Everything You Need To Know About 'The Thing' For Its 40th Anniversary

By Brian Richards | Film | October 29, 2022 | PAJIBA

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REV. LOVEJOY: “I remember another gentle visitor from the heavens. He came in peace, and then died, only to come back to life. And his name was…E.T., the extra-terrestrial. (sniffles) I loved that little guy.”

- The Simpsons, “The Springfield Files,” a.k.a. the one where Mulder and Scully and even Leonard Nimoy show up

When E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial arrived in theaters in 1982, it won the hearts of critics and audiences worldwide. It made Steven Spielberg into an even bigger success story after his previous hits Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. It made people of all ages, especially children, fall in love with the character of E.T., and filled them with thoughts of what it would be like to meet aliens from outer space just like E.T. It was a movie that not only became a beloved classic, but whose impact would go on to spread like wildfire. (Granted, this didn’t stop the Atari video game adaptation of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial from being a massive disappointment that not only contributed to the Video Game Crash of 1983, but also resulted in thousands of unsold copies being taken to a landfill, buried underground, and then having that burial site covered with concrete.)

Unfortunately for John Carpenter’s The Thing, which opened in theaters two weeks after E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on June 25, 1982, that impact practically ruined any chances the film may have had for box-office success. Because after seeing a kind-hearted alien befriend a lonely young boy in the suburbs of California, nobody wanted to see a mysterious alien organism murdering humans and animals in the freezing cold landscape of Antarctica.

At a scientific research station located in Antarctica, the twelve men who are assigned there notice an Alaskan Malamute running for its life while being chased by a helicopter, which is carrying both the pilot and a man armed with a rifle and hand grenades who has every intention of trying to kill the dog for reasons unknown. The helicopter ends up exploding right next to the pilot, and the rifle-toting man is shot to death due to his refusal to lower his weapon while yelling at the other men in Norwegian, which none of them are fluent in. The dog is taken inside to safety, and once it becomes acquainted with its surroundings, it soon reveals that it is not really an ordinary dog. It is an ancient alien lifeform that can perfectly imitate any human or animal that it comes into contact with, and it has every intention of possessing whoever crosses its path and killing anyone who threatens its survival. The twelve men, including helicopter pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell); senior biologist Blair (A. Wilford Brimley); chief mechanic Childs (Keith David); dog handler Clark (Richard Masur), and station commander Garry (the late Donald Moffat) discover who and what they’re dealing with, and are forced to accept that not only is this Thing willing and able to kill every single one of them, it is also capable of changing its appearance to look, act, and sound like each and every one of them. Which forces each of them to ask: Who can be trusted? And will they survive?

John Carpenter was first approached to write and direct his own re-telling of director Howard Hawks’ Christian Nyby’s The Thing from Another World in 1976 before he grabbed Hollywood’s attention with Halloween two years later. But he was reluctant to take the job, as he held that film in very high regard (For further proof, the scary movie that Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace choose to watch while they’re being looked after by their babysitters is none other than The Thing from Another World), and had doubts as to whether his own version of the story would measure up or even surpass it. But once he took another look at Who Goes There?, John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella that inspired The Thing from Another World, and realized that the story’s themes could be just as powerful and terrifying in the present day as they were when Nyby made his film, he decided to go for it. Carpenter later decided to cast Kurt Russell in the lead role of MacReady, as they had worked well together on both Elvis and Escape From New York. And before he became more well-known due to his commercials for Quaker Oats and diabeetus Liberty Medical, and that inexplicable Cajun accent he used in Hard Target, Wilford Brimley was cast in one of his very first roles as Blair, who quickly deduces what the Thing has planned for his colleagues and for the rest of civilization, and none of it is good.

Carpenter’s brilliant directing, Bill Lancaster’s superb screenplay, Drew Struzan’s iconic poster, and an impressive ensemble cast whose performances make you care whether they will live or die, while also wondering which one of them is actually hunter or prey. They all contribute to how incredible and frightening The Thing is, and why it’s a film that is still worth watching and discussing four decades after its theatrical release. But if there’s one person whose work deserves praise, and who is largely responsible for scaring the living sh-t out of most audiences who watch it for the first time, it’s special make-up effects designer Rob Bottin. He was able to make the effects for the Thing itself look convincingly horrifying and gruesome as it unleashed its warpath on MacReady and company. It also helped to maintain the mysterious and unknown nature of the Thing, as we never do see what it really looks like, due to each one of its metamorphoses that causes it to resemble its previous inhabitant. But the damage that it is able to inflict whenever it makes its presence felt, whether it’s absorbing all of the surrounding sled dogs while locked in the research station’s kennel, or turning its own chest into a giant mouth in order to bite someone’s arms off, is truly unforgettable. It’s what convinces both the characters in the film, and the people in the audience, that this Thing is a serious threat that needs to be found and destroyed before it’s too late. (Legendary special-effects creator Stan Winston provided some assistance to Bottin, but he insisted on remaining uncredited so that attention wouldn’t be taken away from Bottin’s own accomplishments. Hence why he is given “Special Thanks” in the film’s closing credits.)

