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Articles
Adventure
Seeker: The Avatar of Horror – Part II
by
Paul Crowley
(Part I here)
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“Who Goes There?” (which was deemed by the Science Fiction Writers Of America, voting in 1975, as the greatest novella of the genre,) came and went, with little notice in the greater popular culture, until it happened to attract the attention of a man by the name of Howard Hawks, a director and producer in Hollywood. Hawks, who is now considered one of the greatest of the American “hard-bitten” school of moviemakers (the sort that those French pointy-heads just love to heap their pointy-headed honors upon, along with such prophets of the age as Jerry Lewis), oversaw a movie based, loosely (just how loosely we will discuss in a moment) on Campbell’s novella. The black-and-white film, which premiered in 1951 and was nominally directed by Christian Nyby (just how nominally we will also discuss in a moment), was part of a decade that would see a steady progression of “monster pictures” which would carry on the earlier tradition established by such European and American directors as F. W. Murnau (1922’s Nosferatu), James Whale (1931’s Frankenstein), Tod Browning (1931’s Dracula) and Merian C. Cooper (1933’s King Kong), who had rapidly used the emerging, and increasingly dominant art of the cinema to elevate science fiction and/or horror to a level of popular appreciation which dwarfed that of its literary antecedents, and whose mantles, in the rest of the decade of the 1950’s, fell upon even such minor auteurs of the genre as Ed Wood (whose magnum opus, Plan Nine From Outer Space, is considered the greatest unintentionally hilarious science fiction/horror film of all time – those of you conversant with the film who remember the immortal dialogue sequence involving the word “there” between husband and wife, or the airliner cockpit shower curtain, or the flying pie plates, will understand).
The 1951 film version, rather ponderously entitled The Thing From Another World (later shortened by reissue and popular usage to, simply, The Thing) and starring the usual assortment of B-list Hollywood journeymen-and-women (Kenneth Tobey, Margaret Sheridan, a thin, bald-headed scarecrow named Douglas Spencer who, memorably, played the inevitable wisecracking journalist, and a young unknown, James Arness, who along with his brother Peter Graves would eventually become a star of series television) is something of a minor masterpiece of the genre, despite its having, presumably for technical and censorship reasons, almost nothing to do with the original Campbell story. What makes the film distinctive, indeed enjoyable and reasonably suspenseful, are the original approach to the story (because the state of both special effects technology and what was considered graphically permissible in a moral sense were severely limited) and the hand at the helm, which, despite the directing credit attributed to Christian Nyby, has been universally agreed by film historians to be that of the nominal producer, Howard Hawks.
We normally don’t associate producers, who oversee the broad plains of a film’s process rather than the individual blades of grass, with the precise and daily artistic and craft supervision entailed in the task of directing. Hawks, however, was already a celebrated and successful director, of such film classics as Scarface (1932), Viva Villa! (1934), Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938) His Girl Friday (the 1940 film version of the Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur play The Front Page), Sergeant York (1941), To Have And Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948), and I Was A Male War Bride (1949) as well as serving as producer on all these films with the exception of Viva Villa! and I Was A Male War Bride. A master film maker who had apprenticed and worked steadily as a journeyman writer, director and producer since the 1920’s, Hawks was the type of renaissance movie man whose day was to slowly fade as the business of film demanded ever more specialization after the 1950’s. What his overachieving supervision lacked in finesse was more than made up for by the singular vision that it brought to films – a unified approach tendered and completed by one person instead of by committee. In the case of The Thing (we shall drop the longer title for the sake of convenience; John W. Campbell’s original title, Who Goes There?, while perhaps more indicative of the mood of a group of military and scientific types marooned with a gooey monster in the Antarctic tundra, was never used again, and Hawks’ title, in its shortened form, became the standard nomenclature for the two films and the computer game that derived from the Campbell novella), this vision involved a wholesale dismissal of all the characters (not one of the names in the novella appears in the 1951 film), the introduction of several woman into the camp environment, the relocation of the novella’s venue from the South to the North pole, the radical redesign of the alien creature’s form and capabilities (really a reduction, since it is no longer capable of absorption and imitation of life forms) and, in a final turnaround, dialogue that was snappy, funny, rapid and overlapping as opposed to the somewhat lumbering wordiness of Campbell’s original story dialogue. To form an aural picture of what this last change meant for the film, one need only recall the dialogue of His Girl Friday, in which Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Walter Bellamy and other actors are all heard to be talking over, under and beside one another at various points in the movie. That fast, furious and funny sort of talk made its way into the first film version of The Thing (hence the wisecracking newsman referred to earlier). The sort of bad-boy-and-girl naughtiness typical of a Hawks film is also present, especially in a lightly played bondage scene in which Margaret Sheridan gets the romantic drop on Kenneth Tobey by tricking him into being handcuffed to a chair, a scene which is played for laughs in the script with only the barest hints of the smoldering sexual potential inherent in it (manly man, seductive woman, immured in a remote facility miles from the usual constraints imposed by Judeo-Christian civilization – and it’s s-o-o-o cold, shouldn’t they be snuggling?). This lightening of mood pervades the film and transforms it from a vehicle of utter dread into something more akin to a witty New Yorker cartoon.
