Kelly WandJohn Carpenter Fest: Of Fogs and Things
June 16th 2008 12:00
While there are extremely few John Carpenter movies that I hate*, there are many I consider mediocre, and somehow the droogs who planned John Carpenter Fest at the Avco Theatre in Santa Monica this past weekend managed (on purpose?) to pair up a classic with a third-stringer on all three nights (“The Thing” with “The Fog”, “Escape from New York” with “Escape from L.A.”, and “Halloween” with “Christine”). So great, however, is my love for “The Thing” that I found myself sitting through the mire of “The Fog” afterwards, simply because coming off “The Thing” tends to trick one into ascribing visionary qualities to the mundane.
As Carpenter himself said between the screenings, the most powerful movie experiences of your life are the ones you see when you’re young and impressionable, and by fortunate genetic happenstance, I was born at just the right time to be able to see “The Thing” in its first theatrical run in 1982 at the highly impressionable age of twelve. Mainstream audiences of the day didn’t share my opinion: in the feel-good summer of “E.T.,” “The Thing” was widely reviled, not just by mainstream critics but by horror and science-fiction fans, basically for being “too horrific.” Pauline Kael wrote, “Carpenter seems indifferent to whether we can tell the characters apart; he apparently just wants us to watch the apocalyptic devastation.” (To me, the sameness of the goggled faces poking from fur parkas only heightened the paranoia; wrapped in their gear, they all look inscrutably alien.)
Now that I’ve seen “The Thing” so many times and know its every contour like a lifelong lover’s, it has (sadly) lost most of its power to frighten me, but as an ensemble piece, as a paean to doom, as a war movie, and as a study in dehumanizing isolation, it gets better and better with age. The movie borrows heavily from “Alien” (there’s even the same shot-for-shot version of a supposedly smart character who’s about to get killed off asking a DOS prompt the odds of defeating this heretofore completely unknown organism), yet while it lacks “Alien”’s British elegance, it features an even crueler, weirder antagonist capable of becoming virtually anything**. Grimness-wise, even “Alien” offered a Hollywood happy ending; “The Thing” ends in darkness and pessimistic ambiguity.
Like a nightmare one can’t shake or quite remember every detail of (or even recall what made those details so horrible), it’s studded with confusing bits and unresolved mysteries. Even its closing lines (which Carpenter attributes to Russell) can be interpreted in a number of ways; for all we know, one “limb” of the Thing is talking to another. Why else would Keith David’s great character just disappear for the entire finale if he wasn’t the Thing? And whose shadow’s on the wall when the dog enters? What happened to Fuchs in the snow? Who drained all the blood from the refrigerator if Gary and Copper are both uninfected? Why’s the light on in MacReady’s shack? And where the hell did Blair get all the parts for that second ship? We never find out, because the characters never find out. That all these red herrings come off as creepy and unnerving rather than careless is a testament to its artistry (screenwriter Bill Lancaster’s only other film credit was 1976’s “Bad News Bears”; go figure (oh, and the sequel where they go to Japan; really go figure)).
As in “Alien,” we’re given zero backstory about these people. We don’t know if they’re good at their jobs or what their titles are. All we need or want to know is that they’re jaded and burned out; they convey the sense of being blue-collar. They never refer to their pasts or their salaries or when they’re leaving or how long they've been together; they seem disinclined to speak to each other if they can avoid it. There’s no talk of women back home or sexual conquests; instead of watching porn, they watch “Let’s Make A Deal” reruns. A bit incredibly, they’re not out of weed. The only youthful member of the crew is a black roller-blader who has virtually no dialogue, ever. Most horror movie casts feature an asshole character to give the audience at least one whipping-boy who “deserves” their fate but these are just a bunch of average dudes, which makes everyone fair game. There's none of that schmaltzy crap about whether humans are "worse" than the horror. Yet in some ways, the Thing’s arrival is the best thing that ever happened to them: it gives their existence meaning.
Where any modern movie about an alien lifeform would rely heavily on CGI intercut with actors pretending to react to it, “The Thing” revels in the visceral: Wilford Brimley gropes around up to his elbows inside Rob Bottin’s grotesque cadavers and chews an eraser that’s just touched gooey, burnt extraterrestrial slime. The characters are equally repulsed and fascinated by the Thing’s innards, and so are we. The very idea of stocking a modern summer movie exclusively with laconic middle-aged unknowns pondering entrails is unimaginable.
