charred remains

in the snow at the Norwegian camp is taken back to the American camp

to be examined, dissected and analysed more closely. The resulting

autopsies will expose and illustrate its enigmatic inner workings.

Autopsies and “Other” Things

The autopsies can also be read as being analogous to a film

frame, or what Raymond Bellour called “The Film Stilled” (Bellour),

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for both capture not only a gesture but also reveal hidden meaning.

Yet if viewed in isolation, the frame will be void of meaning, with

no way to read it, as it has no useful reference point. However,

viewed as a part of the whole, like a film theorist’s close

inspection of a film, this dissection process becomes the most

informative exposure of the whole, while probing for its motivation,

drive and essence.

The investigation looks deeply inside the creature, slicing

through layers and breaking the Thing into its basic units, going

beyond a cellular level to reveal its biotechnology. The essence of

the Thing is contained in this frozen image and its microscopic

fragments. Like the captured frame, this image gives greatest

proximity and intimacy, which renders, to both the characters and

the viewer, the fundamental and profound differences between the

humans and the alien “other.”

The growing fearful and claustrophobic atmosphere of the camp is

highlighted when the scientist, Blair, opens the Thing creature like

a theorist dissecting a film. By exposing its inner, hidden, most

obscure and mysterious zones, he reveals gruesome deformed body

parts, past perceptions, sufferings, suspicions, imaginations,

dreams and fears, all of which are reflected through the astounded

look of the observing speechless men, captured by the camera as it

broodingly looks into each man’s face. After the autopsy, Blair

determines that their winter base is now host to an insidious

monster that uses stealth to infect and replicate other life forms.

This revelation fascinates and intrigues him causing him to

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investigate the nature of the creature at a microscopic or molecular

level. Blair explains what he finds to the others saying, “What we

have here is an organism that imitates other life-forms, and it

imitates them perfectly.”(Carpenter The Thing) Blair concludes that

no one can be trusted because the monster by now could have

replicated any of the team.

The Last Machine Undergoing Mutation.

A link between the camera and the Thing recurs throughout the

film. As it moves about the freezing Antarctic base, the camera like

the Thing infected dog creature, fluidly tracks and takes stock,

investigating, assimilating and recording its findings. This

parallel match is maintained as both camera and Thing furtively roam

the camp observing and replicating what they focus on. Carpenter

pushes this, through moments like the shot of the dog watching from

a window as the helicopter leaves the American base camp that is

matched with a shot from a window as the helicopter arrives at the

Norwegian camp. The shot from the Norwegian window initially

appearing to be a point of view shot from an invisible observer

rather than the omniscient camera.

The film and its creature, also, undeniably evoke a certain

perverse fascination through the very intensity of their spectacular

gore and fright. The dormant, not quite dead, static globs of alien

Thing are exteriorisations of the metamorphic process at whatever

point the progression was halted. Each time this Thing absorbs

another being, it undergoes an internal readjustment. The only

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alternative to this kind of behaviour for this creature is entropy,

or decline and extinction.

The same can be said of the film industry, which has always

existed, on a very tenuous thread. Cinema, even from its beginnings,

has been fraught with scepticism, with questions constantly being

raised about its existence, nature and fate. Terry Gilliam narrates

in The Last Machine (Christie) that even one of the pioneers of film,

Louis Lumière, is reported to have quipped to Georges Méliès:

“cinema is an invention without a future”(Christie). And now people

like Lev Manovich are discussing the redefinition of cinema as can

be seen through his statements, “Digital media redefines the very

identity of cinema” and, “this ‘crisis’ of cinema’s identity also

affects the terms and the categories used to theorize cinema's

past.” (Manovich)

The cinema has repeatedly battled to overcome such doubts

concerning its future. The introduction of technologies such as

television including digital, cable and satellite transmissions,

video, DVD, interactive computer games and advances in computer

graphics has regularly found the film industry in a position of

vying for the public’s entertainment dollars and contending with the

echoing phrase “Film is Dead!”(Beacham). Despite such lack of

confidence and unsympathetic remarks, film has continued, budding

extensions and tendrils, repeatedly evolving by altering and

remaking itself. Each of its re-evolving technologies being inter-

dependent and growing one from the other while simultaneously

containing and stretching its actual representational creative

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points. Points of change that are the physical essence that make

film, points that include its creative team and apparatus, points

that mediate exchanges at crucial interfaces and act as delegates

for other functions such as cameras and projectors, that then enable

other points, points of viewing and absorption.

As Vivian Sobchack emphatically states: “What else is film if

not ‘an expression of experience’?” (Sobchack). The intensity and

the emotive power of the cinematic experience are equally matched by

the speed at which its own various technologies transform and

augment. The fluidity of film sees it mutate and interact with

changing times and technological advances.

Moreover, it is clear that this mercurial mesh-like development

never was and never will be a completely linear affair. Rather it

seems cinematic progress is always on the lookout for other or alien

and innovative technologies that it may appropriate, absorb and

utilise as its own, making film an amorphous and almost “unkillable”

(Campbell) Thing.

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Works Cited

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NOTES:

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