And this article wouldn’t be complete without a shout-out to the late, great composer Ennio Morricone, whose score and usage of synthesizers is not only reminiscent of Carpenter’s own music from Assault on Precinct 13, but is perfect in setting the mood for what’s to come and putting the audience on edge.

As the primary setting, U.S. Outpost 31 is immersed in bitter Antarctic cold while also located thousands of miles away from the rest of civilization, which leaves the research team members to rely only on each other for companionship. Despite that reality, one quickly gets the impression that they’re really not the closest of friends, but they work well together in order to carry out their respective duties and get the job done. Even MacReady mostly wants to be left alone in his shack to play chess on his computer, get drunk, and get some much-needed sleep. The paranoia that suddenly kicks into high gear when the Thing arrives and launches its bloodbath soon results in the men being at each other’s throats, to the point where it’s almost a greater danger to them than the actual Thing itself.

One man ends up dying from a bullet to the head, another comes this close to blowing up everyone else with dynamite when they accuse him of being the Thing and attempt to bum-rush him, and it even reaches the point where the men are tied up and held at gunpoint until they each forcibly take a blood test that proves if they’re for real or if they’ve been infected by the Thing. (The blood test scene occurring in a film that was released in theaters just as the AIDS crisis started getting serious attention from the medical community is naturally hard to ignore.) Much like the classic Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” the Thing doesn’t really need to do much in order to wear the men down, and make them turn against each other out of fear and exhaustion and distrust. It simply needs to stand back and watch as they do the majority of the work all by themselves.

The Thing was not a box-office success when it opened in theaters. Besides the fact that it was a dark, scary, and violent film that was released in the same month as the heartwarming and family-friendly E.T., it has been said that The Thing not only dealt with poor marketing but also suffered from bad timing all around. Not just because of E.T., but because the film opened when many other sci-fi/fantasy films such as Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Poltergeist, Tron, and The Road Warrior were all playing on the big screen as well that same year, and audiences possibly reached their limit with how much sci-fi and fantasy they were willing to buy tickets for. It also didn’t help that critics were incredibly harsh with their reviews of The Thing, as many of them described it as boring, nihilistic, disgusting, and simply unbelievable. But as the years went on, the general opinion of the film had greatly improved, with more people renting it on home video and realizing that what they had ignored in movie theaters was actually a terrifying and beautifully-crafted work of art. It soon went from being a widely loathed disappointment to a beloved classic now considered one of the greatest and most influential sci-fi films of all time.

This is something that John Carpenter is grateful to hear whenever he’s interviewed and his legendary career is discussed, especially since he has said that The Thing is probably the film he is most proud of. But considering that his career and his confidence both took massive hits as a result of The Thing’s critical and commercial failure, and that he lost several career opportunities because of it (he was originally hired to direct the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Firestarter, but Universal Pictures later rescinded their offer), he has a right to be bitter and talk sh-t in his most recent interviews, and to possibly even wonder where all of this adoration and support was when he needed it most back in 1982.

2011 saw the release of The Thing, which was a prequel to Carpenter’s film, and showed the events at the Norwegian research station that led to the Thing being chased to U.S. Outpost 31 by a helicopter and shot at in the first place. It starred Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje.

In 2010, Clarkesworld Magazine published the short story The Things, which was written by Peter Watts, and was told from the perspective of the actual Thing during the events of Carpenter’s film.

It also became known back in 2018 that the scientists who work at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station have a yearly tradition they partake in to signify the changeover when the summer crew of scientists leave the station, and the winter crew arrives. The winter scientists get together and watch all three versions of The Thing to prepare themselves for the eight months of darkness and isolation they will death with as part of their work, even after the very last flight from their station has departed.

As The Thing arrives at its conclusion, MacReady makes it clear to his fellow survivors that the Thing is willing to kill them all before slipping into hibernation until a rescue crew arrives with the possibility of escape and further assimilation, and how that cannot be allowed to happen, even at the cost of their own lives. John Carpenter has said more than once when interviewed that he considers this to be a rather hopeful and inspirational ending for the film, and that it isn’t nearly as bleak and hopeless as most critics and audiences would think. When you look back at these last couple of years, it’s easy to remember how there are far too many humans who used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to be as cruel, reckless, and selfish as possible, while caring only about their own comfort and satisfaction.

And yet, watching the final scene that shows two men accepting their terrible fate and refusing to put the rest of the world in jeopardy, even as they both wonder if the other has been infected by the Thing? Maybe Carpenter has a point.

