john carpenter’s the thing is a movie about how the hyperindividualism and lack of emotional intimacy between men (specifically men in the united states military) immediately crystallizes into distrust and alienation in crisis. how kurt russel with an absurd callsign name and the goofiest hugest cowboy hat imaginable is the Man, running the whole show and managing the crisis until he fails because when faced with having to truly understand and connect with his last remaining ally he can’t, because all he knows how to do is sit in the snow and die next to him. It is a movie about losing control over your own body in the most horrific way possible. It is a movie about cold war paranoia and fear of bloodborne pathogens. It is a movie about how dread is an incredible force and even so sometimes what you CAN see is worse than what you can imagine. It is a movie about how the scariest thing men can conceive of is something that looks exactly like a man and acts exactly like a man but yet on some fundamental level…isn’t. It is a movie, as one of my eleventh graders pointed out this week, about “playing among us in real life.” but most importantly, john carpenter’s the thing is a movie about a dogy who is my friend and wants to become me :)
