OK, Gentle Readers - a guest blogger today! Here is a excellent article by blogger and writer Alex Livingston about the relationship between Lovecraft's only novel, At The Mountains Of Madness, the work considered by many to be his greatest, and the 1982 John Carpenter film The Thing. I have to say I think The Thing is probably the best example of Lovecraft in film, - despite it not being strictly related to an HPL story. Alex breaks it down for us. Enjoy...
Can we talk about The Thing and At The Mountains of Madness?
I re-watched John Carpenter’s masterful thriller last week, and as MacReady and Doc puttered around the Norwegian camp, finding abandoned research documents and an empty coffin of ice, I could not help but see Dyer and company investigating the wreckage of the Miskatonic research party’s tent city. Something was found deep in the ice. Something weird. It looks like it came to life. And it didn’t say “take me to your leader”.
A great setup for a story, to be sure, but one that serves as more than simply a catalyst for a thriller. In order for these tales to make sense, a few facts must be in place in the development of the story world:
o Aliens exist.
o They are much, much older and much more technologically advanced than we are.
o They have no respect for our lives, and can kill us very easily.
o We are only alive because they either have not noticed us or have yet to put their plan for our eradication into motion.
What better place than Antarctica for a story about mankind’s isolation? As our understanding of the universe grows, the perceived importance of our presence in it diminishes. We’re a blip. An oddity. Closer in intellectual advancement to a crow breaking a shell with a rock than to the horrible powers which exist beyond the borders of our knowledge. Indeed, the aliens themselves are so foreign-looking that we can barely understand what they are, be they Lovecraft’s anemone cucumbers or Carpenter’s tentacle-flailing blood beings. And they’re here, hidden in the dark places of the world we thought was ours.
The authors take their stories to very different places, and the success of each could be related to the times in which they were released. Mountains(1931) came about when the edges of our world were still only starting to be explored; Byrd’s expedition started in 1928. To find a massive city with the impossible geometry of German impressionist movies, one in which hieroglyphs reveal that humankind started not in Eden but at the hands of cold alien biologists, was terrifying. We have found the edge of the world, and it reveals to us that there is no God.
By 1982, we were fine with that. Alone in the vast, dark universe? Sure. So the focus moved from external to internal. We humans have nothing to trust but each other, and can turn on each other with very little prodding. This is a post-McCarthyism tale, in which the enemy is not some mad beastie but our own incapacity to work together. Fear rules, and it will undo us all. It forces us to ask ourselves what we would do if placed in such a situation. Would you kill everyone, just in case they were duplicates? Would you trust your friends, perhaps trusting them too much? Would you run out into the cold and die, to hell with the rest of humanity?
These stories may strike different chords, but share a completely modern worldview. Someday we will find the truth about our existence, and that truth will be one of terror.
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You can find more of my thoughts on The Thing here. http://galaxyalex.com/?cat=14
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