What happens when an imaginative kid finds himself in a series of creatively bankrupt jobs as an adult? What will he do when he's forced to grow up? "Emblogification Capture Device" is a humorous exploration of education, career, employment, lifestyle, politics and pop culture.
In the two previous installments, I talked about how I was contentedly living in the same modest apartment building for over 25 years, how the quality of tenants in the buildings started to go downhill circa 2015 and how a resulting fire drove me from my home on July 12'th 2022 at 2 AM in the morning.
So, what you do when you're rendered homeless by fire? Well, if you're Canadian, you retreat to the closest Tim Hortons that's open.
While distractedly munching on an egg-and-cheese-on-a-biscuit breakfast sammich and gingerly sipping on a cup of coffee hotter than the surface of Venus, I felt an odd rush of exhilaration. Let me tell ya, there's nothing like a near-death experience to activate your twisted sense of humor. Witness this image I sent to friends upon first spotting the Tim Horton's fireplace:
And then there's this l'il chestnut:
For the record, the irony isn't lost on me that I was trying to sell the Flashpoint: Fire Rescue board game at the time. Huh.
Okay, so, what's the second thing Canadians do when they're rendered homeless by fire? Well, they call their insurance company!
You have insurance, right? Riiiight???
It's my understanding that none of the three people directly affected by the fire that night had tenant insurance. None!
For the record, I feel a modicum of sympathy for two out of these three people, but the S.O.B. who provoked the attack on our building can get heckin' WRECKED for all I care. Dirtbag.
Side note, since that night, I've been consistently stunned by the number of people - mainly Millennial and Gen Z folks - who tell me that they don't have tenant insurance. But, then again, a lot of these folks are being crushed under a tsunami of debt and / or they're hideously underpaid. Faced with these "non future me" challenges, it makes sense that they opt to sink their fleeting funds into less hypothetical and nebulous threats, like staving off malnutrition or exposure.
But, listen up, kids, I'm here to tell you right now: YOU NEED TO GET TENANT INSURANCE. LIKE RIGHT NOW. I promise...I will present Exhibits "A" through "Z" shortly.
With my brain now approaching the consistency of cottage cheese, it took forever for me to track down the contact number for my insurance company and call them from my car. Suddenly my stomach turned to ice and my testicles shrunk up into my body cavity as a horrible thought crossed my mind.
'What if they can't help me?'
Now, I don't know about you folks, but I don't call up my insurance company every few months for a casual chin-wag. I have an auto-payment system set up on my credit card, they take money away from me every month, and society tells me that this transaction should pay for some semblance of mental peace.
But, since I was raised by a pessimist and I always look at every glass as half-empty, I was fully expecting the conversation with the insurance agent to sound like the following Monty Python skit:
Ergo:
ME: I'm sorry, did you just say that you "aren't satisfied with the grounds of my claim"?
INSURANCE AGENT: Yes, well, Mr. Pretty, in your policy...one moment please. Ah, yes, here it is...in your policy, specifically in section four, paragraph eight, sub-section twelve, it unequivocally states that any claim you make will be ignored.
ME: What?!?
INSURANCE AGENT: Yes, well, you opted for the 'cold shoulder' policy which, honestly, is a great value if you never make a claim, buuuuut you had to go ahead and make one, so here we are...
ME: Oh, dear.
Needless to say, the brief wait to speak to an agent felt like the longest five minutes of my entire life.
Fortunately, my fears were soon assuaged and the agent on the other line was incredibly helpful and reassuring. I soon discovered why I'd been paying into an insurance policy for all these years. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that the following would happen over the next few days and months:
I was given a $12,000.00 relocation budget. I just had to save my receipts to claim any expenses, such as food, accommodations and - presumably - counseling.
An insurance adjuster would be dispatched to the site. They would appraise the damage and, if required, dispatch a recovery team who would be tasked to remove all salvageable items and warehouse it.
At the warehouse, everything would be inspected and we'd be compensated for everything that is non-recoverable.
My stuff would be warehoused until the unit was repaired, then shipped back to me and put into place.
This provided just enough mental solace for me to focus on the next step: temporary shelter.
Unfortunately, this turned out to be more difficult than I expected.
Y'see, this all happened back on July 12'th, 2022, smack dab in the middle of tourist season, with COVID restrictions finally loosening. After calling around to a bunch of places, I quickly realized that there weren't many, if any, options.
On the verge of growing despondent, I decided a more direct approach was in order. Barely dressed, still jittery from shock, sleep-deprived and smelling like a pile of half-melted spatulas on a wood chip barbecue, I stumbled into the Château Bedford Hotel & Suites and explained my plight. By some miracle, the lovely staff took pity on me and they were able to accommodate my request. I finally had a place to sleep, at least for one night.
After a fitful nap and a shower, I decided to return to the scene of the crime around 5 pm that evening. This probably wasn't the smartest idea.
Upon arrival, I immediately spotted the daughter of the building owner, so I decided to bend her ear. During the resulting conversation, my sleep-deprived brain managed to retain the following:
She seemed genuinely upset by what had happened.
She pledged to try and get us into alternate accommodations as soon as possible.
She feared that the damage was so extensive that it would take at least six months to a year to repair everything.
After this last, genuinely upsetting little piece of trivia, I spirited off to work. Now, I already hear you asking 'Work?!? You went to WORK??? Why???'
Well, I have three rebuttals to that:
I'm fucking Gen X, of course I went to work! I'm programmed to go to work if 35% of my body is missing.
$12,000.00 might seem like a lot, but with a hotel costing over $140.00 a night, I knew that this money wouldn't last very long.
I actually relished the diversion that work provided that evening.
Despite the spiritual balm provided by that last point, I was also duly distracted at times.
'Six months to a year without a home?' I thought to myself.
I literally had only one night booked in a hotel! With waaaaaay too many people in the city right now and rental vacancy rates hovering close to 0%, where the hell was I going to go?
NEXT UP: We survey the damage, rescue some fish and rely on the kindness of (relative) strangers.
As a weird shut-in kid who was practically raised by movies and television, I always looked at apartment living as kinda cool and vaguely anti-establishment. Consider the examples set forth in such real-life fare as WKRP in Cincinnati, How I Met Your Mother, Friends, Sex in the City, The Jeffersons, Seinfeld, Frasier,Big Bang Theory, and Rosemary's Baby.
Um, okay...well, maybe scratch that last one. Though, you know, if the rent was reasonable enough, I'd be totally cool if my neighbors were all secret Satanists. As long as they weren't also business executives and corporate lawyers, we're gravy.
Oh. Whoops...spoiler alert!
Anyhoo, beyond these frivolous motivations, there were a few more realistic ones. Even at the height of my economic earnings, the only way I could really afford a house is if it was in the boonies, about thirty to forty clicks away from whatever tenuous place of employment I was calling a "career" at that point. As a young buck from a small town, I didn't want to live in some remote, cut-and-paste suburban hell! I wanted to be in THE BIG CITY, (reasonably close to) downtown. You know, where all the action was!
Growing up, I also saw my parents periodically clobbered by the sort of unexpected expenses that only home ownership can provide. Need a new roof? Cracked foundation? Basement flooded? Well, say goodbye to five to ten thousand dollars of your savings, you starry-eyed optimist, you!
Oh, and snow. I don't wanna fookin' shovel snow.
Content in the knowledge that I wasn't going to have to re-shingle or shovel anything anytime soon, I settled into a contented snooze late on July 11'th. I was only asleep for about an hour or two before the fire alarm went off.
Now, if you've either lived in a university dorm or in an apartment building, you know to completely ignore these things. They randomly go off so often it ends up being the fire safety equivalent of the The Boy Who Cried Wolf. So, unless it keeps clanging away for a good ten to fifteen minutes or you start smell smoke or you look down and notice that your genitals are on fire, you generally turn a blind ear to that cacophonous shit.
That night was like any other night. In reaction to this angry, persistent false alarm, I just groaned, looked around, muttered in frustration...and then promptly put my head back down on the pillow.
That is until the banging on the door started.
"GET OUT!!! GET THE FUCK OUT!!! THE FUCKING BUILDING IS REALLY ON FIRE!!! GET OUT!!!"
Like a cat roused by pouring (purring?) scalding water on its ass, I went from a reclining position to standing bolt upright in 2.6 milliseconds.
ACTUAL FOOTAGE OF ME ON THE NIGHT OF THE FIRE
Oh, confession time: I've never been one to wear Ward Cleaver-style pajamas to bed (or anything for that matter), so my first inclination was to cover myself up as best I could.
'KEYS! WALLET! CELLPHONE!' my barely-conscious brain barked at me. Even though I usually kept all of this stuff together in one place, my "decapitated chicken" impression was well on point that night. A renewed volley of fists on the door nearly caused me to jump out of my finally-covered skin.
"GET OUT!!! GET THE FUCK OUT...NOW!!!"
I needed no other encouragement. I tore open the door and was immediately hit with a horrific stench of smoke and a minor stampede of my fellow somnambulistic residents.
A quick word about the smoke: it smelled like a the contents of a fireplace had spilled out of onto the floor if a Barbie factory. Hey, if in a few years I come down with a pesky case of black lung, look no further for the culprit...just sayin'.
As I stumbled out my front door, I could finally see who our guardian angel was: Gabrielle, who had thankfully replaced Mr. Mail Order Bride across the hall from us a few years back. Instead of dragging as much of her stuff out of her burning apartment as she could lug, she'd taken it upon herself to rouse and evacuate as many of her neighbors as possible. Bless her heart.
Mercifully, as soon walk out my front door and turn ninety degrees to the right, my nose is practically touching the exit to the side stairwell. As I whipped it open and stumbled down the steps, I distinctly remember someone standing in the lobby shouting at the escapees.
"DO YOU HAVE PETS??? DON'T FORGET YOUR PETS!!!"
'I don't recognize you,' my unconscious brain mumbled at me as we vomited out into the side parking lot. Immediately, my still-dulled consciousness was drawn to the side of the building closest to me, which was engulfed in a wall of flame.
Ever sit too close to a campfire and immediately realize that you done fucked up? Well, take that to the power of ten and you'll know the heat I felt that night.
The other thing I can't do justice to is the sound. It was like a ravenous, crackling roar, implacable and all-consuming. It sounded like something otherworldly, nightmare fuel. I'm telling you, there's a reason why the Greeks considered the element of fire to be equal parts destructive and intelligent.
