In John Carpenter’s version of The Thing (1982), there is, as Philip Brophy has pointed out, one particularly telling line uttered during the course of one particularly telling and spectacular scene.1 The Thing concerns an alien that first invades and then imitates both human and animal forms. It has infiltrated the base camp – and the crew – of a scientific observation post in Antarctica. At one point, in the guise of the body of an ailing crew member, it tears off the hands of the doctor who attempts to revive him; then, awakened, sprouts all manner of tentacles and limbs through the muscles and flesh of its host. It is shot down in flames. But one of its tentacles latches on to the crew member’s head, which is now lying under the table:
the tentacle lashes out of the head onto a door, and drags itself on its side. Just as it reaches the doorway, the crew see it and are transfixed by it. The head slowly turns upside down and, suddenly, eight insect-like legs rip through the head using it like a body. The sight is of an upside-down severed human head out of which have grown insect feet. As it ‘walks’ out the door, a crew member says the line of the film: ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding!’2
As Brophy goes on to show, the significance of this line lies in its twofold status. It is on the one hand a narrative event: a fictional remark made by a fictional character about a specific, fictional entity. As such it is a sign of the character’s astonishment, an acknowledgement of what is for him the reality of the creature and its powers. On the other hand, it is what one might call both a ‘textual’ and an ‘institutional’ event: a remark addressed to the spectator by the film, and by the cinematic apparatus, about the nature of its special effects. As such it is the sign of a number of things. It is a sign that the film is, at this point at least, ‘violently selfconscious’ (to use Brophy’s words):3 it is aware that the Thing (and the world it inhabits) are cinematic fabrications, the product, in particular, of an up-to-date regime of special effects; it is aware that the powers of this regime have here been stretched to their limit; and it displays both those powers – and that awareness – to the full. It is a sign also of an awareness on the part of the spectator (an awareness often marked at this point by laughter): the spectator knows that the Thing is a fiction, a collocation of special effects; and the spectator now knows that the film knows too.
Despite this awareness, the special effects have had an effect. The spectator has been, like the fictional character, astonished and horrified. An effect of this kind is fundamental to science fiction in the cinema. So too, though, is the awareness. In fact, as I shall go on to argue, the effect and the awareness are interdependent. Indeed, one of the keys to understanding the attraction, the pleasure, the lure of science fiction lies precisely in the intricate intercalation of different forms, kinds and layers of knowledge, belief and judgement that a line like the one from The Thing, together with the effect it accompanies, serves both to correlate and mark. In order to identify a little more precisely the nature and function of these forms, kinds and layers, it is necessary to say something about narrative fiction and genre, about cinema and the nature of its images and sounds, and about the status and role of its special effects.
All narratives involve the representation of events and their agents. The primary purpose of these agents and events is to provide links in a narrative chain (a plot) on the one hand, and to occasion a range of aesthetic effects (like suspense, surprise and pathos) on the other. Narrative events and their agents are understood and adjudged on the basis of a variety of types of knowledge, and in accordance with a variety of different criteria. This knowledge and these criteria can either be internal and overt or external and implicit. Thus on the one hand the narrative can have its characters comment on one another, on the world they inhabit, and on the events that they encounter, thereby providing the spectator with an array of explicit information and judgements. Alternatively, it can rely on the spectator’s own knowledge and values, appealing implicitly to information and criteria of judgement it presumes it shares with its audience. Most narratives in most genres in the cinema involve both kinds of knowledge and judgement. Thus, for example, two of the members of the crew in The Thing are called doctors, but the film does not at any point explain what a doctor is or does. It assumes we will know. However, soon after the Thing’s first transformation on the base, one of the doctors performs an autopsy on its partially incinerated body. He is needed to provide both spectator and crew with the kind of information that the narrative cannot presume. He says:
‘You see what we’re talking about: here is an organism that imitates other life forms. And it imitates them perfectly. When this thing attacked our dogs it tried to digest them, absorb them, and in the process shape its own self to imitate them.’
This information is treated as authoritiative, in part because it is delivered, precisely, by an expert, and in part because it remains uncontested: it is the only explanation we are offered. However, a little later in the film there is both speculation and dispute. Two members of the crew are sent out onto the ice to investigate what looks like the remains of some kind of spaceship:
– ‘Jesus, how long you figure this has been in the ice?’
