“Viral Things”: Extended Review

Now is perfect timing for a re-review of The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror “classic” of alien infiltration of a polar outpost—as Matthijs van Heijningen’s 2011 remake has come and already quickly gone from U.S. theaters. Carpenter’s The Thing was itself a remake of director Christian Nyby’s 1951 Howard Hawks-produced The Thing From Another World, which was itself based on John Campbell Jr.’s 1938 pulp story “Who Goes There?” Opening in 1982 against the ugly-cute alien of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., The Thing’s unseen yet malevolent alien and its spectacular eviscerations and incinerations was a box office failure for Carpenter. Yet, like its alien protagonist long-frozen in Antarctic ice, The Thing perversely lives on, a viral zombie that has been remade, preserved, dismembered, transformed, and passed on through genres and media that include the video game, Youtube homage, fanzine, blog, and documentary.¹

As with the mode of viral reproduction, the phenomenon of the Thing no longer necessarily bears the DNA of its murky origins in Campbell’s pre–World War II United States, when waves of European immigration had triggered xenophobic and isolationist reactions. While the alien takeover in the original was resolved by a macho glaciologist who takes command over a dithering biologist he dismisses as overly identified with the creature he longs to preserve and study, Carpenter’s plot line is more classically looping, refusing narrative closure as well as any clean distinction between humans and Things. The basic, shared through-line of The Thing devolves from the discovery of a UFO embedded in Antarctic ice and its subsequent accidental thawing, setting off an interspecies competition for survival. Neither species can survive alone on ice; each requires a network of some kind. For humans this network is society, specifically the hermetic homosocial world of the quasi-military science outpost. The Thing’s mode of social and biological survival, however, passes through and among individual bodies as it reproduces through imitation, neither acknowledging nor possessing bodily borders. Even the grammatical naming of “the Thing” is a singular epithet that is always also an undefined plural. In the 1935 story, the Thing came equipped with standard-issue red beady eyes and loathsome tentacles. But it was the Thing’s ability to infiltrate the dreams and thoughts of the men that Carpenter elaborated on in his screenplay of the paranoid infiltration or infection of the base in which one man after another becomes perfectly, imperceptibly imitated by the Thing. In the 1935 and 1951 iterations the alien threat was amenable to externalization as a monster. It was gleefully incinerated by military flamethrower in 1935, and in 1951 by a DYI-style electrocution clearly staged as a post-World War II populist rejoinder to technoscience and the A-bomb. By 1982 nuclear power had become the thing to fear itself and Carpenter’s final scene is thus a version of an arms race standoff. The only way that humans—who in all the versions have an irrational attachment to their already processed bodies and who cleave superstitiously to fictions of individuality and nation on which heroic resistance only feeds—can outdo the Thing’s viral reproduction is to deprive the Thing of a host, a decidedly Pyrrhic victory. The two “last men,” who could either or both already be perfectly imitated Things, slowly freeze to death locked in each others’ gazes in the firebombed ruins of the station.²

While a fear of homosexual contact within homosocial groups permeates each iteration of the Thing meme, the psychosexual fantasies of porous bodies only feed more disturbing realms of geopolitical competition. In the 1951 film, Scotty, the heretofore useless (read: feminized) journalist, ultimately takes command of the base radio to broadcast the warning that has become a stock line of Cold War paranoia camp: “Keep watching the skies.” Never mind that the Thing crash-landed a hundred thousand years ago; the time and space of national defense is infinitely manipulable and...