I can't describe the gut-wrenching horror of seeing your home on fire. Your primitive lizard brain immediately tells your body to flee, post-haste, or just freeze up like a deer in headlights. Thankfully, someone infinitely smarter than me suggested that we move the car out of the side parking lot to ensure we didn't get trapped behind a bunch of emergency vehicles. After re-positioning to a side street, we watched with dread as the flames grew increasingly ravenous.
I didn't take any video during those first ten to fifteen frantic minutes. Partly because I was having a really hard time dealing with reality, and also because the whole situation felt, well, embarrassing. Given the human detritus that the building owners had been letting in lately, a part of me wasn't surprised that this was happening. And, as such, I didn't want to document this abject humiliation, the culmination of all my prescient fears.
In reality, the fire crews arrived blindingly fast but, to my shell-shocked brain, it felt like an eternity. The truth of the matter is, if they'd gotten there any later, the fire probably would have reached the roof. And, given the fact that the building was a wood-heavy structure built in the 60's or 70's, I'm convinced the entire edifice would have foundered if that had happened. And if you don't believe me, just check out the EPIC at the end of this post.
As soon as the fire crews arrived, I finally gained enough presence of mind to start taking some video. Even in my dumbfounded state, I was pretty impressed by how quickly they brought the blaze under control.
It's so strange for me to watch this now. Taken at 1:55 am, you can see that the ground floor unit is still completely engulfed in flames. There's a fire engine already on site, with more approaching sirens wailing away in the distance.
I would love to know the identity of the people milling around out front in this video. Could the person responsible for the fire be somewhere in this shot, perhaps chowing down on a big ol' bowl of regretti spaghetti? Also note that someone runs in from the right and approaches the occupants of a car parked directly across from the burning unit. Is that the wayward occupant of said unit? To this day I still have a million questions...and no source for answers.
At the very end of that segment you can see the firemen (firefolks?) repositioning the hoses and getting ready to soak the same patio where the fire started, which you can see in this next clip, taken one minute later. Note that a second fire engine is now on the scene.
In this third clip (taken at 2:29 am) you can really see the scale of the response. By then there were no less than four vehicles on Braeside. Clearly concerned about possible hot spots in the attic, the fire fighters ensconced in the side parking lot prepares to access the roof.
How they did that caught me completely by surprise: they actually used a chainsaw to cut a phreakin' hole in the eave of the building!
This next photo is of particular interest to me. Can someone in the know tell me what's going on here? Are they looking for hot spots? Is this evidence that an investigation of the fire was already well underway? I have no clue.
Taken at 3:54 in the morning, this next clip shows our street completely cordoned off and choked by an entire fleet of emergency vehicles:
Then, finally, there's this clip from a minute later, which shows the fire crew finishing its thorough soak of the attic.
And what did we do while we watched our homes go up in smoke? Well, we...
Gossiped with our across-the-hall neighbor Gabrielle about how the fire started and why. I have plenty of thoughts about that, but I gotta keep it to myself right now. At least for the time being.
Tried to stay warm. Even though it was a night in July, it was still pretty cold.
Tried to stay hydrated. At one point, Gabrielle's partner materialized from out of no-where, distributing well-appreciated bottles of water. Thanks, my dude.
Considered hanging out in bus Metro Transit had parked on Lacewood drive to act as temporary shelter. I hate to sound ungrateful, but since I despise doing that at the best of times, I opted instead to alternately freeze my ass off outside or huddle in the car for hours on end.
Tried to get some information from the cops, but they were all universally unsympathetic, cocky and / or surly. Not sure if this is relevant, but the average age of these guys looked to be about sixteen to seventeen years old. One cop looked so young I had to resist the urge to put him over my shoulder and burp him. But I didn't cuz dat bebe was packing HEAT.
I also spoke to our neighbor who lived above us. Picture Santa Claus if ol' Saint Nick was from the Irish Loop in Newfoundland. Within seconds, I regretted talking to him because his words cut me to quick.
"OH, SHE'S GONE, B'Y," he lamented, pulling absolutely zero punches when it came to my visibly-fragile mental state. "DIDJA SEE IT? MY SON, THEY SOAKED THAT FRIGGIN' ATTIC! EVERYTHING'S GONNA BE FLOODED! THE ARSE IS BLOWN RIGHT OUTTA 'ER!"
That may indeed have been the case with Santa's digs but, when the fire department graciously let us back into the building later that night, we felt the tiniest flutter of hope. My apartment actually didn't look all that bad. Granted, in the half-light, I could see some pretty sizable dark spots in the ceiling and water was pooled in the entrance, the kitchen, the dining room and the hall leading to the bathroom. But, from what I could tell, most of my collectibles, including hundreds of games, toys, movies, books and whatnot, looked reasonably intact. Was this a miracle?
"You know, you might have gotten off lucky," one of the firemen observed as he escorted us around.
After gathering up some key valuables and enough clothing and supplies to keep us sustained for the foreseeable future, we were asked to evacuate for the second time that night. But this time we had no idea when, or if, we'd ever be allowed back in.
That's when an even more disconcerting thought barged into my brain.
You are homeless.
Next time: as the initial shock wears off, shelter becomes the main consideration. But where do you go when COVID restrictions are lifting in two years and there's literally no room at the inn?
EPIC: The fire was reported in a bunch of media releases, including CTV, Saltwire and CityNews. The best take-away, by far, from all of these articles is the following quote:
“Crews arrived and found the east end of the building was well-involved in flames,” explained district chief Pat Kline. “They got a fast knockdown on the main bulk of the fire, it did extend into the roof and was a little bit of extra work.
“The first couple of crews did an incredible job stopping it or we could have easily lost the whole building.”
FAIL: The worst thing about apartment living: you can be a model tenant but you have no sweet clue what kind of morons you're sharing a roof with. As George Carlin famously said: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
So, for those of you keeping score at home, I fired up this Emblogification Capture Device waaaaay back in April of 2010 to help me through a rough patch. I'd just left a lucrative, but soul-destroying, job that was making me feel as if I was dying inside and frittering my time away while doing it. Armed with a nest egg of "fuck you" money, I quit that pointless toil and struck out on my own in a GRAND EXPERIMENT.
At that time, I was feeling pretty sanguine about my future. Over the next four years, I used this space to develop my writing and editing skills, cheer-lead the publication of my first novel, explore opportunities in the local film community and generally keep my morale up. The end goal of this GRAND EXPERIMENT was always the same: to get paid to write and / or edit.
Slowly but surely opportunities presented themselves to me. In 2013, I started a part-time job that was incredibly fulfilling, but also woefully non-lucrative. In 2016, I started to get freelance writing gigs and, since then, I've written over forty articles for a variety of sources. Then, in May of 2019, I became a staff editor for a small publishing house in Ontario.
With that, I considered the mission of Ye Olde Emblogification Capture Device to be largely complete. This blog went to fallow and I switched my focus to more immediate things that. Like y'know, making money.
Behind the scenes, the thing that really sustained me during this GRAND EXPERIMENT was my miraculous living situation. For over twenty-five years, I've lived in the same place and, during that time, it became a magical realm frozen in time. As a model tenant, the price for my two bedroom apartment never rose above $840.00 a month.
When I first moved in there, it was a quiet little place, mainly inhabited by senior citizens. In the mid 90's I fled a louder, noisier chicken coop of a building and put my best foot forward to move into my current place. I actually had to undergo an interview with the family who owned the building back then and, to ensure a good impression, I dressed up and constantly underscored much how I wanted a "quiet place to live."
"Welp, the loudest it ever gets here is if a card game gets out of hand," the building owner at the time told me, without a hint of irony.
The place was absolutely lovely for many years. I remember my parents first coming to visit me and they legit though I was the sole tenant in the entire complex. My cute octogenarians neighbors, clad exclusively in ployester slacks, sweater vests and dresses, would decorate the common areas for every occasion and host Christmas and Easter parties with their doors thrown wide open.
But, as we all know, nothing good ever lasts. About twelve years ago, the building was sold to a new owner and, as the more respectable senior residents died off, things slowly started to go downhill. Since then, we've had to contend with mice, silverfish, pot / cigarette smoke and a wall that leaks like a sieve whenever it's hit by direct rain.
It's hard to believe, but there was a period of time, circa 2012-2020 when renters held all the cards in Halifax. Our building had a slew of vacant units, which I think the owner was desperate to pack with bodies, so long as they could sit upright and had a body temperature of 37 degrees. As a result, the complexion of the building changed from "ersatz seniors home" to "borderline flophouse."
Oh, the stories I could tell. How about time the mail-order bride who lived across from me pounded on my door in the middle of the night seeking asylum from the crusty old fuck who requisitioned her? How about the time six months worth of my checks were stolen from the lobby suggestion box by a resident dirtbag? This dumb fuck then proceeded to cash all of them at once, resulting in five of the checks bouncing around town like little rubber balls.
Oh, then there was the sedentary piece of shit who took it upon himself to single-handedly lower the property values by sitting on his porch all day and night, regardless of season, smoking dope and playing video games through the patio door? Thanks to this charming prick, our parking lot would often become a late night arena for verbal sparring matches between Mr. Charisma and some jobber he'd clearly fucked over in a drug deal. I remember coming home late one night from a friends place and I couldn't even get back into the buildings because the cops had cordoned off the entire street due the latest dispute instigated by this asshole.
Sadly, there's gonna be lot more about this fucking organ donor coming in future entries. Stay tuned.
Regardless of how bad things got, I'd always tell myself that things could be worse. Especially when I'd talk to my 20-something co-workers about rent, and they told me that they were paying anywhere from $800.00 to $1200.00 a month...often just for a single room. The implication of this never failed to chill me to the bone.
Holdupaminit! I'm picking up on your psychic signals, Dear Reader. I can actually hear you asking: why didn't you do what everyone else your age did and buy a house? Welp, that ain't easy when your first job abruptly vanishes and the subsequent fire you were forced to leap into was so stressful and / or rage inducing that you thought about walking off the job every hour of every day?
Oh, and, spoiler alert, don't even try and approach a mortgage broker unless you're working full time. They might be able to get you into a house but your rates will be so ridiculous it'll be the equivalent of highway robbery.
When COVID hit in January of 2020, I really started to worry. What if I was forced out of this place by some sort of calamity beyond my control? I'd be lucky to find any place, let alone a spot where the rent was vaguely comparable. If my rent suddenly jumped, the GRAND EXPERIMENT would come to a screeching halt.
