Re: Men

In The Thing, we saw that a lot of Carpenter's men looked eerily the same: they were the two older white doctors, the two black characters, and the group of lumberjack men. It was difficult to keep the lumberjacks straight, to say the least. This is kind of a way at which the tables have turned from displaying women as replaceable to now showing men as the replaceable ones. We also see that the evolutionary success of the alien “thing” is completely undermined and thus labeled the antagonists. We can also take a step back and look at this from a global point of view: this sort of "mass casting" the same character definitely highlighted the insecurity of Americans and their egos.

There are too man of the lumberjack to keep straight. Of the cast the only memorable ones were MacReady and Fuchs, mostly because MacReady was the main protagonist and Fusch was the first to die. This phenomena of casting multiple men who look alike is also repeated in the recent fifth season of American Horror Story: Hotel. The repetition of men gives a sort of constricting house-arrest feel, a sort of cabin fever feel. Can cabin fever extend to America as a country? How about Earth? All of a sudden, the vast artic prairie was not big enough to escape the alien and men. When all of the men were standing around Fuchs as he releases an alien cry, it is difficult to differentiate the lumberjacks, aside from MacReady of course. This definitely added to the paranoia, since it was especially difficult to determine which of the men were human and which were not when they looked all looked so similarly.

The alien things are a superior being, and it made sense that they would be able to overtake measly humans and earth. Let’s be real, humans are not at the top of the food chain, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what the universe contains, much less what earth contains. As a species, we’re not doing so hot. That’s why it is such a surprise, and clichéd that the humans were able to outsmart and outdo the evil aliens. Evolutionarily speaking, the aliens absorb their universal hosts and adapted so well until they came here to earth, so why is it not possible that they would be able to fight the humans and do the same thing here? Perhaps part of it can be contributed to their entire being seeking and fighting for survival, whereas the humans here in this situation were actually working towards the greater good of mankind.

The superiority of aliens is also seen in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the pods showed that they were clearly capable of taking over the world, and that it was superior to humans. The resistance of these Americans to aliens can be translated to the resistance of Americans to other nations. This is also a translation of the nationalism that Americans have: we are better than the aliens, and we are better than our fellow Americans.

I really like this class, and wish that there were more classes like this one. I really enjoyed being able to talk about the movies with guidance from the texts. With that said, I don’t think that it was necessary to have both the text and book, and just the printout book would have sufficed. I love horror movies and all things macabre, and so this class was exactly what I wanted and was looking for. I also think that it would have been cool to watch foreign horror films too, but that could totally be another class in itself. I have some friends who are also really into horror movies and we do weekly comparisons of what we know and think about different horror films, which this class definitely helped me a lot in considering my takes and impressions of different American horror films.