watching the Thing and like
it’s a mound of flesh, right? and it keeps forming eyes capable of looking at you. and the longer you look at it, the more openings appear. and at first the openings are full of what looks like legs, which move aside to reveal a flower, which unfurls to reveal a fleshy orifice studded with teeth moving towards you with great power and longing.
and it’s like, the central tragedy is that none of these men know each other on a level intimate enough to see through the imitation. when keith david turns and asks them how they’re supposed to tell if he’s an imitation or not, none of them can honestly say that they know him well enough to test how deeply it runs; he may as well be a stranger to him. when baby slut kurt russell mentions that the long johns could be anybody’s, it means that he isn’t able to tell whose they are by taking a good long whiff of the crotch and armpits. the secret weapon that could have successfully circumvented the thing was the time these men should have spent intimately exploring each other’s bodies. I have a job interview tomorrow. I need to get this out of my system now.
having by now gotten the job for which I was interviewing, I think where I was going with this was that, the constantly moving shifting expanding de-categorizing of the Thing is its own horror vehicle by virtue of the fact that every other body in that film very much wants to be its own discrete category, unknowable and untouchable to the other bodies around it. and the more you look at the Thing, the more there is of it; the more openings it has, the more eyes it will form for which to see you, the more limbs it will form for which to touch and know you. and these men do not want to touch and see and know each other. they do not want the joyous erotic sound of each other's stevie wonder albums to enter their ears. they do not want the joint that touches their lips to touch the lips of another man. the first and only horror of the Thing is its drive to touch and know and queer the coherent category that is the human body. I will be washing dishes in the back of a bakery while blasting mongolian throat singing if anyone has any further questions.
