Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

On the one hand, there was their pal, that neat little all-around guy, Reddy Kilowatt; on the other hand, before getting into the first reel of The Thing down at your local theater, you couldwatch newsreel footage as an Army mockup of a town just like yours was vaporized in a nuclear furnace.

Robert Cornthwaite plays the Appeasing Scientist in The Thing , and we hear from his lips the first verse of a psalm that any filmgoer who grew up in the fifties and sixties became familiar with very quickly: "We must preserve this creature for science." The second verse goes, "If it comes from a society more advanced than ours, it must come in peace. If we can only establish communications with it, and find out what it wants-” Only scientists, Cornthwaite says, are capable of studying this creature from another world, and it must be studied; it must be debriefed; we gotta find out what heats up his rocket tubes.

Never mind the fact that the creature has exhibited nothing but murderous tendencies, laying low a couple of huskies (it loses a hand in the process, but not to worry, it grows back) and living on blood instead of Green Thumb Plant Food.

Twice, near the film's conclusion, Cornthwaite is hauled away by soldiers; at the climax, he breaks free of his guards and faces the creature with his hands open and empty. He begs it to communicate with him and to see that he means it no harm. The creature stares at him for a long, pregnant moment . . . and then bats him casually aside, as you or I might swat a mosquito. The medium-rare roasting on the electric sidewalk follows.

Now I'm only a journeyman writer and I will not presume to teach history here (too much like trying to teach your grammy to suck eggs). I will point out that the Americans of that time were perhaps more paranoid about the idea of "appeasement" than at any other time before or since. The dreadful humiliation of Neville Chamberlain and England's resulting close squeak at the beginning of Hitler's war was still very much with those Americans, and why not? It had all happened only twelve years prior to The Thing 's release, and even Americans who were just turning twenty-one in 1951 could remember it all very clearly. The moral was simple-such appeasement doesn't work; you gotta cut 'em if they stand and shoot 'em if they run.

Otherwise, they'll take you over a bite at a time (and in the case of The Thing , you could take that literally). The Chamberlain lesson to Americans of the early fifties was that there can be no peace at any price, and never appeasement. Although the Korean police action would mark the beginning of the end for the idea, in 1951 the idea of America as world policeman (a kind of international Clancy growling.