Lucidno
The Thing
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Already from its premiere on 25th June, 1982, John Carpenter's The Thing was met by general misunderstanding, both from the critics and the audience. What seems especially intriguing from today's perspective is that the 'problem' that the The Thing powerfully posed to the auditorium was essentially of referential, linguistic nature: the 'object' to which the rhetoric of the film referred to was ultimately elusive. For one part of the audience, Carpenter's film was ideologically gloomily dissonant, since the early 1980s optimism was competently embodied in the sentimental mush of Spielberg's ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Nihilism was also politically and aesthetically unacceptable in the Regan-era 'new sensibility' which emerged, at least in part, as a reaction to the apocalyptic spirit of the 1970s (and which was perhaps most consistently expressed precisely in horror films). From the mainstream genre approach reading, The Thing was denounced as 'Alien on ice', which practically confirmed the enormous intellectual laziness of its critics; their inability to more closely engage with the text that after all eventually became a horror standard, was clouded by the recent disparaging association with Ridley Scott's box-office hit. For those who preferred to view it in auteur context, Carpenter's remake of The Thing from Another World (1951), by his favorite director Howard Hawks, was taken - despite being a clear homage – as irresponsible and 'excessive', since Hawks' visual economy in depicting monsters was replaced by overly explicit reliance on special effects which, within this logic, resulted in the suspense being allegedly suspended in favour of the fascinating but rather bizarre and repulsive 'materialization' of the Thing. It is as if The Thing truly 'failed': in terms of ideological moment (for which it was 'outdated'), the current trend (for which it was 'derivative') and in its relation to the original, that is, its auteur role model (for which it was 'tasteless' and unworthy of its brilliant predecessor.) In all these three cases, the artistic, semantic and genre range of The Thing was conveniently reduced, ignorantly narrowed to 'details' that 'only' missed one thing - the Thing itself or, we could almost say, Thing-in-itself, in its relation to visual representational potentials of the cinematographic apparatus. In other words, Carpenter's masterpiece is - despite all the spectacular mutations and transformations of the monster - primarily a film about language (language as a general structure, as langage) that is available to us to describe the traumatic intrusion of the Other into our logosphere. The Thing is not a film that followed the fashion of the horror-SF combination that was commercially exploited at the time by Alien (1979). This is a film that goes to the point zero of horror inscription, to the basis of the genre, to the Real that is unenunciable, to the very ontological void in which the Thing dwells, the mysterious center of desire and death, of life and terror. Das Ding: this is exactly the border of language, the point-gape separating the Real and the Symbolic, the lost (maternal) object that is outside the system of reference. This is the limit of art itself, its power to imagine what can not be imagined (and what can not even be presented or represented), to signifyingly mark what is beyond the (cinematic) signification. The Thing, in a nutshell, is the ultimate meta-horror, a film that examines the terms of the genre, but it is also a meta-movie par excellence, a work that tests the limits to which it is possible to go with symbolization of the Real before the language breaks down. While The Exorcist (1973), another masterpiece that operates primarily on the meta level, finds fatal incarnation of the Other in the metaphor of the devil which, because of its strategic ambiguity provides a fundamental shift from phobia to anxiety (and which disturbs the being precisely because it does not have an external referent), The Thing establishes its metaphysical horizon by opening a clearing, an empty space in which das Ding is revealed as a traumatic Thing, the lost core of horror around which the whole genre universe revolves, even though it can never be referentially invoked within our readymade, 'mitigating' explanatory schemes whether they are religious, philosophical or scientific. The Thing's empty place, unmappable center of ex-sistence, the Real as the domain of the omni-power of life: it is the epicenter of the rhetoric of horror which, in the fragmented and phenomenological 'concretization' of the genre, is already lost, because narrative already means ontological 'translation' into pacified referentiality. However, The Thing persists in that clearing, in that closeness with the Thing: Carpenter's vision is realized. Although The Thing comes relatively late in the development of the genre of horror, it is primordial, prehistorical, and in a way it precedes the subconscious and the conscious of the genre.