“The Thing” is such an intense, disturbing picture, it’s all the more startling to find the sixty-year-old John Carpenter such a mild, easygoing personality. (During the Q&A, when asked what his creative ambitions for the future were, his response was immediate: “To finish Ninja Gaiden II.”) Such laidbackness is more along the lines of what one would expect from the maker of the night's second entry, 1980’s “The Fog,” an almost perversely conventional potboiler Carpenter wrote with Debra Hill about leper ghosts trying (like the leprechaun in “Leprechaun”) to recover a cross of gold in a far too pleasant-looking coastal hamlet. Their supernatural weapons: hooks and fog. And driftwood. But they knock first, for some reason. "The Fog" is stubbornly surprise-free. No one you expect to die dies; the fog itself doesn’t do anything, even though disc jockey Adrienne Barbeau closes the movie with a baffling, unmotivated speech about it and not ghosts or greed or motherhood. For some reason, even though their gold and the descendant of their mortal enemy is holed up in the church across town, the ghosts find time to harass her (this town has only one radio station, it seems) and an elderly babysitter.
In addition to the problem of non-toxic fog itself not being inherently scary, the movie commits the same cardinal sin as “The Ring” and “Silent Hill,” et al: it tediously explains the grievances of the ghost(s), as if all the arbitrary carnage the ghosts inflict actually follows any kind of pattern or anyone in the audience really cares. Doesn’t having a ghost hung up on mere gold make it less scary? In the end, Hal Holbrook “defeats” the ghosts by the highly dramatic device of buying them off. Oh, and getting stabbed to death after they had the chance to stab him but didn’t stab him until he could say something ironic about not getting stabbed. As for the rest of the characters (and there are tons), none ever do much of anything except run and drive away from the fog.
By contrast, Kurt Russell’s band in “The Thing” knows so little about their adversary that the only sobriquet these scientists (?) can come up with for it is “thing” (even though, logically, it should be plural). Confronted with this intelligent extraterrestrial being that can apparently speak and act human enough when it feels like it, they never consider parley an option and neither does It. In fact, one of the Thing’s most disconcerting traits is that It never seems to mind when one of its canine or human “units” is destroyed; it leisurely finds time to unveil yet more fascinating new forms to adopt, even when it’s in the middle of combat. It wants you to see it. And it’s entirely possible that all Carpenter had in mind was showing off Bottin’s handiwork, that the Thing’s tactics are the result of narrative lapses rather than supreme alien confidence. But even as great art isn’t always properly appreciated by the critics of its own generation, it isn’t always deliberate.
* “Vampires” with James Woods among them, although even it can’t hold a candle to “Memoirs of Invisible Chevy Chase” which is so milquetoast and soulless, it leaves one in a state of shock (screenwriter William Goldman lays much of the blame with Chase, who apparently insisted on emphasizing the potential “loneliness” of invisibility).
** Afterwards, a friend and I debated whether it would suck less to get killed by the Thing or Alien. It was a hung jury.
As Carpenter himself said between the screenings, the most powerful movie experiences of your life are the ones you see when you’re young and impressionable, and by fortunate genetic happenstance, I was born at just the right time to be able to see “The Thing” in its first theatrical run in 1982 at the highly impressionable age of twelve. Mainstream audiences of the day didn’t share my opinion: in the feel-good summer of “E.T.,” “The Thing” was widely reviled, not just by mainstream critics but by horror and science-fiction fans, basically for being “too horrific.” Pauline Kael wrote, “Carpenter seems indifferent to whether we can tell the characters apart; he apparently just wants us to watch the apocalyptic devastation.” (To me, the sameness of the goggled faces poking from fur parkas only heightened the paranoia; wrapped in their gear, they all look inscrutably alien.)
Now that I’ve seen “The Thing” so many times and know its every contour like a lifelong lover’s, it has (sadly) lost most of its power to frighten me, but as an ensemble piece, as a paean to doom, as a war movie, and as a study in dehumanizing isolation, it gets better and better with age. The movie borrows heavily from “Alien” (there’s even the same shot-for-shot version of a supposedly smart character who’s about to get killed off asking a DOS prompt the odds of defeating this heretofore completely unknown organism), yet while it lacks “Alien”’s British elegance, it features an even crueler, weirder antagonist capable of becoming virtually anything**. Grimness-wise, even “Alien” offered a Hollywood happy ending; “The Thing” ends in darkness and pessimistic ambiguity.
Like a nightmare one can’t shake or quite remember every detail of (or even recall what made those details so horrible), it’s studded with confusing bits and unresolved mysteries. Even its closing lines (which Carpenter attributes to Russell) can be interpreted in a number of ways; for all we know, one “limb” of the Thing is talking to another. Why else would Keith David’s great character just disappear for the entire finale if he wasn’t the Thing? And whose shadow’s on the wall when the dog enters? What happened to Fuchs in the snow? Who drained all the blood from the refrigerator if Gary and Copper are both uninfected? Why’s the light on in MacReady’s shack? And where the hell did Blair get all the parts for that second ship? We never find out, because the characters never find out. That all these red herrings come off as creepy and unnerving rather than careless is a testament to its artistry (screenwriter Bill Lancaster’s only other film credit was 1976’s “Bad News Bears”; go figure (oh, and the sequel where they go to Japan; really go figure)).
