The Thing About The Thing (1982)
The Thing has one of the most enduringly discussed endings to any movie. It’s such a comfortably cyclical debate that I could probably set my watch on it. The dilemma it poses is binary enough to be snappy, but elegant enough that it usually just serves as an excuse to rewatch the movie with a keener eye. If nothing else, any excuse to study The Thing is fine by me.
With that in mind, I won’t deprive you of one by offering much of a recap: MacReady defeats The Titular Thing, giant explosion and resulting inferno leaves little doubt that it’s truly destroyed, there are almost zero loose ends, etc. etc. With all shelter destroyed, rescue impossible, and his own humanity inherently uncertain, MacReady is hopeless. Far from a happy conclusion in any scenario, but at least he can die believing he probably succeeded.
Then Childs appears and fucks everything up. In all the chaos, we’ve probably forgotten about the only other character who hasn’t been seen dying or transforming in some way. We haven’t seen him in ages. More than enough time has passed with him unaccounted for to invalidate the blood test that confirmed his humanity. His alibi is flimsy, but then again, anything he said to exonerate himself would seem like bullshit.
They share a kind of world-weary recognition of their own impossible problem. Remember that even if Childs is human, he still has no way to confirm that MacReady is. Maybe neither of them can be entirely sure of their own humanity. The rules governing The Thing are established enough throughout the film to provide a basic understanding of its capabilities, but remain just vague enough to leave us wondering how anyone could even trust themselves, let alone another survivor.
The movie ends with a desolate, half-spoken acknowledgement of futility. They’re both going to freeze to death before rescue can arrive, so there’s no point in scrutinizing each other. Probing the issue is meaningless, and they’re tired. Nothing further can be their own responsibility. It’s a disturbingly somber, menacing sequence that plays (in classic Carpenter fashion) off the methodology of pulp horror to create something that veers into stark reality just when you expect a B movie ending.
The dialogue is especially great, equal parts sinister and sad depending on your own interpretation. Expressions of inevitability become threats if one of them is actually infected. MacReady offers the movie’s final line, suggesting they just “wait here for a little while” and see what happens. It’s gallows humor; if they’re both human, there’s nothing left to “happen” but their demise. Of course, if one of them isn’t themselves, the outcome is only a little less obvious.
The movie ends with a shot of the burning research station from afar, accentuating its smallness in the inky dark. When the fires stop burning, that darkness stands to subjugate it, rendering its existence a thing to interpret. Among its detritus are two veterans of an impossible conflict. They can’t trust each other, but they can’t mistrust each other either. Both acts require energy they don’t possess; all that’s left is death or playing dead.
The question of humanity’s continued survival remains unanswered — as does the continued survival of the organism, though both questions answer each other. The question of their survival, however, is easily answered: Both men are doomed, and if both of them are men, they no longer care. They’ve finally earned their rest.
In the wider context of The Thing, it brings the film’s paranoiac psychosis to a wonderful close. As the last survivors prepare for a slow and uncelebrated death, resigned to apathy, the audience is forced to grapple with their burden. The debates that follow are natural: Is Childs a Thing? Is MacReady a Thing? Are either of them Things? In a grim slapstick twist, are they both Things?
We’ve been playing the role of investigator right along with the film itself, but when the film ends, we lose the arbiter of the narrative and can’t be told whether we’re right or wrong. Right as the characters stop being anxious about what might happen, the weight of their burden falls to us. Like Childs or MacReady, there’s nothing we can do with it anymore.
The questions have to hang in the air. Over 40 years later, they still do. I want to talk about those questions, but I also want to talk about the questions they inspire. They extend beyond the movie, provoking discussion about how audiences and artists handle unanswerable things: are we, as viewers, missing the point by asking these questions at all?
As a whole, The Thing’s ending presents a basic conundrum that’s complicated by the entire film preceding it. It’s a story with a sense of internal logic that renders it teasingly close to hiding some kind of critical clue, but which never seems to actually give it up. The effect it creates is one where answers seem just out of reach, attainable if we could get just an inch closer to them. When that inch comes, the answers have receded just enough that we’re back to square one. It has the rhythm of Lucy moving the football before Charlie Brown can kick it.
Horror as a genre is often simpatico with mystery — they both gravitate towards perceiving a kind of internal machinery within the workings of the plot. That machinery is gradually understood or forever inarticulable, and The Thing is somewhere on the middle of the spectrum, oscillating whenever our minds seem concluded. Rewatching it is an exercise in shifting opacity.
