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Popular Culture Review
Massacre shifts its blame of the source of evil from the infiltration of communist
regimes to the oil collapse of the seventies and the ensuing recession. Leatherface
and pals, after severance from gainful employment, have nothing left to turn to,
and so turn their anger, and of course, hunger, on their fellow humans. Texas
Chainsaw Massacre was a grimy, sandy, cowboy perversion that counterpoised
the glamour and self-indulgence of the cocaine-laced disco world.
The aforementioned Carpenter films update this subgenre to redefine the
menace of hidden enemies. Carpenter modernized themes of the fear of invasive
social change and the fear of the failure of our economy by placing the threat
within American society itself: its principles, dreams, and desires. Carpenter’s
reaction to the rapid urbanization of America and the extreme stratification of
wealth through then-president Ronald Reagan’s failed “trickle-down” economic
theory was to make monsters out of our friends, neighbors, bosses, and
coworkers. This shift in focus was not necessarily more horrifying than the threat
of invasion by another society, but it simply re -examined the cause of evil in our
society. The media told Americans that to achieve happiness they needed money,
and p lenty of it. Power was the necessary tool for accumulating wealth, and
social responsibility was left at the wayside. The political messages of
Carpenter’s films are almost the exact opposite of the fifties’ sci-fi classics.
Instead of glorifying the triumph of democracy and capitalism over communism
depicted in fifties sci-fi film, they attempt to identify the same issues (wealth,
consumerism, and consumption) as the cause of human unhappiness.
The entity that inhabits various members of an Antarctic scientific
research base in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is alien in origin. The
creature crash-lands at the beginning of the film, only to be held in check by
being frozen in place for years. When unwitting Norwegian scientists release the
creature, it manifests itself as a parasite that can control, and ultimately replace,
its host. Such is the level of imitation that friends and colleagues of those humans
taken over are unable to discern whether a person has been replaced by a thing.
Although the initial form the thing takes is that of a sled dog, the remaining
organisms it mimics are human. At various times during the film, humans
explode into dripping maws, tentacles, fangs, and other pieces of appropriated
cellular tissue.
The important difference between the universal order in Carpenter’s
films, and that of those predecessors who influenced him, particularly the
Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks The Thing, is described by Carpenter critic Robert
C. Cumbow: “In general, the science fiction invader films of the Fifties and early
Sixties begin with an emphasis on order and certainty, and an image, perhaps, of
civic or domestic calmness. Then something arrives—usually from the sky—and
disrupts that order. . . .” However, Carpenter’s films “generally begin not with an
order that is subsequently disrupted, but with a world in which things are already
out of joint” (113).