Jay-Z busts Western cowboy myths in all-Black ‘The Harder They Fall’

Los Angeles – Jay-Z said Thursday that his new Western movie “The Harder They Fall” aims to correct misconceptions that all cowboys were white, wore ponchos and listened to... Read more

Los Angeles – Jay-Z said Thursday that his new Western movie “The Harder They Fall” aims to correct misconceptions that all cowboys were white, wore ponchos and listened to “Italian guitar music”.

The US rap superstar is a producer on the Netflix revenge drama starring Idris Elba and Regina King among an all-Black ensemble, as real and once-famous characters from the Old West.

While classic Hollywood Westerns such as Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Western “Dollars” trilogy – famously scored by Italian maestro Ennio Morricone – ignored many minorities, around one in four historical cowboys were Black, according to the film’s director Jeymes Samuel.

“There are a lot of people that would like that history to still stay uncovered,” Jay-Z told a virtual press conference.

In addition to telling an entertaining story, a “cherry on top” for the film is “letting people be seen” who had been ignored by history and Hollywood’s typical, white-dominated Westerns, he said.

Historical Black and Native Americans cowboys

The rap mogul – who is married to Beyonce – also said the film had been educational to him personally, and that their young daughters Blue Ivy and Rumi were now “way ahead of the eight-ball” in their understanding of Black history.

The film draws on historical Black and Native Americans cowboys and outlaws such as Nat Love, Rufus Buck and Cherokee Bill, many of whom lived in different eras and places, and would never have met.

But Jay-Z said taking a more strictly factual or documentary approach would have “got people to turn off” and reduced the movie’s impact.

“If you present it as ‘here’s a fictional story,’ but you slip some things in there… I think music (also) does a great job at that,” he said.

“You just listen to music, you tuned in, you like the beat, and all this information is passing and it’s entering your soul without you even knowing.

‘Great storytelling’

“That’s what I love about ‘The Harder They Fall’.”

Rap music and film are “one and the same” and both are about “great storytelling,” he added, pointing to the lyrics of narrative hits such as the Notorious BIG’s “I Got A Story To Tell” and his own “Meet The Parents.”

Jay-Z said that many Hollywood Western tropes are not rooted in historical reality – for example, Eastwood’s poncho in the “Dollars” trilogy.

Accordingly, the music in “The Harder They Fall” draws on a wide range of anachronistic influences, including Jamaican reggae star Barrington Levy.

“When you hear Barrington Levy, and you say ‘Oh, that’s not Western music’… Neither is the Italian guitar in ‘Oklahoma!'”

ITS GREAT, AND THEY DO HAVE WHITE FOLKS IN A TOWN CALLED WHITE FOLKS 

BURN! 

MY FAVORITE ANTI IMPERIALIST FILM

WITH A GREAT SOUNDTRACK BY ENNIO MORRICONE

QUEIMADA, originally QUEMADA(aka BURN), changed its Spanish name to the Portuguese one, because general Franco was threatening UNITED ARTISTS with a new ban of all their films in Spain, like it happened with COLUMBIA after Fred Zinnemann's BEHOLD A PALE HORSE.

The producer Alberto Grimaldi and the director Gillo Pontecorvo changed the nationality of the conquerors, remaining Marlon Brando as the British Sir William Walker.

Initially Grimaldi contacted Paul Newman and Sidney Potier for the roles, but both actors considered the script as "anti-American".

Unlike Newman, Brando was an admirer of the author of LA BATTAGLIA DI ALGERI (BATTLE OF ALGIERS)

and he proposed Cassius Clay for the role of Jose Dolores. Finally Brando's antagonist was Evaristo Marquez and the shooting started in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), being finished in Morocco after different mishaps and controversies.

But then United Artists considered the movie politically not adequated for US audiences and they made a new editing, cutting several scenes and changing the dialogues.

This mutitlated US cut was the english version. These images are from the uncut italian restored version. Ennio Morricone composed one of his most impressive soundtracks, still maintain its position in the main artery of majestic movie themes. Many of the tracks are literally, a magic carpet ride.

"..The film portrays, quite brilliantly, the nature of a guerrilla uprising. Walker seems all too aware of the danger of a popular uprising, when he cautions the white rulers that "the guerrilla has nothing to lose." And that in killing a hero of the people, the hero "becomes a martyr, and the martyr becomes a myth." " Amazon Review �An amazing film. . . No one, with the possible exception of Eisenstein, has ever before attempted a political interpretation of history on this epic scale.� � Pauline Kael

'Queimada': Revolution In Perpetual Motion - as long as there are empires, there will be wars - "Pontecorvo was an expert on the subject of revolution, possibly even the poet laureate of violent change. An Italian communist, he wore his biases plainly on his sleeve and didn't let them prevent him from reaching greatness, as he did in 1965 in "The Battle of Algiers," a movie so pungent in its realities that the Pentagon showed it to Special Forces people just last year... the movie Queimada is most powerful as argument: It believes in the permanence of revolution, and it closes on a shot of the surly, bitter, seething people of Queimada, and in their anger it sees a forever of violence. This is the way it will go, he seems to be saying, and it doesn't seem that he got that one wrong, unless peace broke out in the past five minutes. It's brilliantly constructed to argue what might be called the classic imperial paradox: To win this war you must make inevitable the next. The corollary is that as long as there are empires, there will be wars. "

