The Thing

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0:00:04.1 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Landry Ayres.

0:00:06.6 Natalie Dowzicky: And I’m Natalie Dowzicky. John Carpenter has had his fair share of Hits and Misses, but only one of his films makes our skin crawl with paranoia about whether or not those around us are still, in fact, human. Here to discuss Carpenter’s 1982 sci-​fi horror cult classic, The Thing, is senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Julian Sanchez.

0:00:28.0 Julian Sanchez: Hey, thanks for having me.

0:00:29.6 Natalie Dowzicky: And columnist for the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie.

0:00:33.3 Jamelle Bouie: Hello.

0:00:34.1 Landry Ayres: Jamelle, I thought I would start a question off posited at you, since it’s your first time on the show with us. You wrote a rather succinct review of The Thing on Letterboxd. In its entirety, I thought I would read it for everyone so they understood. It reads “Oh, hey look. It’s the most nightmare-​ish thing I have ever seen”. [laughter] Would you care to elaborate on that?

0:01:00.7 Jamelle Bouie: Sure, you even got my exact intonation, that’s more or less how I said it in my head. [laughter] So, I had somehow never seen The Thing before then. I thought I had, but I think I had memories of playing The Thing video game back from the early 2000s, if you remember that, sort of a survival horror game. There were a bunch of those. There’s an Alien’s one, it was a whole thing. But I had never seen the movie, and so sort of apropos of nothing at the beginning of this year, I decided I would watch every single John Carpenter film. And at this point, I’ve mostly done that, I have one that I have not finished, but I watched them all in chronological order.

0:01:41.7 Jamelle Bouie: Until it came to The Thing and I just wasn’t anticipating how horrifying The Thing actually look in all of its various forms and permutations. I think that thought came into my head specifically during the blood testing scene, where Palmer turns into… You know his head splits open, and he turns into a monster and tries to eat windows. And at that moment, I was like, “This is genuinely nightmares. I hope to never see this again”. Of course I re-​watched it last night, so that was not really the case. But the creature designs, people have said this a million times, but the creature designs in that movie are just something else entirely. So, that’s what that review was referring to.

0:02:33.3 Julian Sanchez: It’s an interesting contrast too because in a sense, this is sort of a slow burn, psychological horror. I mean, it’s not a slasher flick. The force of it is in this tension about, okay, well, the blood is spoiled, but who had the keys, and they’re trying to just puzzle out who among them could be The Thing, and whether it’s safe to be alone with someone else. And that’s where all the tension is, and I think I didn’t do that well on first release, it wasn’t reviewed that well. I think in part because, okay, you’ve got this slow burn, simmering psychological horror, and then you’ve got this absolutely revolting body of horror transformations that punctuate that. There’s relatively few of those scenes, but they’re really memorable. And I think maybe that sort of was so overpowering and to a lot of people so repellent that it almost sort of obscures that most of the horror in the movie is not about that.

0:03:37.7 Jamelle Bouie: I’ve always found it interesting that this movie is thought of as primarily a horror movie, because to me it has so much in common with the paranoia thrillers of just a couple of years earlier in the ’70s. That to me is more immediate lineage. And not for nothing, The Thing From Another World, the first movie based off of this short story is very much of a… I think it comes out in 1953 and 1954, it is very much of a piece which be Red Scare inspired, anticommunist Paranoia, science fiction movies of the age. And I think that The Thing is just in the DNA of the property. But then that really comes out, I think in John Carpenter’s rendering of the story. And when you place it next to something like The Parallax View, Alan J. Pakula’s film, which I think came out in ’78 or ’79. There’s a lot of similarities just in that sense of ever-​present dread of not knowing who you can trust and not really trusting even the very fabric of the society you’ve built.

0:04:44.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, it’s interesting, Julian, that also that you brought up like this difference between a slasher horror film and, like what Jamelle was saying, this kind of psychological thriller horror. Because before this podcast we covered Candyman, which couldn’t be different within the horror genre. And I was thinking the same thing that the type of horror in both these movies is very different and very distinct. Obviously made in different time periods, but I think too, what this movie kind of situates itself. Landry and I, right before this, were talking about how this year was crazy for movies. The Thing came out the same day as Blade Runner, and also ET came out like two or three weeks before it.

0:05:33.4 Natalie Dowzicky: So it kind of situates itself very interestingly between those types of films. ET has alien specifically, but I think it’s interesting to look at it as like, some people actually don’t consider it a horror film. They more consider it like a psychological thriller with some gory scenes, or some jump scenes, but not necessarily horror. But I actually think it’s scarier than a slasher film because it’s more… I feel like it gets to more at human nature and your understanding of self and what is self than slasher films do. But maybe that’s just my personal preference on what scares me or what’s more nightmare-​ish so to speak.

0:06:16.9 Julian Sanchez: Yeah, genre classifications are always a bit of a mug’s game. I would call it a horror film. If I think a movie where dogs are consumed into a kind of multi-​headed snarling blob thing with flailing tentacles, from that scene alone, has already established itself as horror. A lot of horror movies are, to some extent, the tension of when the killer is gonna strike. But yeah, I think this is doing a lot of more interesting stuff than that. I mean you can make the same argument about it, because I could say a movie like Cube, which has horror elements, but doesn’t quite track the genre convention. So it’s Sci-​fi and these are always rough and ready characterizations that… It’s not worth hanging a whole lot on. I do think it’s interesting actually, you mentioned the… Which was released pretty close to Steven Spielberg’s Alien, which I just thought no, that would be [0:07:19.7] ____.