Or could have, because the film that Hawks made turned out to have its own special ambience of fright and suspense, perhaps heightened by the very breeziness, complete with the Do they really love one another? subplot between the male hero and the woman resident of the research station, which he poured into it. In place of the claustrophobic, obsessively moody tenor of the novella, Hawks instituted a frantic pace, revved up by either rat-a-tat talk or kinetically frenzied action at alternating moments. One’s breath is stuttered and one’s interest is engaged, not by brooding, polar isolation, but by the busy mouths and hardboiled attitude that made His Girl Friday so vital and attractive. The unfriendly and uninviting research facility of the novella has been transformed (nearly) into the sort of place we might like to drop in on over the weekend, populated with friendly flyboys, a beautiful woman who could fill in as one’s sister or lover depending on the state of one’s fantasy life and a seemingly endless supply of bonhomie. Somehow, precisely because of the lighter mood and the friendly atmosphere, it all works. That we are drawn into a movie with only the vaguest association with John W. Campbell’s original horrific vision is beside the point; that we are drawn into it, in spite of this, is the point.
Of course, a film so gregarious and dog-friendly might seem a little boring from the standpoint of, say, dramatic tension, but do not be alarmed, for to the rescue of artistic credibility comes a stock figure, waving his erudition and patrician contempt for all those friendly flyboys right in their faces, namely, the desiccated and clearly sexually suspect overintellectualized scientist who, disregarding the sort of manly and sensible advice of the military fellas who only want to wrap this mission up and get home, thwarts them at every move and holds out a sinister world government, left wing sort of hope that he will be able to communicate with the monster, who is clearly, if not a communist, then at least a dangerously sneaky Democrat, and so, of course, in the scientist’s view, superior, in the sense that it has dispensed with the usual Judeo-Christian verities of patriotism, religious belief, morality and mom and apple pie, to the sort of clearly inferior human beings represented by our chipper bunch of friendly flyboys. And in case you had any doubts, our scientist wears a dangerously bohemian turtleneck, to boot.
Since the original tension among the station’s residents produced by the thing’s ability to absorb and imitate life forms has been completely undercut by the alien’s transformation into a discrete, non-absorbing anthropoid (albeit a pretty damn big and strong anthropoid, who does exhibit the ability to regrow, a la the chameleon, a severed limb or two and happens to possess a rather unsettling appetite for human blood), a subsidiary plot involving disagreements between the military types (led by the commonsensical, love-distracted alpha male) and the scientific johnnies (led by the brilliant, but emotionless Einstein caricature) must fill the dramatic gap. As a result, something of the original structure of the novella has survived: the battle between human and thing (readily evident in both novella and film) and the psychological and, occasionally, physical struggle between human and human (evinced in the novella by a random sense of fear and loathing directed by everyone toward everybody else at one time or another, and in the film through a bipolar, group-oriented struggle between two opposing, but internally united, camps). This sense of forces opposed, not so much by informed choice as by raw destiny, is a Howard Hawks trademark that keeps the movie, even at moments which threaten to descend into cliché, from losing its impetus due to the changes imposed upon the plot.
There is one final consideration that we must make before we proceed to 1982’s film of the same name, and that is the relevance (or lack thereof) of the political events beginning to grab the attention of the nation at the start of the decade of the 1950’s. It is generally believed that films such as Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers (1956) were made with a metaphorical connection to the supposed threat of domestic communism in mind. It is interesting to note that two of the three premiere science fiction/horror B-movies of the decade, The Thing and Bodysnatchers (which was based on a 1954 Collier’s story by Jack Finney, reworked by the author into a 1955 novel) share certain similarities, the chief of which is the fear of invasion by an alien, sneaky fifth column which not only destroys civilization as we know it, but substitutes an emotionless, amoral existence in its place. It would be hard to avoid the political subtext here, but we should remember that along with those who feared communism (perhaps one should also refer to fear of communist hunters), Hollywood contained a number of individuals who had suffered blacklisting at the hands of red-baiters; the sort of mass totalitarian existence depicted in Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers and, earlier, implied in The Thing, might be argued to portray the dangers of unthinking hysteria in democratic societies as well as the more obvious threat of Soviet communism. Art leaves the question to be decided, more often than not, according to the opinions, life experiences and biases of the individual consumer of that art. Like George Orwell’s novel 1984, clearly on its face a representation of life in a fictional Soviet state but with warnings to us all about the disturbing future that technology and media intrusion into the most private areas of our lives have in store for us in the West, this sort of dichotomy is well suited for discussion perhaps, over a fermented beverage or two.
By the way, the third premiere science fiction/horror B-movie of the 1950’s was Them (1954) (co-starring, incidentally, James Arness) and was not included in the paragraph above because there’s nothing even remotely sneaky or fifth-columnish about an invading army consisting of ants the size of three-story homes.
In the hands of anyone else, The Thing would almost assuredly have been turned into the sort of Eeeeeek! A Monster! mishmash that all too often made its way to the screen in the 1950’s, replete with dead dialogue, earnest (and dreary) acting and special effects more laughable than effective. Instead, through the attentions of a film maker who understood and embraced an almost Darwinian sense of agon in his creations, we have the pleasure of viewing a film which, while acutely limited by the state of special effects techniques in 1951, benefited from the refusal of the film maker to dissimulate with his audience and became, in his hands, a vehicle that stayed true, in an internal sense, to the original intentions of the story’s creator. And it is, even in our jaded and
blood-surfeited age, a truly suspenseful and intriguing rollercoaster ride.
That it tones down the visceral horror is not surprising in a film of its time.
Who wins? Well, we would be amazed if a 1950’s horror film ended with the monster triumphant, wouldn’t we? And I’m sure most of you have seen it anyway, but if you haven’t, you’re in for a, as they say, retro treat.