Queimada (1969)

Queimada - Trivia The film's original title was Quemada (the Spanish word for "burnt", as the action took place in a Spanish colony. When the Spanish government officially complained and threatened a boycott of the film (objecting to the script's supposedly anti-Spanish bias, Gillo Pontecorvo agreed to alter the setting to a Portuguese island and the release title became Queimada ("burnt" in Portuguese). Sir William Walker, a real historical figure portrayed in the film by Marlon Brando, was neither British nor knighted. Walker was an American adventurer and his title of "sir" was one he adopted on his own. 'Evaristo Marquez' , who plays rebel leader Jose Dolores in the film, was not an actor. He was a poor villager whom director Pontecorvo discovered while scouting locations and convinced to star opposite Brando. The studio had originally wanted Sydney Poitier. Marlon Brando once said this film contains "the best acting I've ever done"

Queimada - Amy Taubin

" Burn! was a courageous film for Pontecorvo to make. There are few films as passionate or as uncompromising about the real workings and nature of imperialism as a world order, nor a film which identifies so feelingly with the victims of neo-colonial rule. Not since Eisenstein has a film so explicitly and with such artistry sounded a paen to the glory and moral necessity of revolution. Even had United Artists not attempted to sabotage Burn!, it would be a film deserving wider viewing and critical attention. " Joan Mellen SEE THE FULL REVIEW Quemada - Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn! (tamilnation.org)

'The First Iranian Vampire Western' Is A Must-See Horror Gem

Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is one of the most unique and original horror movies in recent memory.

BY BEN SHERLOCK

PUBLISHED 1 DAY AGO



In recent years, the term “elevated horror” has been coined by critics who feel insecure about giving a positive review to a scary movie. After horror cinema devolved into “torture porn” throughout the 2000s, movies like The Witch and It Comes at Night have taken the genre back to basics with low-key production value and character-driven storytelling. Auteurs like Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, and Robert Eggers have revitalized cinematic horror with fiercely original stories and sharp social commentary, and as a result, horror fans are currently enjoying a wave of spooky, suspenseful masterpieces including some of the genre’s all-time greatest entries.


While plenty of praise has been rightly directed at Peele, Aster, and Eggers, one filmmaker that deserves to be included under this banner but often slips under the radar is Ana Lily Amirpour. Amirpour’s 2014 directorial debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, described in its marketing as “the first Iranian vampire western,” is one of the most unique and original horror movies in recent memory, and a must-see gem for fans of the genre. It has a subversive take on vampire lore that flips the female victim trope on its head, as well as effective scares, stylish black-and-white visuals, and an awesome soundtrack.






RELATED: The Best Horror Movies Use Social Commentary For Scares

Set in the fictional dystopian crime-ridden ghost-town of Bad City, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night stars Sheila Vand as “The Girl,” a vampire who spends her nights prowling the streets, looking for despicable men to drain the blood from. Traditionally, vampire fiction paints its female characters as victims, either as the object of a vampire’s desire or their “familiar.” In A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Girl’s vampirism allows her to feel safe, giving her much more agency than horror stories usually allow their female protagonists


Unsurprisingly, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has been praised as a highlight of feminist cinema. Amirpour positions The Girl as a sort of antihero. She spends her nights sucking people’s blood and leaving them for dead, but she mostly targets reprehensible, abusive men. While horror movies from Rosemary’s Baby to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre have focused on women being tortured and terrorized by men, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night offers the exact opposite.

There’s a surprisingly sweet love story that perfectly balances the horror, western, and dystopian elements. After the movie establishes The Girl’s violent hobbies, it introduces her to a romantic interest: Arash, played by Arash Marandi. The idea of a vampire romance might have Twilight alarm bells ringing, but unlike Stephenie Meyer’s lukewarm Y.A. fantasy, Amirpour’s movie avoids tired clichés at every turn and explores the dark implications of romance with the bloodsucking undead. The moment that The Girl falls for Arash is expressed when his neck is exposed and she resists biting it and instead nestles into his chest.



Vand brings an unsettling calmness to The Girl’s demeanor as she builds up to a kill. When her fangs come out and she sinks them into somebody’s neck, they scream in terror. But for her, it’s like tying her shoelaces or brushing her teeth – she’s been doing it so often for so long that it no longer has any impact. After she’s introduced as a bloodthirsty monster, The Girl’s blossoming love for Arash humanizes her.