– ‘I’d say the ice this is buried in is a hundred thousand years old. At least.’
They return to base. The helicopter pilot, MacReady, explains what he thinks might have happened; and crewmen Childs and Palmer comment on what he says:
– ‘I don’t know. Thousands of years ago it crashes and this thing gets thrown out, or crawls out, and it ends up freezing in the ice.’
– ‘I just can’t believe any of this voodoo bullshit.’
– ‘Happens all the time, man. They’re falling out of the sky like flies. Government knows all about it. Right, Mac?’
– ‘You believe any of this voodoo bullshit, Blair?’
– ‘Childs, Childs. Chariots of the gods, man.’
In line with Colin MacCabe’s argument that in conventional narrative films (or what he calls ‘classic realist texts’) the truthful view is the view confirmed by the camera, by what we ourselves see, it is significant that we tend here to accept MacReady’s account.4 We do so not only because it is the only coherent account we are given but because all Childs offers is doubt, though this is important. Nor do we do so only because MacReady is played by the star of the film, Kurt Russell, though this is important too. We do so primarily because we have been shown MacReady actually looking at the spaceship’s remains, and because we have been shown, in a pre-credit sequence, the spaceship crash. Thus this particular conversation, and the judgement it involves, is significant for what it can tell us about the articulation and acquisition of knowledge in any kind of narrative film. It is significant also, though, for what it can tell us about the nature and function of knowledge in science fiction in particular.
All fiction to some extent involves what has traditionally been called ‘suspension of disbelief’, by virtue of the fact that its agents and events are, by definition, unreal. In actual fact, while disbelief may well be involved, it is often knowledge and judgement that the spectator is required to suspend, as Ben Brewster has pointed out.5 Thus in Vincent Minnelli’s film, The Cobweb (1955), we have no choice but to accept the judgement of the film and of a number of the characters that the designs for a new set of curtains show artistic promise and skill, whether or not we may personally like them.6 Similarly, we have no choice but to accept that the unconventional behaviour of many of the film’s characters is due to neurosis, whether or not we have any precise knowledge of mental states and conditions, and whether or not we agree with the way they are portrayed and explained in the film. In The Thing, we have no choice but to accept the doctor’s explanation that the Thing can absorb and imitate other life forms, and MacReady’s thesis that it came from outer space, crashing to Earth in a spaceship. However, while The Cobweb is a contemporary drama, The Thing is science fiction. The cultural status of the events and narrative agents involved in the two films are therefore distinct. While they are in both films equally unreal, spaceships and shape-changing aliens – unlike curtains, neurotically inspired artistic talent and mentally disturbed behaviour – are conventionally adjudged in our culture as also inherently improbable.7
It is in this context that the conversation between Childs, MacReady and Palmer is particularly significant. For what is at stake here is precisely the improbability, not only of the film’s own events, but of the reasons it gives for their occurrence. Childs’s scepticism is especially important. For it articulates a position of doubt, a refusal to suspend disbelief, that is shown to be mistaken. But Palmer’s ready acceptance of MacReady’s explanation is also important. If Childs is sceptical, Palmer is naive (and slightly deranged). His enthusiastic evocation of the ‘Chariots of the gods’ is thus merely the equally unacceptable obverse of Childs’s dismissive evocation of voodoo. MacReady’s position, based as it is on direct observation and a coherent assessment of the facts – not on a refusal to face those facts, or on an acceptance of them only because they fit neatly into a pre-existing framework of irrational beliefs – emerges, therefore, by contrast, as all the more balanced, all the more credible, all the more convincing; all the more probable.
Like MacReady, The Thing is here engaged in a process of persuasion. Major aspects of its fictional world are, from a general cultural point of view, not only unlikely or impossible, but also, therefore, unknowable in advance and thus in need of explanation. The film is therefore involved both in establishing its own credibility, and in establishing its own regime of credence – the rules, the norms and the laws by which its events and agents can be under-stood and adjudged. What is probable or possible in this world? How does it operate? What is regarded within it as unusual, unlikely, inexplicable? How do we know when the explanations we are offered for the events that occur are right or wrong? And so on.
