Objectives: Today we will watch clips from The Thing from Another World and discuss how the film represents technology, science, masculinity, and communism in relation to the alien threat. We will also evaluate Smoodin's interpretation of the film and of other films that similarly align creatures from outer space with Communism in the 1950s.

Questions to Consider:

1) How does the film represent technology? What does Smoodin say about the representation of technology within the film?

2) How is pure science represented in the film? What kind of a character is Doctor Carrington?

3) What is the significance of the use of geiger counters to track The Thing?

4) How is masculinity represented in the film? According to Smoodin, how do "real men" interact with technology?

PASSAGES FROM ERIC SMOODIN, "WATCHING THE SKIES: HOLLYWOOD, THE 1950S, AND THE SOVIET THREAT" (1988):

In Hollywood films of the 1950s, any number of foreign humans and humanoids came to the United States or its territories, usually through a technology at least as good as, and often superior to, anything American scientists had imagined. Appearing as they do in movies made during a period of cold war and McCarthyism, these un-Americans clearly represent the perceived Soviet threat. (35)

The Thing from Another World (1951) gives us a Martian instead of a Marxist, but it becomes clear that one is interchangeable with the other. (35)

These men, seemingly, are completely removed from the icy rigors of the outside world, and instead of looking at the sky in every direction, as Colonel Shannon did, they only stare down at their cards. The military, here, has let its guard down, is less than vigilant.

The implied message is that The Thing, and other things like him, can land on Earth because of our own inattentiveness. Indeed, the film works hard to correct this and to create a vigilant spectator. (36)

[In The Thing] the Soviet threat is associated with the natural world, with that which routinely surrounds us and which, because it is so commonplace, hardly stands out as noticeable. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the communists-as-creastures-from-outer space have links with the plant world as they come to the country as giant pea pods. In Invaders from Mars the spacemen bury themselves into the ground and suck their victims into it. In these films, vegetation and even the earth itself become our enemies. (36)

Scotty, the reporter, says, "Just a minute, Doctor, it sounds like you're trying to describe a vegetable." The scientist responds, "I am." . . . The film tells us that we may absorb communism as unconsciously as we eat vegetables, and all the while believe that it is good for us. (37)

Any number of anti-Soviet films of the 1950s stress this notion that even our next door neighbors might be communists. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for instance, the pods from outer space grow into lookalikes of folks in the community. (37)

These men have a hands-on mastery of technology rather than a scientific knowledge of it. After Pat arrives at the outpost, one of the scientists trues to explain the method for determining how far away from the outpost The Thing's craft had crashed. . . Finally, Pat interrupts and says, "Well, you lost me, Joe, but I'll take your word for it." Despite this unease with calculations, Pat is an expert pilot, taking not so much a scientific approach to flying as a "seat of the pants" one. (38)

The men in the film can make use of science, but it is always a science combined with the virtues of the western. (38)

Indeed, pure science without the cowboy influence only produces trouble. Doctor Carrington, a Nobel Prize winner, represents just such a brand of science. He insists that no harm be done to The Thing and hopes to communicate with him. . . The intellectual, then, the man of thought rather than action, becomes a sort of unwitting Fifth Columnist . . . (38)

So, Jet Pilot and The Thing do not simply celebrate American philosophical and spiritual superiority over the Soviets. They also posit communism as an impediment to typical narrative closure. With the menace gone, audiences can associate the defeat of communism with the pleasure one receives from the comfortable and familiar ending of the classical narrative. The spectator therefore leaves the theater with a double message. Morally and even narratively only American values can produce a happy end. (40)