Polar Spectacle: Overwhelming Nature at the Limits

Polar Spectacle: Overwhelming

Nature at the Limits

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Research Masters 


in Cultural Analysis

Department of Arts and Culture University of Amsterdam

2018

Contents

Chapter One — The Thing & The Polar Imaginary: Page 11

Spectacle as Antarctic horror


Chapter Two — Runaway Climate Fiction: Page 35

Allegory and Derailed Ideology in Snowpiercer


Chapter Three — Save the Plastic Arctic: Page 56

Greenpeace, LEGO, and the Building Blocks of Petroculture

Conclusion Page 78

Works Cited Page 81

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank my supervisor, Jeff Diamanti, for tolerating my confusion, self-deprecation and despair throughout the process of writing; for essential words of support and encouragement at some of my darkest moments; for going beyond his role as supervisor to develop interests and intellectual communities beyond the thesis; and for my occasionally overlong sentences.

I also owe a great debt to Niall Martin, not only for the generosity and good will (=time and effort) that he showed towards everyone during (and beyond) the Research Seminar, but also more specifically for ‘thinking with’ my very unformed and messy ideas. Without his support, my thesis would still be a ‘mind-map’ of dissociated concepts that, now I think of it, looks an awful lot like the Thing.

Coming through at the eleventh hour, my mum also deserves a trophy for kindly proofreading my final drafts. Despite my insistence otherwise, she spent the better part of three days dutifully

rearranging commas, grappling with my obscure ideas and ironing out my repetitive turns of phrase — although, despite her wishes, my 258 uses of the words ‘spectacle’, ‘spectacular’,

‘spectacularity’ and ‘spectacularise’ remain un-paraphrased.

I would also still be sobbing hysterically into my laptop if it weren’t for Laura Pannekoek, whose very thorough and encouraging comments on my chapter drafts gave me the energy and confidence to finish this abomination.

Finally, though many of my friends gave me the emotional support and relief needed to keep my sanity throughout these months, it was Ana Mustafa who was the only classmate who I could comfortably talk these things through with. I owe her a huge debt for relaxing me many times during the otherwise deathly post-lunch hours at the library.

Illustrations

Introduction

Fig. x — Photograph from “Apocalypse Tourism?” (Orlinksy and Holland) Page 5

Chapter One The Thing (1982)

Fig. 1 — Burning Bennings-Thing as fetish Page 11

Figs. 2a-c — Kennel-sequence (MacReady; Dog-Thing; Other POVs) Pages 18-19 Figs. 3-4 — Kennel-sequence (Dog-Thing: partial framing; tentacular incorporation) Page 20

Fig. 5 — Kennel-sequence (escapes through ceiling) Page 21

Figs. 6a-c — Kennel-sequence (Dog-Thing transfixes Childs) Page 22 Figs. 6d-e — Kennel-sequence (Thing’s perspective; Child burns Dog-Thing) Page 23

Fig. 7 — Bennings-Thing Page 27

Figs. 8a-b — Benning’s-Thing’s POV Page 29

Chapter Two Snowpiercer (2013)

Figs. 9-10 — The shoe is on the other foot Page 39

Figs. 11a-c — Passenger sees oncoming avalanche; POV; derails train Pages 42-43

Figs. 12-13 — Derailment (from below; from above) Page 46

Figs. 14-15 — Derailment (extreme long shots) Page 47

Figs. 16a-c — Derailment (falling carriages) Pages 49-50 Fig. 17 — Derailment (engine’s final grind to a halt) Page 51

Chapter Three

“Everything is NOT Awesome”

Figs. 18-19 — Villainous Shell (drilling for Arctic oil; Lord Business turns oil baron) Page 59

Fig. 21 — Emmet and Wyldestyle from The Lego Movie (2014) drowning in oil Page 61 Fig. 22 — Oil floods towards Arctic shore, mirroring rising sea level Page 62

Fig. 23 — Polar bear escapes the oil flood Page 63

Agency Staff, The Mirror (source: WWF)

Fig. 24 — Polar bear clings to melting iceberg Page 63

“Everything is NOT Awesome”

Fig. 25 — Crude oil’s viscosity slowly erases LEGO’s brand identity Page 69

“State of the Arctic” (Greenpeace International)

Fig. 26 — Animated visualisation of gradual Arctic melt Page 71

The Thing (1982)

Introduction

Fig. x — “Sitting roughly 120 miles from the top of the world”

In truth, we actually still know very little about Antarctica and what could lie beneath the ice. What is happening here is what I call the El Dorado complex – the idea that unknown lands will be a treasure trove of resources.

(David MacDonald qtd. in “Oil and gas in Antarctica”)

Sea ice in the far north is melting, but rather than see this as a warning sign, Shell sees it as an opportunity to drill for more of the oil that caused the melt in the first place.

(Greenpeace 2)

A 2016 headline in Bloomberg Businessweek runs as follows: “Apocalypse Tourism? Cruising the Melting Arctic Ocean”. The piece recounts that summer’s first ever cruise through the Northwest Passage, for centuries only a mythical route sought by numerous, morbidly unsuccessful

explorations (Leane, Antarctica 61), and now only navigable because of the rapidly retreating sea ice caused by exponential global warming. “When the Crystal Serenity emerged free and clear”, the article recounts, “there were no accounts of scurvy or cannibalism, only tales of bingeing on

themed buffets and grumbles from shutterbugs about the Arctic’s monotonous landscape” (Orlinsky and Holland). The accompanying images portray white, ageing tourists basking in the Arctic rays, purchasing onboard jewellery, reading serenely in cabins overlooking dramatic seascapes (Fig. a), and being entertained by members of the indigenous communities whose previously isolated lands this burgeoning industry is now encroaching on.

This new phenomenon, and those described by the epigraphs above, briefly highlight the material stakes involved in this thesis’ focus on the representation of the Arctic and Antarctic in popular culture – their co-construction between fantasy and reality. Together, these examples evidence the enduring appeal of polar exploration (whether as luxury tourism or for oil-prospecting) expressed, moreover, in terms familiar from fiction. Describing “a build up in public perception that there are vast oil resources hidden in [the Antarctic]” (“Oil and gas”), the ‘El Dorado complex’ demonstrates in particular this mythic, quest-like attraction to the poles irrespective of scientific knowledge — the geological implausibility and consequently immense unprofitability of Antarctic drilling well-documented by MacDonald (268-9). Such imagery also betrays ideological

inheritances from imperial and mercantile projects to ‘unknown lands’, far-flung from the Western metropoles in which exotic fictions mystified and romanticised settings both tropical and polar — the predominant tropes of the latter described henceforth as a ‘polar imaginary’ (detailed in Chapter One, after Darryl Jones’ neologism). Just as fears of extreme polar conditions failed to dissuade the heroes of the Age of Exploration, these oil-prospectors and tourists seem instead drawn to the poles’ dangers, real and imagined. Moreover, like the opportunism of Shell’s crisis capitalism — drilling ‘for more of the oil that caused the melt’ permitting that drilling — the Northwest Passage tourists seem indifferent to the irony of their own journey: facilitated by runaway global CO2 emissions just like the ones belching from their 69,000-ton cruise ship. Ultimately, these material ‘feedback effects’ between ecological and human activity are therefore also subject to a different kind of feedback: the co-productive relationship between the physical poles and their representation in popular culture. However accurately representative, images of the poles greatly influence the fates of the real Arctic and Antarctic, and, by extension, the global environments on which their melt spells devastating effects.

