The Thing: Fear the familiar face!

When Hollywood endeavored to remake The Thing From Another World (1951), the late screenwriter Bill Lancaster wisely opted for a radical re-imagining, going back to the source material for inspiration, a novella by John W. Campbell Jr. entitled Who Goes There? Chief among the distinctions between The Thing From Another World and what would simply be called The Thing (82) was the decision, very much in keeping the Campbell’s narrative, to render the titular alien not as an angry salad bar in human form but rather an interplanetary chameleon, a parasite able to rapidly assume the form of whatever host organism it came into contact with after being thawed out by a Norwegian research team in Antarctica. They say mimicry is the highest compliment.

However, Lancaster’s script also differs from the earlier movie in that it features not a single woman. While the presence of women in the earlier movie could be written off as pandering to a broader audience with the arbitrary injection of a love interest, an argument of equal merit could be made that a great opportunity was lost in the resolve to make this an exclusively masculine story. A feminine perspective could have pleasingly complicated the deeply uneasy, paranoid group dynamics of The Thing, and you have to wonder if the absence of women didn’t emerge above all from squeamishness on the part of the filmmakers, all of them men, who may have felt uncomfortable with desecrating female bodies with the same infamously ferocious and nauseating zeal applied to those of men and canines throughout.

The Thing begins with a pretty corny looking flying saucer crashing into Earth, leaving no ambiguity as to what we’re dealing with from the get-go. There’s only a short, divertingly portentous half-hour or so between this cosmic establishing shot and the first manifestation of the alien presence in the encampment’s Husky cage, with flesh flying off of this poor pooch’s skull like a self-peeling banana, and blood-smeared spaghetti whipping around the room to ensnare the other dogs. The alien’s use of familiar flesh as a sort of Trojan Horse reveals a similar tactic to that of the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (56), which was also imaginatively updated and remade in a version directed by Philip Kaufman in ’78. But in The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, the process of transfiguration is itself the central concern of the movie. It veers away from the concerns of science fiction and into that of horror, emphasizing repeatedly the body as a site of grotesque violence and chilling anonymity.

The Thing, when not making you want to vomit, is pretty fun, another Carpenter siege drama where evil is evil and the good guys do what it takes. But I can’t help but imagine a David Cronenberg version, a movie far more curious, speculative and precise in its biological exegesis and bearing greater pathos. Undoubtedly Cronenberg, like the scientist in The Thing From Another World, would be more sympathetic to the alien than Kurt Russell, who rarely puts on a hat in the –40 tempests and eagerly torches everything in sight. But maybe we should be imagining a Werner Herzog version. Early in The Thing a characters named Windows tries to get in touch with his colleagues at McMurdo Station, the setting of Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (07). Would those endearing misfits at McMurdo, spanning many countries of origin and encompassing both genders, have been able to fight off the alien? Or might they have embraced it as just another fellow outsider, far from home and in search of communion?

Devotion to the sacred Heart of Darkness: novelist Albert Sánchez Piñol journeys back 100 years to reawaken the mystery of the world

Steamship routes circa 1900

The artwork that envelops Penguin Canada’s recent editions of Cold Skin ($18) and Pandora in the Congo ($18) feature spare images that represent distinctive, exotic locations, a lighthouse overlooking a seductively gloomy sea of mist in the first, the talon-like roots of some massive tropical tree in the second. The images loom over the titles, and are cradled in darkness. I wanted to applaud Daniel Cullen’s cover designs because they immediately made me intrigued by this pair of novels from an author I hadn’t heard of, and, most importantly, they did so by evoking something extremely rare in contemporary fiction, promising stories of places in the world still shrouded in shadow, of mysteries lingering within under-explored and little understood landscapes. Which is precisely what these wonderful new books offer us.

Albert Sánchez Piñol

Translated by Cheryl Leah Morgan and now available to English-language readers, Cold Skin, originally published in 2002, and Pandora in the Congo, originally published in 2005, are the first works of Catalan author Albert Sánchez Piñol, a former anthropologist whose fecund imagination feeds upon models from what feels like a very long century ago. Yet somehow his stories read not in slightest like the sort of postmodern pastiche common to other recent incorporations of genre into literary fiction. He’s not subverting older narrative forms so much as shaking them back to life and imbuing them with significance for a new, smaller world. These are serious novels of adventure and strangeness, written with a serious focus on deeply engaging plotting and precise description, and on rendering the fantastical as something chillingly real. The stories, unsurprisingly, are set in the same time period as the sort of popular novels they recall, those of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Joseph Conrad especially. To remind us how mysterious our world can be, how conducive to wild imaginings, Sánchez Piñol takes us back to a moment when even the most technologically advanced and powerful societies were not so confident, and certainly not so convincing, in their claims as to what the rest of the world is made of. I ate it up like candy. Except this candy is nutritious!—it entertains the hell out of you, but also resonates intensely with the frailties of the human psyche and the ongoing precariousness of colonial pursuits.

