THE LAST MAN STANDING IN THE THING: CARPENTER’S OTHER FINAL GIRL FLICK BY REBECCA ROWLAND

11/7/2022

HORROR FEATURE THE LAST MAN STANDING IN THE THING- CARPENTER’S OTHER FINAL GIRL FLICK

The Last Man Standing in The Thing: Carpenter’s Other Final Girl Flick
by Rebecca Rowland

John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) may be completely absent of women, but it successfully produces a final survivor character with which all viewers may identify, proving that terror, in fact, knows no gender.

The Final Girl is a well-known film trope originating in Carol J. Clover’s 1992 book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film to describe the sole survivor of a slasher movie’s predator. According to TVTropes.org, a Final Girl must “remain fully clothed, avoid [sex], and probably won't drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or take drugs, either,” and a Final Girl is also “more intelligent and resourceful than the other victims…[and] is usually but not always brunette.” Although the gender of The Final Girl seems inherent in its name, in a film comprised only of male characters, John Carpenter’s The Thing boasts its own Final Girl. R.J. MacReady, played by Kurt Russell, fulfills all of the Final Girl requirements, even those that are seemingly implausible given the constraints of the 1982 film’s plot. Moreover, it is the film’s motif of growing isolation that firmly grounds MacReady as the sole survivor who manages to escape the predator all the way until the movie’s final frame.

The Final Girl remains fully clothed.

The Thing takes place at an outpost in Antarctica, and at the time of the film’s main action, a storm is ravaging the camp: no one is removing their clothing. In fact, the only cases where clothing is shed is after The Thing has killed and impersonated one of the quickly dwindling crew. Despite the red herring in a piece of jacket torn and partially burned to suggest otherwise, MacReady seems only to add layers of clothing to his frame as the story progresses (including, of course, a particular jaunty—and inexplicably enormous—campaign hat during outdoor explorations).

The Final Girl avoids sex.

Much to the chagrin of those who are drawn to slashers specifically for the requisite shot of T and A, no one is having sex in The Thing. In addressing this absence, screenwriter Bill Lancaster has explained, “I remember thinking as a kid that the obligatory love scenes in horror movies interrupted the action.” None of the twelve men appear to be even remotely attracted to one another, and their only interaction with anything vaguely female is with the come-hither voice of a Chess Wizard computer program, of which MacReady disposes within the first fifteen minutes of the film. When he becomes frustrated by a loss, he opens the machine’s circuit board and pours the remains of his drink onto it, temper-tantrum-style, thereby erasing the last vestige of sensuality anywhere in the camp and symbolically eschewing sex as only a Final Girl can.

The Final Girl does not drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or take drugs.

On the surface, one requirement MacReady seems not to fulfill is a Final Girl’s avoidance of mind-altering substances. In fact, he embraces the very polar opposite of this mandate, guzzling Scotch whiskey in a number of scenes. Although other characters indulge in alcohol and marijuana, none do it so gluttonously as MacReady. After the discharge of The Thing in the dog kennel, MacReady notes, “I just wanna get up to my shack and get drunk,” and in the closing scene of the film, he huddles among the burning remnants of the base camp, swigging gulps of Scotch directly from the bottle. However, this is merely a mirror image of the Final Girl trope: those who do not indulge in these substances are picked off earliest by The Thing. It is not until the crew is halfway decimated that Palmer, seen earlier smoking a joint, is revealed to be infected by The Thing, and an autopsy of the Norwegian crew members who invaded the American camp in pursuit of the dog reveals “no drugs, no alcohol” in their system, and they are the first to die.

The Final Girl is more intelligent and resourceful than the other victims.