For this reason, this thesis’ focus on ‘polar spectacle’ follows predominantly from its filmic objects’ unique intersections of polar aesthetics, popular culture and environment. Though predominantly literary in its origins, the polar imaginary is now most manifest in spectacular film, where strange creatures, uncanny evils and overwhelming forces of nature often threaten human protagonists and viewers. Understood as ‘spectacles’ in the broadest sense, such visual events imply both a certain exceptional status and also distance from a viewing subject — a normative and spatial separation from the banal and the here and now, mediated by a screen not unlike that distancing the Crystal Serenity’s passengers from the melting Arctic facing them. Considering such a dynamic as prevalent to a polar imaginary therefore raises questions of its suitability to

negotiating similar overwhelming forces of nature: climatic feedback effects. In other words, given that the Arctic and Antarctic are both the most extreme immediate receptors of anthropogenic global warming and subsequent accelerators of further climate change — through the loss of the ice albedo affect, melt-induced release of greenhouse gases (Emmett and Stuhltrager 33), sea level rise (Williams 184), and destabilised ocean currents (O’Hare 5; Tanya Lewis 12) — the polar imaginary poses unique challenges to thinking through the relation of human viewers to polar melt. But it also indicates strange coincidences between the mysterious and violent threats conceived through centuries of mythology and fiction — regurgitated in recent decades of spectacular cinema — and the unpredictable, protracted response to carbon emissions from these distant places. Ultimately, if polar fictions gravitate to the spectacular, then how does polar spectacle negotiate viewers’ imagined relations to distant melt, its political context, and the host of effects that it darkly threatens? To answer such a question, the political-aesthetic significance of ‘spectacle’ in this thesis remains open-ended – referring to the concept’s use in film formalism, political theory and visual culture.

On the one hand, the concept serves most broadly as a catch-all for describing popular cultural entertainment, particularly manifested as exceptional and eye-catching visuals. In film theory, both its description and implications are disputed, though generally imply excess: of expenditure

(Bordwell 107; Lavik 169), scale (Brown, “Spectacle/gender/history” 169), technical specialisation (Tomasovic 312; Bordwell, Staiger & Thompson qtd. in Brown, “Spectacle and Value” 54), as ‘the

antithesis of narrative’ (Darley qtd. in Wood 371) or a meaningless visuality — “‘communication for communication’s sake’ […] gratuitous display” (Brown, “Spectacle/gender/history” 159). As the objects of this thesis prove, film spectacle seems at once self-evident and yet heterogeneous in form, and, consequently, ambiguous in effect.

On the other hand, spectacle inevitably recalls Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, a polemical text epitomising both Franco-centric ‘anti-ocularcentrism’ most broadly — "a profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern era” (Jay, Downcast Eyes 14) — and also a wider, post-Frankfurt School suspicion of popular culture as a malevolent ‘culture

industry’ (Carducci 118). For Debord, ‘the spectacle’ “appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification” (par. 2). In this strict sense describing not images but “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” as false representations (par. 4), the term’s subsequently common use to describe visual form can imply little other than that form’s reproduction of the epistemic deficiencies and injustices of capitalism: “The spectacle is the acme of ideology” (par. 215). Subsequently, the concept’s diffusion to film studies and visual culture has arguably contributed to a generalised conflation of all ‘spectacular’ aesthetics with the logic of the commodity, and the reduction of their political effects to (revised accounts of) Marxist reification and alienation.

In the environmental humanities, in particular, the political-ecological significance of visually ‘spectacular’ forms is relatively under-theorised. TJ Demos’ recent book, Against the

Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today features scattershot applications of

‘spectacle’, broadly condemning “media spectacles” (52, 57), conflating the ‘spectacular’ with the “apocalyptic sublime” (32, 64), and muddling visual form with “happy Hollywood endings” (37). In the 2014 special issue of Public Culture on Visualising Environment, Robert Marzec is similarly quick to describe both an ‘age of the spectacle’ (238, 252), and also ‘spectacles’ as metonymical of a deceitful mass media (246, 247, 248). Even Rob Nixon, whose work elsewhere calls attention to “the slow, incremental environmental violence that is spectacle deficient” admits in that issue: “I don’t think we can renounce spectacle, even if we need to be alive to its limitations” (qtd. in Marzec and Carruth 291 294). Besides equating spectacular images with the image-relations of ‘the

spectacle’, these authors’ focus on the ostensible falsity of commodity-images — seeking “the lineaments of slow terror behind the façade of sudden spectacle” (Nixon 62) — constitutes a certain ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ that itself regurgitates the idealism against which Marxian critique emerged (Mitchell 173-4). Instead, this thesis does the opposite, taking the self-evidence of spectacular forms as its starting point for theorising not the invisible but hyper-visible

manifestations of polar environment as spectacle.

     Neither refuting Debord’s account nor taking for granted its wholesale applicability to visual form (nor environmental aesthetics), the following chapters depart from the insufficiency of spectacle either as a meta-language for commodity culture’s totality (and falseness), or as a blunt tool to condemn popular cultural forms. In fact, the vivid polar spectacles of my three objects are better understood not as false representations, but rather as performative of the settings they depict — particularly in their roles as imaginary limit-points for the agential and geographical complexities of climate change. Bringing the poles (and polar feedback effects) home, film’s negotiation of ‘here’ and ‘there’ in this way relates viewers to polar spectacle. Given that “the psychological distance of climate change” seems essential to influencing “concern” and “sustainable behaviour intentions” in science communication (Spence et al. 957), this broadest sense of connection to ecological calamity should not be understated. Therefore, spectacle’s effects on viewers can be understood as reorienting not only the exceptionality but also the relative proximity of polar catastrophe, spatialising in particular climate change’s relations between human and nonhuman, domestic and polar.

Chapter One begins by outlining the key tropes of the polar imaginary, within which The Thing (1982) typifies a canon of Arctic and Antarctic horror. Though climate change is absent from its narrative, its eponymous monster’s spectacular mutations provide its exceptional visuals. This transfixing ‘thing’ violently incorporates its human spectators, visualising a literal alienation between polar object and viewing subject that is also a dis-alienation, a fusion. The polar imaginary, visual ideology and spectacle combine in this object to alienate and successively dis-alienate viewers from polar environment. As with the wider narrative — that melting will release dangerous things — this consummate polar spectacle here articulates an ambivalent

subject-object relation in which the violence apparently threatening the viewer also questions that violence’s source: as with climate change, this is partly a monster of our own creation.

In Chapter Two, this analogical relation between viewing polar violence and climate change is made explicit by the political-ecological themes of ‘cli-fi’ film Snowpiercer (2012) — in which

backfired geoengineering has made the entire planet effectively polar. The film’s titular train seems straightforwardly allegorical for the vulnerability of humanity to a hostile ‘nature’ exacerbated by its own intervention, and the social stratification of the train itself a fairly blunt microcosm of class division. During the climax, an explosion on the train triggers an avalanche leading to its

derailment. Despite the narrative’s anti-spectacular critique, this overwhelming polar catastrophe shatters the spectator’s ideological separation from environment through a distinctly spectacular vernacular.