“We are never very far from those we hate. For this very reason, we shall never be truly close to those we love.” As Cold Skin begins its nameless narrator is about to arrive on the small Antarctic isle where the rest of the novel will take place. He has taken the job of weather observer and is contracted for one year. The rhythms are incantory, guiding us ominously in toward our destination, imparting upon us in just a handful of words great distance and time and arduous travel. “We had our first sighting of the island at dawn. It had been thirty-three days since the dolphins fell away sternward and nineteen since the crew’s breath first expelled clouds of vapour.” The narrator is accompanied by the ship’s captain and some crewmembers to carry his year’s worth of food and books to his new abode. They encounter the only other man on the island, the lighthouse keeper, but he behaves strangely and may have gone insane. Nevertheless the ship needs to continue on its route and leaves the narrator there.

Cold Skin is a short novel, and things get weird fast. The narrator discovers the terrible secret of this lonesome place: a race of amphibious creatures who attack only at night. He’s soon forced to make an uneasy alliance with the lighthouse keeper in order to fend off the creatures. The lighthouse keeper holds one of the creatures captive, a female, whose eerie allure gives the novel its title. Bestiality becomes familiar in this uncivilized place, and jealousy and desire rise up out of the murk. I won’t tell you just where this all goes, though its image-vocabulary, themes and motifs are rich enough to spill over into Sánchez Piñol’s follow-up.

Pandora in the Congo is twice as long as Cold Skin, and while it departs from its predecessor’s lean, claustrophobic approach, it is in many ways more ambitious while still focusing on young, ostensibly pacifist heroes with few attachments—orphans of one sort or another—and adventures in hostile places that engender unsustainable or unattainable strange love. As the First World War looms, Londoner Tommy Thomson makes his first forays into a literary career, albeit of a not very distinguished sort. He becomes a ghostwriter for a crude, racist old bastard, more a brand name than a legitimate author. He makes a pittance and works like a slave to crank out pre-plotted pulp tales of heroic Europeans in savage lands. But a series of coincidental deaths lead Tommy to realize that there are is in fact a longer chain of would-be ghostwriters than he thought, and that he, being the final link, is simply the most deftly exploited: the ghostwriter’s ghostwriter’s ghostwriter’s ghostwriter. He then takes another, seemingly more noble ghostwriting gig, working for a barrister who represents a man accused of double homicide while working as a cook for two aristocratic brothers exploring the Congo with a team of black African slaves who do all the heavy lifting and then some. He’s to interview the accused and novelize his story, the idea being that by making his Congolese adventure into something compelling and sympathetic the barrister will go to trail with the public on the side of his client. It’s in doing these interviews that Tommy’s adventure really begins, though it is very much a kind of adventure by proxy.

Tommy narrates Pandora in the Congo from a perspective of 60 years, though Sánchez Piñol is careful to minimize the editorializing of hindsight, letting us develop our own understanding of how the novel’s complex webs of treachery speak to the modern world. There are exceptions of course, but I’d argue that they enlighten us more than they condescend: “active collaboration in evil was a matter of a concession as simple as holding out your hand… that hand was the essence of the twentieth century.” Culpability is endlessly ambiguous here. Tommy writes hateful trash, but he does so only because he’s employed by the trash’s true author. He later writes a great adventure novel that he only hopes is in the service of a good cause, but he could just as easily be completely deceived. The man whose story Tommy writes—the man has the curious name of Marcus Garvey—commits horrific acts while journeying through the Congo, but he does so under strict orders from the men who employ him. Such moral quandaries only balloon as the plots continues to take its marvelous twists.

