JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 132 из 359My own suspicion is that he/it got off-course and that the original plan was for him toseed all of Nebraska or perhaps the Nile delta with little bits of himself. Just think-a home-grown invasion force (get in their way and they kill you, but smoke them and . . . real mellow, man-oooh, the colors !).
Yet even this is not much of an inconsistency when we put ourselves into the temper of the times again. The people of those times saw both Hitler and Stalin as creatures possessed of a certain low animal cunning-Hitler, after all, was first with the jet fighter and the offensive missile. But they were animals for all that, mouthing political ideas that were little more than grunts. Hitler grunted in German; Stalin in Russian, but a grunt is a grunt, for all that. And perhaps the creature in The Thing is saying something, after all, which is perfectly harmless- "The people of my star system wish to know if the Get Out of Jail Free card may be sold to another player," perhaps-but it sounds bad. Real bad.
By contrast, consider the other end of this telescope. The children of World War II produced The Thing ; twenty-six years later a child of Vietnam and the self-proclaimed Love Generation, Steven Spielberg, gives us a fitting balance weight to The Thing in a film called Close Encounters of the Third Kind . In 1951, the soldier standing sentry duty (the one who has foolishly covered the block of ice in which the Thing has been entombed with an electric blanket, you will remember) empties his automatic into the alien when he hears it coming; in 1977, a young guy with a happy, spaced-out smile holds up a sign reading STOP AND BE FRIENDLY. Somewhere in between the two, John Foster Dulles evolved into Henry Kissinger, and the pugnacious politics of confrontation became détente.
In The Thing , Kenneth Tobey occupies himself with building an electric boardwalk to kill the creature; in Close Encounters , Richard Dreyfuss occupies himself with building a mock-up of Devil's Tower, the creatures' landing place, in his living room. And he would be just as happy, we feel, to run around up there placing those landing lights. The Thing is a big, hulking brute; the creatures from the stars in Spielberg's film are small, delicate, childlike. They do not speak, but their mothership plays lovely harmonic tones-the music of the spheres, we assume. And Dreyfuss, far from wanting to murder these emissaries from space, goes with them.
I'm not saying that Spielberg is or would think of himself as a member of the Love Generation simply because he came to his majority while students were putting daisies in the muzzles of M-1's and while Hendrix and Joplin were playing the Fillmore West.
Yet even this is not much of an inconsistency when we put ourselves into the temper of the times again. The people of those times saw both Hitler and Stalin as creatures possessed of a certain low animal cunning-Hitler, after all, was first with the jet fighter and the offensive missile. But they were animals for all that, mouthing political ideas that were little more than grunts. Hitler grunted in German; Stalin in Russian, but a grunt is a grunt, for all that. And perhaps the creature in The Thing is saying something, after all, which is perfectly harmless- "The people of my star system wish to know if the Get Out of Jail Free card may be sold to another player," perhaps-but it sounds bad. Real bad.
By contrast, consider the other end of this telescope. The children of World War II produced The Thing ; twenty-six years later a child of Vietnam and the self-proclaimed Love Generation, Steven Spielberg, gives us a fitting balance weight to The Thing in a film called Close Encounters of the Third Kind . In 1951, the soldier standing sentry duty (the one who has foolishly covered the block of ice in which the Thing has been entombed with an electric blanket, you will remember) empties his automatic into the alien when he hears it coming; in 1977, a young guy with a happy, spaced-out smile holds up a sign reading STOP AND BE FRIENDLY. Somewhere in between the two, John Foster Dulles evolved into Henry Kissinger, and the pugnacious politics of confrontation became détente.
In The Thing , Kenneth Tobey occupies himself with building an electric boardwalk to kill the creature; in Close Encounters , Richard Dreyfuss occupies himself with building a mock-up of Devil's Tower, the creatures' landing place, in his living room. And he would be just as happy, we feel, to run around up there placing those landing lights. The Thing is a big, hulking brute; the creatures from the stars in Spielberg's film are small, delicate, childlike. They do not speak, but their mothership plays lovely harmonic tones-the music of the spheres, we assume. And Dreyfuss, far from wanting to murder these emissaries from space, goes with them.
I'm not saying that Spielberg is or would think of himself as a member of the Love Generation simply because he came to his majority while students were putting daisies in the muzzles of M-1's and while Hendrix and Joplin were playing the Fillmore West.