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We have seen our avatar birthed in the final days of the Depression, in the shadow of an approaching world conflict which would, unbeknownst to most, complete the reshaping of the modern global settlement that commenced in the aftermath of the Great War; we have seen it travel on the printed page (the medium of the first great information revolution), announcing, like a messenger angel, the opening of a new, more sophisticated science fiction which would come into its own in the succeeding decades; we have seen it take on the celluloid form of a Hollywood film and in so doing, undergo transformation and retransmission to a new generation at the beginning of what we now call the Eisenhower decade. If that retransmission has softened it somewhat, has blurred the more awful edges of its affect and played down the more horrible visions of its effect, we will now arrive at an avatar more nearly in tune with its original creation, for we are going to descend, in both the directional and emotional senses, into the deep and dark well of the second Hollywood version of John Campbell’s disturbing little horror story, John Carpenter’s 1982 film, The Thing.
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The moving picture which enabled John Carpenter to make the cut, so to speak, was 1978’s Halloween, which will go down in movie history as the film that transformed the “slasher” genre from a cult niche (typified by such films as 1972’s Last House On The Left, directed by Wes Craven and 1974’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed by Tobe Hooper) into a mainstream moneymaking powerhouse. The forerunner of such film franchises as Friday The 13th and A Nightmare On Elm Street, as well as becoming a profitable franchise in its own right, Halloween sported an almost insultingly simple plotline (girl walks down street as homicidal maniac stalks her; girl sits in house as homicidal maniac stalks her; girl, unlike a few others in the film, survives homicidal maniac, who appears to be too weak to finish off girl, though he is, A, homicidal and B, maniacal and she is clearly neither) was rescued by some nicely atmospheric music, nifty editing and pacing and a sly subversive wink at the conventional wisdom that safety was the first province of suburbia as opposed to the urban rathole. What also distinguished the 1978 version from its successive namesakes and imitators was a sense of restraint, both in the number, and graphic portrayal, of the deaths that occurred during the course of its 93 minutes.
Carpenter, who had been making films of one sort or another since the age of 14 (1962’s Revenge Of The Colossal Beasts is clearly a bit of juvenilia, but nevertheless listed in his filmography), admired, according to film critic Leonard Maltin, none other than Howard Hawks, and made Assault On Precinct 13 (1976) as an homage to Hawks, recasting his idol’s 1959 John Wayne vehicle Rio Bravo in an urban setting. This bit of Hollywood trivia is of interest to us only for the reason that Carpenter went on, in 1982, to remake Hawks’ 1951 The Thing (the full title of the 1982 release being John Carpenter’s The Thing, which we will elide once again for the sake of utility to The Thing – confused yet?).
The 1982 Carpenter version of our by now well-traveled avatar stands out, both among his own film work and among science fiction/horror films at large for its powerful, auteristic realization and for its return to the more complicated and, in the context of 1982 technology, more cinematically attainable atmosphere of the original 1938 novella. The setting has been returned to its proper Antarctic locale, the original slate of characters from the novella has been mostly revived (McReady, changed to MacReady, Garry, Blair, Copper, Norris, Clark, Bennings, changed from Benning, are all here, along with some new names, Meadows, Childs, Palmer), the alien’s abilities and nature have been restored to the horrific from the merely bad tempered, the entire feel of the tale has been returned to the darker, eminently less attractive and claustrophobic intensity of John Campbell’s nasty, but hypnotically engaging, premise.
The opening title sequence, a masterpiece of rhetorical mood-setting, presents us with a black screen broken by succeeding sets of stark, white, credit lettering as a mournful, slowly intensifying chord rises and falls into eerie resolution, the music evolving, for the next few minutes, into a pounding obbligato overscored by dissonant whines of synthesized strings which convey not an iota of hope or human comfort, about as far from the usual bombastic opening movie music as one could get . As the music progresses (the tight, dread-filled score by Ennio Morricone is one of the glories of the film), we go from black screen, suddenly, to the glaring white waste of the Antarctic, spare, beautiful, utterly alien itself to human habitation except under the most extreme circumstances of duress. In this vast, frozen landscape, a dog, a handsome husky, runs, seemingly at random, followed from above by a helicopter from which a gunman attempts, unsuccessfully, to shoot the animal with a high powered rifle. It is an opening sequence which is thrilling and unsettling in both the aural and visual senses, and it draws us, as if with some form of emotional magnetism, into the very heart of unfamiliar surroundings before we even know that we have been so drawn. We are curious, certainly, we are overwhelmed by sight and sound, we are already asking questions as our natural sympathies are engaged toward this beautiful dog who runs desperately from a familiar symbol, in our more sedate and civilized areas, of terror: an agitated man with a gun, firing.
The film runs for a leisurely 109 minutes and this enables Carpenter to take some time to establish mood and character (Hawks’ 1951 effort coming in, by comparison, at a relatively crisp and compact 87 minutes). The greatest difference between the 1951 and 1982 versions may be one, in the end, of Zeitgeist (oh please forgive me for using that!) (especially all those of you out there who are unable to properly pronounce the word “nuclear”). The spirits of the eras of Eisenhower and Reagan were, to put it tenderly, about as far apart from each other, spirit-wise, as Bill Clinton and the meaning of the word “is”. This chasm, of course, had nothing to do with either gentleman’s party affiliation (both were Republican), personal political philosophy (both were conservative) or public persona (both presented a genial, somewhat disengaged, but nevertheless fatherly appearance to the general public). What did separate the eras of these two men was the 20-plus year period which formed the interregnum between their respective presidencies, a time of chicanery, Orwellian doubletalk, outright, bald-faced lying and violation of Constitutional freedoms, for which the national government could in one way or another be given most of the credit, along with a tectonic shift in public cultural attitudes about sex, race, religion and just about every other topic Americans could find to disagree about, topped off with the greatest economic dislocation, courtesy of the abrogation of the post-WW II Bretton Woods agreement combined with a four-fold oil price shock, since the Great Depression. America, we hardly knew ye! might have been the theme of this turbulent two-and-a-half-decade tumble through history, which upended many Americans’ assumptions about the trust they invested in, and the lens through which they viewed the actions of, various public officials and personalities, governmental leaders and traditional moral beacons.
