ABSTRACT
John Carpenter’s classic, science-fiction horror film The Thing offers a significant test case for examining the slippery interrelationship between gendered bodies and genre (and geographic) borders. Although set in an outpost in Antarctica, Anderson argues that the film’s frontier plotlines (and its literal film locations) make it an unsettled and unsettling western that dramatizes the confrontation between the unrealities of American masculinity and the proving ground of the post-west. The film’s monster—an alien lifeform that can perfectly imitate all other lifeforms—mimics the assimilations and imitations of American masculinity and the American West, both of which rely upon the “authenticity tests” of the settler state that seeks to legitimize white, Euro-American occupation of Indigenous lands by delegitimizing and replacing Indigeneity. Through its grotesque, illegible “thingyness,” its uncanny ability to mimic, to assimilate, and to lay dormant rather than die out, the film’s shapeshifting monster manifests much of the unspeakable, invisible horrors and contradictions of settler American masculinity, in which some of the worst of what it means to “be a man” often remains hidden in plain sight. By reading the film as a displaced and relocated western—a thoroughly “weird western” that assimilates and is assimilated by other genres—Anderson contends that the hidden horrors and contradictions of the American West are laid bare in The Thing, a film with a monster that unsettles settler masculinities and perhaps even the structures of settler colonialism itself.
