did you notice anything strange about the dog?

Not sure quite how I managed to make it so far through my life without having seen Carpenter’s The Thing. Nonetheless, it belongs to that small but influential set of films which I have read about many times, whether in sf criticism or broader social-theoretical works; as such, I went in knowing exactly what I was getting into with regard to the actual story. Interestingly, I can recall very little of the critical-interpretative stuff, which I presume is a function of the film having been a standard text for so long that there are dozens of readings one might pick from, all of which have now blurred into some vague sense of anxiety about masculinity and/or mutability, the hybrid and the Other. I’m sure someone else has already made the more contemporary gesture, but nonetheless: there’s a very obvious reading in which The Thing becomes a parable of the academy in the age of Large Language Models. The descent into paranoia and mistrust as a function of uncanny mimicry is, sadly,…

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