This paranoia struck me so badly one day during the lockdown that I remember sitting in my room looking around at forty years worth of collectible detritus and thinking: 'What the fuck would I do if this place catches on fire?'
Looking back on it, I'm reminded of folks who live in some tropical paradise, tentatively looking out across the distant horizon at a wall of dark clouds bearing down on them. What do you do when a storm is coming and you don't know where to go or what to do?
Well, back on July 12'th 2022...I actually found out.
NEXT UP: Have you ever wanted to know what its like to wake up from a dead sleep at 2 am with someone pounding on your door and telling you that your building's on fire? For the record, I don't recommend it.
EPIC: Can anyone please confirm that this place is as great as this article seems to indicate?
He sat transfixed, staring into the gold-hued, butter-and-brown-sugar-laden mound of
gourd innards. His sister’s words scarcely registered amidst the clatter of
silverware on plates and the collective sound of intense gluttony.
“Mom, can you poke Jacob? I think he’s
buffering.”
Jennifer smiled awkwardly and reached out to shake her son’s
forearm. The pristine fork slipped from his nonexistent grasp and clunked onto
the draped table.
“Jake, honey…are you okay?”
The young man shook his head and looked up from his
side-dish reverie.
“What?” he mouthed.
“Your sister asked you to pass the squash,” Jennifer
intoned, nodding incrementally towards Emily, who was now making grotesque
faces at her brother.
“Oh, sure…here.”
The precious cargo was delivered and Emily ladled a
disproportionate amount of baked acorn squash onto the hinterland of her
already-crowded plate. She craned her neck in an exaggerated manner, took note
of her brother’s sparse portions and immediately flashed a devilish grin.
“I thought weed was supposed to make you hungry,” she mock-whispered
to her older sister.
A look of anger flashed across Jacob’s face.
“Yeah, you should know, you annoying bi…”
Like Thor’s hammer, a fork-armed fist came down on the
table, causing any cutlery close to the epicenter to jump upon impact.
Immediately all eyes were on Michael, the family patriarch.
“Are we still incapable of having a single Thanksgiving
dinner where we don’t end up yelling at one another?”
Jacob was immediately moved by the sight of his father. Like
a flash, his anger was spent, replaced by the sort of knowing melancholy that was
undeniably relatable.
“Sorry,” the young man whispered, making a show out of
spearing a few planks of turkey onto his plate while glaring at his sister.
“Sooo, Jacob,” his
uncle, Jason, tentatively ventured, “how are things at Carthage Academy?”
“Good,” the young man replied.
“'Good’,” parroted his father, casting a side-eye at Jason.
“Forty-five grand in tuition and all he can manage is ‘good’.”
After ladling a tsunami of brown gravy onto his plate, Jacob
put down his utensils, linked his fingers together and then fixed his uncle
with a plaintive stare.
“I’m sorry. Seems I haven’t answered your question to my
father’s satisfaction. Carthage Academy is wonderful. The Political Science
program is great. The class sizes are small, and I never feel like just an ass
in a seat. My professors are patient, learned educators who seem genuinely interested
in guiding my future career choices. All told, five stars out of five…would learn
there again.”
Everyone froze mid-chew and was now intently staring at him. Immediately,
the dinner scene from Troll 2 flashed
in his brain and it took all of his willpower not to jump up on his chair and bring
this charade to an unconventional, but definitive, halt. Instead, Jacob opted
not to piss on hospitality, choosing instead to stifle an outburst of laughter
and skewer his father with an intense stare.
“Will that do?” he asked pleasantly.
There were no eyes to meet. His father had already gone back
to rooting around on his plate with his fork.
“Better,” he replied, barely audible. “But you didn’t have
to be so snotty about it.”
“Are you still thinking about going into journalism?” Jason
pursued. By feeding the fire of civil discourse, he hoped to divert attention
away from the palpable bad karma, a presence so real it might be caught stealing the last of the white meat.
“Probably my best bet,” Jacob replied.
He was suddenly aware of a slight headache coming on, likely
triggered by the two (three?) glasses of cheap moscato his mother always to
seem to buy in bulk lately. Of course, the conspicuous absence of the elephant not in the room was an equally-feasible culprit.
“It’s pretty crazy,” he idly continued after briefly
massaging his temple. “Two or three reps from some pretty big
media outlets have already come to the school to guarantee jobs for journalism majors.”
“Wow,” Samantha exclaimed, interdicting a morsel of sausage
stuffing that threatened to leap out of her mouth. “God, when I was in college,
journalism wasn’t even an option.”
Jacob pulled his plate in close, picked up his utensils and
then loaded up a gravy-marinated forkful of turkey and mashed potatoes.
“Yeah, well, as soon as the T.A. got rolled back, there were
a lot of new upstarts.”
“The T.A.?,” Jason asked,
cocking an eyebrow above the borders of his tortoiseshell glasses.
Jacob paused and chewed diligently, rotating his unburdened
fork in front of him in a gesture meant to expedite the process.
“Telecommunications Act,” he finally managed. “Clinton
deregulated the media back in 1996. It was supposed to open things up for
competition, but all it really did was let corporations buy up a shit-ton of independent
newspapers and television stations.”
“Language,” Michael muttered, giving his son a brief
Kubrickian stare, which was promptly ignored.
“Oh, yes, I think I read something about that,” Jennifer
ventured, cheerily prospecting for nods of approval around the table. None were
forthcoming.
“Thirty years ago there used to be over fifty different
media companies,” Jacob continued. “But after deregulation, it went down to
about six or so.”
“You kids are too young to remember, but back in the 80’s, the
news was so simple,” Jennifer observed, looking pleasantly surprised that she
now had the floor. “It was just some guy sitting at a desk reading stories with
some plain-looking graphic in the background. No spin, no editorializing, just
reporting the facts.”
“Yep, I remember that, too,” Jason concurred. “Everyone
seemed to be on the same page back then. With the whole ‘truth in media’
movement lately, I think we’re finally getting back to that.”
Jacob nodded vigorously, stalling so he could speak again.
His mother hated it when her kids chewed with their mouths full.
“Yeah it was pretty bad there for the longest time. Kind of a feeding frenzy there for awhile as corporations
snapped up all of the competing voices and then set up their own 24-hour cable news
networks. Between that and social media, it pretty much kicked off the whole ‘customized
reality’ era.”
“Haw, good name
for it,” Samantha barked, pouring a fresh goblet of wine for herself. Jacob was
suitablyimpressed; his sister was
probably two glasses ahead of him by now.
“Seriously, that’s what my profs are calling it now. If you
were right-wing, you had Fox News, and then Rush Limbaugh, Parler, Info Wars
and QAnon for the real wing-nuts…”
“Jesus Christ!” Michael suddenly blurted. “Are we seriously talking
about this? Now, of all times?!?”
Everyone’s heads collectively snapped around to look at him,
risking group whiplash. Immediately Jacob felt a powerful stab of regret.
“Sorry, Dad,” he mumbled, and then instinctively cast his
gaze downward.
He was immediately lost in the monochromatic landscape that
was his dinner, a muddy mish-mash of gravy, turkey and mashed potatoes,
punctuated by a clementine-hued asterisk at the edge of the plate. Something from
this gastronomical tableau was missing, however, and he spent an inordinate
amount of time lost in examination. Even the palpable sensation of his little
sister staring a hole in the side of his head failed to dislodge him.
“Looks like the good stuff’s finally kicking in,” Emily
whispered to Samantha, who admonished her with a playful slap and non-committal
frown of disapproval.
But it was recognition, not chemicals, that finally
triggered Jacob’s dulled synapses.
“Cranberry sauce!” he blurted, more audibly than he
intended.
He spun his knife in his hand, like Tom Cruise with a whisky
bottle in Cocktail, an old movie that
his Dad and Granddad used to inexplicably watch every Thanksgiving. For years, its
precious one-hundred-and-three minute runtime seemed to douse the fireworks without
fail. At least until his grandfather stopped coming to dinner.
That purplish, gelatinous cylinder, ridged from its aluminum
prison, quivered half-way across the table as if openly mocking him. Instead of
giving his annoying sister the satisfaction of asking for her help, Jacob used
his simian-length arms in an attempt to reel in a cross-section of that tart prize.
“And, Emily, how’ve you been lately?” Jason queried, casting
a quizzical look towards Jacob as he struggled to separate, balance and secure
a limp slab of cranberry goodness.
“Alright,” she shrugged, violently mashing her squash to
destroy even the slightest hint of particulates.
“’Alright,’”
Michael scoffed, shaking his head. “Roof over her head and good food to eat
whenever she wants it. A bit better than ‘alright’,
I’d say.”
Jacob didn’t see the storm blowing up in Emily’s eyes, nor
the expectant grimace that flashed across Sam’s face. He was completely preoccupied
with the Herculean task of transporting that trembling disc of cranberry jelly back
to his plate.
“Yeah, well, we’re can’t all be like the ‘golden child’ over
here,” Emily spat, jabbing the handle of her fork in her brother’s direction.
Jason was starting to have regrets for inadvertently stumbling
upon this conversational landmine, but Jacob was completely oblivious. He stuck
out his tongue, like a Shaolin monk adopting the forward stance to reinforce stability
and concentration before launching into a miraculous display of agility.
“Well, at least he has some focus,” Michael blared, almost
relieved by the opportunity to be combative. “He’s planning for his future, and
your sister had her pick of good jobs out there now. But what are you doing?
Absolutely nothing!”
“Michael, please!”
Jennifer said, her look pleading and pained, not angry.
The sight of that jiggling payload precariously balanced on
Jacob’s fork suddenly reminded him of his grandfather. Every time his mom
cracked a tin of the stuff, he could hear ol’ Bob fly off the handle, regardless
of what room, or state, he was in.
‘Jesus Christ, Jenny!’ he could hear the old man bellow, as
if he were sitting to his immediate left. ‘All you gotta do is boil some sugar
water and throw in a few damned cranberries. Even frozen ones are good. Ten
times better than that friggin’
abomination.’
The yelling in his memory was immediately eclipsed by his
sister screaming right into his left ear.
“Yeah, well, at least I didn’t sign off on murdering my own
father!” she screeched.
With that, Jacob lost his concentration and the glistening,
maroon-hued puck slipped off of his silverware, cart-wheeled in mid-air, slapped
into the side of the turkey platter and half-landed on his mother’s pristine
white tablecloth with a wet “thlup”
sound.