We were not the same country (we never are, of course) but this period marked the end of the time when many of the citizens of the United States put anything resembling their absolute trust into the hands of politicians or anyone else who cared to tell them how to run their lives – the perfect moment to reintroduce the public to a story from an earlier, also turbulent time, and on this go-round, in this avatar, cut closer to the more disturbing and horrific aspects of the story as it was first told, which mission John Carpenter rather gleefully endeavored to complete as successfully as possible.
The film hews about as close to Campbell’s novella as any film adaptation has ever hewn to an original literary source, and it is easy to see how the film maker responsible for Halloween, with its milieu of fright underscored by an almost humanistic concern for its beleaguered, selectively doomed characters, would have been attracted by the similar attributes of Who Goes There? This cinematic humanism, present in not only The Thing, but, later, Starman (1984) and, to a lesser extent, Prince Of Darkness (1987), and regrettably absent from the films Carpenter has directed since, lends a gentler, more sympathetic air, even in the midst of the greatest peril and inhuman attacks, to the almost hopeless situation in which the men in the Antarctic research station of the film gradually find themselves immured. We get to know these men, identified, as in the novella, only by their last names (with the exception of MacReady, whom we learn also possesses the initials “R. J.”), on a somewhat more individual level than the wisecracking flyboys of Hawks’ film. There are no swift, witty retorts here, no “right back-atcha” newsman along for the ride, comically inept in combat, but with the secret heart of a lion. There are no delightful romantic dalliances with a hint of dangerously louche subtext, in fact no women at all, nothing to indicate that the business at hand is anything but a grim struggle against an enemy whose greatest
weapon may be the self-doubt and terrified suspicion of the men themselves. There are no cliches, in other words, to protect us from our submission to the darker places opened up in the film.
We are on dangerous ground here, and not just as it regards the survival of the filmic characters in whom we naturally invest a little portion of our own selves. For if humans can be absorbed and perfectly imitated, what, then, is their uniqueness? What value do they have to the universe at large if another life form can extinguish the only quality that distinguishes humans from all the other biota on the earthly ecosphere (that consciousness which, ironically, uniquely apprehends its own coming death) while perfectly reproducing their outer and inner physical selves? These are not just questions for horror writers to play with. The nature of human beings is the lodestar of nearly all philosophical enquiry, increasingly spilling over into hard science itself as we become better at measuring the organic bases of human consciousness, and there is enough room for a great deal of disagreement. We should remember that one can draw two lines from the writings of John Locke, for example: one toward the liberal Western tradition and one toward the totalitarian impulse, because Locke’s epistemological musings left room not only for those who saw his views as compelling an informed, essentially free social contract in which the imprintable nature of human consciousness called for the utmost freedom of idea and information in order to fully develop the individual (Locke mediated through the Scottish Enlightenment school) but also those who saw humans as tabulae rasae to be imprinted with whatever their superiors deemed appropriate and/or convenient (Locke mediated through Helvetius, Lenin and our late Soviet friends, as the historian Richard Pipes points out). Perhaps a little too much for a poor old horror movie to take on, but the loss of self and absorption into a larger, undifferentiated social organism is a fate that has haunted several generations of European and American commentators and has kept them more or less committed to the liberal capitalist model despite its obvious flaws and outright injustices. Perhaps Campbell wasn’t particularly thinking of his novella as a metaphor for totalitarian methodology, although the year in which it appeared (1938) is intriguing, to say the least. Carpenter, whose films abound with references to the shady deals that governments concoct, as well as the threat of absorption into one or another anonymous/mindless state (prisoner, mental patient, vampire, zombie possessed by dead Martians, etc.) might well be hinting at something here, but I’d bet he would deny it and insist that The Thing is just a good, ripping yarn, which it certainly is – maybe along with some other, more serious stuff.
There is no happy flyboy ending for this film – rather, we are left perched upon the horns of a dilemma of ambiguity, as two men contemplate themselves, each other and what has become of their Antarctic research station – and what is to come, perhaps within the next few minutes. It is an ending as brilliant in its mocking way as the film’s spare and mournful opening and it leaves us with a sense that we have experienced a rare event in popular entertainment – the engagement with a mature and powerful artist who is not averse to confronting us, at the very moment when we crave resolution, with the sort of moral uncertainty that prevails in our real lives outside of the cinema. A ripping yarn John Carpenter’s The Thing may be – but it is also, like a very few works, a mirror in which we may perceive what our own predilections allow us to perceive, and so a haunting, affecting reminder to us of both our frailties and our strengths.