Finally, Greenpeace’s campaign video ‘Everything is NOT Awesome’ in Chapter Three brings the politics of climate change at the poles most explicitly into view – pushing for LEGO to end their partnership with petro-giants Shell, in the face of proposed Arctic drilling. Its concise miniaturisation of the pole, and its flooding by crude oil, vivifies certain correspondences between disparate

political-ecological concerns — while also inadvertently rehearsing the visual economy of petroleum culture that idolises and de-emphasises the oiliness of plastic. Its popular cultural rhetoric is also ambiguously a détournement, ‘culture jam’ or ‘cultural acupuncture’. Conjointly, the oppositions between spectacular and anti-spectacular, centre-periphery and environmentalism-petroculture become here most unstable.

Together, these objects demonstrate the capacities and blind-spots of ‘spectacle’ for describing coherent visual forms and their corollary political-ecological effects. Together with their various genres, settings and aesthetics, the forms and spectatorships described in these chapters are spectacular in ways that intersect uniquely with Arctic and Antarctic concerns. As polar spectacles, they test the limits of representing the dramatic collisions of human and nonhuman activity at the edges of the Earth.

1 — The Thing & The Polar

Imaginary: Spectacle as Antarctic

horror

Fig 1. — Burning Bennings-Thing as fetish

Spectators are linked only by a oneway relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another. The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness

(Debord par. 29)

maybe every part […] was a whole? Every little piece was an individual animal
 (MacReady, The Thing)

I don’t know the hell’s in there, but it’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is
 (Clark, The Thing)

The hypnotically grotesque sequences of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) provide the concrete film ‘spectacles’ of this first chapter. Like the threatening, abstract horror of Guy Debord’s spectacle as figured above, the eponymous, bodysnatching Antarctic monster unites what is separate, but unites only in its separateness. Seemingly grouping together a host of horrors both self-evident 1

and metaphorical, the Thing is consummately alienating and alienated. The vivid scenes in which it

For Mark Fisher, whose term ‘capitalist realism’ describes the high pessimism of the spectacle,

1

the Thing is a metaphor for capitalism: “a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact” (6).

erupts from the boundaries of the creatures it has assimilated provide the ‘spectacular’ thrills of this science fiction horror in genre terms, repelling and seducing viewers in gratuitous transfixion. As most typical of the ‘polar imaginary’ referred to throughout this thesis, these spectacles here describe the intersection of visual spectacle with polar environment. What then would it mean to understand this spectatorship as productive of viewers’ relations to distant polar melt?

To answer this, this chapter begins by outlining the key tropes of a ‘polar imaginary’, before analysing the graphic mutations in The Thing as uniquely polar spectacles. Situated within the tropes of polar fiction, the monster’s violent transgression of boundaries also embodies the Antarctic as itself an imaginative space, where subjects’ separation from their hostile environs is perpetually threatened — as both symbolic of and contiguous to its polar setting, the Thing’s excavation from the ice generates a violence that overwhelms its victims. Yet, the mode through which onscreen protagonists are distanced from one another, as well as from a viewer’s perceived ‘home place’ far from the pole, is here an ambivalent one. The monster alienates protagonists, sowing distrust: who is who? But it also violently dis-alienates them, physically intermingling their organic matter. It is both surrounded by and permeates the Antarctic space which it symbolises; it is somehow at once alien, animal and human; it is manifestly, radically plural and yet repeatedly defined (and destroyed) as one ‘Thing’; and its constituent parts act both as if autonomous and also vastly networked (as the main protagonist MacReady concisely suggests above). As polar spectacles, The Thing’s violent mutations are therefore doubly predisposed for spatial and intersubjective alienation, but are also in excess of that alienation. This is to say that spectacle serves here both to reproduce certain social and ecological logics — particularly apropos the Antarctic — and also to dramatise the latent possibility of their overcoming.

1.1 Polar Psychotopography, the Antarctic Gothic, and the Polar Imaginary

To consider the significance of spectacle set at the poles, I will first outline at some length the key features of speculative fictions set both in Antarctica and the Arctic. Mapping the correspondences

between both the Arctic and Antarctic’s discursive histories and their climatological significance reveals a particular set of compatibilities and incompatibilities for visualising the dynamics of climate change in its spatial, temporal and agential distribution. In this way, the historically defined discourses contributing to a ‘polar imaginary’ also reveal the gendered, colonial politics of vision implicated in speculative polar representation.

Though together producing a relatively heterogeneous set of narratives and related concepts, the fictions discussed by the authors below are overwhelmingly speculative adventure, fantasy and science fiction stories from the 19th and 20th centuries, with a tendency for narrating mystery and horror. Moreover, they present a surprisingly consistent set of tropes, many of which are

nevertheless broadly defined by a certain ambivalence. While far flung from their audiences’ implied perspectives, these fictional poles’ extreme otherness is held at a distance only unstably. Though eclipsed by Elizabeth Leane’s far more rigorous and extensive research on Antarctic fiction, it was Darryl Jones’ reading of Edgar Allan Poe that produced the term I will use for the broader aesthetics outlined below: the ‘polar imaginary’. Comparing the imaginative Antarctic setting of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Руm of Nantucket (1838) to the Northern ‘Ultima Thule’ in mythology and fiction, Jones justifies his “geographical inversion” by describing the similar

rhetorical functions of both polar settings (51), whose predominant features echo those outlined by Leane: twin portals to mythological underworlds (56), together “a limit-point of human speech and understanding beyond which is only silence and whiteness” (51). Yet, unlike Leane, Jones’ “Polar Imaginary often conflates the two poles, and sometimes regards them as aspects of the same thing, or as indistinguishable” (52); as figures for narrative, each setting projects its protagonists’ fears of a “ne plus ultra, the end of the world” (53), each equally suited to apocalyptic narratives.2

On the one hand, this has led to a specific 20th century tradition of apocalyptic science fiction, like The Thing, where ancient aliens, unearthed at one of the poles, threaten to eradicate all

Appropriately, the ‘Thing’ itself was transposed from the original Antarctic setting of Campbell’s

2

story to the Arctic in its first, 1951 film adaptation, shot — like its numerous successors— in North America.

human life. Despite the trend towards more “realistic”, exploration-themed fictions throughout the 3

19th century (Wijkmark 198), this glut of polar science fiction and horror film and television most explicitly references the kind of planetary mystery canonised by H.P. Lovecraft and his Antarctic 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness (Leane, “Locating”; Glasberg, “Viral” 209; Wijkmark 231) — itself symptomatic of a longstanding literary gravitation to the mythological, romanticising exploration accounts by recourse to the supernatural. 
4

On the other hand, this particular thread of polar alien invasion stories exemplifies not only the polar imaginary’s imaginary nature, but also its retention of exploration accounts’ colonialist

rhetoric: a preoccupation with difference and distance. As extremes of a nature defined against the particular culture of ‘civilised’ Euro-American perspectives, both poles were long conceived and described by explorers through what Hannah Eglinger describes as “typical imperialistic impetus” and “patriarchal chauvinism”; their “virgin snow and untrodden land” figured strongly as spaces of colonisation: “unknown blank spaces […] waiting to be discovered and mapped” (5). The gendering of polar landscape also conforms broadly to what feminist geographer Gillian Rose outlines of settler colonialist discourses surrounding feminised wilderness, through which ‘landscape’ is constructed as a “visual ideology” (87), conjointly inert and threatening. Paraphrasing Annette Kolodny, Rose explains such discourses’ ambivalent codings of landscape both as “objects of desire” and inciting “a fear of Mother Earth”: “Wild and threatening landscapes haunted Victorian Europe, and colonialists’ deep horror as well as their fascination with foreign lands can be understood through this” (106).

