Paranoia of the Imposter
The Red Scare, "Who Goes There?", and the monsters of Maple Street
Among Us is a video game—
Okay, sorry. Sorry. Let me try again.
“The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” is one of the best-regarded episodes of classic science fiction anthology show The Twilight Zone. It was released in 1960, the twenty-second episode of the show’s first season. It’s also one of my personal favorites, of the episodes I’ve seen.
The episode follows the inhabitants of a stretch of Maple Street, a pleasant, suburban American community; Everytown, USA. We’re shown an idyllic scene of neighborly life, children playing and adults chatting. The opening narration warns us that “This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street in the last calm and reflective moment – before the monsters came.”
There is a tremendous noise and a flash of light overhead, and all at once all the power on the street goes out, all electronics ceasing to function. Cars, phones, and even radios are all affected. At first, the adults remain relatively calm and rational about this mystery, with one neighbor leaving to find out if the power is also out on the neighboring street.
However, things begin to deteriorate after a young boy recalls a science-fiction story he read where an alien invasion caused a similar phenomenon. The aliens in his book, he says, were actually hiding among the townspeople. The adults laugh this off, at first.
But then a neighbor’s car, after previously failing to start, starts on its own. And the neighbor who left to check the other street isn’t back yet. The suspicion starts to grow. Maybe nobody can leave. Nobody but the infiltrators.
And besides, that guy’s always been strange. Him and his whole family. Sometimes he’s just standing out in the backyard looking up at the sky. Isn’t that suspicious?
“As God as my witness,” says the accused neighbor, furious, “you’re letting something begin here that’s a nightmare.”
He’s right. It ends in death.
The Red Scare allegory is obvious; it’s not meant to be subtle. After the idea of infiltrators is introduced, fearful people quickly become paranoid. Completely innocent behaviors become suspicious: Stargazing. Owning a ham radio. Those who are accused are even more eager to accuse someone else in turn, to seize on some other idiosyncrasy or habit to redirect the blame and prove their own trustworthiness.
And there aren’t even any real monsters among them.
We find out at the end of the episode that the roar overhead and the power outage were caused by alien invaders— but ever since arriving, they’ve just been watching from a hill above the town. There are no infiltrators. The aliens don’t need agents on the ground when they can just watch the neighbors tear each other apart.
So anyways, Among Us is a video game—
Sorry, wait. The Thing is a 1982 science fiction/horror movie directed by John Carpenter. It follows the crew of an isolated Antarctic outpost who find themselves under attack from a shapeshifting monster that’s been unearthed from under the ice, which has the capability to consume and perfectly imitate any creature it encounters.
The Thing’s central plot, on a very surface level, is not dissimilar to “Maple Street.” It follows an isolated group of people who become suspicious that any of their number may not be what he seems, a suspicion that rapidly degenerates into bloodshed.
The biggest difference, of course, is that in this version, the monsters are very present.
The titular shapeshifting Thing, having initially entered the camp as a sled dog, is caught in the act of killing and replacing one crew member. It’s chased into the cold and killed, but the question lingers: Who else? Did it get anybody else first? Who, if anyone, can be trusted?
One crew member ruins the vehicles and smashes the communications equipment in a desperate mental break prompted by his realization that the Thing making it to broader civilization and contaminating the population would be an apocalypse scenario. The team, like the neighbors of Maple Street, are stranded, cut off.
Our protagonist is R.J. MacReady, played by Kurt Russell, the base’s helicopter pilot. MacReady is savvy. He’s smart. He is also completely, almost pathologically untrusting.
Relatively early in the movie, another crew member finds MacReady’s burned jacket, a potential sign that the Thing has replaced him and attempted to dispose of the physical evidence by burning it. Following this discovery and another team member’s resulting (understandable) attempt to trap him outside in the cold, MacReady becomes unwilling to take anything on faith.
When he re-enters the station, it’s with a bomb, and a threat that if everybody doesn’t cooperate with his plan to root out the imposter, they’re all going up in flames.
Another crew member attempts to attack him from behind, to defuse what is now obviously the most hostile element of the situation: MacReady himself. MacReady shoots him without hesitation. We later find out that this man was an uninfected human, meaning MacReady has killed a friend and ally. When MacReady then ties up the other survivors to test their blood with a hot wire, they’re helpless when the test is successful and the Thing among them does reveal itself; another proven-human friend and ally is eaten by the Thing while still tied down.