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Our fourth and final avatar of horror, the third reiteration of John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella, has arrived at a time when the interactive nature of entertainment media in the industrial West has transformed the average person’s engagement with, and attitudes about, what used to be as simple as an evening spent in front of a television set or enveloped in the cool dark of a movie theater or even seated at a live stage production. All of these forms of entertainment possess one overriding quality which unites them intrinsically and is more important than any particular differences which exist among them (the more intimate atmosphere of a living room as opposed to a movie house, the more vital experience provided by live actors as opposed to celluloid reproductions, the more spectacular effects possible in a film as opposed to a stage production). They all consist of an essentially passive experience on the part of the audience, which participates in the process only to the extent that it is present to hear and see the aural and visual data being transmitted (if a movie ran in the forest when no one was there, would it make any picture or sound?). It is true that each audience member, whether in living room, movie house or stage theater, brings to the production his or her own perceptions, biases and judgmental faculties, formed by the life experience he or she has undergone, but those individual qualities have no bearing on either the unfolding or the ending of the entertainment at hand (excepting the practice of focus group tryouts, which do have an effect on the finished product but which may be considered part of the normal production process, as necessary as editing or rehearsals in contributing to the final form of the particular piece of entertainment). The power of the experience to shape us as human beings is masked by the passivity involved in our experience of it – often, we are unaware of how or why we are being manipulated, because the visual sense is so powerful and so basically linked to the limbic portion of our brains that, awash in the same sort of primitive response to stimulus that an alligator undergoes, we lose much of our critical analytical ability and respond, reptilian-like, to the sheer onslaught of movement, color and shape. Compare what happens when one reads. The brain, shut off from visual stimulus (excepting the visual input of the letters on the page) and relying wholly on thought, has time to consider what is being absorbed (ideas in the form of words) and can take a step back to consider what has just been transmitted from the page. Reading is by its very nature active – we have all had the experience of losing concentration, reading a page and then realizing that although we have read the words, we retain no memory of what they were. This sort of passive trance does not do well for the comprehension of the written word, but it works just fine when we sit in front of a movie screen.
This distinction between active and passive forms of leisure activity is being tweaked and transformed by the advent of sophisticated computer games that, while relying on a traditional monitor on which the relevant visual data are displayed, are undercutting the heretofore passive nature of entertainment. At the end of year 3 of the 3rd millenium, we are using our little computer-TV’s to participate in, rather than simply watch, the story which unfolds at any one time. This is having an interesting effect on the way we look at, and form our expectations of, entertainment in the broadest sense. We are no longer chained to the totally scripted presentations that arrive, wholly formed and unchangeable, on our cinema screens and televisions and even live stages. We now have some ability (which increases as the logic branches of games become ever more complicated) to affect, if not the broad outline of the particular game we are playing, then at least the incidents, major and minor, of which it is composed. Gaming (beginning with that superbly unscripted mother of them all, Pong, which delighted legions of barflies when they weren’t falling off their stools) offers us a certain amount of control over what may be termed our microdestinies within the macrodestinies of the games we happen to be playing (Sorry!). This is intensely exciting and liberating for a generation of Americans raised on the spoon-fed products of entertainment media. I believe that the future evolution of this aspect, to eventual full control by the player of the game scenario, lies in the growing massive multiplayer online projects that are just now beginning to ratchet up (everyone is waiting for the Myst team’s online Mudpie project in this regard, although one wonders whether it will ever live up to the excited sense of expectation humming on the net pathways).* For now, single players have begun to experience the sort of uncertainty of outcome and tactical and strategic choice paradigms, which characterized, on a simpler level, bouncing ball games, in the much more complicated worlds of storylines and human (and not-so-human) characters.
I preface the discussion of our final avatar with all this ________ (you may fill in the blank, dear reader) because this avatar seems as good as any an example of the complex, realistic realtime worlds that are emerging in the gaming corpus. The value of the 3D realtime movement engine is not so much as a technical wonder; one is less dazzled by than expectant of the convenience of it after the third or fourth game one has played utilizing it. The real value is that it forces the player to think as if he or she were actually in the world of the game: realistic movement, while certainly fun and technically impressive, confers a certain amount of inconvenience, since one must usually stop moving (just as in the real world) in order to perform a task or defend oneself against attack. Sometimes, as in the real world, it’s better to simply run like hell from whatever it is that is threatening one. This increasing verisimilitude brings the gamer that much closer to what ultimately counts in any game: the human content, without which a game is merely a collection of bits and pieces. The best example I can present comes from a game entitled Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault.
One of the five missions the player performs in MOH is the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach in Normandy. I thought, having seen Saving Private Ryan, that I was inoculated against any further insights concerning the valor, and the horrific experiences of, the men who surged upon that beach, as well as other beaches, on that memorable day. I was wrong, however, and it was not until I played MOH that I absorbed the full measure of fear, terror, rage and temporary insanity that are the special province of humans at war. As I spilled out of landing craft into water up to my waist and began the approach to the “shingle” (a stretch of barely protective hump) under the constant barrage of German machine gun nests, I understood in my viscera what I had only comprehended in my head when watching the movie. I was petrified and gravely angry at the same time, and when I finally got to a point (after dying many times, riddled by enemy bullets as unforgiving and merciless as an aroused swarm of stinging insects) where I could inflict a compensating amount of damage upon the enemy, I took a savage satisfaction in each kill, crowing profanities at my monitor and stepping over my victims as if they were so many lumps of stone. I realized for the first time how easily, how unreservedly, any human can surrender to bloodlust in the service of physical survival. All that made up my sense of amour-propre and that anyone might consider best in me, dropped away so quickly that I was unaware, initially, of the change, and when I became aware, I could not have cared less, so infused with rage and fire was I. It was a lesson in the human condition, one that I, never having been in war, had to wait for a computer game to teach me. Actual combat veterans may laugh themselves silly at this, of course – I experienced no physical pain or even discomfort as I waded, jumped and ran through the Omaha Beach landing – but it was as close as I’m ever going to get to the real thing.
Now, we don’t play games to learn great lessons in empathy. We play them to have a rollicking good ride, but we are entering a time when these games will, by their very nature, add up to something more than just the sums of their parts. With that in mind, we now turn toward our final avatar of horror, Universal-Vivendi’s computer game The Thing.