Such a process is of course very common in science fiction (as it is in other genres, like the horror film, which involve the depiction of improbable or ‘marvellous’ events). Common also is the twofold nature of this process, one in which exposition, explanation and the establishment of internal norms are coincident with the negotiation of a position of credibility – and the acknowledgement of positions of incredulity and doubt. Thus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Roy Neary tries to explain to his wife what it is that he has witnessed. ‘You’re not going to believe what I saw’, he says. And in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Elizabeth Driscoll and others try to explain to a sceptical David Kibner that human beings are somehow being copied. ‘Don’t you think we know how insane this sounds?’, she says. ‘But what do you think we’re doing? Do you think we’re making it up?’
One of the reasons why we know that Elizabeth and the others are not ‘making it up’, one of the reasons why we, at least, believe what Roy has to say, is that, as in The Thing, we ourselves have seen what it is that is being referred to, what it is that is being explained. Inasmuch as this is the case, the processes and issues of judgement and belief are ultimately focused – and founded – on what it is we see, and hence ultimately also on the cinematic image and its powers.
In his essay ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, the film theorist Christian Metz has addressed in general terms the nature and the powers of the cinematic image – and cinematic sound – and the extent to which they involve, and depend on, specific regimes and structures of knowledge and belief.8 Metz points out that the cinema is in many ways ‘more perceptual’ than other arts like music, literature, sculpture, painting and photography. It involves both vision and audition, and it involves the representation, in detail, of sound, of speech, of objects in space, and of movement and temporal progression. However, this ‘numerical superiority’ disappears when cinema is com-pared to arts like opera and theatre. For opera and theatre, too, involve several axes of perception, and are possessed of similar representational capacities.
Their difference from the cinema lies elsewhere: they do not consist of images, the perceptions they offer to the eye and the ear are inscribed in a true space (not a photographed one), the same as that occupied by the public during the performance; everything the audience hear and see is actively produced in their presence, by human beings or props which are themselves present.9
In the cinema, by contrast, ‘everything is recorded’,10 everything, therefore, is absent:
Thus the cinema, ‘more perceptual’ than certain arts according to the list of its sensory registers, is also ‘less perceptual’ than others once the status of these perceptions is envisaged rather than their number of diversity; for its perceptions are all in a sense ‘false’. Or rather, the activity of perception it involves is real (the cinema is not a phantasy), but the perceived is not really the object, it is its shade, its phantom, its double, its replica in a new kind of mirror. It will be said that literature, after all, is itself only made of replicas (written words, presenting absent objects). But at least it does not present them to us with all the really perceived detail that the screen does … The unique position of the cinema lies in this dual character of its signifier: unaccustomed perceptual wealth, but at the same time stamped with unreality to an unusual degree, and from the very outset.11
In the cinema, therefore, a dual and contradictory status is accorded its images and sounds. These images and sounds thus incrementally redouble the already contradictory status of any fiction they may be used to present: ‘In the cinema it is not just the fictional signified, if there is one, that is thus made present in the mode of absence, it is from the outset the signifier.’12
Inasmuch as this is the case, the ‘suspension of disbelief’ required by any fiction – or more accurately, the suspension of judgement, on the one hand, coupled with a splitting or division of knowledge on the other (as can be encapsulated in a formula like ‘I know this is fictional, unreal, but will nevertheless treat it as worthy of judgement, and therefore as worthy of credence’) – is given, in the cinema, an additional twist (‘I know that what is presented by means of these images and sounds is not really there, but nevertheless…’). Yet further twists are added when it comes to a genre like science fiction, which by definition deals, as we have seen, with the unlikely, and hence the unbelievable; and when it comes to the mobilisation, in cinematic science fiction, of a regime of special effects, of specially fabricated images and sounds, both to present and to authenticate its events, its agents and its settings.