[laughter]

0:07:19.7 Julian Sanchez: To Steven Spielberg’s E.T, which of course at the time was massively more successful, this was sort of a flop at the time. But I feel now, at least among sort of movie buffs, E.T is kind of regarded as schmaltzy and not very interesting, and The Thing has become a kind of cult classic.

0:07:45.2 Landry Ayres: Yeah, it’s very much, I feel like the sort of admiration for HP Lovecraft, who struggled during his day, and obviously a lot of the film is inspired by the sort of cosmic horror stories that he wrote about, you can see similarities in the initial reaction to the odd, unrecognizable but somewhat alluring nature of those stories that with time we grow to recognize and that sort of reflected in the first reactions to what the people at the base look at when they see The Thing is they start to really… After being initially scared by it, trying to parse where the line between who is between themselves and the monsters in the face of these careless eldritch abomination-​type creatures that are just completely unlike anything that we’ve ever perceived before, which is obviously a huge inspiration to Carpenter’s sort of spiritual trilogy of films that The Thing started with this and then Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness, which is in and of itself a play on At The Mountains of Madness, a story that he wrote.

0:09:11.6 Julian Sanchez: And the setting for this story, the setting for The Thing, of course, is based on the Campbell’s short story, but Campbell himself was probably inspired by At The Mountains of Madness. This is another story by Lovecraft that is set in the Antarctic and is essentially about an expedition discovering alien horrors, frozen beneath the ice. And so I think for kind of horror fans now, looking at this, you would very naturally think of that Lovecraft present. I’m curious if Jamelle has any… Having seen the other two and the sort of Lovecraftian trilogy, probably more recently that I have certainly…

0:09:48.2 Landry Ayres: I actually have never either of them, so I’d be very curious to hear about the other two.

0:09:53.8 Jamelle Bouie: No, I will… Well, first of, I would highly recommend both Prince of Darkness and In The Mouth of Madness. Of the two, I think Prince of Darkness is probably the stronger film, even if it has the sillier concept, which is what if Satan were goo?

[laughter]

0:10:08.9 Jamelle Bouie: But I really love it. And In the Mouth of Madness is a little more conventional, and I don’t think as interesting, but Sam Neil, who stars and then gives a really incredible performance, but… So all three movies do deal with this idea of more or less un-​comprehensible evil, the other two movies, it’s more explicitly evil. I think one of the interesting things about The Thing is that obviously for the human characters, a thing is a terrifying monster, but The Thing itself is just an organism, it’s just trying to do its own thing, so to speak.

[chuckle]

0:10:47.6 Jamelle Bouie: And it is difficult to attribute moral motivation to it, it is not malicious, it simply wants to assimilate because that is it’s biological drive. And when I think about how unpopular this movie was, and it’s worth, I think, if you can find reviews of this movie, it’s worth reading them because people… It wasn’t just that this flopped, it’s that people hated it. They thought it was really, really not… They thought it was trash. And part of me wonders if that reaction to the film reflects it’s a kind of horror, it’s a kind of take that was at odds with I think where American culture was at the time, the idea that there are these fundament… Not just fundamentally foreign, but incomprehensible entities out there for which we cannot actually control.

0:11:38.8 Jamelle Bouie: So much of the movie is the characters and specifically the scien… Wilford Brimley’s character being driven mad by the recognition that there’s no way to control this thing other than everyone killing themselves and isolating themselves, and this movie where the villain is on some level unknowable and uncontrollable and cannot be stopped except through the ultimate self-​sacrifice and even then, maybe not even then, probably just rubs sort of morning in America, America wrong in terms of the kind of message it’s being… It’s put out, when the country has this reinvigorated sense of optimism and power a movie whom…

0:12:27.6 Jamelle Bouie: All the main characters are American, they’re an American base, a movie that essentially says that your sense of power is an illusion, and there are things far older and far more powerful than really you can even imagine. And one of my favorite shots in the movie is the… When they’re exploring the crashed craft in the ice flow, and it’s a cool shot because it’s very obviously this combination of a constructed set in the location, but then a matte painting and sort of the way it’s shot creates this… [0:13:00.6] ____ they can shoot, the actors and climbing down and interacting with physical objects, but then the way it’s shot because of the matte painting creates this sense of immense and otherworldly scale that…

0:13:13.1 Jamelle Bouie: It makes sense to me that people would just find that really off-​putting in the same way that I think there are a lot of films that hit basically at the wrong cultural moment and people find that off-​putting, whereas think if this exact movie came out today, and let’s just say, let’s imagine that the effects which hold up very well, the effects are updated for 2021. If this exact movie came out today, I think people would lose their mind, they’d absolutely love it, because I think sort of the national mood is more tuned to the kind of fear and paranoia this is trying to communicate.