Anyone who loves The Thing has probably seen it an unhealthy amount of times, myself included. It’s a film that inherently compels you to watch it again with greater clarity. What’s really cool is that, rather than diminishing on a second viewing, it always seem to pulsate with the fresh desire to fuck with you. Watching it again with the intention of figuring out who infects who and when only reveals that, even with explicit foresight, it’s still really hard to get anything conclusive.
This is absolutely intentional. It’s important to understand that illusions of grander, comprehensible machinery within the movie are just that: illusions. The mechanics of the creature operate off vibes above all else. Any structural approach would turn subsequent viewings into an uncomplicated autopsy of dryly noting who gets got and when.
What I like about The Thing is that it nonetheless maintains the illusion that the organism is an animal — you never get the impression that it’s just teleporting around to scary situations, even though it would be a normal horror movie thing if it did. That patina of biological rationalization gives us the urge to find patterns (however imagined) in its behavior, as if dealing with a particularly horrifying animal. It’s a uniquely alarming feeling that very few monsters have replicated, at least in film, because it blurs the line between intentional mystery and a collection of happy accidents. If you tried to do it on purpose, I feel like you’d fuck it up.
There are a ton of happy accidents in the final scene alone, and some of the arguments they inspire are classic (while causing any fan of the movie to roll their eyes until they go blind). For instance, does Childs drink gasoline instead of whiskey? Not really, but then again, the fact that he willingly drinks from MacReady’s bottle shows how little he cares about the possibility of infection. Sometimes people will note that MacReady’s breath is really visible, whereas Childs doesn’t seem to produce fog at all. It’s just a weird fluke with the lighting, but imagine how elated you’d be if that unintentionally happened in your movie.
Basically, most readings— even the tired ones! — wrap right back around to appreciating how great the movie is. I say most, and especially with respect to tone. When the discursive wheel turns back to debating if Childs was attacked by Dracula while we weren’t looking, it can just as often be a litmus test for who understands the purpose of ambiguity, not just in The Thing but in anything.
The important principle is that none of our lingering questions can be answered. That’s obvious enough. It’s not an episode of Columbo with the beginning and end chopped off, nor is it a true mystery story. If we could get an answer while the characters in the film couldn’t (or wouldn’t), the film would lose something pivotal. The characters don’t even reflect our desire to solve it by the very end, which is what makes that ending so brilliant. Their ambivalence concludes the movie with shivery, lingering dread.
Sure, MacReady could try and perform another blood test or they could put their arms over the fire for a few seconds or, hell, they could just try to kill each other. The conclusion would prove nothing to them — at most a desire to save their own skins. Neither of these two even particularly liked each other. They’re not friends and even before anything happened they were, at most, tolerating coworkers. No matter how much we care, they make no effort to assuage our worries. MacReady’s laugh is that of a man who expected to die heroically and, having survived, can do nothing but chuckle at how anticlimactic his death will actually be.
What the credits herald is the organism’s transition into a fully existential threat. It mirrors the original Howard Hawks film, removing the B movie flair that originally substituted for the relatively definitive ending of Who Goes There?, which was the short story that inspired both. The changes made to each version of The Thing make up one of my favourite adaptational evolutions; from a sci-fi mag short story with classic genre trappings, to a fearfully post-atomic (hilariously McCarthyist) 50s horror film, to a movie that embraces the full and desolate uncertainty of cosmic horror without Lovecraft’s token babbling — he would make damn sure you knew Childs was a Thing, and then MacReady would probably burn himself alive.
Any analysis of The Thing can only reveal more reasons to leave the ending as vague as possible. If we want to be blunt, there’s a simpler way to say the same thing: we can’t answer the question because the people who made the movie didn’t want us to answer it. It wasn’t written or filmed that way, so there are no heretofore undiscovered facts and logic that crack the case of MacReady v. Childs. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, you can’t definitively solve a polynomial without knowing at least one variable, and you can’t know who is or isn’t a Thing if John Carpenter doesn’t want you to.
So why do people talk about it? Some people will say that wanting an answer misses the point of the film. It’s a statement that has the right mindset, and I totally understand where it comes from. It’s the distinction of “want” that I feel is important to highlight here — ambiguity in narrative generally exists because the storytellers knows that you want to know all sorts of things, and that tactically depriving you of satisfaction will create a meaningful effect.
