The Thing and The Hateful Eight’s analogous narratives speak to broader philosophical notions of selfhood and knowledge of others. Their thematic undercurrents explore the forever-complicated terrain of what it means to truly know another, to truly know oneself, and whether such understandings are even possible. Neither film answers these questions because they are, of course, ultimately unanswerable and subjective. The characters’ attempts to find objective answers only ensure their demise.
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There’s something elemental about the single-location mystery. Perhaps it’s the subgenre’s ability to mine such rich and complex material from the same basic ingredients: an isolated setting, a small group of people with questionable identities, and escalating violence. Or maybe it’s because it fits so seamlessly into a number of genres: horror, whether supernatural (The Mist, 2007) or realistic (Green Room, 2015); thriller (Panic Room, 2002); social satire (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972; Carnage, 2011); and even broad comedy (Clue, 1985). Two particularly illuminating examples, examined below, are John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015), neither of which have been chosen at random: both explore the tension between knowledge of oneself and of another (or, in the case of The Thing, an “other,” quite literally). Each poses the same fundamental question: Can you ever truly know yourself, let alone someone else? Before exploring this thematic core, it’s first necessary to outline the films’ visual and narrative similarities, which are not only illuminating in and of themselves, but also essential for fully appreciating their shared philosophical subtext.
Correlations
The Thing and The Hateful Eight open with identical widescreen vistas of snowy mountains (those of Antarctica and Wyoming, respectively), set against original scores by Ennio Morricone. These establishing shots underline nature’s indifference to the characters’ plight and are followed by analogous arrivals to an isolated setting: a Norwegian helicopter chases a dog (really the titular extraterrestrial) to the vaguely named National Science Institute Station 4 in the former, and a horse-drawn carriage brings recently-captured criminal, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to Minnie’s Haberdashery in the latter. In both cases, the source of the ensuing violence and chaos are brought to the main location, and a blizzard conveniently traps everyone there. After this setup, the narratives become variations of a whodunit or, more precisely, a “who is it?” Who is the human-imitating alien? Who is secretly trying to free Daisy before she is hanged at Red Rock, a nearby town? The shared answer to these questions proves slippery, wavering somewhere between “everybody” and “ultimately, it doesn’t matter.”
While both films are largely indebted to Christie-like puzzle mysteries, they are just as informed by classical Westerns, and this is most apparent in Kurt Russell’s key role in each. Carpenter’s oft-cited love for Westerns seems to have influenced his depiction of MacReady (the name even sounds like that of a gunslinger), who, in a costume choice that borders on parody, even dons a sombrero before flying his helicopter (perhaps in lieu of riding a horse). Tarantino’s bounty hunter, John Ruth, is a walking macho stereotype, swaggering around the store, brandishing his guns, and cartoonishly twirling his mustache. MacReady and Ruth take it upon themselves to expose the culprit and utter interchangeable lines: “Somebody in this camp ain’t what he appears to be” and “One of them fellas is not what he says he is,” respectively. It would be easy to chalk these parallels up to the fact that Russell makes frequent appearances in both directors’ work, but the similarities here are too striking to write off as mere coincidence. In fact, I would go so far as to say that The Hateful Eight is a conscious riff on The Thing, as two specific sequences illustrate.
The first is a centerpiece scene in each film that reveals the evil presence hidden in plain sight. MacReady’s blood test forces the alien in disguise (Palmer, played by David Clennon) to come forth and defend itself, while Major Marquis Warren’s (Samuel L. Jackson) killing Bob (Demian Bichir) initiates The Hateful Eight’s climactic bloodbath.1 Secondly, both of their final scenes involve a “last man standing” situation. MacReady and Childs (Keith David), each suspecting the other of being the thing, wait outside the burning facility, presumably until they freeze to death or one kills the other; Warren and Chris (Walton Goggins), still trapped by the blizzard, kill Daisy before they bleed out from their gunshot wounds. These parallel denouements are of particular note for their racial implications. The lone survivors are a black and a white man who still cannot quite trust each other, even when facing almost certain death. There’s also a shared sense of futility: just as the thing may inevitably spread worldwide, Jody Domingre’s Gang may already be in Red Rock, ready to decimate the entire town after the failed rescue mission at the haberdashery.
Interpretations
The above correlations would be of minimal importance, beyond a superficial appreciation of one director emulating another, if it weren’t for the films’ shared philosophical focus: namely, the impossibility of truly knowing, of looking “inside” both another and oneself. To slightly tweak the above lines delivered by Russell, no one in either of these movies is who they claim they are, not even the so-called heroes.
One common complaint about The Thing is the difficulty of tracking which character is the alien at any given moment. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert voiced this frustration most eloquently (and wittily): “Carpenter allows his characters to wander off alone and come back with silly grins on their faces, until we’ve lost count of who may have been infected, and who hasn’t. That takes the fun away” (1982). Fair enough: despite some moments of shocking clarity (it’s obvious who the alien and innocent victim are during the infamous chest defibrillator scene), it is indeed futile to guess who’s who (or what) for much of the runtime. But this disorientation feels purposeful. Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster want us to move beyond this guessing-game approach, I think, and consider an even more unsettling possibility: who did what when has become convoluted to the point of inconsequence, and the only solution may be self-annihilation, which is precisely the course of action taken. To broaden the conversation, evil is far too complicated a concept to be easily attributed to one identifiable culprit, and the fact that the alien doesn’t seem to have an original form (we only see it being other organisms) implies that it is not exterior to the objects it replicates but, rather, somehow built into their very nature; it couldn’t exist without us. The group of men, after all, constitute a microcosmic society, and most rational humans understand that the evil in society (that is to say, in us) cannot be eradicated by eliminating a single entity.