Amirpour and cinematographer Lyle Vincent chose to shoot the movie in black-and-white. This bleaker palette brought out the bleakness of Bad City, making images like a pile of bodies building up under a bridge even more unnerving than they would be in color. Since the majority of the movie takes place at night, the gorgeous high-contrast monochromatic visuals are used to juxtapose the creepy foreground action against the pitch-black of the night sky.


The movie’s soundtrack is one of its greatest assets. Mixing in a wide variety of musical styles, Amirpour creates the perfect mood for each scene with well-placed musical accompaniment. In addition to the foreboding original score provided by Bei Ru, Amirpour included licensed tracks by such disparate artists as Kiosk, Dariush, and White Lies. The latter’s post-punk hit “Death” beautifully underscores the first intimate moment between The Girl and Arash. Every time The Girl gets her fangs out and targets somebody, there’s a disturbing, almost David Lynchian ambiance on the soundtrack.

Tonally, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night pays homage to plenty of classic vampire films – namely the groundbreaking 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu – but it’s far more than just a vampire movie. With its lone antihero, lawless setting, and the music of Federale evoking Ennio Morricone on the soundtrack, it’s as much of a spaghetti western as a horror movie. There’s nothing quite like it. While most movies fit neatly into a familiar category, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night proudly sits in its own category: the vampire spaghetti western vigilante thriller romance. For vampire fans who got disillusioned by the post-Twilight rut the genre found itself in, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is essential viewing.

Italian star singer Milva dies aged 81

The genre-crossing Italian chanteuse, known for her vocal range and red hair, took Europe by storm in the 1960s and '70s. Her career spanned decades.

Singer Milva passed away aged 81 on April 23, 2021


Milva, an Italian chanson and pop music singer popular in the 1960s and 1970s, passed away Friday at her home in Milan, Italy, aged 81. Born Maria Ilva Biolcati, the singer was often referred to as "La Rossa," meaning "redhead" in Italian, for the color of her fiery red locks.

With an active career spanning decades, Milva was a musical great in her home country. Italy's Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, called her "one of the strongest interpreters of Italian songs." Her voice awakened "intense emotions" in entire generations and upheld the reputation of Italy, he said Saturday after news of her death broke.

Yet her fame was not limited to Italy. Her penchant for singing in foreign languages led to her success around the world — she released songs in English, German, French, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese and Japanese.

Milva collaborated with tango music great, Astor Piazzaolla

She had an especially large fan base in Germany, where she gained fame with sophisticated easy listening tracks. Her song "Hurra, wir leben noch" ("Hurray, we're still alive"), was an especially big hit. A fan of collaborations, Milva recorded songs with Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, as well as famed film score composer Ennio Morricone.

Milva sang with Argentine tango music composer Astor Piazzolla, who died in 1992, and began a long-lasting collaboration with her compatriot, the innovative singer-songwriter Franco Battiato with whom she recorded an album.  

A career to envy

Maria Ilva Biolcati was born on July 17, 1939, to a dressmaker and a fisherman in the small town of Goro in Italy's Emilia-Romagna region on the Adriatic coast. As a child, she worked to support her family, which experienced economic hardship.

Eventually, she moved to Bologna, entered a singing competition and received vocal and acting lessons. From then on, her career was enviable. She recorded dozens of albums, went on tours and appeared on the stages of theaters and concert halls around the world. Between 1961 and 2007, she performed 15 times at Italy's most important pop festival in San Remo, but never won it.

Milva sang a variety of musical genres throughout her long career

For over 50 years, Milva worked tirelessly, recording 173 albums that spanned a wide range of repertoire. Her daughter Martina was born in 1963 but Milva had little time for family life and her daughter often had to go without her famous mother.

Milva had no qualms about breaking away from chanson and commercial music. She toured the world's opera houses and theaters with performances of songs by Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht. Her rendition of the role of Pirate Jenny in Brecht's "Threepenny Opera" helped make her an icon in the world of musical theater. She gave concerts at the Scala in Milan, the Paris Opera, London's Royal Albert Hall and the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. She alsosangin operas by avant-garde composer Luciano Berio and even dabbled in work as an actress. She landed a supporting role in Wim Wenders' 1987 masterpiece "Wings of Desire

Seeing red

The singer was open about her leftist political views and charmed the working-class milieu with her political chansons, including the famous partisan hymn "Bella Ciao," which was a constant in her repertoire. Her nickname "La Rossa" was also an allusion to the color associated with her political commitments.

In 2010, Milva left the stage and said farewell to her fans in a letter posted on social media. "I did my job gracefully and probably well," she wrote. Milva said she decided to take this step because she was no longer able to continue her career "in the best way possible."

Milva is survived by her daughter Martina.

Slavoj Zizek: The treatment of Assange is an assault on everyone’s personal freedoms

Slavoj Zizek

is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London.