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By now, John Carpenter’s 1982 film version of our little horror tale has engendered a certain amount of cult appreciation (fully justified, in my opinion, in view of its qualities previously discussed), so it is natural that the computer game based on the story would use Carpenter’s film as a starting point. A game based essentially upon a film can use one of two approaches: recreate the movie (as Fox Interactive’s Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza has done) or use the film as a basic design guide for atmosphere and backstory and then proceed from there. The second option was chosen by The Thing’s developers (all to the good, I say) and the most interesting quality of the resulting game is the one of so-called “squad-based” tactics. While the game has all the usual bells and whistles of first (really tightly angled third, in this case) person shooters everywhere (well presented 3d realtime movement, an assortment of nasty, but undeniably fun, weapons, an assortment of nasty, and undeniably annoying, adversaries and an assortment of stunning, and undeniably beautiful, in an Antarctic wasteland sort of way, environmental maps to discover and move through), the squad aspect of the game lends it that authentic human aspect without which it would be just another shoot-‘em-up. We will return to this aspect of the game shortly.
After a brief initial cutscene which makes it clear just what sort of problems we are fated to deal with, the game begins with something of an homage to its 1982 film progenitor: a helicopter ride through an unfamiliar part of the planet. Instead of the brilliant white sunlit environment of the film’s opening, however, we are presented with a snow-blown excursion in threatening darkness while the character who will be our persona, one Captain Blake, radio-reports to his superior, Colonel Whitley, as the helicopter he and his 3-man squad are traveling in flies over the apparently deserted and half-destroyed research station featured in the 1982 film and prepares to land on a reconnaissance/rescue mission. Upon landing, we are fairly free to roam around the initial map, limited only by the realistic consideration that the bitterly cold Antarctic temperatures and wind immediately begin to lower our (Blake’s) life
meter and those of the squad, necessitating a quick entry into the nearest available building to shelter from the cold. From here the game proceeds in the usual manner of action-adventure: the first few maps are designed to familiarize the player with the full range of, and to allow him to practice the utilization of, various weapons and physical capabilities coded into the character he inhabits as well as the other characters he will meet, lethal or non-lethal. It is apparent from the first that something very wrong has happened here. Most of the walls of the first building we encounter are breached, open to the bitter polar winds and snow; electrical power is at a minimum, the darkness of Antarctic night outside is mirrored in the dimness of the interiors through which we move. There are no other beings, human or otherwise (our relief at this latter tempered by what we know is coming, at any moment); our helicopter, due to the increasingly problematical weather, has departed after our deployment. We are, to all intents and purposes, the only humans in this part of the planet: four men, a commander, an infantryman, a medic and an engineer, all unknown quantities at this point, thrust into a situation of not only intense stress, but intense loneliness as well. Some theologians have postulated that hell, in the afterlife, will be that state of being in which the absence of God, and so of every other soul in the universe, will be the paramount factor: the suffering of hell will be the isolation of the dead sinner, not the comic book torments which were paraded before us when we were children. That sense of profound loneliness, of abandonment by who and what are familiar and comforting to us as individuals, that deepest fear which prompts all humans to reach out across the personal divide and form social relationships with other humans, that is what we, as player/persona, feel while our character commences his investigation with the three members of his very small, very fragile little human group. Former long range recon scouts in the military will no doubt understand this feeling, and it is a sure thing that the game developers wished us to share this feeling in the most basic way as the game commences.
In its own way, The Thing manages to steep us, at its beginning, in the same mournful and uncertain mood which the 1982 film does. We have
entered a kind of testing ground; it is as if the gods have decided to teach us a few things about ourselves as they have their sport with us. As it turns out (sorry, no plot revelations in here), there are a few hidden agendas hovering, god-like, over our heads, but they will be revealed sometime later in the game. In short order, our character is going to get a chance to forget, periodically, about the mournful nature if the environment in which he operates, since survival, not loneliness, will become his chief preoccupation.
This is where the “squad-based” nature of the game becomes most interesting, but before we get to that it might be time to say something about the way the game’s threats to the survival of Captain Blake and his squadmates are presented.
This is, of course, something of a “monster” game – there are nasties to be confronted and destroyed (as well as human adversaries just as deadly as the nonhuman ones), and depending on one’s point of view, these nasties inspire either terror or laughter in the gamer. One online game reviewer contemptuously referred to some of the game’s opponents as “walking pepperoni pizzas”, and while I will admit that this is in many ways an apt and funny description, it made no difference in my fear level once I was confronting these Neapolitan delicacies with the lights out and a pair of headphones on – although the creatures referred to are, objectively, more ridiculous than terrifying when contemplated outside of the game environment, I had no trouble suspending my disbelief or my capacity for amusement while engaged in the gameplay itself. I suppose that hardcore gamers would shake their heads at this, but, hey, I’m an adventure wimp, remember?
The “squad-based” game design forces the player to do a lot more than simply blast away at whatever comes at him. The gamer must think about the mental state of his squadmates, their weapon and ammunition needs, how much health to dispense to them, in short, the sort of decision making that a real squad commander would be faced with in a real recon-combat situation. This multi-layered approach is further complicated by the fact that any of the squad personnel whom one meets during the course of the game may already have been absorbed by the thing and so are capable of changing from colleague to menace at a moment’s notice. A conflict arises here: responsible for the safety of squadmates (and there is a certain amount of control over their dispositions accorded to the gamer), the gamer is also responsible for killing them should they turn. While I have read, with a certain amount of dismay, dismissive comments in online chatrooms about the fates of the game’s squadmate characters (including gleeful boasts about how some characters may be made to commit suicide – I will have more to say about this below), I found it a challenge, indeed an obligation, to protect the health and the lives of the squad characters I encountered throughout the game, and considered it a personal loss when I either failed to do so through my own gaming actions or was defeated by a scripted event that admitted of no variation. This conferring of responsibility upon the gamer for the lives of others is a most intriguing aspect of The Thing and an ingenious way to invest the game with at least some of the wrenching atmosphere of the 1938 novella and 1982 film.
