The Thing and the New Coke Scene
Forgive me if someone's already talked about this on Tumblr, but I'm procrastinating my next Bobgate post because I got caught on this thread I've been wanting to pull --
In Part 20 of Bobgate, I went into why the New Coke scene was emblematic of Mike and Lucas's hidden rivalry, but watching it again, I realized there were more clues laid into the scene.
Clearly one of the Party's, particularly Mike's, favorite movies, given there's a poster of it in Mike's basement all through the show -- about a mysterious alien creature that can perfectly mimic other life forms.
The twins references on ST and the clone/double/doppelgänger hints on Puzzled are hard to ignore, but I'm still pondering on how that piece will play out in the new ST content and won't be touching on Carpenter's Thing here.
I've only seen one or two posts about The Thing re: the New Coke scene on Reddit, but none that really got to the heart of *what* they're talking about:
Lucas: It's like John Carpenter's "The Thing." The original? It's a classic. No question about it. But the remake? [sips New Coke] Ah. Sweeter. Bolder. Better.
Mike: You're insane.
Lucas: So you prefer the original "Thing"?
The original, "classic" Thing Lucas is referring to is the 1951 film The Thing from Another World, produced by Howard Hawks, and directed by Christian NYBY (this could still be a Bobgate post lowkey).
Coincidentally released around the same time Bob, Henry, and the rest of the Party's parents would've been kids.
And, per The Stalking Moon, "The Thing plays as a veritable blueprint of how to make a compelling "alien monster-on-the-loose" movie."
Seemingly written in as a detail to be brushed off at the time S3 was released, what better time to look closer than now? Esp in light of Tales from '85 and The Boroughs, which both have connections to this movie --
Carpenter's Thing (which I haven't seen yet, so correct me if I'm wrong), begins with a helicopter crash and a sled dog that's The Thing in question.
Meanwhile, the inciting incident of the original movie is the main group of characters -- soldiers, scientists, and one steadfast journalist -- discovering a crashed flying saucer that they immediately blow up with thermite, unintentionally destroying it, and a mysterious frozen body that they bring back to base with them.
Unlike Carpenter's Thing, which honors the source material, John W. Campbell Jr.'s novella Who Goes There?, by having the Thing be able to take on any form, the 1951 feature has James Arness playing the same humanoid Thing the entire film.
And though human he may appear, Arness's Thing is discovered to be some advanced form of plant life. Sound familiar?
On top of that, Dr. Carrington (the "mad scientist" character of the film, the Brenner equivalent if you will) theorizes that in the Thing's home world, "vegetable life underwent an evolution similar to that of our own animal life [...] its development was not handicapped by emotional or sexual factors."
Now enters the first example of queer-coding in the movie. That's right --
At one point, the Air Force Captain Patrick "Pat" Hendry (more on him in a bit) and one of his military buddies crack jokes about how the frozen "man from Mars" is causing the same sort of stir among the scientists an Army Nurse's arrival once did for a battalion of soldiers.
Interestingly, sexuality is rather impractical in Dr. Carrington's view. When he discovers the Thing's body carries seed pods, Carrington proceeds to wax poetic about how the Thing's species is superior to humanity for being able to reproduce "neat"-ly and "unconfused", without feeling "pain or pleasure" -- sexual or emotional. "No heart."
Is this coming from someone without one, or someone who's uncomfortable with his?
You know, for a scientist, that's a hell of a leap to make about a being they barely know... and it makes it easier to justify hurting it, I'd wager.
Dr. Carrington tells his peers: "Gentlemen, do you realize what we've found? A being from another world, as different from us as one pole from the other. If we can only communicate with it, we can learn secrets that have been hidden from mankind since the beginning."
Wishing to communicate with an alien being, you say?
Same premise as Arrival, fyi.
However, Carrington never does quite get the [no] heart-to-heart he craves from the Thing, despite doing everything to hinder the Army men from getting to it first.
Although the soldiers watching over the frozen body try to keep things cold, one creeped-out watchman unknowingly places an electric blanket on the block of ice to cover the Thing, only to thaw the ice, allowing the Thing to escape.
When said soldier sees what's happened, his first instinct is to shoot it, like Judy does one of the kids in The Boroughs.
When the soldiers form what someone describes as a "lynching party" to go after it, Dr. Carrington warns them, "Remember it's a stranger in a strange land. The only crimes involved were those committed against it."
Hmmm... I wonder if the same once applied to a certain someTHING?
One of the places they search for the Thing? The greenhouse where they normally grow STRAWBERRIES in this Arctic outpost....
