Articles

Adventure
Seeker: The Avatar of Horror – Part II
by
Paul Crowley

(Part
I here)

____________________

“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.

                                      ____________________

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.

                                      ____________________

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.

                                          ________________

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 3^rd 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.

                                      ________________

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.

                                      ________________

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.

                                      _______________

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.

                                      ________________

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.

                                          ________________

*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.

____________________