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0:13:54.3 Landry Ayres: You brought up watching this film today versus the context that it was in, when it was originally released in 1982, specifically because of another scene that you brought up at the beginning, Jamelle, which is the blood testing scene. And I hadn’t thought about this while I was watching it until that scene, when… I believe it’s Windows, is the first person that they test, and he cuts his thumb with the bloody knife and puts it into the culture dish. And then they all use this same knife, I believe, to cut their skin and produce something for a test. And this movie came out in 1982, the AIDS epidemic was just beginning to really, really ramp up, I think a week before this was released there was the first study that suggested, with any type of conclusivity that there was probably some sort of sexually transmissive virus that’s causing the AIDS epidemic, but it was still very, very unclear at this point what the transmission method was.

0:15:03.2 Landry Ayres: Was it blood? Was it saliva? Could you get it from a handshake? And we know of course over time we learned so much about this and that a lot of these fears were really overblown and people were being very paranoid, but it is really interesting the way that this scene in particular is placed and looking at the film today, in a sort of context of a fear of contagion of Covid. I don’t initially think of the movie about something acting in a virus-​like fashion, but it really does sort of function in getting from that body horror genre to something much more like a virus, so does that make you view what the film is saying any differently than what you might have originally?

0:15:54.7 Jamelle Bouie: For me, not so much, because I think… When I try to think about big picture ideas this movie has, I think… And I don’t think this is a stretch but also the characters themselves aren’t making ideological statements really at any point, but you have the movie… It’s a isolated, compound, constructed society. And the movie is sort of asking how strong are the bounds of that society? When something like this emerges can we act cooperatively to deal with it? Because I think it’s very clear, on my second watch, this was clear but had everyone just sort of taken a breath and work constructively together they might have been able to contain the thing before it really took over, but the immediate paranoia and fear dissolves those bonds whatever they were between the men and renders them easy pickings for The Thing.

0:16:57.8 Jamelle Bouie: And that… I think that kind of perspective, that message, or whatever you wanna call it, can apply to so many different situations, it can apply to so many different occurrences, not just pandemics. But as I said, the first movie comes out sort of in the midst of the red scare and that… It applies there as well.

0:17:21.3 Julian Sanchez: There’s that great bit of foreshadowing where they go and visit the ruined camp of the Norwegians, from which the… They’d originally unearthed the thing, and they find this… The place sort of, charred and gutted. And it is at least in retrospect I think fairly clear that what’s happened here is not just that the thing has done all this but that they have turned on each other, that they’ve killed each other. And then a lot of these charred corpses were probably not things at all, they were humans who got torched as they became paranoid and killed each other. In reference to what Jamelle said earlier about this, the other alien-​ness and unknowability of The Thing’s motives.

0:18:01.5 Julian Sanchez: One of the really interesting choices they make in the film is that… And I think in the short story the thing is actually telepathic and mind reading, which is left out of this except I guess to the extent that it gains knowledge about the people that it assimilates, is that this is obviously an extremely intelligent organism. It starts building a spaceship out of spare helicopter parts, so this is not just some slavering beast, this is a very sophisticated intelligence. It is capable of human speech, obviously it speaks as a person when mimicking people, but the thing as a thing never speaks, it basically just sort of roars or makes these kind of terrifying noises. It never cajoles or threatens or taunts or explains.

0:18:56.2 Julian Sanchez: It never… Once it’s revealed as a thing, speaks to the party, it only does that as a kind of… It only uses language as part of its disguise even though obviously it’s capable of that, which helps render those motives more opaque and you just sort of wonder, is it because in its natural state it doesn’t think in these linguistic terms, that this is just a kind of coloration that it puts on, as disguise. It’s not close to how its own real natural processes work, or is it just that it sees us as such a lower form that it doesn’t even occur to it to… That dialogue with us would be a relevant strategy.

0:19:51.0 Natalie Dowzicky: And I think Julian, even if it’s… For instance if it did talk, that would be an inherently different film, and I think the point of us not knowing what it is and that element of… Adds an extra layer of us not being able to control The Thing or understand it or even begin to start studying it. And ultimately when I was watching it most recently I think this was the, maybe the third time I’ve seen it but it’s been quite some time since I watched it last. But to me I felt like this is… I don’t know if it’s relatively sad but I felt I could relate to this type of isolation, ’cause isolation within the last two years, we’ve been isolating and distancing ourselves and all that kind of stuff and that’s a big part of this film is…

0:20:36.3 Natalie Dowzicky: And I think I can almost relate to how after being so isolated you become paranoid, right? So, I could… I think that made it a little bit more accessible to today’s audience like we were talking about, but I also think that the setting in the landscape and the visual elements really play in to that idea of isolation and leading, and how that can lead to paranoia. And I was wondering how both of you thought that the setting or the landscape really enhances the film. Like what if it wasn’t in Antarctica would it be an inherently different film if it was dropped in New York at a lab?

0:21:21.1 Jamelle Bouie: Yeah, if it were in New York in a lab, if it were… The stakes for the movie would weirdly… It’d be kind of the same but it would have to have an entirely different vibe. I feel like a movie that were set in a city would have to be, almost by definition, more of an action movie for reasons I can’t fully articulate, but just there’d be… The sense of immediacy you would feel as a viewer like Wilford Brimley’s character in the movie realizes that if this thing can get out it’ll infect the world in short order. And that would still be an important plot point but it would be the main point of the film so that’s what the film would be about in terms of its narrative, how do we stop this thing from getting out?