In his 2011 Atlantic article on the remake of The Thing, Noah Berlatsky proposes that “MacReady is heroic precisely because he is the most paranoid and the least subject to emotional attachments.” However, MacReady is the Final Girl because he is the most reliable and quick-thinking of the group. He leads the expedition to the Norwegians’ camp not just because of his helicopter piloting skills but because of his commitment to getting a job done: when the men first arrive at the partially damaged facility, it is MacReady who enters first, gun drawn, calling out for survivors. When Copper discovers the remains of the partially transformed crew there, he calls out to MacReady to witness it. As soon as he hears the commotion coming from Clark in the dog kennel, MacReady pulls the alarm and leads the group to investigate; he quickly organizes the defense, instructing Childs to “burn [The Thing]…dammit, Childs, torch it!”

Like his counterpart Laurie Strode (Halloween, 1978), who is saddled with watching the children while her friends plan and participate in romantic escapades, MacReady is often looked at to shoulder the responsibility of the group’s leadership. After the scuffle between Garry and the other men, the former nominates Norris to be in charge, but when the latter declines, stating he isn’t “up to it,” it’s MacReady who takes over, disarming Clark and devising a plan to safely imprison the irrational Blair. When Bennings runs out into the snow, revealing himself to not be Bennings at all but The Thing, it is MacReady who takes immediate action, dumping the nearest barrel of fuel onto him and tossing a flare to set the creature ablaze while the other men look on, stunned.

Echoing the resourcefulness of fellow Final Girls Nancy Thompson (A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984) and Erin Harson (You’re Next, 2011), MacReady devises a plan to thwart The Thing’s possible infection of the planet. While Nancy and Erin set up booby traps to catch their predators, MacReady sets up explosives to burn down the camp, thereby preventing The Thing from hibernating in the cold, despite knowing it will more than likely erase his own chance at survival. He tells Garry, Nauls, and Childs, “We’re not getting out of here alive, but neither is that Thing.” In Friday the 13th, part VII (1988), Final Girl Tina Shepard douses Jason Voorhees with gasoline and ignites him, intending to kill him; throughout The Thing, MacReady burns the creature in order to destroy it, and he tries to burn the entire base “right down to the ice” in an attempt to contain it. And of course, unlike Tina Shepard, R.J. MacReady is also brunette, the final Final Girl requirement.

The growing sense of isolation in MacReady’s environment mimics the Final Girl’s inability to receive outside assistance against her threat. Carpenter makes clear from the beginning that there is no way to reach help even before the crew is in danger when Windows, the communications officer, tells the base’s doctor that “I haven’t been able to reach anyone in two weeks.” Later, Windows conveys to Garry—and thus, to the audience—that they are “a thousand miles from nowhere.” Therefore, when Blair destroys both the communications system and the helicopter, it ensures no one will be coming to the crew’s aid, and no one will be able to escape. True to a Final Girl’s reliance on her own abilities to rescue herself, MacReady makes the only chess move that remains: sacrificing his likelihood of long-term survival to avoid the even worse fate of releasing—or becoming—The Thing.

While Childs is also present in the final scene of The Thing, is it is arguable that MacReady is the only true survivor of the creature as Carpenter hints that this Childs is an impersonation of the base’s mechanic. When Nauls and Garry accompany MacReady to test Blair, Childs remains behind to guard the main gate. However, he mysteriously abandons his post, later claiming to have followed Blair into the snow. At the same time, Blair, as mimicked by The Thing, accosts Garry and kills him. Although the audience never sees Childs taken over by The Thing, the filmmaker sets up his absence as a possible opportunity for infection whereas MacReady is never unaccounted for at any point after his negative blood test.

TVTropes proposes that it is through the Final Girl that “the males in the audience are forced to identify with a woman in the climax of the movie. In practical terms, the makers of a horror film want the victim to experience abject terror in the climax and feel that viewers would reject a film that showed a man experiencing such abject terror.” John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) may be completely absent of women, but it successfully produces a final survivor character with which all viewers may identify, proving that terror, in fact, knows no gender.

Rebecca Rowland

Rebecca Rowland is an American dark fiction author and curator of five horror anthologies, the most recent of which is Generation X-ed. She delights in creeping about Ginger Nuts of Horror partly because it’s the one place her hair is a camouflage instead of a signal fire. For links to her latest work, social media, or just to surreptitiously stalk her, visit RowlandBooks.com.

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