The Thing Explained 44 Years Later: A Colonialism Theory

I had a realization today about one of my favorite comfort movies: The Thing (1982). If you’ve never seen the movie before, and care about spoilers, you don’t want to read this. If you’ve never seen this movie before, I want to know what rock you’ve been living under for the last 44 years? Either way, move along if you don’t want to read spoilers.

Hiding in plain sight – 44 years later

I’m watching the movie today and the scene with the dog-thing happens. And I keep watching, past the fire, and to the post incident autopsy where Blair is cutting it apart. And then Blair gives his explanation, but then I pause and back up. And watch the dog-thing scene again. And I’m like why didn’t the dog-thing just chill out? Those dogs didn’t attack it. Why did it attack them?

So I kept watching. And with each alien scene I compared it. I was like, OK, it didn’t attack first that time. It was trying to hide, to infiltrate. This is a thing that “assimilates” but it’s covert. It’s hiding in plain sight.

Why didn’t it hide in plain sight with the dogs? Why did it have to take them over? And that’s when it hit me. It’s because it couldn’t help itself. And why couldn’t it help itself?

Colonialism can’t co-exist

What other “theme” is about someone/something taking over something else just because it’s different and completely doing away with its otherness. Because The Thing was fine with there being multiple dogs, as long as all the dogs were dog-things. But they couldn’t just be dogs. That’s colonialism.

The Thing can’t co-exist with other organisms. As soon as it is near another living being, it needs to assimilate that being and replicate itself. If all beings must be itself, and no others, then that’s a metaphor for colonialism. A forced sameness.

In the scene after Clarke puts the dog-thing into the kennel. The other dogs are all chillin’, hanging out in the kennel minding their own business. And the dog-thing sitting in the center (and I know the dog isn’t trained to do this) looks like it is going to panic, surrounded by actual dogs. We know it’s not a dog. The other kennel dogs don’t even sense that it is other at first.

But they do once the dog-thing starts to pant. And it suddenly invades. Juices and tentacles reach out in attack. It is forcing itself into these other dogs. Did it need to?

I don’t think that means what you think it means

After the fire, Blair is explaining his theory as he gives the team a walk-through of the dog-thing carcass. But he explains it wrong. He misses the point. Because in this scene of his analysis, Blair exposed himself when he touched his mouth with the pencil that he used to touch the dog-thing carcass during his demo.
This scientist who literally just ran a simulation where the Thing-cell engulfed the dog-cell and assimilated it, just touched his face with alien goo. Scientific hubris.

He assumes The Thing was trying to “absorb” the dogs. But its not absorption. It’s assimilation.

Absorption is taking things in, assimilation is using things up. The dog was turning those dogs into itself, not because it needed to, but because it could.

We know the dog-thing ultimately needed to get into a human organism to get off the ice. To spread to the rest of the globe. Blair himself comes to this realization. Later he’s flipping out about it not wanting to be a dog because a dog wouldn’t survive the 1000 mile journey in the cold out of Antarctica. Survival was more complicated in dog form.

Suppressing individuality

But why would it need to turn those other dogs? And that’s the point. It didn’t. It could, so it did. All beings must be itself, and no others. Totalitarian ideologies suppress individualism. Anything different is seen as a threat and eradicated.

Therefore, the dogs, simple, uncomplicated, minding their own business. Couldn’t remain untouched. They had to be turned. The dogs could exist, but only if they were also dog-things and not just dogs.
The dog-thing attack was the most egregious of all The Thing incidents because it was the most aggressive.

All the other times we see the alien “attack” they’re reactionary. It’s defending itself, or trying to survive, or cornered. The other incidents were defense responses:

• The Banning-thing exposing itself then being set on fire
• Norris-thing biting Doc’s hands off during CPR
• the splitting of Norris-thing’s body after it was torched with the flamethrower
• the Palmer-thing going feral during the blood test and eating Windows
• the Blair-thing attacking Garry and Nauls when they tried to rig it with dynamite.

Watching the movie again under this new lens made the metaphor stand out, and it made me uncomfortable. Blair is a scientist. He’s the one who should have “got it” early. But he frames it as a survival strategy, and not compulsion. He’s rationalizing the behavior the same way colonial history gets re-framed as “civilizing” or “progress”.

The real horror

He misses the significance of the dogs essentially being destroyed for no reason. The Thing in this kennel was colonialism as a basic impulse: the dogs exist as something that was not The Thing, and therefore that was unacceptable. He underestimates The Thing. As a result they don’t treat the dead-Thing body retrieved from the Norwegian camp with the horror and caution it deserves, and by the time the team comes to realize the true threat, it is much too late.

Why have I missed this in all of my hundreds of previous viewings? I didn’t see it because it wasn’t touching my life. The metaphor was just that, a metaphor. And this metaphor bothers me now. The current political climate made this metaphor visible because I am now watching the same impulse – the compulsion to eradicate otherness – play out in real time. The Thing couldn’t let the dogs just be dogs. And that doesn’t feel like science fiction anymore.

The Thing is a horror movie, but the real horror isn’t the creature, but how familiar its behavior is.