Illustration from H.M. Stanley's In Darkest Africa (1890)

Besides the rich white Europeans and poor white Europeans, besides the black slaves being worked to death and the black slaves employed to help exploit their own kind, there is an additional people roped into Tommy’s narrative, an underground race of humanoids who, like the creatures in Cold Skin, quickly become the Other for which violence and domination are deemed the only appropriate response. As in Cold Skin, a female from this race becomes the centre point of a battle between various male desires, including that of our narrator. The novel’s narrative threads are laid out with the caveat that nearly all of them are relayed by someone other than the writer of the words we read. They are interpreted, digested, possibly tainted, possibly lies. Our narrator seems himself to be reliable, but he can only narrate what he’s told. In the end we’re overwhelmed by the impossibility of stories being the creations of a single author, and here is where he catch a glimpse of the philosophy of Sánchez Piñol himself, who openly employs the styles and trajectories of the novels he’s presumably admired. Let’s not get too concerned with tracing or judging the indefinable labyrinth of sources for our tales, Pandora in the Congo implies, but rather surrender to the conviction of the telling we’re given. It may be the only lasting consolation.

Otherness versus other people: the dual nature of Werner Herzog's strange, haunting Encounters

The delivery of fresh, wakeful images as an antidote to the world’s endless avalanche of worn, numbing ones has been a guiding promise throughout Werner Herzog’s career, a prolific filmography going back 46 years now. Thus Herzog’s acceptance of The Discovery Channel’s offer to make a film in Antarctica was surely spurred in part by the vast, inhospitable continent’s own promise of abundant, beguiling strangeness. It seemed inevitable. Peruvian jungles, African deserts, Bavarian highlands, outer space, or the South Pole: the landscapes where the unusually determined—and usually highly eccentric—few dare to traipse has always been Herzog’s creative habitat, the places with the strongest current of vision, apparition and mirage.

Indeed, in the opening moments of Encounters at the End of the World Herzog confesses that it was seeing some especially evocative Antarctic underwater photography, taken by his producer Henry Kaiser, that made him want to go. So while Herzog’s bold, observant, opinionated, probing and often dryly hilarious narration is, as always, a highlight, the sequences which unveil the grandest spectacles of the seemingly alien world of Antarctica—coral looming like nicotine thunderheads, jellyfish resembling free-floating atomic explosions—are precisely the ones that leave Herzog speechless, his silent wonder providing all the more space for us to attempt to absorb and grapple with what we see. Not to mention what we hear, like those seal calls that one scientist, at a loss for more empirical points of comparison, simply describes as sounding like Pink Floyd.

(A personal favourite moment: three parka-enveloped scientists silently pressing their ears to the ice floor to listen to seal calls, looking like participants in a Beckett play. Herzog lingers on this, milking it for deadpan comedy.)

Yet the richest source of fascination plumbed in Encounters at the End of the World is, perhaps surprisingly, not the otherness of Antarctica but other people. When Herzog and his crew of one arrive at McMurdo Station, an international encampment of ugly prefab buildings and circling Caterpillars, and are forced to wait some days before they’re able to venture into the white wilderness, they turn inward rather than out, wandering through various dorms and laboratories, meeting the 1000 or so people residing therein: a Colorado banker who joined the Peace Corps in Guatemala and now drives “Ivan” the Terra Bus; a European philosopher who had Homer read to him before he learned to read; a Chicano plumber whose bizarre finger lengths indicate Aztec royal family ancestry; a linguist now working on a continent with no languages. In McMurdo, freaks are the norm. So well-suited are they for the director’s interests it’s almost as though these people are auditioning for Herzog, the preparation for which consumes a lifetime. To paraphrase one of these subjects, it’s as though everyone who wants to fall off the map finds themselves sinking to the bottom of the world, to the point where all lines converge.

In Grizzly Man, his last documentary, Herzog was charged with constructing a portrait of a dead man through the editing together of the dead man’s own video footage, an act of cinematographic archeology that gave Herzog plenty of room to editorialize, drawing lines that convey where the exploratory sensibilities of Herzog and the self-styled bear activist Timothy Treadwell met and parted. In Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog is less inclined to steer the conversation, letting his subjects dictate the themes, a major one of course being the title’s allusions to human extinction, directing our attention to the astonishing manifestations of global warming visible to anyone who lives among the polar ice shelves.

There is one key figure for whom Herzog does however attempt to speak for, a lone penguin fleeing inexplicably from the safety of his brothers, heading straight toward a distant mountain range where only certain death awaits. Why does he do it? Herzog wonders, regarding the penguin’s seemingly suicidal impulse in a way that’s at once comical, philosophical and sad. Herzog reveres the penguin’s mystery and keeps conjecture to a minimum, but it’s parallel to our own species’ rushing toward apocalypse can hardly be missed.