Immediately Jacob felt everyone’s stern regard turn on him. He
glanced incrementally to the right and saw that his mother had cupped her hands
to her mouth in shock, either because of Emily’s declaration or the growing
patch of cranberry blood that was rapidly spreading out on her gilded
tablecloth. He calmly placed his knife and fork down and slowly stood up.
All eyes watched as Jacob paced around for a bit, rubbing
his eyes with the heel of his hands and combing his hair back with his fingers.
It’s not like this was a revelation. He knew what had happened, but to hear it
uttered out loud had a certain crass awfulness to it. It was the equivalent of
digging a dead pet out of the back-yard and using it as the table’s centerpiece.
Eventually Emily reeled in his gaze, stopping him dead in his tracks. She
looked devastated.
“She’s right, you know,” Jacob intoned, gesturing at his younger
sister and looking at each of them in turn.
“Jake,” his mother said, exhibiting unearthly patience. “We
did everything we could.”
“Really? Did we?” he returned. “Did you ever think that
maybe, just maybe, after Nana died, that those people were the only company he
had for the better part of the year?”
That’s when his father shot up, the chair groaning in
protest as the back of his legs sent it skidding along the hardwood floor.
“He did that to himself, Jacob,” Michael growled. “All of
those toxic beliefs he had. It got to the point where I couldn’t even stomach
being in the same room with him. My own
father.”
“Well, you should have talked to him!” Jacob countered. It
was a decent bluff. Inside he felt like he was flailing.
“What, do you think we didn’t try?” Michael shot back,
sounding incredulous. “He wouldn’t even listen. His mind was 100% made up.
Nothing would budge him…nothing.”
Samantha suddenly cleared her throat and took a deep,
bracing gulp of wine.
“Jacob, do you remember last April when he went in for gall
bladder surgery?” she ventured.
“Yes.”
“He asked me and Em to look after Troubles because he said
he ‘couldn’t trust Dad anymore.’ As soon as we got back to his place we blocked
every one of those stupid fringe cable channels, cleaned up his Facebook feed
and unsubscribed him from God knows how many email chains.”
“Yeah, well, we all know how well that worked, huh?” Jacob
snidely observed.
“You’re right, Jacob,” Michael said. “It made him even more
pissed him off and paranoid than ever. Every voice mail he left for us, every
DM, every email…nothing but ‘snowflakes’, ‘sheeple’ and ‘libtards.’Whatever conspiracy-du-jour the underground rabble was still crapping out at the time -
the dumbest, sickest shit you can possibly imagine about Jewish global conspiracies,
cannibal pedophiles, 5G cell phone towers, monitoring chips, fucking lizard people - he’d regurgitate all of it
without question.”
Jacob winced as if stung and Michael collapsed back down in
his chair, seemingly drained after being forced to evoke all of this again.
“He was a smart, critically-thinking man once,” he mumbled.
“But, towards the end, the shit he was peddling made absolutely no sense. For
the love of God, if not for the vaccine, we probably wouldn’t all be here today.”
He fell silent, giving his wife an opportunity to pick up
the invisible conch.
“We thought all of those new media regulations would clean
things up and give him a chance to decompress. And, when that didn’t work, we
called the Department of Continuance to get him into the clarity seminars. We
hoped that would bring him around, but it just made him more angry and obstinate.”
Jason sheepishly glanced around the room. He looked as if
he’d been clubbed in the head with a piece of driftwood.
“You guys never told me it was that bad.”
“It was awful,” Michael resumed. “But the worst thing was
getting that call from the DOC. They flat out told me that he was too far gone
and they recommended quietus.”
Except for the faint sound of Socks the cat whispering
between the chair legs in search of dropped morsels, the room was suddenly very
silent.
“So that’s it then,” Emily hissed, lowering her voice
incrementally as if suddenly concerned that there might be monitoring devices
hidden in the green beans. “We just give up on people now.”
“It was the hardest decision we’ve ever had to make, Em,” Michael
responded without a moment’s pause. “We’d just suffered through four years of the
worst backslide this country has ever seen, in part, because of people just as
deluded and ill-informed as my father was. If forty percent of the population
flat-out refuse to accept reality, what can we do?”
“I dunno,” Emily said, sounding venomous. “Maybe help them?”
“They can’t, or won’t, be helped,” he replied. “There’s no
way we can progress if half the population is grossly misinformed, willfully
ignorant or flat-out regressive. If we have any hope whatsoever of moving
forward as a nation, people like that have to go.”
Jacob felt sweat beading on his top lip. He picked up his
napkin and dabbed at his face. He suddenly felt very sick and had to sit down.
“Uncle Jay?” he asked, introducing an inaugural sip of water
to his body for the first time today.
Jason looked away from an unfocused point somewhere
mid-table and perked up.
“You asked me what I wanted to major in,” the young man
said, scraping the increasingly-formless burgundy blob off the table and
slinging it onto his plate.
“Yes?” his uncle asked, leaning forward expectantly.
“I think I figured it out.”
An endless beat of silence.
“Do tell,” Samantha said, sounding impatient.
“I think I’m gonna go into law.”
This time it was his father’s turn to drop a fork.
In my mercifully-limited interactions with Trump supporters, I've discovered that they pretty much fall into one or more of the following categories:
(1) 401K Fetishists These folks have somehow got it into their heads that only business people are fit to run the world, despite the fact that a disproportionate number of them are complete and total sociopaths.
During those heady salad days (I.E. up until around mid-March of this year), Americans who could actually afford investments were perfectly content to turn a blind eye to Trump's worst attributes, merely because their $401K's were performing well. Which begs the question, why are some of these folks still supporting that clementine hobgoblin after COVID-19 eloquently pointed out the critical flaw in our society, which is based entirely around constant, unsustainable consumption?
I guess many of these $401K fetishists also share one (or more) of the following odious leanings...
(2) Objectivist Ayn Randian Assholes
Sadly, an entire generation of Conservatives / Republicans were weaned on the teaching of this inexplicably-influential Russian crone:
Even though her "screw everyone else, I'm lookin' out for number one!" philosophy is anathema to the development of a humane and progressive society, Conservatives and Republicans are 100% more likely to have a poster of ol' Baba Yaga here up on their wall versus Margot Robbie.
"What? Objectivism? A fancy-sounding philosophy that gives me the right to act like a self-absorbed dick-head? Wow, where do I sign up?"
I swear to Vishnu that the following story is true. I was in Salem on vacation one time, just hanging out in a busy shopping district....oh, wait, before I go any further I have to explain that this took place during THE BEFORE TIMES when we could BE OUTDOORS and STILL GATHER IN GROUPS OF TWO.
Anyhoo, a couple of people representing a recognizable social action group were stopping people and asking if they'd like to sign a petition to raise awareness for environmental concerns. At one point they stopped this douchey-looking, suit-and-tie, briefcase-toting mound of mobile hair gel and asked if he'd be willing to sign the petition.
Without a beat he held up his hand, marched right past them and announced: "Nope...I'm a Republican."
'You're not a Republican, I thought to myself. 'You're a galloping ass munch.'
Oh, related point: if you've spent your entire adult life railing against the "evils of socialism", I sincerely hope that your livelihood wasn't even incrementally impacted by this whole COVID-19 crap. Because if you accept so much as a dime of funding during this time, you may want to make your self-quarantine permanent.
(3) The Brainwashed
Even though we should, in theory, have access to more reliable information than ever before, many of us seem perfectly willing to customize our news, effectively crawling into an echo chamber, never to re-emerge into the light of reason and awareness ever again.
Back in the day, everyone got their news from the same established periodicals or nightly network broadcasts. Granted, there were still discernible political leanings between, say, Time or Newsweek magazine, but they weren't driven by a blatant corporate agenda or mandated to churn out bloated, 800 page issues every month filled speculative (read: wing-nutty) editorials.
For those out there who still remember COMMUNAL SPACES and CHATS AROUND THE WATER COOLER, folks would often gather together the following morning to discus the previous day's events. The thing is, back then, everyone was vaguely on the same page because they were still being informed by fact-based journalism.
But then, along comes Bill "Good Ole' Boy" Clinton, who deregulates media ownership with the disastrous Telecommunications Act of 1996. This essentially let corporations snatch up hundreds of independent media outlets until, nowadays, everything in the U.S. looks like this.
Given this new climate of corporate over-watch, media has since become little more than a soap-box for rich owners and their agendas. And, look, this isn't limited to conservative news outlets. It's a serious symptom for any 24-hour cable news channel.
I don't know about you, but every time I click on a CNN or MSNBC YouTube vid, I'll watch it up until they stop reporting the details of the event. Then, as soon as they roll out a panel of so-called "experts" in to "interpret" what they just told me, I click it off. Back in the 80's, there was no "interpretation" of the days events. You were told the facts and you made up your own damned mind about it.
But, hey, at least CNN and MSNBC still qualify as a news organization, as opposed to Fox "News", which is little more than a constant conveyor belt of conspiratorial opinion pieces mouthed by an interchangeable parade of creepy thimbots masquerading as journalists...
It's really interesting to see what happens when intrinsically good people, who have be exclusively marinating in Faux News, Rush Limblaugh and *heaven forbid* Info Wars, suddenly get disconnected from the teat of fear, paranoia and hatred.
At least this story has a happy ending:
(4) "Look, I'm Not Racist, BUT..."
Back in the day, before such things were normalized, the only place where people could openly yell racist shit in public were at wrestling events. I imagine Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, AKA The Iron Sheik, had some charming l'il homilies yelled at him by rednecks many a time while he was a heel for the WWF.
But, hey, now looky here! We got ourselves a prezident with zero control over the darkest aspects of the human ID. Finally, them pesky filters and bulwarks of common decency are gone and I can finally speak the truth! Sure my investments are in the dumper and 10% of the U.S. population might die due to Trump's idiocy, but I can still feel good about myself by publicly airing my hatred for brown people!
(4) Art of the Deal...With The Devil Hey, guess what, guys? Trump's actually a Democrat at heart!
And, granted, when he was elected, he did go on to become one of the biggest "right to life" champions. And for this, his feckless base LOVE him for it, with former director of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, going so far as to say that Trump "masterfully capitalized on his pro-life position in a way I think no one could have envisioned four years ago" and that "voters who are pro-life love Donald Trump and they will crawl across broken glass to get him reelected."
What really amuses me is how Evangelicals, I.E. all of those "holier than thou" types, are willing to turn a blind eye to the fact that Trump is one of the most corrupt and immoral creeps to ever hold the office of President.