21 Sep, 2020 12:06
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Vivienne Westwood demonstrates in support of Julian Assange, in London © Reuters / PETER NICHOLLS
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Julian Assange has had his rights stripped away in a case that should alarm millions, but too few people care because his character has been assassinated. He might have to go to prison before he gets the support he deserves.


There is an old joke from the time of World War I about an exchange of telegrams between the German Army headquarters and the Austrian-Hungarian HQ. From Berlin to Vienna, the message is “The situation on our part of the front is serious, but not catastrophic,” and the reply from Vienna is: “With us, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.”

The reply from Vienna seems to offer a model for how we react to crises today, from the Covid-19 pandemic to forest fires on the west coast of the US (and elsewhere): ‘Yeah, we know a catastrophe is pending, media warn us all the time, but somehow we are not ready to take the situation seriously…’

There is a similar case that has been dragging on for years: the fate of Julian Assange. It’s a legal and moral catastrophe – just consider how he is being treated in prison, unable to see his children and their mother, unable to communicate regularly with his lawyers, a victim of psychological torture so that his survival itself is under threat. They are killing him softly, as the song goes.

But very few seem to take his situation seriously, with an awareness that our own fate is at stake in his case. The forces which violate his rights are the forces which prevent the effective battle against global warming and the pandemic. They are the forces that ensure the pandemic is making the rich even richer and hitting the poor hardest. They are the forces which ruthlessly exploit the pandemic to assert their control over our social and digital space, regulating and censoring it at our expense – the forces which protect us, but also deny us our own freedom.

Assange fought for the public transparency of the digital space, and there is a cruel irony in the fact that the pandemic is being used as a pretext to isolate him from his family and his defense. We are always ready to protest the limitation of basic human freedoms imposed on Hong Kong by China; should we not turn the gaze back on ourselves? Maybe we should remember Marx Horkheimer’s old saying from the late 1930s: “Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism?” Our version is: “Those who don’t want to talk about the injustice imposed on Assange should also keep silent about the violation of human rights in Hong Kong and Belarus.”

Assange’s well-planned and well-executed character assassination is one of the reasons why his defense has not grown into a wider movement, like Black Lives Matter or Extinction Rebellion. Now that his very survival is at stake, only such a movement can – perhaps – save him.

Remember the lyrics (written by Joan Baez to Ennio Morricone’s music) of ‘Here’s To You,’ the title song of the movie ‘Sacco and Vanzetti’: “Here’s to you, Nicola and Bart / Rest forever here in our hearts / The last and final moment is yours / That agony is your triumph”?

There were mass gatherings all around the world in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti – and the same is needed now in defense of Assange, although in a different form.

If Assange were to die (or disappear in a US prison cell, like the living dead), that agony will be his triumph; he will die in order to live in all of us. This is the message we all must deliver to those who have held him: if you kill a man, you create a myth which will continue to mobilize thousands.

The message to us from those who are after Assange is clear: We can do what we want. But why does this only apply to them? What they are doing to Assange is radically changing the political weather, so perhaps we need new weathermen.

Morricone: Maestro of Music and Image

by DAVID YEARSLEY COUNTERPUNCH JULY 10,2020

Morricone in the Festhalle Frankfurt in 2015. Photo: Sven-Sebastian Sajak, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born in 1929, the masterful composer Ennio Morricone, who died this week at the age of 91, made his entrance into the world just after the advent of synchronized cinematic sound. The Jazz Singer had come out just two years earlier. Over a life that spanned the history of the movie soundtrack, Morricone shaped the combined arts of music and image as few others have or will.

His melodies tended to the simple, even fragmentary: groups of three or four notes stolen from nature or the imagination (assuming there’s a difference) or even lifted from someone else; then a hesitation or pause before moving forward again. His harmonies were rarely adventurous, however rich and compelling. Yet Morricone was a revolutionary, transforming, even inventing ways of making music for moving pictures that exerted a huge influence on his contemporaries, his admirers, and, most enduringly, his audience. He was born and died in Rome, but his music for films stretched across the globe molding the way we see and understand landscapes, people, and history, from the South American rain forest to the grasslands and deserts of the North American West.

As a boy Morricone wanted to become a doctor: he admired his pediatrician, who also looked after Mussolini’s children. It was the age of movies and of fascism. Morricone’s father was a professional trumpet player, who gave a horn to his son and told him music not medicine would be his livelihood. The boy obeyed, and also studied composition from an early age, and his father’s contacts in the Roman music scene landed him arranging gigs in film and television.

Even in the midst of his toweringly prolific career as a composer of soundtracks and concert music, Morricone continued to play the trumpet as a member of the composers’ collective Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza from 1964 to 1980. The ensemble’s impressive and varied output reflected Morricone’s own more innovative impulses and his talent for drawing on disparate musical sources. Listen to his trumpet work on The Group’s 1970 LP the feed-back, a recording that brings together experimentalism with free jazz and funk, and hear how he strove to avoid producing conventional sounds from his instrument. Yet his timbre echoes Miles Davis, whom he admired, and in these spontaneous ideas meant to contribute to the whole rather than burnish individual glory, one can hear the thrilling High Plains pyrotechnics he ignited in the trumpet soloist for his Western scores, Michele Lacerenza.