0:22:09.8 Jamelle Bouie: Whereas an isolated an Antarctic base in addition to the setting I think allowing for a slower burn sort of like the fact that the film isn’t very long but sort of moves at this slow steady pace, even the camera movements are slow and deliberate. That is sort of like a visual, almost visual presentation but sort of it flows from the setting itself the slowness and the stillness of Alaska which is where it was shot. Why I think that… I mean the setting works for all sorts of reasons but I think because Carpenter wanted to make a slower burn of a movie I don’t think you could have placed it anywhere else but somewhere remote. So you could imagine this movie in a desert, you can imagine it sort of in a remote forest but I don’t think it really would work in this, it’d have to be a different kind of movie if you put it in a populated area.

0:23:12.6 Julian Sanchez: Let me move in a little bit because it would be spreading, right? In a sense, so quickly, the fact that it’s remote in a way it kinda gives them the luxury of trying to puzzle out who The Thing is and who The Thing isn’t and maybe hoping that they can get rid of the remaining things before the time when the rescue craft would come to take them away. Although you do wonder is there a point when maybe earlier on when they should have said, “Look, we just need to kill everyone.”

[laughter]

0:23:46.7 Julian Sanchez: “We need to all… We all need to take one for the team here and send the whole place up in flames,” which ultimately is what happens.

[music]

0:24:00.1 Julian Sanchez: Can I just say… I wanna say because we’ve been talking about the horrifying mood that there are just a lot of great little jokes that I kind of enjoyed in this movie.

0:24:06.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. [chuckle]

0:24:07.5 Landry Ayres: Yeah.

0:24:08.9 Julian Sanchez: And they’re usually… And they’re usually kind of visual jokes that you kinda have to think about a little bit to catch them because they don’t wanna break the mood, but there’s just wonderful little bits of sort of funny business. I like that it’s technically an Alaskan Husky or something but the first vector for The Thing is essentially saying it looks like a wolf because the whole thing is about a wolf in sheep’s clothing scenario. And of course you wonder about what is so horrifying that it wears a wolf’s clothing to make it seem acceptable.

0:24:43.5 Julian Sanchez: One of the very first scenes where we see The Thing in this wolf dog form stocking the hallways, Stevie Wonder’s Superstition is playing, and the lyric that you hear at the exact moment the wolf starts stocking down the hall is, “Good things in your past,” and it’s not… They don’t punch it too hard but that’s clearly intentional. I also liked it at one point they’re showing the folks, the scientists watching Let’s Make a Deal on the television there, you wonder how to get the broadcast ’cause it’s probably video tapes or something. But they’re watching, let’s say they’re watching a clip of Let’s Make a Deal that’s all about… Well, there are three doors and which of these doors has the prize and the contestant is siting there fretting over which door is the right door to pick, they all look the same but one of them has something different behind it. So very small kind of background jokes that I enjoy that don’t kind of interfere with the flow of the horror but on a kind of second or third watch you kind of go, “Oh, I see what you did there.”

0:25:52.9 Landry Ayres: Yeah and especially it is… It’s Palmer who’s watching Let’s Make a Deal and it is, it’s on video tape and he stops it and is like, “Oh, I know how this one ends,” and he switches it to another episode. And Palmer actually drops one of my favorite lines that I think is really funny when he is, I think he’s rolling a joint while they’re all sitting around trying to figure out what’s going on. And he drops Chariots of the Gods reference to this famous pseudo-​science, the book that sort of is one of the foundational texts you could say about this sort of ancient astronauts theory that has given History Channel so much fodder to play with over the years.

0:26:39.9 Landry Ayres: And I didn’t… I laughed at it in the moment and I was like, “Oh, of course he… That perfectly encapsulates the kind of guy that he is.” I was like, “They picked the perfect reference there.” But then looking back, talking about it right now, when I was watching it, I didn’t realize that The Thing came from space, I knew that it had been in the ice for a long time but it didn’t click with me in that moment, that Palmer was actually kind of right there, in that moment. So there’s a sort of funny irony that also carries on, when you think about how this was a big influence on a lot of other media. So much so that there’s an entire X-​Files episode that basically takes the entire, the conceit of it, and even a bunch of plot points and simply puts it in an X-​Files episode where Mulder and Scully go to an Antarctic base like that, as well. I was also curious, did anybody else… I don’t know if this was just me, but did anyone else immediately watch The Thing and think of just playing Mafia or Werewolf or…

[chuckle]

0:27:52.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Among Us.

0:27:52.6 Landry Ayres: You know, Among Us?

0:27:53.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, Among Us.

0:27:54.1 Landry Ayres: I mean, that’s all it is.

0:27:54.9 Julian Sanchez: Which is obviously inspired by The Thing. Yeah.

0:27:56.9 Landry Ayres: Yeah, it’s just like a social deduction game, but it’s interesting ’cause you wrote in the document that we were taking notes in before this, Julian, there are times when you think, “Oh, The Thing is assimilating into these people and sort of jumping from host to host in order to achieve some sort of goal, even if it’s like a base level need of survival.” But also there’s sometimes when you think, “Do the people who are assimilated know that they are The Thing?” Which kind of complicates the notion of a social deduction game of an informed minority as opposed to an uninformed majority and trying to parse out who is who.