And for folks who value the wisdom of the Bible, there sure like to ignore this particular chestnut:
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God".
***
So, there you go. How many categories do you fit into? One? Two? Do you proudly check off every box?
Speaking as someone who was raised with a conscience, functioning ears and eyes and a memory that extends more than five years, I disqualified Trump as a presidential candidate / human being back in the 80's when I first heard him vomit the most narcissistic, inane shit to tumble out of a mammal's mouth. I consider myself a good judge of character and my first impression of Trump was of an ego-maniacal, Gordon Gecko-style blowhard corporatist who wears ignorance, excess and greed on his sleeve like a badge of honor.
Seriously, America, consider picking someone from a different sector to lead you next time. Assuming there will be a next time. A scientist, maybe? OooOoo...how about a virologist?
EPIC: "This is your brain."
If people had just paid a modicum of attention to Trump's pre-presidency exploits, I'm confident that he would have been immediately disqualified as a valid presidential candidate.
FAIL: "This is your brain on Faux News, Rush Limblaugh and Infant Wars."
It's SHOCKtober, kiddies, I.E. that time of FEAR when I regale you with yet another tale of how a classic horror movie scared the ever-lovin' shingles outta me as a young, aspiring horror hound!
Before the internet, the best way to learn about scary movies was via my aforementioned and much-loved horror movie books, such as Tom Hutchinson's Horrors: A History of Horror Movies, released in 1983.
Like a masochist, I'd flip through these hoary hardcover tomes, auditioning potential the next fright flicks to traumatize myself with. During every peruse, I couldn't help but gravitate towards the following off-putting image, which was from a film that had been released one year prior:
'Jesus shitly fuck,' I thought to myself. 'That is pure nightmare fuel!'
This was driven home by a macro view of the same scene on page 162:
My half-baked brain had a really hard time reconciling what it was looking at. My dread level was elevated when I read Tom's pearl-clutching description of the flick:
"The movie...offers enormous opportunities to the make-up and special-effects department, and Rob Bottin certainly makes the most of them, turning a dog into a hideous spider-like beast and causing a man to lose his head and burst apart at the seams. Yet for all its technical brilliance (the film) teeters dangerously on the edge of what is acceptable in horror films. It’s box office results were disappointing, perhaps because word-of-mouth indicated that the film was not just horrific, it was too grizzly and unpleasant to be viewed comfortably. No horror film should be viewed comfortably, of course. Audiences should always be kept on the edge of their seats or even halfway under them. But they should not be made to feel so uncomfortable that they feel sick and ill. It’s a debatable point but the lack of (the film's) financial success suggest there is some validity to the argument."
Even though I'd managed to make it through some pretty stomach-churning fare in the past, the very thought of watching this flick made my blood pressure spike. Indeed, the critics in these horror books seemed convinced that this movie was the absolute nadir when it came to good taste and restraint.
Here's Nigel Andrew's equally-excitable review:
"Mutilations and mutations occupy about equal screen time, as a group of Arctic scientists are picturesquely torn apart by alien forces. A decapitated head sprouts spider legs and scuttles across the floor; a dog's head spontaneously burst open like a bloody flower; and the climax features...a towering, roaring, slavering bouquet of limbs and innards and organs all lashing around like an escaped Hieronymus Bosch painting."
The funny thing is, I actually understood the Hieronymus Bosch reference because of this other horror book I owned back then...
Featured on page 15 was the artist's classic triptych: The Garden of Early Delights, including the following harrowing depictions of hell:
I didn't know it at the time, but ol' Nigel's analogy would prove to be spot on.
So, one fateful winter night, when I knew the 'rents would be away for the entire evening, I ran down to my local vidja store, the Video Scream, er...Screen, and picked me up a copy of...
THE THING (1982)
The movie starts our with a stereotypical "flying saucer"-style UFO hurtling towards our planet. This immediately triggered the thought that 'Hey, this flick isn't scary...it's space-y! It's like Star Wars!' but then I remembered the last time I assumed that, the movie turned out to be Alien, so I quickly jettisoned that hope like a xenomorph out of an airlock.
Segue to a bad-ass title sequence which saw "THE THING" slowly burning into my cathode ray tube T.V. screen and, subsequently, my increasingly-skittish brain.
After several picturesque but desolate establishing shots, I watched with budding interest (and discomfort) as the speck of a distant helicopter drew closer, winging it way across the stark, white, frozen, landscape. Eventually its quarry was revealed: a dog or, more specifically, an Alaskan malamute lithely running away from the whirlybird.
That's when the helicopter's passenger whipped out a semi-automatic rifle and start sniping away at the doggo. Rewatching the movie now, I can't but help to wonder if Sarah Palin was affected by this film as a child even more than I was.
Even at a very young age, I could recognize quality film-making when I saw it, noting director John Carpenter's awesome camera set-ups in this sequence. This was aided considerably by the legendary cinematography of Carpenter's long-time collaborator, Dean Cundey, resulting in one of the best- looking horror films in cinema history. Hell, even the slimy bits that followed later on looked good, in their own weird way.
As the dog and the pursuing chopper started to approach a remote-looking research station, I got a brief montage introducing us to the film's characters, including the legendary Kurt Russell as R.J. MacReady. Resplendent in his Snake Plissken-era long hair and prospector beard, Russell once again proves that he's a god among men within a few seconds of screen time. That is, until he loses his computer chess game and sulkily hucks what's left of his drink into its electronic innards, shorting out the "cheatin' bitch" in the process.
And, yes, back in the early 80's it was perfectly feasible to invest a ludicrous amount of money into a computer that did nothing but play chess with you. What can I say, back then we were all hidin' in caves and shit, terrified of the sun. Anyhoo, I digress...
I remember watching intently as the dog, arguably the best actor in the entire movie, entered the perimeter of the camp. By the way, I was already completely invested in the film by that point. Likely because the exteriors for this fictional setting of U.S. Outpost 31 in Antarctica, was actually a real set built on location in remote Stewart, British Columbia. Nowadays, most of this would be shot on a sound stage or with the actors standing in front of a green screen with a CGI snowbank comped into the background.
When MacReady blearily emerges from his watch post and stumbles out into this very real environment, I’m 100% sold on the illusion. This is really driven home when the cast gear up in their snowsuits and venture outside, curious as to what all the ruckus is all about. You can see their breath in the cold air, which modern special effects artists would just simulate with CGI. To this day, "simple" effects like CGI cold breath sticks out to me like a sore thumb.
The helicopter's frantic passenger jumps out and hurls a grenade at the dog about as well as Trump would theoretically throw a baseball. After promptly blowing both himself and the chopper up right some good, the pilot stalked up to the camp's perimeter, guns blazing, clearly hell-bent on killing the mutt.
Just before he can "Old Yeller" the poor pooch, Garry, the base commander, played by Donald Moffat, smashes out a window with his revolver and ventilates the babbling Nordic freak. Even this scene really disturbed me as a kid. I was used to seeing people flying back in an exaggerated way when they got shot in movies, but here, when the actor got tagged in the head, he just kinda face-planted into the snow as if the life was instantly sucked out of him. This rag-doll doll effect, accompanied by a final death spams, seemed subconsciously realistic to me.
That's when I was introduced to a flurry of characters, including physician Copper (Richard Dysart), chief mechanic Childs (Keith David), geologist Norris (Charles Hallahan), radio operator Windows (Thomas Waites), senior biologist Blair (Wilford Brimley), roller-skating cook Nauls (T.K. Carter), sardonic burn-out / assistant mechanic Palmer (David Clennon), assistant biologist Fuchs (Joel Polis), Clark the dog-handler (Richard Masur) and meteorologist / random casualty Bennings, played by Peter Maloney. Immediately, everyone seemed well-cast and inhabited their respective roles perfectly.
As MacReady and Copper wing off in the chopper to investigate the Norwegian base, Carpenter turns out attention back to the base. Accompanied by the eerily-appropriate strains of Stevie Wonder's "Superstitious", we see this foreign dog creeping around the base. Again, I'm an animal lover, particularly dogs. I've been around them all my life and I know when they're giving an unnatural performance. So, to you, Jed the wolf dog, I wanna say cheers, my dude. Good job creeping me right the fux out.
At one point, the dog slinks into a room and we see a silhouette turn towards the animal. Although you could probably parse out the identity of this person now by process of elimination back then I had no idea who that was. In fact, I'm pretty sure Carpenter pulled a fast one and used some random person's silhouette who isn't even in the cast. At this point, I started to pick up on all the subtle techniques that Carpenter was using here, including the frequent use of dissolves.
I feel myself shifting uncomfortably on the couch as MacReady and Copper arrived at the destroyed Norwegian base. Here's another example of the film's seamless production design. The place is a creepy, burned-out husk that clearly shows signs of a desperate struggle. Between the bloody ax driven into the wall and the incredibly gruesome sight of a dead body with it's wrists slit open and a Pac-Man like straight razor wound to the neck, Carpenter and company build an atmosphere that is truly unsettling.
I almost shut of the movie at that point, but I steeled myself and pushed on. Unfortunately the creep factor went through the stratosphere when Copper and MacReady came across a giant block of ice with a massive humanoid shape cut out of the middle of it. What was even more disturbing was the body dumped outside, a strange and twisted blend of charred limbs and melted faces. I almost had a conniption when the Doc suggested that they wrap the monstrosity up and take it back to the base for an autopsy.
"What are you guys doing?!" I muttered audibly to myself. "Does that Mr. Potato Head floral arraignment of half-melted body parts look even remotely normal to you two fucks?"
Oddly, they didn't seem to hear me. After they got this mangled stew of flesh back to the base, I was "treated" to a nauseating series of nigh-pornographic close-up autopsy shots, showing this weird, twisted, mishmash of human remains close up. The puzzled look of revulsion on the actor's faces pretty much mirrored my own at that point.
Even though Blair's autopsy leads him to conclude that the monstrosity has a completely normal set of internal organs, when the camera pans up to revel a warped and twisted face, we clearly know that something's rotten in the state of Norway. Later on, THE CREEPIEST HOBO scares the crap out of Bennings, so he orders Clark to put the animal in the kennel
The scene where the mystery dog is penned up with the other animals is absolutely amazing. I know I keep harping on this, but I really think this good boi deserves a posthumous Academy Award. He slooooowly walks in and methodically lays down, all the while doing this insane Willem Dafoe in Platoon 1000-yard stare, which understandably unnerves the rest of the pack.
