The Thing (Really unexciting name for a horrifying monster)

For my first paper I chose to write about the 1982 movie "The Thing". There are a lot of reasons that The Thing is such a creepy monster, but the main reason is something that is very comparable to the one of Cohen's main ideas which is that the monster dwells at the gates of difference.

For those of you that are not familiar with the thing, its most disturbing characteristic is that it could be anyone around you, close friends and colleagues included. This monster has the ability to absorb living things into itself in order to mimic them. It will match the physical characteristics of whatever it absorbs perfectly and it will even match the sound of their voice. This becomes a problem because once you know that it is near and what it can do, nobody can be trusted because anybody could be the thing.

That is what brings me to my main point about the thing dwelling at the gates of difference. The thing is a manifestation of distrust. When it could be anybody, nobody is free of suspect. The reason that difference is the problem here (even though the thing is ironically completely similar to its victims) is that differences are a thing to be feared as a human being. Human beings are not all identical, they do not look the same, they do not think the same, and they do not act the same. Those last two points are important because that is why differences are a thing to be feared among humans, we just can't know what others are thinking or what they are going to do. When you are looking for the thing, you have to examine each individual present and decide whether or not their differences are the normal, acceptable kind, or the abnormal monstrous kind. You can not know whether someone is acting the way they are because they are terrified or if it is because they have been replaced.

The thing is a representation of how humanity treats differences. We think of those that behave similarly to ourselves as normal and harmless, but those with differences are abnormal and not to be trusted. That is how the thing dwells at the gates of difference, it sits at the edge of the psyche and makes the little differences between people deadly.