0:28:37.9 Julian Sanchez: Yeah, and then there are variants of Werewolf depending on how you’re playing, where your role can change during the night, maybe unbeknownst to you, so you can become… In some of these variants, you can actually become a werewolf without knowing it, which makes the strategy much more complicated, then you have to figure out whether maybe your card was switched or whether someone is pretending your card was switched, so you’re the werewolf and you don’t know it.

0:29:02.9 Julian Sanchez: But yeah, there’s a couple of points where I think it’s implied that there is some uncertainty on the part of the people themselves about whether they are Things. In the blood testing scene when Windows’ blood gets tested, he sort of breathes a very visible sigh of relief, like “Oooh… ” He wasn’t sure entirely what the result was going to be. And I mean, earlier on, Norris, who turns out to be a Thing… So first, he’s offered, they don’t really trust Garry with the gun anymore because he had the key to the blood and he might have tampered with it, and so he kind of agrees to give up his gun and let someone else take charge, and so they offer it to Norris, who is at this point presumably a Thing. And he says, “Oh no, I don’t think I’m up to it.”

0:29:53.9 Julian Sanchez: And maybe that’s a strategic thing, like, “Oh, I don’t know if I can keep the disguise up through that much scrutiny”, but later he’s sort of feeling some kind of internal pains and grimacing, in moments when he’s alone, and you kinda look at that and think in retrospect, was he being taken over or had he been taken over and, but was not yet conscious of it? Which adds a kinda second layer of horror, right? The initial horror is, “I don’t know who I can trust. Which of these people is The Thing?” But then the second one is, “I don’t even know if I can trust myself. Have I become… Would I know it, if I had become a Thing?” Which is sometimes where I think that dovetails with the sort of extreme body horror that we get in this film.

0:30:47.9 Julian Sanchez: I think body horror, right, at some level is about the disconnect between… I don’t know I guess the pure self, like the Cartesian mind that we might even if we intellectually don’t think that’s what we are, but we kind of perceive ourselves as these… I am the abstract person, the mind, and these kind of meat cages that we’re locked into that sometimes betray us by developing tumors and otherwise breaking down in ways that do not match our conscious will. So the kind of extreme body horror of, your neck gets elongated, your head turns into this horrible spider thing and your torso opens up and becomes a kind of ravening jawed mouth is… It works very nicely with this idea of the horror of not being sure that this physical suit you’re wearing is gonna betray you, is acting in a way that comports with the desires of the person within.

0:32:00.6 Jamelle Bouie: That’s a really great observation. And I think it gets to why the prequel that came out in 2011, there is a Thing prequel that was released, doesn’t really quite work as well, because I think the writers and filmmakers of that movie, they thought in terms of scare, sort of, “What’s scary about this?” And they thought in terms of, “What’s scary is a big monster trying to get you,” but that’s not really what’s frightening about this movie at all, and so to take that approach, it’s sort of missing the point in a big way.

0:32:32.9 Jamelle Bouie: I think it’s interesting, right? That sort of the… To be sure that The Thing survives as a property. There is the aforementioned video game, there’s a sequel, but there are tabletop games based on The Thing. And going back to the early point about Werewolf or Mafia, or whatnot, I think this absolutely does. If you’re going… Any way you would try to revive it, that the key has to be thinking in terms of this paranoia and this isolation in the this sense… The This sense of unknowability, not only of the people around you, but of yourself as well. I think they’re always talking about remaking this movie, and I think there’s probably… I think there’s a remake currently in development, but if I were gonna remake this movie, I might change the setting only in ways to sort of enhance that sense of isolation. In an undersea base set this movie in space, right? Like in the future.

0:33:34.7 Natalie Dowzicky: You’d have like a whole universe. It’s like The Thing goes to the desert, the Thing goes under the sea.

[laughter]

0:33:43.5 Julian Sanchez: I think the right format for this is a game. I mean, I think there’s a reason Among Us, which was a runaway hit, maybe especially during the pandemic, when we were all playing it.

[laughter]

0:33:55.3 Julian Sanchez: In fact, watching the movie, having played Among Us, which for those who haven’t played, it’s a game with a similar premise is you’re on a space station or some other isolated environment, and some among you are essentially alien murderers who are trying to get the others alone as they accomplish various tasks so they can kill them. I remember there’s a scene where Roy MacReady does a little bit of game theory and says, “Okay, look, I know some of you must still be human, because if The Thing had taken over everyone, I would just be dead.” And so they’re actually trying to reason backwards very much the way you do in the game Among Us from, “Alright, who’s been alone together? If The Thing had been alone with this person, then that person would also be assimilated, and so can we kind of reason backwards so strategically to try and figure out who might or might not still be a Thing?”