Where such gendered, colonial discourses intersect with polar mythology and anthropocentric hubris, both poles come to signify an ecology at once desirable (and exploitable) and also steeped

As indicative of a “twentieth-century tradition of Antarctic aliens hidden in the depths of the

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continent” (Antarctica 66), Leane mentions both the feature-length The X Files 1998 movie’s Antarctic alien virus, and the 2004 Alien vs. Predator, in which both of its titular ancient aliens are excavated at the South Pole. But, further reinforcing the interchangeable ‘polar imaginary’

hypothesis, apocalyptic Arctic alien parasites are also unearthed in Peter Høeg’s 1992 novel Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow and its 1997 film adaptation, the 1993 episode of The X Files, ‘Ice’, 2009’s explicitly global warming-themed The Thaw and, most recently, 2015 television series Fortitude (Donald).

More recently, while the 2018 television series The Terror, and the 2007 novel on which it is

4

based, recount Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition, their liberal use of horror mystify the pole’s natural threats as ambiguously supernatural (Kajganich).

in malign agency. Victoria Nelson, in her more theological account of the mythology driving polar fiction, characterises “the polar quest” in terms of a self-reflective quality, which she names ‘polar psychotopography’: “the way in which ‘inner psychic processes’ are projected onto ‘an exterior landscape’” (Nelson qtd. in Leane, Antarctica 55). Nevertheless, such broadly psychoanalytical terms naturalise these tropes as independent of discourse and history — also simplifying their discursive features, however fantastically-derived. For the purposes of this thesis, I therefore understand such tropes not as a-historically cosmological but as precisely ideological — the projection not of mere ‘psychic’ content, but rather as historically derived and particular in their effects.

That The Thing should fall neatly into this dynamic is unsurprising: extraterrestrials as constitutively ‘other’, and the poles as supremely ‘over there’, go hand in hand in their extreme distance and difference. Timothy Morton writes of the increasing insufficiency of ‘Nature’ to define ecology that since modernity, humans “saw the reflected, inverted image of their own age...always ‘over yonder’, alien and alienated” (An Ecological Thought 5). However, the poles’ increasing association with climate change increasingly figures them as uncannily inextricable from ‘us’ ‘here’. While this foreboding of dark sentience often seems to map contingent histories of colonisation elsewhere, the resultant polar imaginary also provides a neatly ambivalent schematic for climatic feedback effects: polar aliens and climate change both reflect (in)human horrors. Appropriately, situating The Thing as eco-trauma horror, Christopher Justice cites Dana Polan: "Polar alien invasion films offer visual representations of the trauma we’ve created. […] the horror is now 'part of us, caused by us'; we’re responsible for the monstrous” (214). Ironically or coincidentally,

speculative polar fiction’s abandonment of verisimilitude produces narratives highly compatible with the poles’ actual ambivalent status as loci of warming — both anthropogenic and, at least, partly nonhuman. Like the poles themselves, we are both victims to and agents of the climate crisis. If the above features typify narratives within a polar imaginary, Antarctic settings in particular amplify the self-reflexive, disturbing and uncanny aspects of polar fiction. Dedicating an entire monograph to tracing the aesthetics of precisely Antarctic fiction, Leane emphasises “a

the underside of the world, casting the continent as a repository for both humanity’s deepest fears and its hidden, forbidden desires” (Leane, Antarctica 54-5). Nuancing Victoria Nelson’s trans-polar and broadly psychoanalytic reading of polar mythology, Leane traces the features of a specifically ‘Antarctic Gothic’. Most broadly, Leane writes, “Polar mythology, with its whirlpools and abysses, dovetails readily into the gothic concern with fearful, dark spaces”, but it is Antarctica’s later discovery and mythical saturation with monstrously feminine “vortexes” and “polar holes”, corresponding also to its actual geophysical instability, that instil its coding as both

psychoanalytically attractive/repulsive and more specifically, ‘abject’ (58-9). “The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I” (Kristeva 1), and "Antarctica’s extreme mutability” therefore provides fertile ground for “tales that explore the instability of the

subject” (Leane, Antarctica 58). Gothic Antarctic images displace colonial optics onto unpopulated, superlatively imaginative landscapes unstably separated from their viewers — the visual excesses of distant South Polar spectacles threatening to spill over into the here and now.

1.2 The Thing as horrific polar spectacle: separation, imbrication and visual excess


“For Campbell, as for Lovecraft, Leahy, Poe and Coleridge before him, the Antarctic represented more than a conveniently large blank space on the map, and more than just a generically hostile setting: it signified instead an instability at the margins of the subject and the margins of the world”

(Leane, Antarctica 79)

As Leane makes clear, the historically specific emergence of the above tropes, through gendered and colonial logics, means that polar fictions thematise ambivalence and transgression, laying the ground for stories and images in which horror and desire are two sides of the same coin, and subjects, objects and their environments are held apart only tenuously. Long figured at the edge of human geography, consciousness and history, the cosmic horror and apocalyptic scale associated with polar settings provide fertile ground for spectacle's testing of limits. However coincidentally, polar spectacle is therefore also schematically predisposed to ‘revenge of nature’ narratives that

thematise the runaway feedback effects of polar melt — an anthropogenic thawing that triggers a devastating ecological response.

As much as John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) fits neatly into the ‘traditions’, ‘imaginaries’, histories and tropes outlined above, it also provides decidedly visual spectacles. Unlike Christian Nyby’s 1951 film adaptation of John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? — which articulates decidedly cold war tensions, transposes the location to the Arctic and presents the ‘Thing’ as a man in a suit — Carpenter’s film sticks fairly close to the text, and relishes making Campbell’s Antarctic monster grotesquely vivid.

Consequently, this section’s analysis of The Thing focuses on its particularly visual, spectacular qualities — with particular attention to how such form intersects with the narrative features of a polar imaginary, and also with historically contingent modes of viewing and visualising

environment: ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’ and landscape.


For this reason, I here provide a brief synopsis. The film’s events take place almost exclusively at an American research station in Antarctica. The titular, shapeshifting alien ‘Thing’ arrives at this base in the guise of a sled dog, having already infiltrated and almost entirely decimated a

Norwegian research station elsewhere on the continent. The Norwegian team (the Americans later find) had discovered an alien spacecraft buried in the snow, and unearthed the creature from the nearby ice. Initially unaware of this, the (all-male) American team inadvertently allow the Thing in dog form to, one by one, kill and ‘assimilate’ its members, realising too late that some unknown individuals are really aliens in human form. Overwhelmingly shot in fairly typical, Hollywood continuity style, the vast majority of the film is made up of relatively long takes of dialogue within the base’s interior as the crew try to discover who’s who. Consequently, tension builds there

between the conversely grotesque spectacles during which various manifestations of the Thing are discovered and suddenly burst from the confines of their hosts, attempting to kill and assimilate the remaining human team members. Unlike the fairly balanced realism and intrigue of the rest of the film, these scenes revolve around rapid cuts between carefully framed shots of the mutating Thing — an enduringly repulsive collection of practical effects designed by the now legendary Rob Bottin, in which rubber, animatronics and writhing masses of tentacles and goo disintegrate and

reintegrate into the malformed body parts of humans and dogs, insectoid legs and often

featureless protrusions and recesses or teeth and eyes. Ultimately, the plot is both claustrophobic and apocalyptic in scale, as the team members realise that if the Thing were to reach civilisation, it would wipe out all life on earth.