The improvisation ensemble’s work grew indirectly out of the required pilgrimage Morricone and some of his colleagues made to the summer courses at Darmstadt, mecca of the European musical avant-garde, in 1958. But he turned away from modernism’s isolating, mathematical strictures in order to produce works that were, in his words, “to be listened to, rather … than remain an incommunicative theoretical system.”

The accessibility and vividness of his film scores often had a searing quality informed by his profound knowledge of music history and technique. Morricone was an erudite musician, basing his work on a foundation of study and hard-won technical skill, commitments he advised younger musicians to adopt. Among the many who heeded that advice was his admirer, Alessandro de Rosa, who collaborated with the composer in a wonderful book published in Italian in 2016 and translated in 2018 as Ennio Morricone: In his Own Words—an honest, thought-provoking, often unexpected, and ceaselessly informative book about the composer, his modes of creation, his aesthetic ideas, and the cast of fascinating and influential musicians and filmmakers he worked with over his six decades of dogged labor.

Rather than subject his musical material to abstruse procedures (though he was capable of these, too), Morricone often turned to the past, reanimating it through intuition and imagination. Daunting, disorienting chromaticism was a hallmark of his modernist contemporaries, but Morricone had a gift—and the attendant skill—for bringing it into the service of cinematic and political action. The credit sequence of his score for Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) in which the French forces raid the freedom fighters’ hide-out is driven by the gunfire tattoo of the snare drum. The heavier caliber of the piano adds to this barrage with a bass line that ascends through three half-steps then leaps down and presents the mirror image of that same figure.

Morricone took the motive from an antique Ricercar—a genre devised, as the word suggests, “to search” after new combinations of thematic material—by the seventeenth-century organist of St. Peter’s in Rome, Girolamo Frescobaldi.

Frescobaldi’s treatment of his theme was as recondite as anything the post-war intellectuals could devise. (Ten years before scoring The Battle of Algiers, Morricone had published a volume of piano pieces called Invenzione, Canone e Ricercari that paid homage to the ancient masters of polyphony.) But in his redeployment of Frescobaldi’s chromatic line, Morricone militarizes the researches of his Roman forebear from three centuries earlier like a commander barking orders at his musical troops. As the French counter-terrorist action unfolds on screen Morricone charges the brass to take over the same ascending chromatic figure but at a slower, warier pace, as if another unit were penetrating the Arab quarter. More winds then join the operation as it spreads through the Casbah. Through this ingenious contrapuntal collage the venerable motive is transformed into something unforgiving, remorseless, decisive. The music of attack becomes an attack on French colonial rule in North Africa, even an attack on oppression across the globe.

The theme for one of the leaders of the Resistance, Ali, is given to an African flute, straining at first against the shackles of European tonality.

The throaty notes rock incessantly between a pair of interlocking major and minor thirds heard above a tragically heroic orchestral accompaniment. The melody appears trapped in its own prison, but will not give up the fight. During preparations for the film, Morricone heard Pontecorvo, himself a musician, whistling the tune, but waited until the premiere of the film to disabuse the director of the notion that the theme had been transmitted to the composer clairvoyantly.

A distinctive melodist, Morricone proved himself equally adept at rhythm, whose possibilities imbued the images with energy and portent, as in the sequence from The Battle of Algiers where a group of Arab women, disguised as Europeans, place bombs in a café and club.

Morricone intensifies the urgency of this plot with North African percussion patterns that sound like motors: the machinery of history chugging towards tragedy, but continually slamming into the sounds of the city or, more terrifyingly, silence. These gaps in the soundtrack stretch the tension towards its terrible breaking point as the dancers and diners enjoy themselves in the final seconds before they are converted from occupiers to victims. A bass drone spurs a frenzy of wallops on the tenor drum that seems to detonate the bombs.

Kindred attempts—successful, if sometimes fraught—to clear sonic and ethical space for musical traditions that had resisted, or even been erased by European aggression moved Morricone to create one of his greatest, most opulent scores, that for Roland Joffé’s The Mission (1990). Set in eighteenth-century South America, the film elevates music to an affirmative force even in the clash between Old and New Worlds. The scene in which a Jesuit missionary (Jeremy Irons) captivates the Guarani warriors with his oboe (first alone, then with a studio symphony orchestra), can’t help but cast the European civilizer as Orpheus—and therefore the natives as wild beasts. With its tapestry of embellishments that Morricone gives to this Father Gabriel to play, his music evokes the baroque style of the film’s period.

Thanks to its rapturous melody and life-affirming orchestral backdrop, “Gabriel’s Oboe” became a huge hit, recorded by Yo Yo Ma and other international heavyweights.

