Paranoia rules | Bangkok Post: Arts & Culture

DVD REVIEW

John Carpenter's 1982 version of The Thing is about monsters from space in the same way that Lars von Trier's recent Melancholia is about the end of the world. Both films use spectacular catastrophes out of science fiction to show the power of destructive mental states that can literally pull the world out from under those affected by them.

THE THING USA, 1982, colour, 109 min.
Directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell, Wilfred Brimley, TK Carter, Keith David and David Clennon. In English with subtitles in various languages (including Thai) depending on edition. Extras vary but can include a commentary soundtrack by director Carpenter and star Kurt Russell and (in the Region 1 edition) a documentary programmed as a picture-in-picture feature.

Sufferers from severe clinical depression exhaust themselves in attempts to shut out the world, and those whose condition has reached a suicidal extreme make use of the easiest and quickest way available to them to annihilate it. Von Trier, who admits to debilitating bouts of depression, gives the heroine, Justine, the opportunity to see the destruction of the world that she has come to despise. The shattering of our Earth as it collides with the rogue planet Melancholia may be a metaphor, but von Trier's psychological portrait of the melancholic, and eventually acutely depressed young woman looks so much like an apocalyptic science fiction film that commentators who don't get the point have been carping at its disregard for hard science.