0:34:49.9 Julian Sanchez: I think a game is the right mode for this because, more effective, even than watching other people go through this kind of paranoid process is engaging in it yourself and wondering if, “Hey, is the person I’m in this room with gonna turn around and kill me horribly?” And Among Us does this with a very cartoony almost cute aesthetic. But you imagine a game like Among Us, but with high-​end graphics of the, sort of, John Carpenter style, where it’s not just a cutesy, you know…

0:35:30.3 Natalie Dowzicky: You’re not a version of Pac Man running around. [laughter]

0:35:32.6 Julian Sanchez: Yeah, but then the other player literally turns into this kind of monster thing. I think that would be absolutely horrifying, and maybe the only reason they haven’t done it is that I’m not sure how long I could stand to play it.

0:35:47.5 Landry Ayres: Yeah, as fun as a VR game would be like that, I would probably play one round and they’d be like, “No, that’s good enough. That was my $60”. Well, the idea of sort of being aware of the people around you specifically made me… As that game suggests… Made me realize I did not know that Mafia was originally developed by a professor at Moscow State University, and so sort of came to fruition and was developed through student groups I think in the late portion of the Soviet Union. So there’s sort of this lingering tale of this surveillance system, and so watching this movie through a sort of Panoptic lens using that sort of terminology was something that I didn’t think about, but might lend itself a little bit more to developing why some of these characters acted in the way they did.

0:36:52.8 Julian Sanchez: Although, in a sense, that would resolve the tension to some extent, although maybe not for the same reason you have to take away the cell phones in every horror movie…

0:37:07.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

[laughter]

0:37:07.8 Landry Ayres: Yeah.

0:37:09.1 Julian Sanchez: So they can’t just call the SWAT team in. It’s dependent, to some extent, on sort of limits of surveillance technology within the base. You are left with this question. Although you could imagine talking about how to update this, if you were to do a remake or a sequel today, you might imagine something based around the idea of, “Look, we know the aliens are among us, and so how do they adapt to the technology, and how much technology are we willing to embrace to surveil our fellow organisms in an effort to suss out who might and might not be a Thing.” Maybe, I think the right twist there, is of course, that maybe there are no Things and we’ve just done this to ourselves.

0:38:02.4 Landry Ayres: The monster was us all along.

0:38:04.1 Natalie Dowzicky: All along.

[laughter]

[music]

0:38:05.6 Julian Sanchez: So wait, we have to talk about the ending.

0:38:10.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, I was literally just about to ask, ’cause I saw, Julian, you wrote down “What if this is a happy ending?” Care to elaborate?

[laughter]

0:38:20.9 Julian Sanchez: I mean, so I realized the natural and probably correct read on this ending, is that this is a bleak, somewhat nihilistic, terrifying-​ly ambiguous ending as Childs and MacReady just sit there passing a bottle of scotch back and forth, wondering which of them is The Thing. But on the other hand, there’s been sort of tension between these two the entire film. So, even up to the point where we know Childs and MacReady are both… Or at least, let’s assume the test is accurate and all that, but the fact the movie’s presented us, I think we’re supposed to understand that at least up to a certain point of the movie both of these characters are human and they’ve kind of been at each other’s throats anyway, irrespective of knowing that and this is the… First of all, they can actually sit down and share a drink, they’re passing that bottle of Scotch back and forth, and maybe or probably one of them is in fact, at this point, an other-​worldly, horrifying, homicidal, alien terror.

0:39:33.3 Julian Sanchez: And they’re saying, “Well, but maybe it’s futile to continue this pattern of distress. Alright, maybe one of us is an alien, maybe one… Both of us is an alien, but we can’t really do anything about it. I guess we may as well share a drink.” And I can imagine… I imagine the happy ending after this where the alien finally speaks up and says, “I was just trying to build a ship to get home. I didn’t wanna do all this.” But that’s probably not how it ends. Although it does leave open the question of the logic sketched earlier, which is, “Okay, well, if one of them is The Thing and the other is not particularly well-​armed, why doesn’t it just attack now or maybe it’s waiting for the most opportune moment.” But anyway, it’s an interesting final scene where maybe out of nihilistic resignation, but nevertheless, they have both to some extent abandoned the paranoia that’s been driving the film.

0:40:42.3 Jamelle Bouie: Right. They’re no longer paranoid, they’re simply weary, but then I think they’ve both resigned themselves to whatever their fate might be. MacReady clearly concluded that no one can leave alive. And so, either he’ll be the last one alive at which point presumably he might off himself or Childs will be the last one alive, but they’ve both concluded that. The reason why they’re waiting is all the fire. Childs says, “The heat is still elevated from all of this, so we have some time.” And so we’ll… And once everything dies down, then they’ll know which of them is The Thing if either of them is. But yeah, the optimistic ending to me if you’re gonna read it, is just that neither of them are The Thing and they both just… They die of exposure and thus, The Thing doesn’t escape. So in the optimistic version, they successfully keep The Thing from spreading, but no one survives. But it’s that ambiguity and even that ambiguity gets back to the idea throughout the film that people are unknowable, sometimes even to themselves.

0:41:56.8 Julian Sanchez: Yeah. I think Carpenter had an interview, and this is obviously extra, extra-​textual, so at some level, who cares, but Carpenter has said that he believes one of them at the end is The Thing, but has refused to say which. And obviously the setup of it is such that, hey, Childs shows up again after being mysteriously absent for a lot of the third act and so I think the viewer is supposed to think, “Well, we should be wondering whether he’s The Thing.” But I don’t know. How sure are we MacReady isn’t The Thing? We haven’t seen… There’s a cut. We don’t see what happens to him after the Blair thing. There’s shots earlier where it seems like we got a visual of The Thing’s eye perspective or something, kinda zooming on his room and we have some reason to think that people might be infected for a while before knowing it. So the film in that final scene biases towards wondering if Childs is The Thing, but we don’t really have that much certainty that MacReady isn’t either.