In the end, though, MacReady is one of the last remaining survivors of the catastrophe. So perhaps all this is worth it. Right?
At the end of the movie, he and Childs, the only other survivor, who has been hostile in response to MacReady’s own aggression throughout the movie, are left sitting alone in the burning ruins of the outpost. Neither can be sure the other isn’t a Thing; they simply can’t trust each other enough for that. If they ever had trust between them, it’s clear the events of the movie have shattered it irreparably. They share a drink. They’ll freeze to death, or kill each other, soon enough.
Some viewers have theorized that the drink MacReady pours for Childs at the very end of the movie is gasoline, a final test; if he drinks it without problem MacReady will know he’s the Thing. If Childs is human, of course, this is a miserable, slow and horrific way to kill your only remaining companion.
MacReady lives the longest because he trusts the least, but in the end, that can’t save him. It only wins him hours.
This is not a triumphant ending. Like the neighbors of Maple Street, the men at the outpost have destroyed themselves. The monsters in this story may be real, but it is the team’s paranoia of outsiders that stops them from resolving the situation from the very start of the movie. When the dog-Thing first approaches the outpost, it’s being pursued and fired on by a Norwegian, the last survivor from a neighboring station that we later find out were the ones that unearthed the Thing. He shouts out a warning to the American group as he runs up, desperately trying to caution them— in Norwegian, which none of them speak.
“You get the hell away. It's not a dog, it's some sort of thing! It's imitating a dog, it's not real! Get away, you idiots!"
Instead of stopping, assessing the situation, finding a way to communicate, they shoot him dead; after all, he’s shooting wildly after the dog and trespassing, and he doesn’t speak English. And the entire rest of the movie proceeds from there. This could have been averted from the start.
Interestingly, the grim ending of the 1982 The Thing differs significantly in tone from its inspiration, the 1938 novella “Who Goes There?”, which predates the Cold War and Second Red Scare.
While the themes of paranoia and suspicion that define The Thing are certainly still present in “Who Goes There?”, they are far less central. The driving question of the story is still ‘Who can we trust? Who’s been replaced?’, but the station crew of “Who Goes There?” conduct their investigation in a far more scientific, rational manner, ultimately successfully rooting out all of the Things once MacReady devises the same hot wire test he uses in the movie.
MacReady, still the protagonist in this version, is characterized far differently. In “Who Goes There?” he is a calm, reasonable, almost preternaturally impressive man. Throughout the story, he consistently has the most correct read of the situation, and his instincts are always right. He does not err; he only lacks information. This MacReady would never be brought, by desperate paranoia and selfishness, to threatening to immolate all his teammates to force them to obey him. He’s respected by his men, who obey him without question.
This MacReady never kills a human.
“Who Goes There?” ends with an unambiguous victory, if a narrow one for the heroes. All the Things among the men are rooted out and destroyed by the hot wire test. While there is some suggestion given that an albatross the survivors see flying away just before the conclusion may be a disguised Thing escaping, this possibility is ultimately dismissed by the story’s ending.
“Who Goes There?” is just not a story about the destructive power of paranoia. The protagonists are never really wrong. Their suspicion is a driving force of the narrative, but it never leads them astray to tragedy; it’s always justified. Even when one man impulsively murders another, the narrative acquits him with the reveal that the murdered crewman was a Thing.
The Thing, meanwhile, is a Cold War movie to its bones. It’s not just about the horror of being unsure that the people around you are who they appear to be. The Thing is about the horror of killing a man in a moment of terror, tying his corpse to a table, and testing his blood only to find out he was human just like you all along. It’s about the horror that the people in the room with you could all be exactly who they say they are and you still might tear each other to pieces.
Thematically, The Thing probably has more in common with “Maple Street” than it does with its own source material.
All media is shaped by the time and environment in which it’s made. “Who Goes There?” a story about a shapeshifting infiltrator, was not originally a parable about the toxic dangers of paranoia, but became one when its content was adapted for a Cold War media landscape.
Okay, so, Among Us is a video game—
Sources:
I didn’t read any academic papers or anything for this one but the full text of “Who Goes There?” is available online here!