Morricone was no ethnomusicologist, but he tried nonetheless to reclaim in The Mission something of what he imagined to be the lost music of the indigenous peoples by wedding simple choral acclamations with wistful Andean flute lines above yearning orchestral surges buffeted by the thump of jungle drums.

The result is romantic and utopian, exoticizing and intoxicating— a skeptic would rather say excessive, even schmaltzy. But this elixir can be so exhilarating because the ideal will be wrecked by the history the film portrays.

In counterpoint to the enchanting tones of the priest and the joyous music of the indigenous peoples, Morricone depicts the worldly imperatives of the Catholic church with quasi-renaissance vocal polyphony that could be (and probably by now, has been) heard in the Sistine Chapel. As the credits of The Mission roll Morricone brings all three elements together in a tour-de-force of polyphonic layering in a piece called “As Earth as it is in Heaven”—a final effusion of ambrosial, healing world music.

This reconciliation is celestial rather than terrestrial. The murdered will not be raised from the dead by the conquerors’ musket and sabre. Music, however radiantly ecumenical, cannot heal these wounds, forgive these crimes.

But this virtuosic, irresistible skill at contrapuntal combination in evoking places that Morricone had seen on film but never visited found its most famous expression in the films directed by his Roman schoolmate, Sergio Leone. In the first of the director’s Westerns, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Morricone repurposed an arrangement he had made of Woody Guthrie’s Pastures of Plenty for a recording of that song by Peter Tevis, a California singer then popular in Italy.

Morricone’s setting called on the whistle and whip to summon visions of the open range. The tolling of the bell and the chanting of the chorus (its English tinged by Italian accents) seems to suggest that a lone singer is riding with his own posse, or perhaps being urged on by the voices of destiny. This was hard-bitten, intrepid music, leagues distant from Guthrie’s plaint of struggling dirt farmers and herders.

Guthrie had based his song on the nineteenth-century ballad “Pretty Polly,” so Morricone was well within his rights to equip that same accompaniment with a new melody. He gave the newly-inserted invention to his celebrated whistler, Alessandro Alessandroni, the wind-riffled tune shot through with bolts from the electric guitar of Bruno Battisti D’Amario.

However popular and crucial to the composer’s subsequent success this music became, both Leone and Morricone thought A Fistful of Dollars their weakest, ugliest work.

The blatantly anachronistic electronics and studio effects could reach unprecedented levels of viciousness, as when D’Amario’s guitar slashes across a devastated homestead until the camera finds its way to the perpetrator—blue-eyed Henry Fonda, taking an unexpected turn as the black-hatted bad guy in the greatest of the Leone/Morricone Westerns, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

A similar, if richer, texture to Morricone’s Pasture of Plenty /A Fistful of Dollars encompasses the three-way duel at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The rocking guitar figure is now taken by the piano; rather than a clear male voice, an English horn intones a solemn, sweeping melody. The chime tolls. The bass now moves with the force of fate. The musical tableau expands inexorably, magnificently towards the horizon. Lacerenza’s trumpet soars. The incomparable soprano Edda Dell’Orso—one of the singers in Alessandroni’s choir, Cantori Moderni., that is also heard in these Westerns offers up a benediction for the death soon to descend.

These pastures of plenty are full of the dead and the loot, the spoils of war and the winning of the west.

At the end, the coyote cry of the famed opening theme returns to lacerate the landscape. That musical utterance is so much more violent than the sounds of the animal itself. The soundtrack tells us that human deceit and revenge are unique in nature.

That Morricone’s score soared over the credits after the battle was done proved that, however closely tied to the images like the noose around “the ugly” Tuco’s head, music wins the final duel between sound and image.

Morricone received an honorary Oscar in 2007, handed to him by Clint Eastwood, whose first starring role had come in A Fistful of Dollars. In his speech, Morricone said that the prize represented not a point of arrival but of departure. He kept on riding. Nominated for a sixth time for his grand score (the penultimate soundtrack of the more than 500 he delivered) for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight in 2016, Morricone become the oldest winner of a competitive Academy Award. He was as old as Oscar himself: Morricone and Academy Awards had both been born in the fateful year of 1929.

That evening in Los Angeles, Morricone spoke in Italian, with Eastwood translating. In Morricone: In His Own Words, the composer expressed regret that he never learned English or another foreign language. For all its ennobling mixture of diversity and specificity, technique and imagination, Morricone’s soundtracks speak a global language, immediately and powerfully understood and loved. Morricone shrugged off Tarantino’s fawning comparison of him to Mozart and Beethoven. The Maestro was modest about how history would judge his work, but his music doesn’t just survive him, it glorifies him and his visionary hearing of the world.

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More articles by:DAVID YEARSLEY

DAVID YEARSLEY is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at  dgyearsley@gmail.com

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