0:43:05.8 Jamelle Bouie: Right, right. Based on the text at least, it’s basically unresolvable. People have spent decades trying to figure out exactly which of them is The Thing and there’s no way to answer it. And I think it’s that ambiguity, which makes this such a different film than the two films that follow, Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness, which don’t have that element. They’re much more conventional in their structure and in how they end.

0:43:42.9 Julian Sanchez: I have to compare everything to Wagner because I think it’s written into my contract somewhere.

0:43:49.5 Landry Ayres: Got to play the hits.

[laughter]

0:43:52.4 Julian Sanchez: No. I mean, it is the kind of thing that tends to infuriate audiences, like the last scene of The Sopranos, the deliberate ambiguity there that made people a little crazy, but I was thinking actually of Tristan and Isolde where the iconic Tristan chord is left unresolved all the way until the end. Here right, the chord is never resolved. You’ve got this simmering tension that’s created all through the film and Carpenter refuses in the last instance. Even though presumably something is gonna happen in the next half hour, refuses to give you that resolution, which of course is the secret to a movie that’s gonna stick in your head and claw at you. An ending where Childs grows spider legs and attacks or something and would be, I guess, a cleaner resolution. You go, “Okay, well, that was it,” but you wouldn’t spend any time thinking about it later.

0:45:00.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, it’s also… It’s just like… Well, Blade Runner came out the same day, but the ongoing discussion about Deckard being a replicant and everyone arguing whether or not that’s the exact reading, right? It’s the…

0:45:13.0 Landry Ayres: Well, it’s interesting that you bring that up, Natalie, because for a while, and I believe Carpenter has pretty much completely debunked this, but it was interesting because for a while there was a lot of assumptions and rumors that there was a lighting or glint in the eye of characters in The Thing who had been assimilated, which is a huge part of the production of Blade Runner itself and is sort of a controversy that’s up in the air of whether you see that glimmer in Deckard’s eyes at the very end and it just is so funny to me that these films came out the same day and that sort of…

0:45:48.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Wild.

0:45:49.8 Landry Ayres: Discussion and rumor happened in both of them, even if one of them was pretty much debunked.

0:45:54.5 Julian Sanchez: And the paradox of this ambiguous ending is that it has to be that… The point is that there’s no textual answer, but also it only works to the extent that you don’t just immediately embrace that there’s no textual answer because the film deliberately doesn’t give you that answer, but the film does also want you to try and find that answer. The point of the ambiguous ending is that you then… You sort of sit with it and keep trying to digesting the film and working over it, looking for the textual answer that isn’t there.

0:46:31.4 Jamelle Bouie: There’s this sort of puzzle box thing that fans have that is imposed onto a film, because for me, the ending is essentially, it’s bringing to a conclusion, but also recapitulating all the themes of the movie. All these questions of knowability and of paranoia and all these things come to a final point with just two people sitting face-​to-​face with each other, not knowing ultimately if the other is who they say they are, and returning to this point, returning to the point that they departed, except now our hero, or at least our protagonist, MacReady, has a sense of resignation about the entire situation that he finds himself in. I’m not… It makes sense that people would spend the better part of three decades trying to determine who is whom, but I think you can… I remember watching the first time and I didn’t really care, the thematic elements of that ending were satisfying enough to me.

0:47:41.4 Julian Sanchez: Right, I think part of what makes the [0:47:46.3] ____ classic is these sort of brain worm things that get into your head and make you puzzle over it, but certainly, I think that’s right, that… Ultimately, the point of that ending is that it doesn’t matter.

[music]

0:48:04.6 Landry Ayres: And now for the time in the show where we get to share all of the other things that we’ve been enjoying with our time… This is Locked In. So Julian, Jamelle, what else have you been enjoying with your free time books, movies, television, games. What else?

0:48:22.5 Julian Sanchez: So let’s see, novels, I just polished off the last book of Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes series about I guess commerce between parallel worlds, Invisible Sun was the final one of, I guess, 9. And then reading actually another book about parallel worlds called The Space Between Worlds. So for whatever reason, parallel universes is a theme in my fiction lately, I’ve been running a couple of different Call of Cthulhu campaigns, one in person and one’s over Zoom for some friends on the West Coast, so that’s been a lot of fun. And also I’ve been on a binge lately of books by Bart Ehrman, who is a New Testament scholar, and writes a lot about the process of the compilation of the New Testament and the Gospels, how they were changed over time by scribes and later editors, and how you can try to reverse engineer the oral form of the oral traditions that are encapsulated in the Gospels. Out of historical interest as a non-​believer, I find that fascinating. Oh, and of course I should mention my friend Spencer Ackerman’s excellent, excellent book, Reign of Terror, about the post-​911 war on terror and how it gave rise to the Trump era.