As soon as Clark is out of sight, we see why the dogs are getting so spooked. I sat there in stunned wonderment as the Norwegian dog started to shake and then his head suddenly split open like a gory flower. I gaped, slack-jawed at the screen as the revealed skull just kinda fell off, revealing a massive lashing tongue.
At first I was just too flabbergasted to hit "STOP" on the VCR remote. Particularly when the dog's once-beautiful fur broke out into a rash of flailing calamari. I sat there, transfixed as this beautiful animal transformed before my very eyes into a Lovecraftian nightmare monster.
The other dogs, who could sense that shit was about to get very real as soon as their spooky new flat-mate moved in, are now desperately trying to get as far away as possible, even chewing on the wire mesh of the cage door. At this stage, limbs and tentacles are just lashing and splattering all over the cage. In a particularly sickening scene, the creature appears to power-jizz all over one of the crouching dogs.
And that's when I shut the movie off for a second, partially due to terror and partially due to nausea.
'Who the fuck decided that it was a good idea to give Carpenter a budget?' I thought to myself.
After pressing "PLAY" on the remote, I instinctively recoiled, expecting to see something even worse. Instead I watched as Clark headed back to the pen, clearly alarmed by all the ruckus. As soon as he opened the cage door to investigate, a dog came flying at him from out of nowhere. After spotting the writhing mass of rampant tentacles, he immediately kicks the door shut and locks it.
Even half-drunk in his quarters, MacReady can hear the growling and unearthly screams. He sounds the base alarm and dashes off to help. When he reaches the cage, Clark's testimony pretty much sums up the entire situation:
"I dunno what the hell's in there, but it's weird and pissed off, whatever it is."
We then see Bennings burst into Child's room, asking for the flamethrower. When a character in a horror movie invokes the "kill it with fire" clause, you know the shit is hitting the fan!
The next time I chanced a glimpse inside the cage, it was through a mesh of interlocked fingers. And, *spoiler alert*, the scene was predictably awful. By now, the creature has done due diligence in its effort to imitate and absorb this entire pack of dogs. The beast unleashes a hellish, ear-piercing scream as MacReady whips the gate open.
Both of us watched in astounded horror as the thing lashed out at one of the remaining dogs, practically mummifying the poor thing in a yarn-like ball of pulpy tentacles. I feel myself living vicariously through Mac as he snaps, blowing away the remaining dogs in what any rational man would see as a mercy kill.
Unfortunately, Clark isn't rational and he tries to wrestle the weapon away from Mac. This gives the creature an opportunity to morph again, sprouting a pair of grotesque, oversized limbs which reach up, crash through the roof and start pulling the bloody, skinned carcass towards the ceiling. That's when Childs finally had the presence of mind to step up with the flamethrower.
Unfortunately, he immediately found himself in a staring contest with a one-eyed horror show that unexpectedly split open and shot a tongue-and-tooth-covered rose petal of pure nightmare fuel in his direction. At the very last second, in an act of pure self-preservation, he finally triggered the flamethrower, instantly cremating the inexplicable threat.
I'm not sure what caused me to stop the film for a second time at this point. Was an assault by a monster who's penchant to terrify wasn't restrained by a set physical form? The genuine terror displayed by the cast? Or was it the creature's final death scream, a triumph of sound design that lingers in my nightmares to this very day? Whatever it was, it took awhile for me to voluntarily wade back into this visual abattoir.
Comes the dawn, and I immediately get another justification for skipping the popcorn. Wilford Brimley looks decidedly nauseated here as he hacks open the nightmarish amalgam of surreal flesh left over from the previous sequence. The scene fades out on his authentically-disgusted facial expression, the fade-out hinting at the time it took for both his and our brain to process what we've just witnessed. In the very next scene he’s regaling his buds with his theory about the creature:
"You see, what we're talkin' about here is an organism that imitates other life-forms, and it imitates 'em perfectly. When this thing attacked our dogs, it tried to digest them...absorb them. And, in the process, shape its own cells to imitate them. This for instance. That's not dog. It's imitation. We got to it before it had time to finish."
This gives considerable weight to the following scene where he's administering a sedative to one of the surviving malamutes, all the while grilling Clark about his time with the alien doggo. Clark reacts defensively and it's almost as if Blair sees the writing on the wall right then and there. The paranoia has begun and, in a very real way, it's already game over.
The team reviews video footage brought back from the destroyed camp. Even though my stomach was beginning to settle at that point, the grainy images immediately made my skin crawl. With the video seemingly documenting that the Norwegians discovered a massive humanoid shape buried in the ice, MacReady, Norris and Palmer head off in the chopper to check it out.
Soon the trio find themselves standing at the site of a massive downed spacecraft, the same one we saw hurtling towards earth before the credits. This chilling scene is augmented by a stellar matte paining by the legendary artist Albert Whitlock as well as some truly eerie music by the equally amazing Ennio Morricone. It's a one-two punch to the nerves that had me dreading the implications of what's to come.
After MacReady reports his findings back at the base and Nauls scolds his team-mates for putting their "dirty drawers" in the kitchen garbage ("Hey, kids...it's a CLUE!"), we fade see Blair in his lab. In a gloriously-dated ode to Atari-era video game graphics, we see the doc run a "simulation" of an intruder cell attacking and copying a dog cell. Notwithstanding my suspicion that Blair is holding out on Mac and playing some unconventional mod of Asteroids, Wilford Brimley is absolutely riveting in this scene.
His computer then spells out something that I suspect he already knows: that there’s a 75% chance that one of the team members has already been infected. Worse still, we're told that, the entire world population will be infected within 27,000 hours of first contact if even so much as a single intruder organism reaches a civilized areas. After reading this, Blair calmly opens his desk drawer and takes out a revolver, clearly resolved to do take some extreme, but likely necessary, action.
Continuing my subconscious goal of gnawing my fingernails down to the quick, I watched as Bennings and Windows moved the remains of the morphed dogs into a store room.
"Talk about drawing the short straw!" I muttered to myself. "I wouldn’t touch those fucking things with a 10-foot pole!"
The paranoia, exhaustion, and tension continues to build among the men, as Fuchs corners MacReady and whispers a request for a private meeting. Clearly Windows and Bennings pick up on this, giving the two some stink-eye.
Windows can't resist taking one last peek at the twisted face under the sheet. As he covers it back up and turns away, the blanketed form starts shifting around in place. Then, as if that wasn't scary enough, Carpenter gives us a low angle and we see a narsty fountain of goo running off the table and onto the floor. Of course, that's when Windows says "sionara!", leaving Bennings to the niceties of what I could only imagine was a nicely-congealing, ten foot tall slime monster.
During their secret tete-a-tete, Fuchs tells a clearly-bored MacReady that Blair is concealing information from them and then drops the bombshell that the organic samples aren’t technically dead. Wheeee!!! That's when we cut back to Windows checking in on Bennings who, *surprise! surprise!* is nowhere to be seen. After finding a pile of bloody, ripped clothing, not unlike what Nauls found earlier, Windows gets a glimpse of something distinctly repellent in the corner.
Seeing that half-naked, blood-and-slime-covered, hentai perversion of Bennings immediately sent chills down my spine. But I didn't have time to dwell on it, as Windows wisely ran out to Mac and Fuchs and the three of them rushed back into the room. Naturally, the Benningsthing has already skedaddled, and, for a moment, I thought that Carpenter was gonna pull a classic Scooby Doo moment.
"Suuuure, you saw Bennings turning into the thing, Windows! I think you need to lay off on whatever Palmer's been selling to you, brotha!"
Fortunately we're spared this cliche when they spot Bennings run-staggering away from the storehouse. They give chase and pretty soon, everyone on the base has surrounded their irrevocably-altered colleague. By now the creature has turned itself into a near-perfect duplicate of Bennings, save for the hands, which are these surreal, elongated, skeletal and skinless mockeries.
In a haunting moment that recalls the finale of 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the creature balefully looks at his former friends and makes a noise that I immediately add to my audio book of nightmare fuel. When confronted with this hellish aberration, MacReady does what every self-respecting man would do: kick over a fuel drum and then light the fucker on fire.
My gleeful chant of "Yeah! Burn, bitch, burn!" was tempered somewhat by the next scene where a clearly-traumatized Garry tells Mac: "I know Bennings! I've known him for ten years. He's my friend!" Donald Moffat's performance here is heart-breaking, embodying a wide range of fear and helplessness. This is made all the more tragic by MacReady's cold retort: "We gotta burn the rest of him."
In a moment that even my teen-aged brain recognized as a classic example of "too little, too late", I watched as Mac and company gathered up and torched all of the bio-samples and then plowed them over. As the last one to leave the scene, Mac catches a glimpse of someone leaving the helicopter, which is parked in the distance. When he investigates, he discovers that the chopper's instrumentation panel has been turned into a mechanical version of what The Thing does to a human body.
I didn't have long to ponder The Mystery of the Disemboweled Chopper for very long. A gunshot rang out, signalling the start of THE GREAT WILFORD BRIMLEY FREAK OUT SCENE. To all those Millennials out there who think that Wilfred Brimley is nothing more than a "diabeatus" meme, just watch this glorious sequence and tell me that he doesn't serve up some of the juiciest line deliveries in cinema history. In my opinion, this is one of the actor's career highlights.
When Mac arrives at the communication room, it's pure bedlam. A dazed Windows is cowering in the corner, bleeding from a nasty head wound. Blair has gone completely apeshit, "axe"-ing every sensitive piece of equipment in the room a question. All the while he's delivering lines like "It wanted to be US!" and "I’LL KILL EWE!!!" like an octogenarian prospector strung out on bath salts. His rage, fear and conviction are all 100% real to me.
After Mac's famous "card table gambit", they overcome Blair and lock him up in the tool shed. Even slightly concussed and borderline nuts, Brimley wasn't done dropping some science on me yet. When Blair tells Mac that he "doesn't know who to trust anymore", Kurt Russell replies "I know what you mean, Blair" in such a weird, stilted tone. This line delivery was so odd that I seriously though that Mac was a "thing." It's as if deliberately trying to antagonize Blair, patronize him or make him even more paranoid.
Regardless, before Mac leaves the shelter, Blair tells him to "watch Clark and watch him close, you hear me?" Even back then I didn't give much credence to this warning since, in the prior scene, Clark is shown mourning the remaining dogs that Blair has deliberately put down and that didn't feel very "thing"-esque to me.
