One of my all-time favourite movies is John Carpenter’s The Thing. It’s a remake of the 1951 classic The Thing from Another World, itself an adaptation of the short story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell. Carpenter’s vision captured the fear, paranoia, and isolation of a group of researchers in the Antarctic who are slowly picked off one by one, hunted by a force they neither fully understand or know how to defend against: Something from another world. And this something — this “Thing” — can perfectly imitate any living being.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the biologist Blair determines that a single cell of the alien organism is enough to infect and replace whomever it attacks. It makes the battle against their unknown enemy all the more futile. The ensemble cast struggles to fight the “Thing” which has descended upon them.
For anyone who hasn’t seen this classic of 1980s horror I won’t go into any more detail. But suffice to say the movie is a character study of the slow descent of men into anger and paranoia when confronted by uncertainty and the unknown.
It’s appropriate viewing given current events.
Our own “Thing”
COVID-19 descended upon us, seemingly out of nowhere. As it’s a virus transmitted rapidly from person to person, the global pandemic that scientists had predicted for years had finally come. In the case of Ireland what was touted as a brief lockdown to get things under control turned into three lockdowns. And we’re now in the third month of the third lockdown, the longest and harshest of its kind in Europe and possibly the world.
What do we have to show for it?
We stopped the health service from being overwhelmed but barely. Case numbers have dropped significantly but the drop seems to have plateaued And now creches and schools around the country are reporting a rise in cases, as if this wasn’t entirely predictable. Of course there has been a reluctance on the part of officialdom to link any of these things together; that they are entirely separate events with no influence on each other.
The position of the government echoes that of Childs, one of the characters in The Thing. He refuses to believe the origins of what they’re up against and just how serious it is. At one point, after being told in no uncertain terms how precarious the situation is, he responds “I just cannot believe any of this voodoo bullshit”. But, as the situation deteriorates, Childs eventually realises the nature of what he’s up against. And, in the movie’s denouement, he comes to understand what must be done.
The Irish government has been told again and again what it needs to do. From the public to health experts, it was warned that the measures it was taking weren’t good enough. Ordering people to isolate themselves and to stay within 5km of their homes while allowing others to fly into the country without the need for quarantine goes beyond irresponsible. It veers into recklessness. And this on top of insisting that schools can reopen without it having an effect on the case numbers.
From one direction to another
In the initial stages of The Thing the characters struggle to face up to the problem, finding it difficult to believe what has befallen them from the ice of the Antarctic.
Carpenter’s direction is flawless. No shot is wasted. The soundtrack is both ethereal and menacing. We learn as the characters learn. And their struggle becomes one we can identify with.
In our own personal horror movie the direction has been shambolic with the result being that it has played out just as you’d predict. It’d be difficult to write a script with characters this unwilling to face the truth and so cretinous. Although the latter implies the former, we all hoped for the best. It’s all most of us could do; hunker down and pray that the government knows what it’s doing and won’t needlessly put the lives of people at risk.
Instead, our worst fears have been confirmed again and again. The government wasn’t faced with a “Thing” from another world. It was faced with a very real and very serious threat to public health. And not once has it taken it seriously enough. All it has done is reacted to a situation that it let get out of control in the first place.
The horror we and the characters are faced with in The Thing eventually comes to an end after a running time of nearly two hours. Our own horror has lasted over a year and we’re nowhere near the end.