Fig. 2a — MacReady [first eyeline match to Dog-Thing]

Fig. 2b — Dog-Thing

In this way, while the plot has nothing to do with climate change (other than by inadvertently symbolising the apocalyptic potential of polar melt), the film nevertheless visualises aspects of the polar imaginary, in which gothic and abject qualities intersect with the spectacular to make

Fig. 2c — Other POVs

As effectively the ur-scene for the film’s later mutations, an early sequence taking place in the base’s kennel demonstrates the visual characteristics of the Thing-as-spectacle. In essence the introduction of the Thing, this scene is Bottin’s initial flourish of special effects, during which both audience and protagonists first witness its grotesque visual potential: a drama of aggregation and disaggregation in which the distinction between subjects, objects and environments becomes porous. Having left the intruding dog (the Thing) in the kennels, the crew are alerted by the dog handler, Clark, that something is up, after he catches a glimpse of unusual movement from within the dark cage. Approaching well armed, the men close in on the kennel and shine a light through the cage to reveal an unsightly agglomeration of half-formed dog’s heads, claws, writhing, wiry protrusions and blood-soaked fur (Figs. 2a-c). In this perverse theatre of violently graphic enmeshing, it is impossible to make out distinct beings, surfaces or origins. Lit dimly and intermittently by torchlight, the creature’s tentacular incorporation of the half-dead sled dogs

surrounding it provides immediate justification for the men to begin firing at it (Figs. 3-4). Shot from various angles, the creature’s undefined mass is always only partially framed, escaping one

unifying view (Figs. 2b, 3, 5). Moreover, its own makeup is always incomprehensible — having no one head, nor mouth, nor skin, its surfaces continuously shift and reveal new eyes, new openings and teeth (Figs. 6a-c). Intercut with the gawping faces of the team, the Thing’s intra-diegetic visual power is literally stunning; as one member, Childs, approaches with a flamethrower, he is briefly

paralysed by the creature’s implausibly evolving surfaces as numerous eyes open from folds of flesh. Only when the creature’s skin suddenly tears apart and a toothed protrusion launches at the camera do we realise we are (temporarily) occupying Child’s point of view (Figs. 6c-d); embodying the Thing’s teeth, the camera suddenly flips 180 degrees and rapidly approaches Child’s paralysed face, before rapid cuts to his weapon end the sequence in flames, returning a safe distance

between viewer and Thing (Fig. 6e). As with later scenes, spectacle here defines the visual pleasures of a horror at the threshold of subjects and objects.

Fig. 3 — Dog-Thing: partial framing & torchlight

Fig. 5 — Perspective behind Dog-Thing: partially escapes through ceiling

As visual object, the Thing’s spectacularity broadly corresponds to film formalist accounts, in terms of exceptionality and difference. The film’s transformation scenes are self-evidently spectacles as “moments of ostentatious display that temporarily arrest the flow of narrative”
 (Brown, “Spectacle and Value” 51). In particular, the scene constitutes what Simon Lewis distinguishes as ‘object spectacle’: “a theatrical revelation akin to the drawing aside of a curtain” (219). Such techniques of emphasis also often reveal protagonists in highly gendered ways, perspective exaggerating the stature of their (masculinised) heroes or — as Laura Mulvey famously notes of spectacle — eroticising female protagonists in their ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (837). The Thing’s spectacular form models Debord’s critique, that the spectacle skews reality “solely as an object of contemplation” (par. 2) — the Thing’s exceptional visuality put on show.

Such a gendered perspective correlates with Martin Jay’s designation of the scopic regime of ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’. This ‘scopic regime’, in which disembodied, masculine voyeurism’s historical contingency is naturalised, renders its object as inert nature: “a reifying male look that turned its targets into stone” (Jay, “Scopic Regimes” 8). Like Rose’s historicisation of landscape, Jay describes how this regime “succeeded in becoming so because it best expressed the ‘natural’ experience of sight valorized by the scientific world view” (5). Conversely, the dog-Thing’s head roars directly at the camera, its teeth almost grasping the viewer (Figs. 2b, 6c). While the Thing is certainly to-be-looked-at, it also looks back (with many eyes) and its look is deadly.

Fig. 6a — Dog-Thing transfixes Childs

Fig. 6b — “

Its revelation also oscillates between gothic inscrutability and spectacular coherency. Fear in the gothic, as Judith Halberstam describes it, “emanates from a vertiginous excess of meaning”; “The monster” within the literary gothic “always becomes a primary focus of interpretation and its monstrosity seems available for any number of meanings” (2). Similarly, Leane notes that

Lovecraftian polar monsters — including Campbell’s Thing — “are creatures that are defined by their inability to be defined […] all can only gesture towards it in hyperbolic language, in a chain of endless deferral” (Leane, Antarctica 71). But Carpenter’s Thing instead answers gothic fear with visual excess. Unlike much of the horror genre’s leaving things to viewers’ imagination, Bottin’s spectacular, grotesque set-pieces provide the real Thing — its horrific qualities self-evident.

Fig. 6d — Dog-Thing transfixes Childs: cut to Thing’s perspective

In this sense, The Thing’s spectacles seem at once to sublimate the unconscious or uncanny aspects of the gothic Antarctic — fixing the deferral of meaning onto one Thing — and also to realise them as explosions of rapidly changing forms: visualising the unvisualisable. As Steffan Hantke writes of these scenes’ spectacular quality: “It is important to note that this is not Hitchcockian suspense, but rather moments of grand guignol, […] These scenes are all about spectacle, visibility, and the outer limits of what audiences are willing to watch” (116). Visual excess here functions materially as the exhibitory flourish of practical effects and psychologically just at the threshold of pleasure. The “ornamental excess” of gothic aesthetics here become gratuitous

(Halberstam 2), the surplus of meaning modulated into spectacular abjection — Bottin’s evolving models emphasising ruptured surfaces, spilling liquids and limbs. Yet, if the gruesomeness of such grand guignol is somehow psycho-sexual, this is not to draw a line under it as an a-historical psychoanalytical phenomenon. Ann McClintock’s account of ‘abjection’ describes this “process whereby an object is rejected, yet that object nonetheless haunts the subject as its inner

constitutive limit”, but emphasises its social genesis (qtd. in Henessey 50). As Rosemary Henessey puts it, the “unruly elements” of this "forbidden area in a culture's logic” are representative of an ideological separation of sex from history (50). Insofar as the Thing here (and in later, similar outbursts of graphic violence) constitutes the spectacular object, therefore, its object-ness defines an apparently natural transfixion (really ideological) through which mutability, abjection and

transgression form the visual drama that both repels and attracts spectators.