Just as rattled as the characters were at this stage, I watched as Gary, Copper, Childs, Fuchs and Mac had an impromptu strategy session out in the snow. After Copper proposed a blood test, this immediately led to another horrifying discovery: the untainted whole blood storage unit has been opened and destroyed.
Naturally, this ramped the ol' "Mistrust-O-Meter" up to "11", and pretty soon the accusations are flying like spitballs. Since Copper is the only one with access to the fridge and Garry has the only key, the spotlight is immediately on them. They don't do a very good job defending themselves, with Garry looking decidedly twitchy and sweaty and Richard Dysart's Copper offering up one of the most idiosyncratic line deliveries along with the kind of look that the Dramatic Gopher would consider overblown.
Just as they're about to come to blows, someone notices that Windows has dashed off. They catch up to him just as he smashed open a rifle cabinet. Garry shows up first, pointing his revolver right at the radio operator's head. Mercifully, Mac arrives on the scene and talks them down. At this stage, Garry's nerves are clearly about as shot as mine, so he resigns as the base commander so Mac takes charge, under a withering storm of suspicious looks and silent protests.
After burning the blood samples, MacReady gives one of his best soliloquies:
"I know I'm human. And if you were all these things, then you'd just attack me right now, so some of you are still human. This thing doesn't want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It'll fight if it has to, but it's vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it's won."
After isolating prime suspects Copper, Garry and Clark he orders Norris and Childs to tie them up in the rec room, shoot them up with morphine and watch them like a hawk. Kurt Russell then delivers an amazing solo performance, basically doing what amounts to a "captain's log" entry into a tape recorder. The level of exhaustion, weariness and resignation in his voice is just palpable. If there was any doubt that Mac wasn't our avatar in the film, it's dispensed with in this one scene.
At this point, the power inexplicably goes out, giving Carpenter another opportunity to show why he's a master of suspense. We see Fuchs in his lab light a candle and investigate a strange noise. As he creeps through the darkness, a dark figure suddenly whips past the foreground, accompanied by a jolting musical sting. Watching this for the first time as a kid, I nearly hit the roof. Normally, I hate jump scares but, when they're earned, they can be pretty awesome.
Fuchs follows the mysterious figure outdoors and stumbles across a fire pit which contains MacReady’s torn and charred overalls. With that, my disorientation got kicked up another notch. I think that's why the movie is so effective and continues to be potent to this very day. Screenwriter Bill Lancaster, son of the famous actor Burt Lancaster, doesn't bother to fill in every blank. When things start falling apart, he plants plenty red herrings and false leads to throw the viewer off-kilter.
Before Nauls can share this interesting piece of trivia with the group, we see that Mac's simplest orders are getting blow-back. When he tells Palmer and Windows to team up to search for Fuchs, the mechanic will have nothing of it, leading to a nasty confrontation which Mac is forced to de-escalate.
With a nasty storm bearing down on the camp, MacReady leads a group out to the tool shed to check on Blair. Once again, Dean Cundey lights this night-time scene perfectly and the use of color tones is extraordinary. In a lesser film, this whole sequence could have been a murky mess, but here it not only pops, it makes the viewer feel palpably chilled.
The visit to Blair is another surreal moment. Mac ask the scientist if he’s seen Fuchs but the Doc ignores the question, saying "l'm not gonna harm anybody and there's nothing wrong with me.
And if there was, l'm all better now. l'd like to come back inside.You got my promise."
When I was watching this for the first time, my young, over-clocked brain was thinking 'Um, okay, he sounds pretty sincere, but there's just something not right here.' The next time I watched the film I finally noticed THE FUCKING NOOSE HANGING IN THE FOREGROUND. Yeah, that kinda undercuts your "I'm all better now" claim there, Blair, ol' boy. I dunno, maybe he had it there as a precaution, just in case something slimy came to the door, looking for donations on a cellular level.
On the way back from the tool shed, Nauls spots a charred body just lying in the middle of the camp. They rush over and find the remains of Fuchs, his glasses still sitting next to the impromptu crematorium.
"Maybe he burned himself, before it could get to him!" MacReady speculates.
Ultimately, the circumstances surrounding the scientists's fate is undetermined. By all accounts, Fuchs had a lot more to do in earlier drafts of the screenplay, so I'm not sure if his role was truncated just for the sake of time. Whatever the reason, it feels like yet another deliberately planted mystery designed to further disorient and obfuscate the viewer. Speaking off, on the way back inside, MacReady notices that the lights in a shack are inexplicably back on so he leads Nauls up there while Windows heads back to report their findings to the group.
After another fade out and in, we're told that 45 minutes have clocked by with Mac and Nauls failing to return. With the weather getting worse by the second, Childs gives the order to start boarding up the outside doors. From his vantage point, Norris looks out the window and spots someone stumbling back towards the door. He also exhibits clear signs of a bum ticker, which, in my mind, instantly exonerated him from B.E.M. (bug-eyed monster) status.
Under protest, Palmer lets the prodigal son back in and its revealed to be Nauls. Breathlessly, the cook reveals that he found MacReady's torn-up jumpsuit up by his cabin, so he decided to "cut him loose" from their mutual tether and hoof it back to the base. That's when John Carpenter's camera zoomed in on a nearby door handle as it twists and turns, revealing that something wants in real bad. At the time, it also caused my teenaged heart to seize up in my chest.
Childs is adamant about keeping the door sealed but the debate is cut short when the sound of shattering glass can be heard coming from the store-room. The chief mechanic runs over and starts hacking the door down with an ax, intent on murdering the intruder. As soon as the door is breached, Childs stops in his tracks, as a ghostly-looking, frost-bitten MacReady is shown holding a stick of dynamite next to the idling spout of his flame thrower.
Nauls and Norris try to sneak up behind Mac and tackle him, but he fights them off. Norris falls back into a shelf and actor Charles Hallahan exhibits some pretty convincing symptoms of a legitimate heart attack, which I found disturbing in its own right.
While MacReady holds his accusers at bay, Copper tries to revive the ailing Norris using a defibrillator. Dysart has another great moment here, uttering a subtle little whimper when his first attempt to revive Norris fails. Seconds later we find out why the geologist wasn't responding normally, leading to one of the best set-pieces in the entire film.
As Copper comes down with the paddles for a second time, Norris's chest pops open like a bear trap. I distinctly remember watching this as a kid and physically recoiling away from the screen. Well, as you might expect, this impromptu, shark-like maw clamps down on Copper's forearms, biting them clean off.
The sequence is sold perfectly by a combination of Dysart's bloodcurdling scream and a tricksy illusion designed by special effects whiz kid Rob Bottin. Bottin brought in an actor with missing limbs, gave him fake forearms, and triggered the creatures "jaws" to chomp 'em clean off. As if that wasn't convincing enough, he made cast out of Dysart's face, crafted a lookalike mask and then put it on the amputee for the long shots!
Viewing this for the first time, I had no clue how it was done. I just knew that it looked 100% real. This prompted another pause in the film and the sort of silent affirmation that only an aspiring gore hound would say.
'Awrite, suck it up,' I said to myself. 'It's not real. Remember Dawn of the Dead? That was gory and you made it through. Get back in there, buttercup!'
As I pressed "PLAY" on the VCR remote, I'd soon be forced to realize that Carpenter wasn't gonna let me off the hook quite so easily.
Watching through partially-obscured vision, I saw the now-limbless Copper fall back from his "patient" who's chest cavity promptly exploded in an Old Faithful-style geyser of writhing tentacles and splattering gore. I sat there, dumbfounded, as the same ghastly image in my horror book manifested itself right before my unblinking eyes. Have you ever gone to one of those spook houses or haunted corn mazes and just frozen up like a deer in headlights when something truly terrifying pops up from outta nowhere? Yeah, that was me watching this scene. I was literally too traumatized to look away.
I audibly exclaimed "OH THANK JESUS!" when MacReady torched the slimy McNasty with a gout of fire from his flamethrower. We then cut away to a (way too) close-up on the operating table to see "Norris" twisting and writhing as he burns to death. But that's when something ten times worse started to happen. His head, his fucking HEAD, started to twist back and forth and shimmy across the table. The neck, now stretched to the breaking point, began to split off the body and rupture, revealing a nasty, green-and yellow, fibrous tangle of goop-filled veins inside.
When I watch the scene now, I'm amused by how close actor Kurt Russell is is holding the prop dynamite to the burning tip of the flamethrower. But back then felt like the narrator in an H.P. Lovecraft story, feeling my sanity ebb away a little bit as Norris's decapitated head gently touched down onto the floor via its gory bungee cord.
Then an impossibly-long tongue suddenly lashed out of the mouth, attaching itself to a nearby desk.
The head then used this impromptu tether to drag itself to safety, making a really creepy, otherworldly sound all the while. As the others rushed in to extinguish the blaze, I watched the rogue noggin' sprout six spider-like legs and two antennae-style eye stalks, peek out from underneath the desk and then skitter away like a giant cockroach. That's when I actually started chuckling to myself like a certifiable madman.
Carpenter must have suspected that this scene was so extreme that laughter would be the only defense against it. Moments later, MacReady and company slow turn around to see the spider-head gamely trying to make a break for it, prompting Palmer to utter the deathless line: "You gotta be fucking kidding me!" Thankfully, Mac roasts the abomination before it can make good its escape.
After witnessing this autonomy of body parts displayed in the previous scene, Mac comes to the realization that every single cell in the creature is its own individual organism. This inspires his theory that any tissue, even blood, will instinctively recoil away from harm if its threatened.
He starts barking orders at Clark, giving Richard Nasser a chance to deliver some truly patronizing line deliveries. Across the room. Keith David's Childs is cold as ice, practically daring Mac to kill him. He only backs down when Mac cocks the revolver and aims it point blank at his face. Clark then takes this moment of distraction to rush at Mac with a scalpel, but the chopper pilot whirls around and shoots his assailant right in the forehead.
Side note: since I'd only seen my first movie head shot at age 12 in Raiders of the Lost Ark, I was still pretty squeamish when it came to cinematic violence. So, as you can imagine, my inaugural viewing of The Thing was like the horror movie equivalent of taking someone who can't swim up in a helicopter, flying over the middle of a lake and then pushing them out the door.
Taking no chances, Mac ordered Palmer to lash Clark and Copper's bodies to the table and then got Windows to tie everyone else down. He then collected a blood sample from everyone, scraped the plastic coating off some copper wire, and then heated this up in the barrel of the flamethrower.
