the thing (2011)
over
a sweeping white panorama you can’t believe it’s not john
carpenter a spellbinding ten seconds of “am I
watching the wrong movie?” before the illusion is
shattered a snow cat hurdles into ice and we realize oh
wait this is national treasure or tomb raider
and yet the suggestion of john carpenter
persists through the paranoia procedural to follow. your
patience for this will hinge severely upon how good “john
carpenter la croix” sounds to you. an alienating effect
follows in which we recognize things but cannot quite
identify them — who goes there? no answer from the
formless, weightless cgi material that cocoons the
proceedings in a sense of immateriality, a feeling of
being tangible yet only real in fleeting glimpses of
self-estrangement. we’re supposed to be in a prequel yet
we repeat the events from before in a way that points not
to a cycle of being stuck here but instead in a way that
feels like a repetition a repetition that is uncomfortable
even more present even more crisp in its early-2010s
studio horror way of retreading the diffuse anxiety from a
time we are rapidly forgetting yes add this to the list of
unfairly derided horror reboots that people are generally
right about. to include a film in this pantheon is to say
very little of value about the film itself but nonetheless
this movie means something to me because of its
refusal to recapture anything of worth from before. it’s a
film that does not learn from the past a film that
disregards what anyone would want from a film called the
thing this remold retreats to its impulses its
predictable course of action as a survival tactic as a
means of automating its processes of plugging john
carpenter into an algorithm and merely following that
current through the increasingly uncanny predictable path.
it’s actually more strange to do new things or to return
to old things once you’re not as dissociated because the
surreality of the experience is given a certain veracity
that can be unsettling. the knowledge that these things
are real is grounded firmly in miles of ice, a vista that
only says one thing; it takes on the weight of a massive
being of unknowable horror entombed in an icy slab.
eventually you develop better more efficient ways to
maintain to survive you learn to be comfortable with
algorithmic processing you adopt this as meaningful work
because it is still work even if you’re not constantly
thinking about it. these routines take a toll but you give
yourself over to entropy you embrace it this is a tactic
this is woman’s work this is seeing your friends’ bodies
warp gastrointestinal silk sinews extending like piano
wire taking on new grotesque forms an unknowable beauty
you use every part of this body.
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