For Elizabeth Leane, these qualities make the Thing as it appears in Campbell’s novella a decidedly Antarctic figure. First reading the continent as itself monstrously feminine in its abjectness — “an unruly body that does not know its boundaries, swelling and shrinking like a pregnant woman” (59) — Leane describes of the Thing:


Just as the abject substance, blood, stands in metonymical and metaphorical relationship with the Thing (it is both part of the larger whole from which it is taken and a substitute for the whole), so the Thing stands in metonymical and metaphorical relationship with the continent. The Thing is contiguous with Antarctica (it was buried in the ice for 20 million

years) and also serves to symbolize Antarctica (it shares the same spatial characteristics). The alien is shapeless and shifting; the Antarctic, too, has no fixed shape or size, doubling its area from summer to winter, exceeding its own boundaries, constantly expelling

material, fracturing, melting and reforming. 
 (Leane, Antarctica 78)

While Campbell’s monster merely resembles the paradoxes and gendered mutability of the pole, these abject qualities appear in the image form of Carpenter’s Thing. Visualising this Antarctic gothic not as a mystery figure or stage for rehearsing polar fiction, Bottin’s models instead burst forth as vivid visual objects, indexing the polar space that they also resemble: the setting becomes a hostile protagonist. As if indicating this, in the kennel scene, part of the Thing seems to disappear into the ceiling (Fig. 5), to later burst from the floor and walls at the film’s climax. Carpenter’s Thing brings forth the horrors of the polar imaginary as a gratuitous visual onslaught, through which the Antarctic’s alienness becomes tangible.

Moreover, the fact that the Thing in Leane’s terms is both ‘contiguous with’ and symbolic of Antarctica gestures to a mutability in terms not just of form but also of proximity — a polar nature unstably relegated to the fringes of ecological thought. To the extent that the Thing’s spatial mutability symbolises a mythologised and even geophysical Antarctic, its relation to protagonists and viewers articulates a polar imaginary in ecological terms: it figures the pole over there in relation to viewers here. Citing cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, Leane expresses the transgressive power of the Thing’s abjection in psychotopographic terms: “the horror of the story occurs when the continent refuses to obey the boundaries that the men have established; when the ‘alien space’ of Antarctica, in the form of the ice-encased Thing, invades the sanctuary of the ‘homeplace’; when what should have remained outside is allowed inside” (Leane, Antarctica 78). In this sense, the abject is unsettling in spatial terms. Moreover, for Nelson, the Thing falls neatly into “the category of the Other who emerges from the Pole, the desert, under the sea, and all other regions of inner wilderness outside the realm of consciousness”; the horror of its repulsion is therefore a kind of death drive: "The pull we feel the Polar Spirit exerting on us to go to it is also our own desire for it

to come to us” (n.p.). The ‘realm’ to which this Antarctic monster is relegated is therefore both constitutively other to a conceived subject position and precisely threatens that category. Such graphically ambivalent alienness can be read most generously as ecological

interconnectedness portrayed through a spectacular idiom. Christopher Justice writes of polar horror that such films’ “nascent ecological sensitivities suggest an environmental occurrence in one location will impact another continents away. That complex systems are interdependent is an emerging, yet subordinate theme” (215). Writing specifically of The Thing, Justice argues that it presents “challenges to ecological ideologies” in narrating the interdependency of organisms (the monster’s parasitic nature) and the mutability and interrelation of factors within vast ecosystems (220-221). Carpenter’s visualisation of polar abjection therefore appears congruent with ecological thought, at least to the extent that it dramatises the dark ecological agency of feedback from human emissions. In any case, the spatial drama is the same: the human detritus dumped on the world’s peripheries returns, with a vengeance, to the centre.

In terms of relating subjects, objects and environments, these scenes are therefore spectacles not merely of alienation, but also of imbrication. Paraphrasing Leane’s reading of the particularly Antarctic monster, Justice’s analysis also corresponds to Morton’s dark ecological appraisal of the monster’s ‘ecopoetic’ aesthetics and visualisation of what he calls the ‘mesh’. Writing against the word ‘Nature’, Morton’s neologism instead describes radical ecological interconnection as a kind of post-poststructuralist linguistics: “all beings are related to each other negatively and differentially, in an open system without center or edge” (An Ecological Thought 41). Morton’s call for an aesthetics of interrelations without subjects or objects nevertheless lacks historical justification, and his

object-oriented ontology leans on an idealistic — even “dogmatic” — conception of inaccessible ecological truths (Hansen 392). Rather than merely gesturing to such ecological-aesthetic ideals, the visual and grammatical (dis)pleasures of such imbrication are better understood as socially-produced ‘abjects’ in McClintock’s terms: ideologically ‘unruly’ precisely as products of ecological alienation.

Along these lines, the Thing’s repulsiveness to the film’s protagonists makes some narrative sense in grammatical terms. “Torch it”, says MacReady to Childs — ‘it’, to the men, seems in some

sense to corral the multiplicity of the alien’s biological and ontological transgressions into a singular form. The internal and external shifting of the creature’s boundaries, its de-centred structure and confusion of distinctly identifiable beings, can no more be uttered than permitted to live. This process is not unlike what Karen Barad calls ‘thingification’ as a historical blindness to process and relationality: “The turning of relations into ‘things' ‘entities,' 'relata'—infects much of the way we understand the world and our relationship to it” (Barad 812); you can’t torch relata, but you can burn things. In at least one sense, then, the Thing’s spectacularity is a commodification of ecology, insofar as the complex (inter)relations that precede its naming as one ‘Thing’ are somehow

solidified into singular entities. In making imbrication tangible, Bottin’s Things are both visually excessive and also, like the word ‘Thing’, simplifications — the ideological stabilising of otherwise unstable ecology.

Fig. 7 — Bennings-Thing

More threateningly, the ‘Thing’ names an unstable separation from its hosts. It was common practice during production to describe various manifestations of the mutating, attacking Thing and also its completed human imitations using ‘-Thing’, for example: ‘Bennings-Thing’ or ‘Blair-Thing’ for those assimilated team members and the monsters bursting forth from their matter (Cohen). The name of whatever or whoever the monster has already assimilated ceases to be a noun in its own right and becomes a modifier for the dominant descriptor ‘Thing’ — already a “grammatically shapeless and protean noun”, like the shifting polar geography it represents (Glasberg, Antarctica

63). In this way, subjects lose grammatical cogency and instead themselves become mere relata — functions of an object itself extremely mutable.

This loss of stable subjecthood finds an audiovisual analogy during a later scene, in which the Thing is caught midway through assimilating a human protagonist, Bennings. This ‘Bennings-Thing’ is encircled by the remaining team members outside the base. Almost complete in its body-snatching, the replica is visible as such only once the camera slowly reveals its deformed,

elongated hands — at which point the Thing lets out a disturbing howl (Fig. 7). Morton writes of the film’s sound design that the protagonists’ “screams are indistinguishable from the Thing's slow yelping, which is never entirely distinct from the sound of a decelerated voice saying ‘I’” (Ecology Without Nature 182). Beyond emphasising the (non)human nature of the Thing, for Morton, this is 5

therefore the melancholic cry of the subject (‘I’) in the internally impossible statement “I am

immersed in nature” — an audible lament that traditional notions of the subject (as distinct from its environment, its constitutive others) are negated within the ‘mesh’ of interconnected ecology (182). Surviving the movie, on the contrary, means violently disavowing the human in the Thing. “It isn’t Bennings!” shouts MacReady, before setting the Bennings-Thing on fire.