This squad-based structure not only entrusts the gamer-captain with at least a minimum concern for his squadmates – it also pays off, as in a heart-pounding sequence involving a desperate battle against waves of attacking “things” in an abandoned medlab in the middle of a frozen plain. Having taken some care to insure that one’s comrades are OK and have enough weapons and ammo to defend themselves turns out to be in the best interest of oneself, and it is left up to the individual gamer to choose this course of action from motives of mere self-interest or from some higher plane of moral principle. One of the most interesting angles to all this has been my discovery, in the afore-mentioned chatrooms which I occasionally visit when I wish to view discussions about technical or gameplay issues in a particular game, of a sort of vicious glee emanating from a surprising number of gamers who have played The Thing when they discuss the fates of the various characters who appear as squadmates in the course of the game. They are not talking about enemies here; they are chuckling over the gruesome fates of characters who are supposed to be allies in the struggle against a multiform adversary, and are particularly jubilant when they can make a squadmate commit suicide when afflicted by the terror (the horror) of what is happening. One of the major objectives of the game is to hold your fellow characters together, in both body and soul, and, except for a few scripted events which will defeat that purpose during the course of the game no matter what the gamer does, this task becomes integrated into the gamer’s planning – or should. One’s response to the horror of what is loose in the Antarctic in this game – whether a compassionate or a cynical response – inadvertantly reveals something fundamental about one’s view of life in general. At least, that is what I believe.
This is not to say that abandoning scruples and indulging in pure mayhem without regard to consequences in the unrealistically constraint-free environment of a computer game is not without some amusement – this will be the subject of a forthcoming column – but what saddens me is the number of players of The Thing who chose to boast of their homicidal tendencies and accomplishments in public. Something is going on here – something which will play out, perhaps, to our regret.
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More about the specifics of the game I will not say, since the greatest pleasure for gamers is discovering a game wholly new, without someone else butting in to tell them all about it like a maiden aunt just bristling with all that great gossip about…well, about everything (I really did love my own maiden aunts, long since gone except for comforting memories from my childhood and early manhood – and they were not particularly gossipy as I recall, so please excuse the cheap metaphor). I believe the game is a worthy addition both to its own antecedents and to the wider sphere of that gradual melding of passive and active entertainments which was discussed above. I am perhaps a little too ready to suspend my disbelief and to enter fully into the environment of any computer game I happen to be playing (although I suspect that most of you adventure gamers who have managed to avoid nodding off and have read this article to this point are definitely in that happy league of people who recover their childhood capacity for immersion in a good story), but I was alternately thrilled, terrified, wrenched and transported by this game. Excepting the inevitable (and dreary) “boss” which one must confront at the end (is there at least one “shooter” which dispenses with this nonsense? Please?), The Thing succeeds very well in wrapping the gamer in a mournful, desperate (albeit beautifully realized) place in which the gamer may discover whatever assets or liabilities he possesses in his confrontation with, not just terror, but horror.
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So, our fourth avatar displays a number of characteristics which make it a fitting (and, of course, enjoyable) inheritor of the interesting little novella which appeared nearly seven decades ago and which was to stay alive, in one or another forms, through so much historical and cultural evolution in the United States of America. Each of the four iterations have mirrored qualities of the times in which they appeared. The novella, stuffed with questions of identity and struggle on the eve of the greatest war to engulf the planet; the first film, hampered by the technical and cultural limits imposed on films in the early 1950’s yet mirroring the fears and strengths of the society which would see it in theaters; the second film, a sophisticated realization of John W. Campbell’s original vision whose ending sequence seems the very essence of modernism; the current game, with its combination of shoot-em-up, horror and humane concern; each has entertained, disturbed, stimulated and, oddly enough, comforted us in the way that art always does, regardless of our like or dislike of a particular artistic expression: we come away from our confrontation with art a little wiser or a little more perplexed, but we are always changed for the better by it in some small way. It may surprise some readers that I utter the word “art” in the same neighborhood as the phrase “computer game”, but computer games (if you recall) are becoming something more than the sums of their parts. Not all of them, or even most of them, to be sure, but some of them? Yes, and that is fitting. Mass media have given us some of our most downright idiotic and insulting disasters (oh, forget it, it’s too easy to name names on this one); they have also given us some of our greatest and most thoughtful treasures. We need, and will gladly accept, whatever challenge and comfort we can from the myriad artistic ventures which surround us; if some small part of that challenge and comfort comes from a computer game based upon a horror story, let us accept it, and recognize that even as we mourn for our fellow humans, we stay engaged with that part of ourselves which is at once repelled, and fascinated, by horrific events. It is no insult to the sufferers among us that we divert ourselves; it is indeed our tribute to them, that we continue our small engagements with the entertainments of this world, as varied and as vital as the air we breathe, for we are creatures of imagination, and to abandon that quality, even in the face of horror, would be to deny our own natures, and thus, to resign to fate.