Thanks to John Carpenter's crackerjack direction and excellent editing by Todd Ramsay, what follows is one of the most tense and nail-biting sequences in cinema history. As Mac prepares his ad hoc test, we have no sweet clue who’s human and who’s a thing, even the characters themselves. Witness palpable look of relief on Thomas Waites's face when Mac dips the hot wire into his blood sample without any effect.
Carpenter then proceeds to serve up one tense "PSYCHE!" after another, to the point where even I started to doubt our protagonist's sanity.
"This is a crock of shit," Childs mutters, mirroring my own thoughts.
Just before the innocent Clark and Copper are are both cleared, Garry echoes the sentiment of Childs, declaring that "This is pure nonsense. lt doesn't prove a thing!" to which Mac retorts: "l thought you'd
feel that way, Garry. You were the only one that could have gotten to that blood. We'll do you last."
Just as Mac dips the hot wire into Palmer's blood sample, the contents of the dish suddenly lurches up, making an audible screech, not the xenomorph's scream in Alien. Stunned, Mac reflexively drops the sample and backs away. After the blood spatters to the floor it seems to rally, oozing away like a mini version of The Blob whacked out on Jolt cola.
The next few scenes hit me like multiple blows to the head with a railroad tie. Carpenter gives us a master shot of Palmer convulsing, his face expressionless and dead-eyed. Before he's replaced on screen by a Rob Bottin nightmare creature, David Clennon gives a chillingly-effective performance that literally had me wincing at the screen. Especially when Nauls, Garry and Childs, tied up next to Palmer, start screaming for their lives and desperately rail against their bonds. Idly, I couldn't help but think back to the poor dogs in the first transformation scene.
The following sequence is both a cinematic ballet of absolute chaos and a surreal blending of alien and human flesh. Via some powerhouse editing, Palmer starts to morph into another one of Rob Bottin's monstrosities, turning into a bloody, hyperactive scarecrow of amorphous flesh and flailing, overextended fingers. At one point, Palmer's distended skull splits open, a tongue lashes out, grabs poor hapless Windows by the throat and then pulls his head into its own trap-jaw noggin.
Carpenter then makes a strange choice, opting to shoot just the feet of the two men standing uncomfortably close to one another as their bodies start to meld into one. This was disturbing enough as some sort of psycho-sexual nightmare. With the Palmer-thing now merging with Windows at the hands and head, the radio operator's body starts flinging around the room like a ragdoll. All the while there’s blood and gore raining down all over the room, to the point where the greatest danger to the Palmer-thing is a nasty slip n' fall accident.
Eventually what's left of Windows flings off across the room and strikes a wall. Mac finally gets his flamethrower operational and torches the Palmer-thing. As it's incinerated, the creature makes a truly dreadful wailing sound, it's fractured, fang-filled head opening and closing like a giant Venus flytrap. Desperate to escape, the walking nightmare bursts through the wall and tries flee into the darkness. Mac pursues it doggedly, finally using his dynamite to blows it to smithereens.
Apparently this all left Mac just as stunned as I was, because it took him several beats to register the screams for help coming from within. He goes back inside and flames Windows, who's already starting to turn from his contact with Palmer. The brief moment of peace that followed was immediately shattered when both Nauls and then Childs start freaking out because they're still tied up with Garry, whom they're convinced is a thing. But, in a plot twist, the former base commander turns out is human as well, giving him an opportunity to deliver one of the best lines in the movie:
"I know you gentlemen I’ve been through a lot but when you find the time I’d rather not spend the rest of this winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!!!"
When we fade back in, we see Childs staring at the window. Mac appears and tells him that they're going out to give Blair the test, adding: "if he tries to make it back and we're not with him, burn him." Well, to no-one's surprise, the tool shed's door has been opened from the outside and the famous oatmeal salesman is no-where to be seen.
Mac, Garry and Nauls discover that Blair has pulled up the floorboards and tunneled underneath the shed. In this movie about a shape-shifting alien creature, it's the only moment that stretches credibility and had me snorting in disbelief. Look, I can buy the fact that he dug a tunnel, especially if he's a "thing" now, but where the hell did he put all of that excess ice and snow?
The perfectly-sculpted, Hoth / Echo-base style ice corridor leads to which appears to be a makeshift workshop. Even as a kid, this scene was so patently unbelievable that I really couldn't wrap my brain around it. Clearly this scene is trying to tell us that the Blairthing has been stealing equipment parts from all over the camp to craft a miniature version of his flying saucer, but it comes across as pretty ludicrous. When did he get the time to do all of this?!?
Say what you want about this unlikely plot development, but you can't slight the bravura film-making that follows. Carpenter follows this up with a moody series of establishing shots, accompanied by the director's very own heartbeat-like electronic score. The camera slinks around the base, as if doing an impression of something that traumatized us in a previous scene. It really amps up the viewer's feelings of cold, desolate isolation.
While coming back from Blair's flipped tool shed, Nauls spots a figure what he thinks was Childs leaving the base, running out after something. Aaaand that’s when the power cuts out.
Mac posits that the thing has willfully knocked out the generator. After Garry writes this off as "suicide", Mac reminds him that the thing's best strategy now is to plunge the entire base into a deep freeze. Not only will this kill its human opponents, it'll give the creature a perfect opportunity go back into hibernation and wait for an unwitting new rescue team to come across it.
"Maybe we'll just warm things up a little around here," Russell growled in his distinctively bass-ass sorta way. "We're not gettin' outta here alive...but neither is that thing."
Our three remaining heroes use their remaining explosives to blow us Blair's Etsy project as well as every single other building on the base. As they moved into the generator room, an exchange between Mac and Garry really drove home just how fucked these guys really were.
Garry: "Generator's gone."
MacReady: "Any way we can fix it?"
Garry: "lt's gone, MacReady."
And this is where the film kinda stumbles into tropes a little bit. Mac idiotically tells Nauls and Garry to split up and set their charges all over hell and creation. Yes, I know every single horror movie does the whole "let's split up to cover more ground" bullshit, including Alien, but that's still don't make it any easier, youknowhutimean?
As Garry inched his way deeper into the bowels of the complex, his flashlight suddenly started to konk out. Natch. Back then I wasn't familiar with the set-up for every single horror movie scare, so when Garry fixed his illumination issue, turned around and then ran face-and-eyes into a ninja-like Blair, I just about shit a Trump wall worth of bricks.
This shock to the system was a quick reminder that Carpenter wasn't finished with me quite yet. Taking advantage of Garry's surprise, Blair clamped his ham-hock onto his former friend's face and then pushed him out of frame. I then watched in abject horror as Blair's fingers started to worm their way underneath the flesh his quarry's face. This led to the ghoulish sight of Blair dragging Garry's corpse away, his hand completely molded into the base commander's mush like a trailer hitch designed by David Cronenberg.
After Nauls just kinda fucks off, Mac notices the conspicuous absence of his peeps. He sets the remaining charge, sensing that something is lurking nearby. Then, after Carpenter builds an unbearable amount of tension by lingering on a static shot of the corridor for what feels like an eternity, the floorboards start to explode upward. Knowing that something big and ugly is headed right towards him, Mac leaps out of the way, losing his last stick of dynamite in the process. A storm of tentacles breaks through the earth, pulling the detonator back inside.
That's when the creatures bursts up through the hole and, let me tell ya kids, it's a doozy.
The Thing's final form is a massive, twisted-looking beastie with Blair's head on one side and a massive maw filled with sacrificial dagger-sized fangs on the other. The body itself is random patchwork of raw-looking human and canine limbs, bloody flesh and tentacles of various sizes and shapes. As it roars like a fucking kaiju, special effects lunatic Rob Bottin pushes an aborted-looking dog shape out of its flank, causing my stomach to do back-flips.
Mac, ever the hero, comes to his senses long before I would. He dives for the still-lit dynamite, picks it up, utters a pithy "Yeah, well, fuck you too!" and hurls it at the creature, blowing it to smithereens. A horrible screech, possibly human as well as alien, is heard amidst a chain reaction series of explosions, culminating in an impressive non-nuclear mushroom cloud.
"Whelp, they're all dead!" I cheerily said out loud to myself.
To my legitimate surprise, Mac is shown stumbling through the ruins, bundled up in a blanket and clutching a bottle of his precious J&B. He might have survived the explosion but he has the bearings of a dead man walking. He and I both know that, when the fires burn out, the base will plummet to sub-zero temperatures and his demise is inevitable.
As Mac settles into the nearest snowbank, Childs appears from out of nowhere. At first Mac is startled, but he quickly resigns himself to whatever might come next. The final exchange between these two is appropriately chilling, the perfect capper to a nigh-perfect film:
Childs: "How will we make it?"
MacReady: "Maybe we shouldn't."
Childs: "lf you're worried about me..."
MacReady: "lf we've got any surprises for each other, l don't think we're in much shape to do anything about it."
(after a pause)
Childs: "Well... what do we do?"
MacReady: "Why don't we just...wait here for a little while. See what happens."
Childs: "Yeah."
***
As the credit rolled I sat there, praising myself for getting through another rewarding, but clearly harrowing, fright film. Just like every other heavyweight horror flick I'd watched prior, John Carpenter's The Thing had subjected me to a unique and unexpected experience.
Gone was the implied violence and subtlety of Carpenter's tense but understated Halloween. Like Dawn of the Dead, this was a balls-to-the-wall gorror movie, but stripped of any sly, coal-black humor to soften the blow of the nasty bits. Indeed, watching The Thing was my graduate thesis. I'd evolved from a terror tenderfoot to someone who could deal with pretty much anything a director could throw my way.
In the intervening years, I've seen a lot of horror movies that have also creeped me out or disturbed me. But, after ten awesome years, I can finally end this series, knowing that I've given due praise to the movies that have made me an ardent fan of cinema as an art for and horror in particular. These movie taught me that, regardless of the genre, movies can't be a passive experience. They're meant to make to laugh, to think, to dream and to scream.
So, Dearest Reader, if you take anything from this series, let it be this: don't tolerate "entertainment" that's content to be nothing more than a passive product. Seek out the works of eccentrics, madmen and crazy people, knowing that when you've absorbed their works, thing-like, you'll emerge on the other side a more resilient, thoughtful, wise and interesting person.
Happy Halloween and thanks for reading!
EPIC DOC:
PREQUEL FAIL: Speaking of valueless non-threatening "product."