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In Freudian psychological structure, there are two modes of representation: thing presentations (Sach-Vorstellungen) and word presentations (Wort-Vorstellungen). As art film is based on a combination of the two 'methods', on the synthesis of the media and the message. Its ability to simultaneously function as a reality and a dream is based on the reciprocity of the process where the both word will be a sign and the thing (object, character) will be a sign. But how then does The Thing 'break' this box, how does it depart from the established representational procedures which guarantee the transparency of the images and stories for the spectator? Here we refer to a distinction that exists only in the German language, between Sache and Ding. In other languages, the word la chose, causa, or thing does not make the required difference: Sache is 'ordinary' matter, which is, as Jacques Lacan says in the The Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 'always on the surface, always within range of an explanation'. (In this regard, The Thing is a film-signifier of the lack of signifier). Das Ding, however, is resistant to signification, this Thing inextricably remains within the Real and beyond symbolic order, and as such is an unsolvable mystery, because it cannot be evoked, it cannot be 'shaped' as a neutral 'Nothing'. Access to it may be possible only through jouissance or fear - two cardinal modes of horror as a genre - which cannot be transliterated through text or iconographic inscriptions.
Carpenter's mise-en-scène in The Thing is precisely set to never disturb this emptiness within which the Thing lies and around which the film's signifiers circulate. In fact, the Real is beyond speculation, the Thing cannot be doubled, summoned into the mirror stage, into the analytical framework of identification. Hence Carpenter's ingenious procedure: in horror films the monster, even though it structurally constitutes alienation or estrangement in relation to the human subject, functions as a monstrous mirror that acts as a foundation or at least support for the identity of the Same. Following the famous dictum, the desire of the subject is the 'desire of the Other', which means that, within the horror terminology, transgression, violent behavior and sexual aberrations of the Other are the inherent ingredients or lack which must be rejected as the abject and the monstrous so that full human identification could take place. In The Thing Carpenter not only rejects this 'desire of the Other', but also, in the decoupage, rejects the gaze of the Other with which it is fundamentally linked: in the framing mode there is never an instance of visual specification of the position of the Thing, that impossible point of view which would topographically and spatially indicate a certain subjectivized agent, something that would, therefore, be representable in itself. But here the question naturally arises - how come there is no reflection when the Thing enters the human beings and then imitates them: isn't the specular image already included in this process, isn't there a doubling in which the viewer is supposed to recognize his or her own deformed appearance in the transforming monsters? This is the crystallization of Carpenter's point: since the Thing takes shape or shell of the dog and the man, its 'substance' remains unfathomable, beyond visual networks. What can be registered is only the existential, frightening 'degradation' when the ontological Thing transforms into the ontic human, a mutating grotesque that embodies what happens when ontological difference is cancelled (in the The Thing this ontologicall difference is articulated differently to the usual genre procedures of a destabilizing anthropological or sexual difference). There is no manifestation of the Thing, no phenomenology of das Ding (remember that maxim of the phenomenologists: 'Zu den Sachen selbst'!). Carpenter once again uses the diegetic material as a pretext for observations on visual capacities of the cinematic apparatus: imitatio is mimesis, and hence The Thing is humanistically 'mimetic', filled with atrocious content, but constitutionally 'realistic', that is Real because there are no signifiers that would cut the Real, produce a hole in it. In the director's previous masterpiece, another crucial metatextual achievement, Halloween (1978), Carpenter's sublimation was the condensed manner in which the figure of the Other was (historicaly, aesthetically, visually) inscribed into the scopic field of film, that is in the way that the genre economy of fear was articulated. The inscription was gradually performed on four levels: an initial subjective frame of murder marked the intrusion of trauma, an anxious vicinity of Eros and Thanatos; the narrative preparation for the climax takes place as the killer Michael Myers is placed on the edges of the frame, which suggests a paranoid perspective where the calm surface of everyday life is about to be brutally usurped; when the action is 'reduced' to a battle between Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Myers, the film enters into a classically framed suspense; however, through the very ending in empty frames that indicate Myers' absence, through displacement, the existence is defined as ex-sistence. In relation to this 'traditional' setting that Carpenter employs in Halloween, which is enriched with the modernist (Hegelian) awareness of the necessity of representation of the lack, The Thing goes wider (in the aesthetic development of the genre) and deeper (in the sense of returning to the very basic, primordial constellation of horror). For Lacan, sublimation is a process where object is raised 'to the dignity of the Thing'. This is why The Thing is a film of double sublimation, the sublimation of a sublimation. Carpenter's film must have a privileged place in the history of film: it rises das Ding, the Thing itself, to the dignity of the Thing. Aleksandar BECANOVIC
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