As in “Alien,” we’re given zero backstory about these people. We don’t know if they’re good at their jobs or what their titles are. All we need or want to know is that they’re jaded and burned out; they convey the sense of being blue-collar. They never refer to their pasts or their salaries or when they’re leaving or how long they've been together; they seem disinclined to speak to each other if they can avoid it. There’s no talk of women back home or sexual conquests; instead of watching porn, they watch “Let’s Make A Deal” reruns. A bit incredibly, they’re not out of weed. The only youthful member of the crew is a black roller-blader who has virtually no dialogue, ever. Most horror movie casts feature an asshole character to give the audience at least one whipping-boy who “deserves” their fate but these are just a bunch of average dudes, which makes everyone fair game. There's none of that schmaltzy crap about whether humans are "worse" than the horror. Yet in some ways, the Thing’s arrival is the best thing that ever happened to them: it gives their existence meaning.
Where any modern movie about an alien lifeform would rely heavily on CGI intercut with actors pretending to react to it, “The Thing” revels in the visceral: Wilford Brimley gropes around up to his elbows inside Rob Bottin’s grotesque cadavers and chews an eraser that’s just touched gooey, burnt extraterrestrial slime. The characters are equally repulsed and fascinated by the Thing’s innards, and so are we. The very idea of stocking a modern summer movie exclusively with laconic middle-aged unknowns pondering entrails is unimaginable.
“The Thing” is such an intense, disturbing picture, it’s all the more startling to find the sixty-year-old John Carpenter such a mild, easygoing personality. (During the Q&A, when asked what his creative ambitions for the future were, his response was immediate: “To finish Ninja Gaiden II.”) Such laidbackness is more along the lines of what one would expect from the maker of the night's second entry, 1980’s “The Fog,” an almost perversely conventional potboiler Carpenter wrote with Debra Hill about leper ghosts trying (like the leprechaun in “Leprechaun”) to recover a cross of gold in a far too pleasant-looking coastal hamlet. Their supernatural weapons: hooks and fog. And driftwood. But they knock first, for some reason. "The Fog" is stubbornly surprise-free. No one you expect to die dies; the fog itself doesn’t do anything, even though disc jockey Adrienne Barbeau closes the movie with a baffling, unmotivated speech about it and not ghosts or greed or motherhood. For some reason, even though their gold and the descendant of their mortal enemy is holed up in the church across town, the ghosts find time to harass her (this town has only one radio station, it seems) and an elderly babysitter.
In addition to the problem of non-toxic fog itself not being inherently scary, the movie commits the same cardinal sin as “The Ring” and “Silent Hill,” et al: it tediously explains the grievances of the ghost(s), as if all the arbitrary carnage the ghosts inflict actually follows any kind of pattern or anyone in the audience really cares. Doesn’t having a ghost hung up on mere gold make it less scary? In the end, Hal Holbrook “defeats” the ghosts by the highly dramatic device of buying them off. Oh, and getting stabbed to death after they had the chance to stab him but didn’t stab him until he could say something ironic about not getting stabbed. As for the rest of the characters (and there are tons), none ever do much of anything except run and drive away from the fog.
By contrast, Kurt Russell’s band in “The Thing” knows so little about their adversary that the only sobriquet these scientists (?) can come up with for it is “thing” (even though, logically, it should be plural). Confronted with this intelligent extraterrestrial being that can apparently speak and act human enough when it feels like it, they never consider parley an option and neither does It. In fact, one of the Thing’s most disconcerting traits is that It never seems to mind when one of its canine or human “units” is destroyed; it leisurely finds time to unveil yet more fascinating new forms to adopt, even when it’s in the middle of combat. It wants you to see it. And it’s entirely possible that all Carpenter had in mind was showing off Bottin’s handiwork, that the Thing’s tactics are the result of narrative lapses rather than supreme alien confidence. But even as great art isn’t always properly appreciated by the critics of its own generation, it isn’t always deliberate.
* “Vampires” with James Woods among them, although even it can’t hold a candle to “Memoirs of Invisible Chevy Chase” which is so milquetoast and soulless, it leaves one in a state of shock (screenwriter William Goldman lays much of the blame with Chase, who apparently insisted on emphasizing the potential “loneliness” of invisibility).
** Afterwards, a friend and I debated whether it would suck less to get killed by the Thing or Alien. It was a hung jury.
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Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
I'd love to stage a horror retrospective ie the movies of David Cronenberg or Dario Argento.
btw ... your eye avatar makes my eye water!
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Kelly Wand
Sprocket Holed
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
Comment by Anonymous
It's not as good a film as The Thing (really not many movies are) but I feel it's among John Carpenter's best, right up there with Halloween.
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
Comment by Kelly Wand
Sprocket Holed
In The Mouth of Madness also has its moments. And mouths.
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
In the Mouth of Madness I haven't seen for years, but I remember enjoying it. Probably good time to revisit. Cheers
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Kelly Wand
Sprocket Holed
Comment by JohnDoe
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