Metz has discussed special effects in the cinema in ‘Trucage and the Film’.13 He points out that ‘trucages’ in the cinema are of various kinds, and can operate in a variety of different ways at a variety of distinct and different levels. Some, like the effects involved in fades and dissolves, are meant to be perceived. Others, like the use of stuntmen and stand-ins, are not. Some, like back projection, are involved at the point of filming. Others, like wipes, are not. Some, like the use of models and make-up, are primarily profilmic (effects produced in front of the camera, but without the aid of its own particular technological capabilities). Others, like slow-motion and mattes, depend either upon the specific capacities of the camera, or upon other cinematographic devices and processes. And so on. At the moment of viewing, as opposed to the moment of production, the spectator is engaged in a number of mental operations. In the case of ‘visible trucages’ ‘the spectator undertakes a type of spontaneous sorting out of the visible material of which the text is composed and ascribes only a portion of it to the diegesis [the fictional world]’.14 In the case of the majority of effects usually termed, and regarded, as ‘special effects’, by contrast (the use of mattes, make-up, back projection, models and the like), ‘the spectator ascribes to the diegesis the totality of the visual elements furnished him’.15 Metz goes on to argue:
In films of the fantastic, the impression of unreality is convincing only if the public has the feeling of partaking, not of some plausible illustration of a process obeying a nonhuman logic, but of a series of disquieting or ‘impossible’ events which nevertheless unfold before him in the guise of eventlike appearances.16
Thus here, once again, the spectator’s credibility is subject to division: ‘The spectator is not the victim of the machination to the point of being unaware that it exists, but he is not sufficiently conscious of it for it to lose its impact.’17
With this particular combination of forms of awareness and ‘impact’, we are back again at the point in The Thing at which the character utters his self-reflexive line. Here it is worth stressing, once more, the element of display the line involves. As Metz himself points out, while there is always a degree of duplicity, of secrecy, of the hidden attached to the use of special effects, there is always also ‘something which flaunts itself’.18 This flaunting both caters to – and counters – the spectator’s awareness, while ensuring at the same time that cinema will take the credit for the impact. Either way, cinema gains. It is worth also stressing that, of course, both the impact itself, and hence the particular – and delicate – balance between impact and awareness, is always relative both to the capacities of cinema’s special effects regimes as they exist at any point in time, and to the amount of capital expended on effects in production. As has already been pointed out, The Thing is concerned, among other things, not only to display the latest special effects, but also to display an awareness that they are the latest. It is also concerned, like other, often cheaper, science fiction and horror films to build in an element of camp, a tongue-in-cheek knowingness. This element is designed to protect the spectator (and hence the film) both from disappointment, should the effects fail to convince, or should their convincingness serve merely to highlight the improbable nature of that which they are used to represent; and also from genuine trauma, should the effects and what they represent be taken too seriously.
Metz draws on the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal, and on its model of the fetish, to pinpoint the nature of the divisions of knowledge and belief that the cinema, its fictions, and its special effects all, in their various ways, involve. Just as the fetish both avows and disavows an absence, a lack (the lack, for the fetishist proper, of the phallus wished for in the object of sexual desire), so the fictional representation, the cinematic image, and the special effect both avow and disavow something that does not actually exist.19 Although, as a clinical perversion, fetishism is a specific psychic formation (and practice), it is, like all perversions, only a particular response to a universal human experience (in this case the experience of castration of insufficiency, loss and lack); only a particularised extension of a universal disavowal (the disavowal of the lack of the phallus the mark of power and selfsufficiency initially imagined as belonging to the mother). It thus provides a paradigm for
all the splittings of belief which man will henceforth be capable of in the most varied domains, of all the infinitely complex unconscious and occasionally conscious interactions which he will allow himself between ‘believing’ and ‘not believing’ and which will on more than one occasion be of great assistance in resolving (or denying) delicate problems.20
Inasmuch as the institution of the cinema is one of the ‘domains’ to which Metz goes on to refer, a thesis such as this accounts both for the spectator’s general capacity to believe (and at the same time to know), and for the extent to which that capacity can be exercised, multiplied, doubled and redoubled in a genre like science fiction. It accounts, too, for the extent to which knowledge and belief are foregrounded – highlighted as issues – in science fiction films, the extent to which, for instance, as we have seen, the characters themselves have often to suspend disbelief, have often to undergo a process of learning, have often to revise the habitual basis of the judgements that they make. What it cannot do, though, is predict how any one individual film will draw on this capacity and deal with these issues. As a final comment, it is perhaps worth suggesting in this context that the more interesting films will be those which work not, like E.T. (1982), simply to affirm belief (and the cinema’s capacity to feed it), but those which, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (in particular the 1956 version), work instead to link habitual perceptions, assumptions and judgements to issues and forms of social conformity – and in the process offer a challenge to both.
Notes