For the ending to work, we have to “want” it answered. It delivers a shard of glass into your brain that never goes away. If we weren’t tortured by a lack of closure, it wouldn’t have the capacity to hurt us. Wanting is human, and you can’t avoid that any more than you can avoid eating or going to the bathroom. What inspires uncertainty also inspires inherent debate.
But it’s important to understand that there are spectrums to “wanting” something in a piece of fiction. What these people are often trying to say is that fixating on that final question belies all other questions, and they’re often right. There’s so much more to The Thing than that final scene, itself the culmination of everything that precedes it. Fixate on who gets infected when, and you run the frequent risk of missing anything else. I speak from experience, having spent three separate viewings missing the greatest joke in the movie: Blair’s casual, unmentioned noose.
The Thing isn’t a logic puzzle — it’s a movie. It’s an audiovisual experience, and you’re going to miss the forest for a single tree if you spend every moment denying its power to play detective. To appreciate the film, you have to actually watch it like one: caring to pay attention to things like framing, blocking, choreography, sets, lighting, and a dozen other things, not to some specific end but purely because you find them interesting. Ignoring the language of the medium, or only paying attention to it insofar as it satisfies a pointless aim, is cheating yourself out of 90% of a movie you clearly want to appreciate.
This doesn’t change that these questions are an inexorable part of The Thing. There’s no way for them to provoke anything unless you’re invested in what the answer might be. In a vacuum, there’s no problem with arguing about whether it’s Childs or MacReady or the fucking albatross that John W. Campbell wrote about. It’s fun to talk about it! For people who get it, knowing there can be no closure is part of the enjoyment. It doesn’t ruin the entire rest of the movie unless you let it. We enjoy getting our answer, but that doesn’t mean we’re looking for the answer.
The way these debates have been affected by the rise of attitudes engendered by the internet is another matter entirely. It was absolutely intended for The Thing to be a movie you wanted to pick apart with the people you saw it with, but that was a different experience entirely. That kind of casual, interstitial discussion is difficult to have on the internet, where forums have formalized it. A Twitter post can be reacted to by thousands of people concurrently, who can then branch into their own conversations. Banter becomes theorizing, and theorizing has become emboldened by the ability to scrutinize every frame of a movie forever in crisp, sometimes dubious 4K.
This brings us to the other end of the spectrum. A certain viewing philosophy dictates for a lot of viewers that, instead of wanting to know, they have to know. They want the answer, which is either hiding inside the movie itself or held under lock and key by the director. Comparatively, these people are joyless and talking to them is boring or outright frustrating. They think about everything through a filter of bullshit nerd methodology; they “appreciate” the movie by turning it into something it fundamentally isn’t, which is white noise for people who browse Wikia pages as a substitute for reading books.
These people are everywhere. They, and the content (that’s Content with a capital C) curated to them, are unavoidable. But they’re far from a Thing-specific problem. Originally, I had an entire article-length portion of general statements here, and I only cut them out because they were ballooning into their own piece (that I might finish on its own).
The important point was this: too many people do this now, and it’s a bad way to look at anything. It turns storytelling into a third-class citizen — a vestigial component to its true purpose, which is to convey What Happened. In this framework, information is king. Getting as much raw information out of a work of art is the end goal of repeated analysis. It’s as if The Thing is a historical event they’re trying to gain a definitive understanding of, developing new ways to learn more by looking at the same stuff — since The Thing didn’t actually happen, their tools are bogus and their findings are ridiculous.
Something sinister enters the equation when somebody announces a work of art as “solved.” The joy of interpreting a work of art is in having an opinion, developing that opinion, testing other opinions against your own, and ultimately syncretizing something between the work and the viewer. To discuss the full spectrum of media analysis would take thousands of words. But there are so many ways to think about art, and so many ways to format an opinion about art, and so many ways to create a framework through which to understand art… you get the idea. To rob your brain of anything deeper is a sad thing.
The Thing has incredible sound design, for instance. I’m not a sound designer, so I loved hearing an expert share their own thoughts about what the film accomplishes with its audio. Hearing what animal noises were sampled, and why they were probably chosen, is something that continues to inspire the way I describe sound in any movie. I’m especially fond of the idea they introduced me to, which is that the scream of the Bennings-Thing is a collection of overlapping noises, as if to convey that every creature the organism has ever assimilated is screaming in unison.