What’s at stake in these scenes, as in the statement ‘I am immersed in nature’, is precisely the distinction between subject and environment that defines this thesis’ visual focus. As is easy to forget in Morton’s account, the ‘I’ as considered disembodied and distinct from ‘nature’ as

surroundings is a contingent discursive formation with particular ideological effects. If spectacle is understood to distance viewers from the objects of their vision, then a similar case could be made for its tendency to alienate subjects from environment. In this sense, it would also reproduce the disembodied, singular point of view rehearsed by Cartesian perspectivalism: alienation would therefore also describe an ecological and spatial separation. However, spectacle here doesn’t act alone. As outlined earlier, these distinctions between self-other and subject-environment are the

According to co-producer Stuart Cohen, the foley for this cry was a mixture of ‘nonhuman sounds’

5

and digitally synthesised versions of recorded human screams — elements of which were also used during other transformation scenes (Cohen). So, in this sense at least, Morton is not over-interpreting.

precise arena for the transgressions of gothic and body horror, amplified as they are by the discursive ambivalences of a polar imaginary.

Fig 8a. — Bennings-Thing’s POV: pans from right of encircling team-members…

Fig 8b. — Bennings-Thing’s POV: …to left

This violation of the subject-object distinction is visualised in such scenes, in which the Thing at once constitutes the spectacular object, and yet also refuses determination by and distinction from onlookers. The Thing’s repulsive attraction exceeds the gendered, colonial logic of disembodied looks. During the kennel scene, shots of the Thing at times seem to follow MacReady’s

perspective. However, this apparent eyeline match is made unclear by frequent cuts to different team members’ transfixed looks (Figs. 2a-c), to shots behind the Thing and otherwise cutting

diagonally across various angles (Figs. 3-5). In contradiction to the narrative coherency and narrow focalisation of classical continuity editing, here no single look captures the Thing as it is shown to the viewer. Later, during the above-described encircling, this unveiling of the howling Bennings-Thing — not quite human subject, not quite ‘thingified’ — cuts soon after to a reverse-shot from the Thing’s perspective, slowly panning around to capture each of the remaining team members, transfixed (Figs. 8a-b) — flipping the theatre of the spectacle by surveilling its

surveyors. Only from this impossible perspective (from the spectacular object itself) are the looks 6

of the protagonist-spectators visible in their alienation both from the Thing and from one another. If the spectacular dog-Thing elides capture by the hero’s look, the Bennings-Thing reflects these looks back in symmetry at precisely the moment when they are most impotent. This inverted spectacle visualises a gaze made up of alienated looks: each protagonist asserts his own self-distinction from the Thing in front of him, even as he suddenly realises the equivalence of his look to those made by other subjects, some of whom are really Things. The Bennings-Thing — part 7

human subject, part spectacular object, part polar landscape — is surrounded, but its surroundings are the subjects whose (disembodied) perspectives are now implausible. Their stability as subjects threatens to dissolve into interrelation.

To situate this inverted scene within a polar imaginary, the looks it corrals might be understood through polar psychotopography in visual-ideological terms. The ambivalent draw of the Things in these scenes corresponds on the one hand to what Gillian Rose describes as a gendered ‘way of seeing’ or ‘visual ideology’ that has historically produced nature as ‘landscapes’ distanced in relation to white, male viewers (Rose 86). But such visualisations also reflect a ‘fear of Mother Earth’: a “fear [that] also motivates the voyeuristic gaze which sustains a gap between the subject looking and what they see” (106). As would-be voyeurs, the protagonists encircling the Bennings-Thing are instead reflected in the object of their looks, reduced to mere placeholders for a desiring, fearing gaze whose visual-ideological production of landscape is caught in the act. In this sense,

Once on fire, the encircled Bennings-Thing seems to take the place of the fetish — Marx’s figure

6

for the commodity — in a ritual burning (Fig. 1).

In this way, the Thing’s alienation also alienates the crew from one another — the central

7

narrative tension in Campbell’s story. As Leane notes: “everyone is ‘under constant eyeing’” (Antarctica 77)

the scene narrates not merely the impossibility of the ‘I’ within the sentence ‘I am immersed in Nature’, but also the impossibility of the eye held apart from nature as inert landscape. Landscape is not out there waiting to be seen, but instead “a 'visual ideology’, because it uncritically shows only the relationship of the powerful to their environment” (Rose 87). In other words, the

objectification of nature facilitates its exploitation, its alienation from human viewers only visible through such an inversion.

The excavation of the Thing merely rehearses in spectacular exaggeration the anxieties inherently produced by the gendered separation of land from its colonisers: “this separation, together with the indifferent land’s refusal to be either Mother or Mistress, legitimated the

degradation of the landscape then and continues to destroy it now” (Rose 105). Environment as inert visual object is a specific function of historical land claims and resource extraction, and the resultant voyeur as overseer merely displaces the violence of exploitation onto landscape as always potentially monstrous nature. In psychotopographical terms, the Antarctic monster reflects the desiring gaze that sought it out; the horror of the inversion lies in upsetting the presumed separation of nature as inert visual phenomenon.

This discursive background also situates these spectacles’ narrative function — a rehearsal of imbrication and separation that both reproduces polar nature’s alienation and spectacularises its violent resistance. Although Christopher Justice’s reading highlights the potential in The Thing of narrating the dispersed violence of ecological crisis, I call this interpretation ‘generous’ because it equates the diegetic horror in horror film with affect offscreen. Inversely, Morton’s appraisal of the film as ‘ecopoetic’ presumes that its spectacles of imbrication model desirable realities (as if body horror were literally utopian). Both authors forget that, in The Thing, the monster — and the monstrous transgressions it poses — is both visually pleasurable and yet must, emphatically, be met with fire.

Ultimately, the ambivalence of the Thing as polar spectacle is that, on the one hand, it

reinforces the ideological rendering of the poles as distant and different. As literally alien, the Thing alienates the interrelation of the viewer, here, and the ecological object, over there. The films’ repeated scenes of intra-diagetic, horrified viewerships of monstrous polar things perform

exaggerated fantasies of separation between anthropocentric subject and ecological object, in which hostile natures threaten to invade the subject, but are satisfyingly contained — corralled into one place and then incinerated.

But, on the other hand, these stagings are only enjoyable — they only make sense as desirable forms of spectatorship — insofar as they threaten to rupture the separations that they repeatedly rehearse. The horror factor entertaining the film spectator rests precisely on the narrative tension between the satisfaction of a hostile polar nature kept at bay, and the possibility, and frequent, vivid realisation, of its overrunning the team — its spilling over the ontological gap separating man from thing and subject from environment.

