The Thing

...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!

maybe it doesn't want to take over the earth but just wants to be left in peace so it can finally build that spaceship out of helicopter parts and not be INTERRUPTED all the GODDAMN TIME and get the hell off this stupid planet

I have somehow never seen this movie

i think you need to question a few things abt yr life then

The thing is an "exact copy" in that it is not visually different from the original, but clearly the thing has different motives.

ha i thought you were talking about the movie versions here

Cell by cell the Thing has different motives, but does it have its own "humanscale" consciousness? The Norris-Bennings "puppetshow" scene is interesting in the sense that the larger part of the body on the autopsy table puts on an absurd diversionary show so that the smaller part -- the NorrisHeadSpider -- can creep away under the table, and perhaps escape. So is this liKe a wolf in a trap gnawing off its own leg? No: because the leg is also conscious. It's more like Gandalf holdng off the Balrog while the others flee: one Thing self-sacrificing to save another (even though they were just one "creature" beforehand).

And then of course Palmer -- himself also a Thing, albeit a stoned Thing -- dobs the NorrisHeadSpider in, and gets it fried. Suggesting that once the Thing is in DIFFERENT hosts, it no longer operates collectively. Is the Thingmind in Palmer being canny in some to us unreadable way? Or is it at the moment overriden by Palmer's consciousness? Or are different Things indifferent to one another's Host's well-being, since one cell is actually enough? Or are they perhaps even mutually hostile? Or mutually unaware, once in host bodies which lack sensory Thing-awareness.

The dog seemed to know the dogthing wasn't a dog. Why? Smell? Doggie racism (bloody Scando Huskies coming over here taking our Pedigree Chum...)

In Darwinian terms: How would a Thing even evolve? Would it evolve intelligence? Would it need to?

jeez i hadn't even twigged that Palmer was a Thing already in that scene.

i like those videos. quite a bit.

i had never considered that abstaining from a shared bottle of liquor could be considered an indication of human-ness, i.e. you don't want to risk infection. so maybe blair up in the shack wasn't infected (yet), but childs accepting the J&B might prove he already is infected, since he doesn't care about the possible contamination. it IS a little funny how the soundtrack starts up the ominous BUMP BUMPS the moment he takes a sip.

In the original story, the Thing has a degree of telepathic ability -- it can certainly broadcast into dreams, whether or not it can read. In this film, Blair at least leaps to various conclusions about what's going on WAY in advance of any the evidence. (Quite a lot of time passes -- it's set over several days, which isn't readily apparent -- so we obviously miss many agitated conversations, but even so, when Macready says "aliens", we have at least seen a flying saucer and encountered some very weird morphological shit; but when Blair says "this creature can imitate anything it wants, down to the cell level" -- or however he says it -- he is fronting.)

No reason to suppose the saucer-building alien is of the Thing's race: it might just be infected. The bugthing and the orchidthing presumably predate the saucerthing. Is the Thing a threat to "lower" lifeforms? There aren't any flies in the Antarctic (I seem to remember).

I actually think Carpenter sets up the final chat between Mac and Childs to be literally undecideable: I feel that formal story undecideability trumps clues here -- sometimes putting on a white fur coat is putting on a white fur coat, as Freud would say. But he's absolutely right you should be paying attention at that kind of level. (You always should: the wardrobe designer may be sending out a secret message-in-a-bottle...)

so he's either become Thing or has been thought-implanted by Thing. if it were the former, you'd think he'd keep schtum about the Thing's M.O. unless... unless Thingblair figures that if the men knew it could duplicate them, they'd turn on each other..

xpost ha you are saying that the bugthing and dogthing might have just hitched a ride on some other alien's craft?

no dogthing i am fairly confidenct came from the norwegian camp! we will have to wait for the premake to revolve that...

my "plausible" backstory is that the Thing is originally quite "primitive" organism in "great chain of being" terms: and perhaps evolved on a planet without too many -- large -- mobile animals. It can't -- or doesn't -- infect "down": otherwise bacteria in the air would carry it from person to person. So it starts as a fungus and gradually grows into a swamp-full of uglies, maybe on an isolated island. The aliens land in their nice saucer, pick some flowers and fly off -- gradually realise something is horribly amiss, and crash the saucer into Earth, but not before they're all Thingified.

The bug fits somewhere into this story. Maybe it was the ship's pet bug.

bug? orchid? I missed these...

It depends on the subtlety of Thing intelligence: I feel it is aware and hyper-driven by a local, connected sense of survival, which is also intensely situational in the sense that is articulated "through" the intelligence of the copied body. So Thingblair may reason that if the "rest of" the Thing is identified and destroyed, it gets off unnoticed.

I don't think the Thing is very bright in itself. It hitches a ride on the intelligence it has to hand. Blairthing could think "I'm also the saucerthing! It could build a saucer out of stuff in this shed. I will bodyshift back." But dogthing could not think this.

It is not as bright as people.

The bug grows out of Norris's head -- also we see someone break off a buggish-looking leg at an earlier autopsy. The "orchid" is in the dog compound -- a sort of flowerhead that pokes out at MacReady, while the big talons are smashing through the roof. It's what jumpstarts him into frying it.

ah gotcha

So many autopsies!

they're like the memories of lifeforms it's imitated in the past (on other planets?? or maybe the norwegian camp have a greener thumb than our ice jocks; in any case, those tentacles aren't native antarctic fauna)

or ARE THEY

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/science/2006/01/who-needs-europa/

omg the guy who discovered lake vostok just died three weeks ago!!

http://int.rgo.ru/news/andrey-kapitsa-dies-in-moscow/

Its MO is funny, because it alternates between hiding as well as it's possible to imagine, and going BOO as chaotically as it's possible to imagine -- and the latter, though it's when we jump most, is actually when it's at its most vulnerable in some ways. Providing you're not frozen in fear, as poor old Windows is, and let yourself be actually bitten, it's not that strategic, or even quick, when it comes to growing effective mandibles. Tendrils is a plant's trick.

The final monster is BIG, and has some kind of turbo-tendril traction for speed -- not legs, though big snakes can move fast -- but its threat is primarily weight, and strength. I assume from its size it had gobbled Nauls also.

Grenades don't entirely strike me as a lasting solution: but maybe I have watched T2 too often.