A Comparative Study of John Carpenters The Thing and Howard Hawks The Thing from Another World essays

A Comparative Study of John Carpenters The Thing and Howard Hawks The Thing from Another World essays The director John Carpenter entitled his 1982 remake of Howard Hawks 1951 The Thing from Another World simply The Thing. Carpenters new, shortened title significantly eliminates the alien origin of the protean monster that terrorizes the human characters of the film. This suggests that what is so frightening about Carpenters Thing is not that it is an alien, but that it is formless and nameless. Most horror films force the viewer to confront some concrete horror, from a thing that goes bump in the night to a blood-sucking vampire. Hawks concrete version of horror threatens truth and the American way of life by attempting to infiltrate human society. However, Carpenters more subtle rendering of the socially destabilizing force of The Thing compels the viewer to confront the ultimate horror of all-namely the formless and undefined nature of his or her own identity. Hawks Thing, in contrast, is merely a being that provides a focus of hatred for the human race to unite against and u ltimately triumph. Essentially, Carpenters creature dwells perpetually in Lacans mirror stage of infant development, whereby the infant, in a search for a stable self in an unfamiliar world, mimics other persons. The unstable identity of The Thing in Carpenters remake destabilizes the secure sense of self and reality of the actual humans who are being pursued by the creature. Trust is a tough thing to come by these days, says one of the still-human characters, the helicopter pilot MacReady, whose identity has not been subsumed by the Thing as the alien takes upon the image of every human person it kills. Carpenters film quickly devolves into a war between those possessing a conventional sense of identity, namely the remaining humans, and the Thing, which will win once it has killed and taken in the image of every person it has eve...