association-list

I see a few ways in here, craft-​​wise.

1: Mis­di­rec­tion

One way swings around that delib­er­ately provoca­tive ending line. We’re asked to fully reimag­ine the movie from the per­spec­tive of the all-​​invading alien mon­ster, pro­tean, agres­sively hege­monz­ing. A mon­ster for whom the very rape cannot have any mean­ing. In the com­ments, Watts says,

Yeah, I went back and forth on that line for exactly the reason you sug­gest: a metaor­gan­ism with­out sex wouldn’t know what rape was. Which is why I intro­duced the “rapist” dialog with Childs’ search­light a couple of scenes ear­lier, during which the mis­sion­ary admits to levels it cannot under­stand in that word. But it does learn con­no­ta­tion of “forced pen­e­tra­tion of flesh”.

Which is enough, I figure, to save that last line. And my ass.

The typ­i­cal con­ven­tion to signal that a word being used is for­eign is to put it in ital­ics. Watts, or Clarkesworld, hasn’t done so here, but I think that it might have been useful to do so, just to empha­size that the crea­ture doing the talk­ing doesn’t actu­ally under­stand the con­cept, but I figure it isn’t strictly nec­es­sary. There’s an argu­ment to be had there, as the con­ven­tion is cer­tainly used earlier:

Later I hid within the bipeds them­selves, and what­ever else lurked in those haunted skins began to talk to me. It said that bipeds were called guys, or men, or ass­holes. It said that MacReady was some­times called Mac. It said that this col­lec­tion of struc­tures was a camp.

The final line sig­nals that we’re not being told the story that we expect we’re being told. We spend the entire story metic­u­lously repick­ing each piv­otal moment of the film, explain­ing why the mis­sion­ary isn’t at fault, how the harm it caused all springs from incom­pre­hen­sion. But at the last we see the rever­sal: the mis­sion­ary does mean to have us all, to release use from death and our tiny, brutish suffering.

The last line is there to tell us that we’re explor­ing ‘evil’ from the inside and that while we’re seeing the other side of the story, the inte­rior inter­pere­ta­tion is entirely con­so­nant with the exterior.

It’s a neat trick.

2: Pacing

Another way to look at it is how to tell a story that most of the read­ers already know in a way that’s com­pelling. Reimag­in­ing is often a ster­ile exer­cise (imag­in­ing is often a ster­ile exer­cise), but find­ing a moti­va­tion for the crea­ture, work­ing a back­story that fits the facts on the ground and enriches, rather than usurps the polt. Whe shuf­fle back and forth between two strains. Missionary-​​as-​​Childs, walk­ing into the long night and think­ing through its expe­ri­ences; and a retelling of the events in the movie, rein­ter­pereted through the newly invented backstory.

Left alone, nei­ther of these threads would work. A simple recount­ing of the story of the movie would leave us bored. What does it matter if the crea­ture is there, sor­row­ing at the hos­til­ity that it encoun­ters? By the same token, its reflec­tions on the dif­fer­ences between its nature and that of the world that it finds itself in are hollow with­out the con­text of the fram­ing story. Com­pellingly writ­ten, sure, but noth­ing but a deci­sion and a small, quiet death happen. It takes a dif­fer­ent kind of artistry to raise this sort of intro­spec­tion out of the level of the dull. It’s unclear whether or not Watts can manage it, but here, hung of the scaf­fold­ing of the other thread, it becomes a sail, rather than a baggy pile of canvas.

3: Crit­ter gonna get ya

Some­thing of the ever­green pop­u­lar­ity of this genre of story is that it makes for almost auto­mat­i­cally com­pelling cinema. Hon­estly, it’s pretty hard to fuck it up too bad. Your char­ac­ters can be paper thin or gilt card­board and no one is going to care. Faults are excused and ratio­nal­ized away by the stark moral dilemma of need­ing to get rid of the mon­ster that is killing every­one one by one. No one really cares that MacReady is a swag­ger­ing jack­ass with silly hair, he’s as close as we’re going to get to a hero, so we’ll root for him as long as he lasts.

One of the things that makes The Thing so sticky in the memory is that the crit­ter might already have got you, but you haven’t real­ized it yet. It’s a break from the stan­dard con­ven­tion. Later betray­als might not be telegraphed, as is a core of the form, because the char­ac­ters are never sure which side they’ll shortly be on.

To some extent, to offer the critter’s per­spec­tive is to defuse the ten­sion some­what. Part of the fear comes from the fact that you never know where the threat is going to come from. I think that Watts does the best thing here. He doesn’t try. He knows that most of the read­ers will know how it comes out, that even if they haven’t seen the movie, they’ll know the form, know the stan­dards. He allows the move­ment and ten­sion of the story to come from a course of rev­e­la­tion walked in a void in the exist­ing story. Who will the crea­ture get next stops being impor­tant. At the time of the telling, every­thing is already over, or almost. Who it will get next stops being the ques­tion, and it starts being, ‘What will it decide, and what will that mean?’.

4: Con­clu­sions

This story more than most is ensnared in nets within nets of mean­ing, right from the workd go. “I am going to rewrite The Thing from the alien’s per­spec­tive”, is a simple enough state­ment. But since the source text for this remix exists in the way it does, you already have threads about cancer and para­noia and our unre­li­able biol­ogy and the feel­ing that death is hunt­ing us all down one by one anyway, all before you write a single word. The colo­nial­ist stinger in the tail adds another layer of dif­fi­culty. I guess what I mean here is that I can’t get past the excel­lence of form and all of the accreted mean­ing to what Watts is trying to actu­ally say. Which may be noth­ing, hon­estly, other than that it’s a fun thing to try and rewrite The Thing from the alien’s perspective.