While the Jody Domingre Gang members’ fake names indicate this theme of unknowability in The Hateful Eight, even more revealing is that the characters who come closest to what you might call the “heroes” turn out to be far from morally upright. At first glance, Ruth seems to be our protagonist, but his treatment of Daisy is so cruel (he punches her, tosses hot soup in her face, and eagerly awaits her hanging at Red Rock) that he earns little sympathy.2 Yes, Daisy is a ruthless criminal,3 but we get the sense that Ruth has chosen his profession for reasons besides ensuring “justice”: he seems to genuinely enjoy watching these executions for which he is partially responsible. Warren, a former slave and current bounty hunter, seems a good candidate for the hero role, but his past is fraught with questionable decisions. For example, his legendary escape from a Confederate prison during the Civil War resulted in many black inmates’ deaths (he set fire to the building in order to get away). One may argue that the only humane characters are those whose deaths precede the opening scene and are later revealed in flashback: Minnie Mink (Dana Gourrier), Sweet Dave (Gene Jones), and their workers at the haberdashery. However, even this example is given a shadow of doubt when Warren claims that Mink was prejudiced against Mexicans.
Warren’s character arc speaks to the other issue of self-knowledge. The crucial object associated with him is a supposed letter from Abraham Lincoln that he always keeps in his pocket. Eventually, we discover that this wartime correspondence is a hoax, the letter a forgery. It was, Warren admits, a ploy to help win himself over to white people (it’s partially why, one suspects, Ruth agrees to give him a ride to the store). Given Warren’s precarious (to say the least) position as an African American bounty hunter a few years after the Civil War, viewers can hardly blame him for this deception that grants him some safety. Yet Warren’s relationship with this lie goes beyond mere trickery; he seems to have invested in it so thoroughly that it has become a part of his identity, influencing how he interacts with others and views himself. When Daisy spits on the letter early in the film, his furious, violent reaction feels very real. During the aforementioned final scene, when Chris asks him to read the letter one last time, they both seem to take some solace from hearing “Lincoln’s” words before dying. He’s bought into his own lie, so to speak. The letter is not just a ticket to being on good terms with white people; it is, for this character, a source of genuine pride and calls into question his awareness of this delusion.
Self-deception proves even more complex in The Thing, largely due to the creature’s ambiguous effect on its victims. Unlike Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to which the film is occasionally compared, the creature does not duplicate/clone humans: it absorbs them entirely. The real humans are not stored away or hidden somewhere; they and the extraterrestrial simultaneously occupy the same body. What’s more, the human host is not all that different after having been “dominated.” They continue, for example, to speak and understand English, to know who they are, who the others are, what their relations are supposed to be with the others, and so on. It’s almost as if some trace of the original human must remain intact in order for the disguise to work, which elicits some intriguing questions that, to my knowledge, are largely missing in discussions of this film: Does the occupied human even know that he4 is infected? If not, is it possible that when he protests his innocence, he is in fact being honest insomuch as he genuinely does not know who he is? Are you lying about yourself if you think the lie is true? Is such a lie one of deception or ignorance? These ambiguities intensify an already bleak ending, for they open up the possibility that MacReady and Childs are not only both the thing (and that their efforts to destroy the facility are therefore pointless) but also totally oblivious to what they are.
The Thing and The Hateful Eight’s analogous narratives speak to broader philosophical notions of selfhood and knowledge of others. Their thematic undercurrents explore the forever-complicated terrain of what it means to truly know another, to truly know oneself, and whether such understandings are even possible. Neither film answers these questions because they are, of course, ultimately unanswerable and subjective. The characters’ attempts to find objective answers only ensure their demise.
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Note: Pippin’s Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form (University of Chicago Press, 2019) inspired this article, specifically the author’s discussion of “unknowingness.” All images are screenshots from the films being discussed.
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Work Cited
Ebert, Roger. “The Thing.” 01 Jan. 1982, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-thing-1982. Accessed 11 Apr. 2020.
- Jody, played by Channing Tatum, the gang’s leader and Daisy’s brother, has been hiding in the store’s basement the whole time; similarly, Carpenter’s alien has been building a getaway ship underground (not to mention that it was discovered buried under ice in the first place). It’s interesting that in both cases the evil is literally plotting its attack beneath everyone’s feet. [↩]
- Ruth’s death is the closest Tarantino comes to embracing full-on horror. In a gory scene that would have felt right at home in The Thing, he repeatedly projectile-vomits blood after drinking poisoned coffee. [↩]
- Although we can infer she has robbed and murdered, it is worth noting that Daisy’s exact crimes are never explicitly outlined, an admittedly manipulative gesture on Tarantino’s part to perhaps make her slightly less abhorrent. [↩]
- “He” is a key word here, for all of the characters in The Thing are male (besides, of course, the female-voiced computer chess game that MacReady destroys). The Hateful Eight is similarly male-centric, besides Daisy, for most of its duration. Though there are secondary female characters (most notably Minnie), they are only shown in flashback and are defined mostly by their absence. The female presence in both films is belittled and called a “bitch.” While it would be ridiculous to suggest that Daisy is Tarantino’s version of the computer game, each narrative clearly has something to say about masculinity, a topic ripe for further exploration. [↩]