When I watch a movie like The Thing, I’ve gotten better at appreciating aspects of it that barely mattered to me when I was younger, like how every element of the film works to communicate how fucking cold it is. It’s not just “they filmed in a cold place, so it looks cold.” The use of color, the lighting, even the importance of shooting on location — now and then somebody shivers, and you know it’s hardly acting. Thoughts like these are critical to learning to read a movie beyond just reading what’s literally in the screenplay.
Unfortunately, observations about filmmaking are just as often weaponized. There’s this apocryphal story about The Thing cinematographer Dean Cundey saying that you can tell who’s human based on a “glint” in their eye, one absent from anybody who’s infected. I’ve heard it circulated for years. The theory even reached Carpenter himself, who replied that Cundey is “full of shit.” Until writing this, I had never actually heard the source for this claim — even people who disagreed with it seemed to regard the fact itself as true.
What Cundey actually said was during an audio commentary on a Blu-ray release of the movie. What he’s discussing is the technique he used in a specific scene, wherein a character (Palmer) is moments away from transforming after a blood test reveals his Thingish nature. Before we learn that he’s an alien, there’s a close-up of his face. In this shot — this specific shot — the lighting was adjusted so none of it reflected in his eyes. This gives him a cold, flat look that becomes incredibly creepy with context. It’s as if it’s already stopped pretending to be Palmer, unsure if MacReady’s test is actually going to work.
This is a really neat bit of insight! It tells us a lot about how a cinematographer can create spontaneous visual meaning while a movie is already being shot. The key word is “spontaneous,” because this specific detail is so small that it’s unlikely anyone would ever plan for it; you’d be in that room filming that scene, watching the light as it sits against an actor’s face, only to say Oh Fuck, Wait Hold On.
Dean Cundey is telling us about a cool thing he did, rather than telling us about his special piece of paper he carried around during shoots that said “eyes don’t have glints in them if the person is an alien” and the overarching vision that implies. He’s telling us how a movie gets made in a way that explicitly denies the notion that films (at least the good ones) are produced solely by showing up and following the instructions of somebody who’s already made the entire movie before anyone arrived. New meaning emerges while you’re filming! It’s one of the coolest things about the medium.
This fact was taken as incredibly interesting by certain dorks, but not for any of its insight into process or form. The information was quickly recirculated, turned into Dean Cundey revealing the Secret Trick you can use to solve the entire story, sending people out to “decode” it by noticing every single instance of the technique… the one that’s only actually used in a single shot for two seconds. A piece of cool film trivia is immediately smashed into a nonsensical framework that asks you to find a shittier way to watch the movie by looking at as little of it as possible.
Not only does this indicate a profound lack of understanding about lighting (the “trick” they’re assuming was used would make most of the movie look uglier), but it also shows how many people only care about “process” when it communicates something that sounds punchy. Instead of allowing Cundey’s insight to tell us something about cinematography, it can only fulfill a narrow vision of The Thing as a challenge to be overcome.
Under these terms, movies are basically crossword puzzles where the clues have been obfuscated. To get good at doing an actual crossword puzzle involves more than the crossword itself —you have to learn widely and enthusiastically about other things until the clues start to indicate anything to you. When movies are treated this way, they only ever lead back to themselves. The cinematographer isn’t telling you about his job; he’s just giving you a Game Theory episode.
This inclination to never allow a film to lead away from itself or inform a wider understanding about the medium it occupies is, for lack of a better word, depressing. It’s a kind of non-listening that feeds into destructive beliefs about art, turning The Thing into something resembling prose, where each scene is written with the dull indifference of an instruction manual: Look for eye glint. If eye glint is not present, pause film and screenshot.
It feels like audiences are increasingly less content to walk out of a piece of fiction without knowing everything about it. New artists, coming from the audience, find themselves wracked by the same compulsion. Worse yet are executives, who mindlessly feed the money machine whatever they assume it wants, and who will never feed it ambiguity; nobody thinks that ambiguity makes five hundred million dollars, which means that it’s worthless.
2011’s The Thing feels like a film that was made by and for all of these people. It’s a prequel to the original film that only silly people asked for, determined to do little more than than fulfill a need to Know What Really Happened. Here, the mystery to be solved is What Really Happened to the Norwegians in the original film. The answer, for whoever wasn’t paying attention, is “they died.” If you want to know how, the answer is “by dying.”
