The Thing

to anyone who adores this film, i highly recommend this book:
http://www.calamaripress.com/images/Snowmen_cover.JPG

xpost Yeah, there are no machine guns in this movie. And most of these dudes seem the type of cats to carry weapons regardless of location.

Did "Alien" start the whole team of characters being called by a single name thing (Ripley, Macready, etc) or is there a war movie precedent I'm not thinking of?

MASH is pretty single-name isn't it?

many of the characters take their names directly from the john w. campbell original: copper, blair, norris, macready, commander garry -- so it's already pretty single-name, and the all-maleness presumably amplifies this; there's a military tinge to it even though the film's camp isn't military

alien is slightly diff -- and at the time more startling -- bcz women get militarised

good god, i had never known this aspect of campbell's life:

His mother, Dorothy (née Strahern) was warm but changeable of character and had an identical twin who visited them often and who disliked young John. John was unable to tell them apart and was frequently coldly rebuffed by the person he took to be his mother.[3]

!!!!!!!

omg that is what this film is entirely about!

this changes everything

i mean, how completely insane is that.

(was searching wiki cause i thought i remembered campbell having been in the military (hence the slightly military tone of Who Goes There) but no)

except "penetrated with slimy tendrils" instead of "coldly rebuffed"

ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

oh wow

xp

dunno ... MASH is fairly two-name, characters with nicknames, titles (Hawkeye Pierce, Hotlips Houlihan, Father Mulcahy, etc)

As Sam Moskowitz has written about Campbell in his early critical study of science-fiction writers, "From the memories of his childhood he drew the most fearsome agony of the past: the doubts, the fears, the shock, and the frustration of repeatedly discovering that the woman who looked so much like his mother was not who she seemed."

hope this moskowitz guy wasn't pulling our leg

i just remembered everyone saying "hotlips, hawkeye, radar" etc, but yes, we were aware of titles and non-nickname surnames, so poor guess on my part

Sgt. Bilko

... tho he was called Ernie occasionally.

So, yeah, war movies basically.

"Where Eagles Dare" has a one-name-only cast but "Dirty dozen" has first names, ranks, etc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ssiWgTA1qk

...and a mere 9 years later: i recently obtained and read the Anne Billson book mentioned by mark s when opening this thread...

(It is, as he said, very readable)

I saw the trailer for the Thing remake/reboot the other day and all I could think of was mark s on this thread -- it remains one of my favorite things from ile.

― ¯\(°_o)/¯ (Nicole), Tuesday, August 23, 2011 8:21 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

same!

As Sam Moskowitz has written about Campbell in his early critical study of science-fiction writers, "From the memories of his childhood he drew the most fearsome agony of the past: the doubts, the fears, the shock, and the frustration of repeatedly discovering that the woman who looked so much like his mother was not who she seemed."

amazing anecdote if true

the doubts, the fears, the shock, and the frustration of repeatedly discovering that the woman who looked so much like his mother was primarily composed of chitin and radioactive mucus

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51V7K8HACAL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

http://www.tylerham.com/pics/thing1.jpg

^want

One thing I noticed is when PalmerThing's blood hits the floor, it's right next to a stack of puzzle boxes and model kits.

what kind of name is Windows anyway?

― Ask The Answer Man (sexyDancer), Tuesday, August 23, 2011 4:13 AM (10 hours ago)

Windows is the radio operator - his nickname comes from being the "window to the rest of the world" or something.

Did "Alien" start the whole team of characters being called by a single name thing (Ripley, Macready, etc) or is there a war movie precedent I'm not thinking of?

Most of Sam Fuller's war movies have single name characters. Steel Helmet from 1951 might be the first (can't remember if it has a "Griff" in it though)

bah forgot to look out for the puzzles and models by palmerthing blood (it was on telly again so i watched it again)

what i keep coming back to about this movie is weird (uncanny) contradictions inherent in the monster's m.o.

as childs says, "if i were a perfect copy of myself, how would you know?" - to which the doc replies he's thought of a "blood serum" test. but this test makes no sense - if the thing is an exact copy, surely childs' blood would be exactly the same if he's really childs or if he's been taken over by the thing.

but further, imagine that the thing comes into contact with the rest of civilisation - and the entire world becomes thingified..

how would we know?

it's uncanny valley time!

http://www.openthefuture.com/images/second%20uncanny%20valley.jpg

"radical post-human" = "never does the washing up"

'human likeness' axis figures curiously elided beyond 100%

maybe the answer is that actually it is NOT an exact copy. the dog, for instance, is preternaturally calm, and the other dogs react to it; thing-blair builds a spaceship (real blair wouldn't know how and wouldn't want to); so along with superfast body-morphing The Thing's real talent is for subterfuge. it is more, and different, and less than human but it is good at hiding it.

but maybe not perfect: i remember a scene when they're putting blair up in the shack above the camp and somebody (bearded nerd scientist dude?) plonks down a bottle of vodka in front of him - blair's favorite tipple. blair doesn't touch it. macready picks it up, takes a big swig, sets it right back down. blair ignores it..

cf. gygax upthread:

in the last scene when Childs takes a pull of whiskey, MacReady shoots him a kinda "knowing" glance, which i interpreted as "why the hell would the thing be drinking alcohol?"... the thing wants to proliferate, not impede it's spread by killing it's own cells with alcohol!

http://mlkshk.com/r/6G0G

lol

The weird thing is, in the Alan Dean Foster novelization, "Windows" is called "Sanders." >>shrug<<

is that the only difference?

I always thought Windows was an allusion to a) his role as the radio/comm guy and b) the fact that dude is always wearing shades. even inside, at night.

it was the film's one gesture in the direction of utopian science fiction: a world where Mac kills Windows ?

(i'll get me coat)

uggghhhhh

Would it be too many xposts for me to reply to mark s with "No, there was also a pred ship?"

"pred"?

don't ask

to catch a pred(ship)

so lemme get this straight, a "prequel" with the *same name* as the previous film... has this been done before?

for some (swedo-norwegian) reason i have totally got it mixed up in my head with the remake of tinker tailor soldier spy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SppG-I_Dhxw&feature=channel_video_title

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgRWMbGSUec&feature=channel_video_title

The thing is an "exact copy" in that it is not visually different from the original, but clearly the thing has different motives. Hence the test. Childs may not know if he's a thing or not, but the thing that's part of him sure does. It wants to survive above all else, so that's why the test works. Now, what the alien's motives are beyond survival are never mentioned. It's like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" - they take over earth ... and then what?

Plus, really, in the end none of the characters know anything about the thing. They're just quickly adapting under stressful conditions. The Thing and us ... we are the same!