Paranoia: MacReady's Tape Recording Scene

                                                                 

Paranoia and MacReady’s Tape Recording Scene

                Fear is a human emotion that affects people to an extent unlike most other emotions. In comparison to feelings of joy, anxiety, elation and et cetera, fear does not fleet, and it is not unexpected. Fear is a recessive emotion that is drawn out by various, but generally static variables. For every individual, the stimuli that makes someone feel happy can be radically different from another person. What people describe as “good”, “depressing” or “stressful” are subjective, despite a few related factors present for every category. Fear is stimulated by a more ubiquitously accepted factors. Robin Wood describes horror, in its purest form, as “the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses,” meaning that it is much easier to find someone who gets frightened by the same things as someone else.

                However, this also means that people can expect fear more than they can other emotions. Fear acts as simultaneously a reaction to stimuli and a stimuli itself. A horrific element naturally causes stress, anxiety, and in many cases, a second level of fear. The fear of experiencing horror can be known as paranoia. In a horror film, horror and terror cannot be experienced for 90 straight minutes, so a director must use atmosphere, mood and suspense to build paranoia within the film. Paranoia stimulates intrigue into the audience experiencing it. In John Carpenter’s 1982 film, “The Thing”, one of the most horrific things about the eponymous creature is that it can “possess” people to an almost perfect degree; the people surrounding the monster can’t tell what or who the creature is by sight alone. In fact, for most of the movie, they don’t even know if the monster can possess multiple people at the same time or not. The fear of the monster come primarily from two characteristics:

1. It’s indistinguishable from others

2. It’s implacable

In a scene in the movie, J.R. MacReady, our protagonist played by Kurt Russell, stows away in his room, and records a tape diary to relay his potential last words. He leaves the door open, just in case he needs to escape, presumably. The scene is framed in a way to reflect to reflect the isolation and tension that MacReady is feeling due to the ever-looming presence of the monster. He states at the beginning of his message that he plans to hide the tape so his message may be found in case he, and everyone else, dies. He first mentions how the storm outside has hammered the facility for 48 hours and they are effectively trapped there. He stops recording for a second, takes a drink, and stares at a pair of torn long johns he picked up earlier. He gathers his thoughts and starts recording again. He talks about his inference about how the monster rips through clothes when it possesses someone. He then says this: “Nobody... nobody trusts anybody now, and we're all very tired...” After he says that, he stops recording, rewinds the tape, replays the line, and then rewinds again so he can tape over it. He finishes his recording by stating that “there's nothing more [he] can do, just wait”. He then signs off with his name, rank and outpost.

This scene encapsulates the paranoia the film generates on its protagonist and its audience correctly. The movie is technically filmed in an omniscient third-person point of view, but it barely uses it. For 90% of the movie, the camera focuses on the human characters, and most of the monster’s movement is unseen. Because of this, the audience is experiencing a viewpoint that is of a bystander who just isn’t harmed. The mysterious nature of the monster is discovered along with the characters. This also helps connect the audience to the characters and causes them to empathize with their feelings of paranoia.

Paranoia in our characters also allows them to reveal sides of their personality that would never be revealed under normal circumstances. In Freudian terms, fear can suppress a character’s superego, and allow their id to consume them (For another example, see the Doctor Who episode “Midnight”, which has a similar plot to the movie). In “The Thing”, MacReady is stoic and cool most of the time and seems to present himself as the alcoholic loner of the group. However, in this scene, he is shown to be visibly distraught and uncertain about what he is going through, and he is shown drinking to calm his own nerves. He is portrayed as any other person put in such a horrible situation. However, he also shows a level of intelligence and courage during his situation, since he’s recording and hiding his tape in order to keep anyone possessed by the monster from destroying the record.

A very interesting move that MacReady does is to record over his line “Nobody... nobody trusts anybody now, and we're all very tired...” There is no explicit reason as to why he would do that, but a possible reason is that, in the case someone found the tape, he would not want his own paranoia to escalate to the next group and allow everyone to kill themselves. Another possible reason is that he does this because he mistrusts himself with the information. He wants to trick himself into believing in his own teammates. It is never shown why he would do this.

                Works Cited

The Thing. Dir. John Carpenter. Perf. Kurt Russell and Keith David. Universal, 1982.

Wood, Robin. "The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s." American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. By Andrew Britton. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1979. 25-32. Print.

Davies, Russell T. "Midnight." Doctor Who. Dir. Alice Troughton. BBC. 14 June 2008. Television.