One of my favourite sequences in the original film is the investigation of the Norwegian base, wherein an entire story is implied through the lens of another one. The axe embedded in the wall, the man frozen to death in his chair, the absolutely terrifying corpse of the charred Split Face, itself composed of two characters we never get to learn about. Even the clumsy pilots who shoot the dog at the beginning of the movie — these all “explain” themselves by not getting explained, and the prequel they imply is better than any prequel you could conceivably make.
This is decidedly proven by the prequel they conceivably made, which is determined to answer a bunch of questions that already created an interesting narrative through their hazy, interpretable quality. Like the ending of the original film, it’s a collection of questions that already answered themselves. Now you can watch that axe get plunged into the wall! Surprise, a guy was trying to hit something with the axe. You can watch the Split Face before they burned it, which reveals that it was, uh, a monster that they had to kill. Every reveal replaces a fun mental picture in your brain with a shittier, rote picture filled with bad CGI.
It’s a movie with no real surprises — not that you couldn’t take the concept of the original movie and make something freshly dramatic about it, as has been done before. But there’s no drama in answers without the drama they provoke. Token attempts to create new meaning — a half-hearted attempt to replace the blood test in the original movie with a tidbit about Things not having earrings — feel more desperate than natural. They fail to create drama, and without that drama, there’s only information. A story made of obvious outcomes with predictable characters checking boxes is as dramatic as a Wikipedia entry.
Movies like these always feel like they treat the “unseen story” they’re telling as if it were an IOU that the audience can finally cash in for something real. The experience is subtractive; I had my own explanation for the axe in the wall, and now it’s subsumed by an image that, in its reality, is incredibly boring. Instead of being given the chance to imagine something, the opportunity to stop using my brain is being treated as a gift.
To actually tell this story, the information would have to come from an experience so uniquely good that it surpasses the value of leaving that story undisclosed. That experience is not here.
A telling exception comes in the handling of a specific character. It’s natural that we eventually come to learn about the Norwegians aboard the helicopter at the beginning of the original movie. It would’ve been easy to use this as another anodyne exercise in scene-setting, and yet the film stumbles across a piece of information that creates new dramatic meaning: that the Norwegian who desperately tries to kill the dog in the opening scenes of the 1982 film was the Norwegian dog handler. He took care of that dog and now he has to murder it, knowing with horrified eyes that it’s already dead.
The movie ends with the beginning of the frantic helicopter chase we’ve been expecting, only for it to be more than that. “That’s no dog!” the man we’ll see shot yells as one movie segues into another, and his voice is a mix of fear and heartbreak; he genuinely sounds like he could burst into tears. It has the incredible effect, otherwise never glimpsed, of recontextualizing something rather than simply filling in the blanks.
When I watch The Thing, something about the Norwegian camp has lost its power. It’s like something caused it to etiolate. No matter how much I want to erase the 2011 depiction of the events from my brain, my head can’t function like that, and the original film has unfairly suffered as a result. The beginning, on the other hand, has a fresh effect: I get sad while watching it. It’s become a tragedy. The effect is transformative, and it’s terrible that everything else has to come with it.
I don’t think a movie like 2011’s The Thing should exist or can particularly do much by existing. It highlights the destructive potential of the insatiable urge to provide information rather than produce drama. It also holds the argument against itself: the realization that information informed by the production of drama has the power to stimulate, and tell interesting stories, and provoke actual emotion.
Ambiguity is delicate and purposeful. If the artist doesn’t show you something, it’s probably to some specific end. If they clearly have no intention of showing it to you, it’s probably for a reason. If a person’s fate is left deliberately ambiguous, it’s because we’re left to wonder what happened next; we can decide for ourselves, and have fun exercising our own creativity doing it. There’s no fun in ransacking a movie to forge its meaning.
If you like golden eggs, it’s a bad idea to try and get more by murdering the goose that lays them. In art, what exists outside the borders of the frame tells its own story. The artist tells you things by not telling them to you, and refusing to acknowledge this is the same as choosing not to hear the majority of what they say. If you like a movie, you should learn to listen to it.
As for who in The Thing is truly The Thing, I want the only definitive answer to be the director’s instinctual response. When he was recently asked, Carpenter handled the question with easy grace, saying that anyone who wants to find out can send him a check in the mail.