It is this this ‘rehearsal’, the transgression of and restoration to norms, that typifies what Noel Carroll calls ‘ideological’ accounts of horror fiction as “rituals of inversion for mass society” that merely pose the horrific and its ultimate destruction as reproductive of ideology — that they reinforce the norms that make monsters monstrous to begin with (201). The transgressions posed by horror in this sense mirror the widespread “fantasies of liberation” account of ideology critiqued by James C. Scott (185). Such a position condemns popular forms of immaterial resistance as typifying “bread and circuses” or ‘carnival’ “rites of reversal” as ultimately repressive: “safety-valves to carry off the explosive elements” they seem to dramatise within the confines of ritualised fantasy (Scott 187, 185). To the extent that The Thing stages the successive alienation and imbrication between subjects and the (ecological) objects of their vision — as ‘rituals of inversion’ or

transgression — it might be understood as ultimately hegemonic, its horror only a temporary threat against which to reinstate the normative: Nature held against the detached viewer-subject. This may be at least partly true. But as Carroll notes of such critiques of horror as ultimately repressive, they can only account for narrative factors (201). Though The Thing’s grotesque spectacles

function respective of narrative, the effects of their visual excess (realising the abjection and abstraction of perspectives) are not reducible to that narrative: perhaps the ‘excess’ of the film’s spectacular appeal is precisely that its monstrous visuals have an effect beyond narrative — and beyond fiction.

Such accounts also overlooks spectacle’s confusion of escapism and the banal. Debord’s concept describes the false appearance of exceptionalism produced by ‘commodity spectacles’ as not a break from the real, but rather the very (inverted) essence of it: “reality erupts within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real” (Debord par. 8). As Mike Wayne writes of spectacle in horror film: “Media spectacles are thus not quite the ‘escapist’ rupture with the ordinary that they present themselves as, because the ordinary and everyday tissue of experience under capitalism is

already an escapist fantasy” (Wayne 203). Taking spectacle seriously, therefore, also means taking fantasy and fantastical horror seriously as both reproductive of (visual) ideology and therefore also a lens to its critique.

For polar spectacle to mean more than the always-already repressive reflection of ideology, its visual excesses must be accounted for. If, as in McClintock and Henessey’s view, abjection is a function of ideology, then the enjoining of subject and (polar) environment in The Thing is repulsive as such in response to the normative separation of viewers from polar landscapes and

wildernesses. Therefore, the thrills of corralling and being overtaken by Things reassert the ideologically acceptable limits to thinking subjecthood ecologically. But the entertaining, hyper-visual horror of The Thing also troubles the nature of this excess — it confuses pleasure with horror, and so what is at first experienced as transgressive seems more normative, and what is first experienced as restorative can be disappointing in the pleasure economy of its spectacular horror — each moment of grand guignol correspondingly more gruesome than the next.

These inversions and transgressions — here-there, self-other, subject-object — are the dramatic wellsprings of the polar imaginary. To the extent that The Thing imagines (and images) hostile Antarctic space in terms not uncommon in polar fiction (both preceding and following it), it articulates a polar imaginary haunted by the hellish possibility that distant, alien ecologies threaten the here and now. Through that imaginary, psychotopography and the gothic express separation and imbrication not only through carnivalesque spectacles that return viewers to the norm, but also as reflections of historical ambivalences. The violence that distant polar nature threatens to return to the centre has antecedents in the gendered anxieties of colonial rhetoric, and descendants in the feedback effects that follow from polar melt. Spectacle in The Thing therefore rehearses both

visual ideology and its excesses — a polar agency both human and nonhuman, whose spectacular, devastating effects will ultimately be seen as more than spectacles.

2 — Runaway Climate Fiction:

Allegory and Derailed Ideology in

Snowpiercer

This train is a closed ecosystem […] From time to time we’ve had to stir the pot, so to speak: The Revolt of the Seven, the McGregor Riots, The Great Curtis Revolution — a blockbuster production with a devilishly unpredictable plot! […] we need to maintain the proper balance of anxiety and fear, chaos and horror in order to keep life going.

(Wilford, Snowpiercer)


Snowpiercer encapsulates the status of practically every cultural artefact made today: produced and distributed through the processes made possible by capitalism as an

economic system […] In this context, the utopian ending of the film rings hollow and naïve, a placebo or a vent for the politically aware and a fun spectacle for everyone – a product
 (Protic 6)

While spectacle and horror in The Thing test the porous boundaries of ecological subjects, the limits in Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) are symbolically global, explicitly political, and made to be broken. This latter film’s computer-generated visualisations of ecological extremes at sub-zero temperatures, together with its action blockbuster presentation of catastrophic violence, move the consideration of polar spectacle to a different generic setting. Here, political dystopia, self-referential Hollywood tropes and ecological themes construct a narrative that explicitly thematises the ecological and ideological dimensions of spectacle outlined in the last chapter.

Carpenter’s vivid entry into the gothic strain of the polar imaginary provides an enduringly resonant figure for darkly ecological Antarctic horror — ambivalently alienating the pole and reversing the violence of its peripherality. But the icy setting of Snowpiercer is by turns a

convenient backdrop and an overwhelming narrative force. The unintended product of meddling in Earth systems, it at first seems to provide a simplification or ‘world-reduction’ facilitating an

allegorical political struggle ostensibly void of environment. However, its dramatic return as

avalanche later shatters this allegory, reasserting the dynamic ecological horizon to human politics as an unpredictable, all-consuming agency.

Even before this, Snowpiercer proceeds from a setting where the revenge of polar nature has already taken place. Its story takes place after an apocalyptic climate event, when a

geoengineering solution to escalating global warming has backfired, causing rapid, lethal freezing worldwide. The hostile polar elements held apart from the viewer of The Thing are separated from the protagonists of Snowpiercer only by the windows of its eponymous train — spectacular vistas unevenly provided for the passengers, who are also the only remaining humans on an Earth made exhaustively polar. The ‘rattling ark’ of the Snowpiercer circumnavigates the globe, in parallel with the forward motion of its protagonists, as they fight their way through the violently divided social stratification of the train — the ‘freeloaders’ at the ‘tail-end’, the ‘first class’ at the front.

Unlike The Thing’s ambiguous symbolisms, Snowpiercer is in this way precisely allegorical. As the technocratic despot at its engine, Wilford, puts it: “The internal engine — it is eternity itself”; “The train is the world, we the humanity”. Asserting the train’s own physical confines as the limits to political and ecological possibility for the train’s inhabitants, Wilford’s ideological maintenance of this symbolic threshold is — as implied by the epigraph above — part of a ‘blockbuster production’ comparable with Snowpiercer itself. In this respect (as in many others), the film differs from both The Thing and more recent ecologically-themed blockbusters as highly reflective on its commercial context and popular cultural aesthetics, as if through the suspicious lens of a (post-Frankfurt School) critical theoretical perspective. As a key contemporary example of filmic ‘climate

fiction’ (Murray & Heumann, Monstrous Nature 206), Snowpiercer inherits its frozen planet setting from The Day after Tomorrow (2004), whose commercial success “elevated a low-probability scenario into an iconic image for climate change”, cementing a category of ‘Into/In Ice Age’ cli-fi films now outnumbering those depicting rapid heating (Svoboda 59). But while TDAT typifies what Mark Fisher calls ‘capitalist realism’ by burying class politics in its spectacularly icy landscapes — in order, ideologically, “to conceal the corrosion of the U.S. model of capitalism beneath the biblical destruction of absolutely everything” (Beaumont 80) — the inversion of global warming that frames Snowpiercer instead thematises limits and excess as the sites for revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) politics. Against its villains’ capitalistic domination of environments and populations, the film’s momentum seems at first to accelerate the rebellious plot, later revealed by Wilford,