While the military men monster-hunt, the scientists stay back and run their own investigation, discovering that the Thing consumes animal and human blood like a vampire (it's killed sled dogs and two scientists)
-- And that it's using this blood to grow his seed pods -- his children. Inside the greenhouse where strawberries are also grown, remember.
Meanwhile, Carrington takes science and life into his own hands by replicating the Thing's process, using the seed pods from the Thing's severed arm to "hatch" podlings of his own --
I definitely see this scene from The Thing being a precursor to the Alien egg scene.
While the other scientists are worried about the implications -- that the Thing might be creating an army of super-powered beings like him to conquer the human race -- Carrington is pretty blasé: "Science has no enemy."
Similarly Brenner never seemed to feel one way or the other about the ethical consequences of his experiments, just the ground being broken.
Again, we see concern over the Promethean theme -- of mankind's irresponsible approach to science and desire to play God -- in The Thing from Another World, much like Mary Shelley did in Frankenstein (which almost certainly inspired the movie, given the Arctic location, and the Thing's appearance, behavior, and fate).
Dr. Carrington is so desperate to communicate with the Thing and acquire its "wisdom" (in those words), that he sabotages the Captain's plan to stop it and rushes to talk to the Thing, who only ends up knocking him aside.
Unfortunately, we don't get to learn much about the Thing in the end -- just that it's smart and knows how to fight back, cutting off the heat in the Arctic compound so that the crew can freeze to death while he thrives in the cold (like a certain MF).
But the crew is smart too, and realize the Thing can be hurt by heat, fire, and electricity.
However, The Boroughs in particular shows that the monster isn't always the Big Bad -- and that there's no way of knowing the truth until you stop, think, set ego aside, and actually try to *communicate* with your "enemy".
All this being said, here were other details from the original Thing that I think inspired the Duffers and ST writers:
The UFO/Thing interferes with both the flight crew's compass and their radio signal throughout the movie. As they're talking about the static that's scrambling their radio messages, one of the men quips, "Even the Pony Express got through." #signalgate confirmation AND --
#horsegate??? As a reminder, the Pony Express was an old-school mail delivery system where mail was transported by literal horse. Is THAT what the horse represents? Messages making it through the static? After all, it was the Indiana Flyer music that helped Dustin, Robin, and Steve crack the Russian Code + we see Mike throw El's letter into a horse-themed trash can when he and Will have their first (not angsty) heart-to-heart in S4. [Did someone already figure that bit of code out and I'm just now catching up??]
The botanist on the team compares the intelligence of the plant-based Thing to Earth's telegraph vine that can signal to other vines nearby (Hive Mind???) and the acanthus plant that draws small animals to it with sugary sap so it can feed on them (v Little Shop of Horrors-coded).
There's a romantic subplot between Captain *Pat*rick *Hendry* (which has the same etymology as Henry) and Dr. Carrington's secretary *Nikki* Nicholson, and we learn in their first scene together that their last encounter ended with her playing a "nasty trick" on him 👀
And here's where we get to the Bobgate of it all. Two of the men in Captain Hendry's crew are named BOB and EDDIE (not really an Edwardgate believer in that there's a Henry double walking around, but I do think Eddie/Edward is coding for Henry's queer "shadow self" in a Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde kind of way).
It gets even crazier though -- at around 34:25 in the movie, Hendry and *Bob* have a 1-1 scene where, for absolutely no reason, the music gets all romantic, they're whispering in like, a really flirty way about the Thing??? Seriously, they're practically eye-fucking each other. When Bob finally leaves, Hendry gives a looong look on his way out 👀 The movie's on Tubi; I need someone to watch it to confirm I'm not crazy.
That's when Bob tells Hendry the ice has melted enough to see what "the thing" in the block of ice looks like -- a humanoid with crazy hands (covered in "rose thorns", eyes, and no hair).
Remember how Vecna's kind of like Frankenstein....? What if his final form was modeled after Arness's The Thing too?
ISTG, Hendry is queer-coded as hell. The sequence that immediately follows the Hendry-Bob scene is Hendry and Nikki on a date where she literally has him tied up, pours liquor into his mouth, and teases him for never having kissed her during their previous meeting. So she takes the initiative and kisses him. When she tries to kiss him a second time, he withdraws, but she pulls him back in and once again comments on his being "civilized" rather than handsy like some other men might be in his position.
The film ends with the Thing burnt to a crisp, the journalist reporting the story over the now-clear airwaves (warning the audience of other potential space invaders and to "watch the skies"), and with Hendry and Nikki discussing marriage... And while Hendry doesn't seem too keen on the idea, he only considers it at *Bob's* urging.
I'm curious to see what others think of the original Thing -- I gotta watch the remake now. But I will say this is good table-setting for the next actual Bobgate post, so --