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Listen for one more moment:
October, 2003: A Clear, Mild Day At Fall’s Beginning
It is a clear, mild day at fall’s beginning, the start of the annual season of gradual dying, dying expressed so slowly, in a few falling leaves here or a thin veil of night frost there, that one hardly notices it until the sharp cold of winter bursts through clothing to proclaim itself master of all who walk in its way. A city has weathered two years on, has seen two memorial services at the tragic pit, has listened to politicians (the great scavenger animals of tragedy) and other important people intone about sacrifice, resolve, memory and all the other ideals and attributes that politicians and important people speak about when faced by the blunt end of horror. What do these words mean, really? They are as empty as the wind gusts that will soon be swirling along the streets of the city as it descends into the cold time; for words die and their utterers forget what they said and time, like a great bloody grinder, moves on and points us all toward the next great event. Time heals all wounds, it is said, but it also smashes, smashes one’s wounded memories into a kind of pavement composed of ache and loss which trails, just behind and under the feet of the walker, incessantly whispering, “Time’s awastin’!”, with something of glee and something of fury in its voice, to remind the walker that of all the horror in the world, his portion is but a pittance, a puny, infinitesimal particle of the whole, great galumphing steaming plate which is served up to humanity every second of every day of every…
The walker sees this at once, with the clear eyes of a sufferer, but he also sees the larger truth which time’s pavement, in its insistent march onward, has not the ability to understand: that the least amount of horror, apprehended by the smallest of the small, by the insignificant, by the forgotten or the nearly vanished, sounds a huge gong whose vibrations thrum along the subterranean human pathways, and it is this great and terrible sound, composed of all the outrages and horrors and tragic defeats, of all the individual human suffering beyond the pale, of the entire collection of each pittance, of each puny infinitesimal particle of human agony, which connects all humans so afflicted and binds them to one another, through six degrees of separation, across oceans and continents, across barriers ethnic, religious and cultural, which, for a moment or two every single second of every single day of every single month and so on through the decades and centuries and millenia, pauses every single human at least once in his or her life and reminds him or her of charity, of sympathy and empathy and plain fellow-feeling, of those qualities which are almost, but not quite, forever lost in the hubbub and palaver and silliness (and, yes, the seriousness) of our lives in the new millenium.
On this clear, mild day at fall’s beginning, we are all walkers looking down and behind at time’s pavement as it accretes under our forward-stepping feet; since the laws of physics forbid us from seeing the future, we must face the past. For many of us in this scarred city which still sits perched upon the awful memories of an end-of-summer day in 2001, the full cup of horror has but briefly brushed our lips; many of us have not lost loved ones or friends or even acquaintances; many of us have been spared the brooding disease of grief, so impervious to time’s supposed healing powers. But we remember, nonetheless, if not our own engagements with horror, then those of the others within our midst who were so profoundly wounded on that historic (ah, God, yes, historic, and may God grant us just a little less history, thank you) day. There is the tragic pit, clean now, clean with the bustle of new development, surrounded by a gentle fence interweaved with green strands of material to block the views of the merely curious; there are the small and large disagreements about what will rise and what will not rise in the tragic pit, some evidence, at least, that New Yorkers are returning to their usual argumentative ways, that, though one longs to use some other, fresher phrase, one must in the end rely upon the hoariest of bromides: Life goes on.
So, horror fades from the communal consciousness; great endeavors are underway, armies are on the move, a great crusade has been declared, an entire nation is living through a political sea-change whose end, even now, is unforeseeable, all of this springing from the events of a few hours on a sunny morning in a September that seems much further removed in time than the small span of two years. The continuum moves on, over, under and through us; there will be new horrors, there always are, and the city and the nation wait with breath bated for what may never come but is expected, nonetheless, by all.
So, horror fades and we work and play as we ever have, perhaps with a slight shiver now and then as we suddenly dip into dangerous memory. Our time is taken with spouses and friends and lovers and various distractions which more often than not obscure our vision rather than enlighten us; here and there, in the shadow-times of our segmented lives, a book accidentally opened, a film seen by chance, a painting, a piece of music or more rarely, certainly, a particular computer game, grabbed off a shelf in an impulsive moment, may direct our minds to places not previously known, not because these places do not exist, but because their discovery depends upon an exquisite dance of moment and opportunity. A book…
a film…
a painting…
a song…
a computer game; such are our small pleasures in an immensity of loss. May we continue to distract ourselves, to pay homage to the human capacity for recovery amidst the debris; to pay homage to those small moments when we grasp at truth only to have it snatched away. It is not the certainties, but the uncertainties, which make us strive to understand; if those uncertainties greet us in the midst of great thoughts and great doings, fine enough; that they greet us in the midst of matters as prosaic as the dance of images in a computer game is not so far from the possible, and not so far from the sublime.
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*Cyan Worlds has announced (February 5, 2004) that Uru Live, the realization of its Mudpie project, is shutting down. The non-online version, Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, will continue with expansion packs containing material which was intended for the online version.
Note on sources:
For those wishing to explore the writings of John W. Campbell, The Best Of John W. Campbell, edited by Lester del Ray and published by Doubleday in 1976 is an excellent compendium. Mr. del Ray has an introduction from which I culled Campbell’s biographical data. The book itself is likely out of print, but may have been reissued.
For anyone wishing to know anything about films, the Internet Movie Database (us.imdb.com) is a wonderful source. It was invaluable in providing accurate info on Howard Hawks’ and John Carpenter’s filmographies and the stories and casts of the two films in question, as well as Leonard Maltin’s comments on John Carpenter’s admiration for Mr. Hawks.
The source for the story about the couple who joined hands before leaping to their deaths from one of the burning World Trade Center towers is a PBS-Frontline documentary entitled Faith And Doubt At Ground Zero, which was broadcast in September of 2002. The fact of the anonymous couple’s hand-joining is taken from witness comments recorded in the documentary. The rest of my comments about that incident were an act of the imagination and are wholly my own responsibility.
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