AKA The Miracle of Life
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DIRECTED BY: Joël Rabijns, Yves Sondermeier
FEATURING: Pascal Maetens, Karel Vingerhoets, Celine Verbeeck
PLOT: Marianne loses her child at birth but the placenta miraculously lives, is named and baptized, and grows up to endure scorn and loneliness.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: When trying to describe Thingy, you inevitably think of Basket Case, but in doing so you miss the mile-wide streak of pathos that this movie feels for its grotesque hero. Here is a film that dares to place an oozing lump of Silly Putty at its center, and insists on presenting it as a cautionary tale about intolerance. The film sees the obvious joke of this ridiculous premise, but forces you to view it through the saddest possible lens.
COMMENTS: Whenever you think life is handing you the short end of the stick, poor Luke is here to assure you that it could be so, so much worse. Just being a teenager is difficult enough, what with having to navigate the land mines of high school hierarchies, recognizing your elders for the flawed human beings they are, and trying to get a sense of your own personality. It’s infinitely more complicated to look in the mirror and see, looking back at you, an unholy mashup of Grimace, tandoori chicken, and a Pink Pearl eraser.
You could easily be misled by the title into thinking that this is a wild romp through the fields of giddy indecency. It’s a marketing ploy suggesting a level of camp and silliness appropriate to the Troma label. But Luke is never addressed by the title’s demeaning sobriquet, and he never confesses to anything. Curiously enough, the sensationalist approach lends the film a certain credibility, because despite the creepy extremism of the scenario, this is a painfully serious film, a sympathetic plea for tolerance for all the sentient birth membranes out there whom society treats appallingly.
If ever a character manifested his own disappointment into existence, Luke is that hero. He has just one eye, uses what remains of the umbilical cord as his only limb, relies on a toy jeep to get around, and he speaks with a sad, resigned voice that can only be described as Flemish Bud Cort (the actual actor goes uncredited). He’s utterly ridiculous, which is the cue for Rabijns and Sondermeier to keep putting him in the most normal of situations and watching as he completely fails to fit in. At school, at home, at work (as a front-of-the-house order taker at a fast food joint notably called “Hamburger Holocaust”): everywhere Luke goes he meets with derision. It’s just drawn to him, as it would be. He is truly a sad sack.
Even if the movie didn’t have Luke, it still has a collection of parts just as unusual, just as disturbing. Leading the pack is Luke’s mother Marianne, played for no obvious reason by male actor Maetens. She isn’t played for laughs or irony or even to make a point. In fact, the casting becomes completely irrelevant once Marianne fully gives in to her work-out addiction, which consists of exclusively building the muscle of her right arm to ‘roided extremes. (Why only one arm? She explains: “I get what I want with only half the work.”) Less showy but equally strange is Father Gritty, the priest who magnanimously grants the little lump the rites of baptism. It initially feels like a gesture of supreme grace, but it starts to seem like he has no other parishioners, and the man of the cloth has a peculiar interest in his godson’s growth, eagerly asking for details about the legs of a girl Luke is sweet on. Plus, there’s the overall sense that everyone in the film is committed to the fact of Luke’s existence, but equally as certain that he will endure nothing but scorn. The Thingy has the feel of a Weekly World News article transformed into an ABC Afterschool Special.
The Thingy feels peculiarly American, a strange sensation given that this Belgian production barely tries to hide its accents. It’s tempting to look for some trace of satire: the sensationalized news perpetually running on TV, the familiarity of the class-conscious high school, the fact that Marianne has been passing Luke’s father off as having been fighting in Vietnam for seemingly years… it all of it points to a strangely cartoonish view of the States. Even so, the film seemingly has no axes to grind. In fact, it’s only in its final scenes that the movie loses the sheen of its strangeness by descending into an orgy of nihilistic violence. Only here, in pursuit of its final tragic punchline, do the filmmakers run out of story and decide to punctuate the climax with a series of horrible acts. If The Thingy falls apart just short of the finish line, the fact is it remains a singular work, creating an unthinkable situation and treating it with the gravity, sincerity, and honesty that it demands. Poor Luke. There but for the grace of God go you and I.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by peter mckain. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
The Thingy: Confessions Of A Teenage Placenta (Blu-ray)
- The Thingy: Confessions of A Teenage Placenta
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Worth noting is the (forgotten?) first novel by Caroline Thompson, FIRST BORN, which Penelope Spheeris had optioned to make at one point.
https://reactormag.com/first-born-the-debut-novel-by-screenwriter-caroline-thompson/