0:49:57.1 Jamelle Bouie: I am always reading various works of history, so I’m sort of in the middle of a big biography of Julius Caesar, which I had… I’d read SPQR a few months ago and decided I would just read more contemporary Roman history, but I think after I finish this Caesar biography movies and Augustus biography by the same author, I’m going to actually read OG Roman historians like Livy and Tacitus and Polybius and the whole gang just for my own edification. And also because I spend a lot of time reading about the early American republic, 1770 to 1820, and all those guys were obsessed with the ancient Roman historians. So to that, now what I’m reading, it’s kind of a tome so it’s taken me a while but it’s a book called The Age of Federalism, about the Federalist Party, its beginnings, its growth, and its downfall during the age of Jefferson and Madison and such. So that’s what I’m reading. And then to balance out this high-​minded reading, I’ve been binging trash horror franchises.

0:51:23.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Ah yes, trash horror is our favorite.

[laughter]

0:51:29.5 Jamelle Bouie: I recently watched all the Friday the 13th movies, which are uniformly bad almost. The one that I like the most is, I feel like the one that gets the most crap, but it’s Jason X because there’s at least a concept there.

[laughter]

0:51:43.5 Jamelle Bouie: And I think it’s pretty well executed. I had watched the entire Nightmare on Elm Street franchise before then and those movies I really enjoy, even the very bad ones, I think have a lot of merit to them and the best ones, like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is… Are genuine classics. I just finished… I guess I just finished Freddy Vs Jason a couple of days ago, which I also like because it at least had a concept, and now I’m on the Halloween series. I’ve seen John Carpenter’s Halloween several times. Let me just watch Halloween 2, and I’m just gonna go there by release order, since I know Halloween has a weird chronology if you go by timeline order.

0:52:24.3 Natalie Dowzicky: For me, I’m also doing some spooky season stuff, so I’m listening to an audio book right now called The Year of the Witching, it’s a really, really good audio book. I don’t know if I’d be listening to it, not in Halloween-​ish time, but it’s set in early 1600s, and it’s about a witch haven that’s in the colonies. It’s fiction, so it’s not, obviously not real, but I’ve been enjoying it and then… I mean, I hopped on the Squid Game train. I’m kind of sad that I did, [chuckle] but it was worth watching, but I felt like I just got peer pressured into it. And then I’m taking a break from my historical fiction reading ’cause I’m running out of books, sadly, so I am turning to… What is the next book on my list? Oh, it’s Untamed. It’s a New York Times Best Seller. I think it’s Glennon Doyle, I think wrote it, but it’s been on that list for a while, so I’m just now getting around to it, but, yeah. And then, of course, I’m going to be watching Dune in the next 24 to 48 hours. [chuckle]

0:53:49.0 Landry Ayres: I also will be watching Dune, very, very soon. I’m very, very excited to watch that. My spooky season since we’re dropping some of our spooky views. I have been watching and rewatching, “What We Do in the Shadows”, so much fun. I love it, I look forward to the new episodes every week, and it’s just a great quick thing to watch that I could pick up at any time, so I love that.

0:54:21.1 Jamelle Bouie: Matt Berry might be the funniest person on television right now.

0:54:24.0 Landry Ayres: He is my favorite, and actually I’ve been watching another thing that he’s in, that I think I’ve talked about on the show before, and I think it was that episode Julian was on, which is… I have been watching and reading a lot of “The Moomins”, which is a Finnish novel series that became a cartoon strip and then a sort of Japanese animated television show, and now there’s a CGI series that is produced, I think by Sky in the UK, etcetera. But it’s a family of trolls that live in an idyllic sort of Valley and live Bohemian lives and go on adventures, but it’s very Finnish, so it’s… There’s moments of great elation and wandering in nature and then sheer terror and chaos that for adults is fine, but for children would be super, super spooky, and Matt Berry actually voices the father figure, in that as Moomin Papa. And, at one point in the first, I think his first line in the whole series is he yells ‘Bats’, which is just hilarious, considering his “What We Do in the Shadows character.”

0:55:37.5 Landry Ayres: So that’s another thing I’ve been watching, also “Over the Garden Wall,” which is in my classic October rotation. One of my favorite sort of mini-​series to watch during the fall season. It just captures that feeling so well and the music is incredible. I really, really love “Over the Garden Wall.” And I’m also trying to go back and sort of pick up some classic things or cult classic things that people have told me I would really enjoy, that I never got around to. So for instance, Netflix is coming out with “Sandman” very, very soon. So I’m going back and I’ve never actually read “Sandman”, so I wanna go through and sort of familiarize myself with the source material before I decide if I wanna even give the show a chance.

0:56:27.4 Julian Sanchez: I just have to say, it is such a… I’ve read that, probably 100 times.

[laughter]

0:56:33.1 Julian Sanchez: And seeing just the trailer for that series, seeing this thing I’ve been reading and rereading for 20 years, actually kind of represented this high production value. A version with real serious actors attached is just… Absolutely sends chills up my spine, so I envy this experience.

[music]

0:56:57.6 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to keep in touch with us and get more of Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod, that’s pop, the letter N, locke with an E like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We look forward to unraveling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is produced by me, Landry Ayres, and co-​hosted by Natalie Dowzicky. We’re a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. To learn more, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.