David Clennon The Thing (1982)
David Clennon (born May 10, 1943, Waukegan, Illinois) played Palmer, the assistant pilot at U.S. Outpost 31, in The Thing (1982). Palmer is the camp's UFO-believer and stoner; his five-word reaction to the Norris head walking under a desk on insect legs — "you got to be fucking kidding" — is the most-quoted single line in the film, and the line's success in the audience is one of the reasons the head-walk works as horror rather than as bathos.
A character actor with a stage and an off-Broadway pedigree
Clennon trained at the Yale School of Drama in the late 1960s and worked for a decade in New York theater — including the off-Broadway production of The Connection and a lead in the original cast of The Front Page revival — before drifting into character work in film and television in the late 1970s. Costa-Gavras's Missing (1982), released the same year as The Thing, gave him his first major film role of significance: the State Department officer Phil Putnam, opposite Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. (wikipedia)
"I came to Hollywood late and I came as a character man. I never had to play a leading-man part, and that was a relief." — David Clennon, Backstage (interview, 2010s)
Palmer was written as comic relief and Clennon played him as comic relief
Bill Lancaster's screenplay treats Palmer as the camp's principal comic register: he mocks Garry's "popgun" in beat 9,b9 runs with the UFO theory in beat 15 (aliens "practically own South America"),b15 and provides the audience-surrogate gasp at the Norris head-walk in beat 31.b31 The line — delivered as Palmer crouches at floor level watching a severed head with insect legs cross the linoleum — is one of the cleanest examples in 1980s genre film of a comic moment used to ratchet horror higher rather than break it.
"Carpenter shot the line a lot of ways. He had me whisper it. He had me scream it. The version that got into the picture is the one where I just say it like I'm reading the menu." — David Clennon, The A.V. Club (2017 interview at The A.V. Club Random Roles)
The blood-test reveal
Clennon plays Palmer in the rec-room couch sequence as bored — irritated at being tied up, irritated at the petri dishes, the same low-affect register he has played the rest of the film in. The transformation in beat 34 is the film's biggest single-actor practical-effects sequence after the dog-thing kennel: the body splits in the bonds, takes Windows by the head as Windows backs against the door, and is torched in the doorway.b34 Clennon's contribution is mostly the ten seconds of human acting that sets the moment up — the sudden break in the bored register, the look Palmer gives MacReady in the half-second before his blood leaps.
The discovery that Palmer is the Thing is the film's only major reveal that violates audience expectation. The audience has been trained to suspect Garry, Childs, MacReady, Blair — Palmer was the comic-relief stoner, and the comic-relief stoner is exactly the man Lancaster's screenplay arranges to be unbelievable as a horror antagonist until the test runs.
"The Palmer reveal works because Clennon is so harmless for ninety minutes. By the time the wire touches the dish, you have ruled him out three times. Lancaster and Carpenter both knew that — Palmer is the proof that the test does what no person could do." — Anne Billson, The Guardian (writing on The Thing, 2010s; archived at The Guardian — Film)
After The Thing
Clennon went into a long and unusually principled second act. He played Miles Drentell on thirtysomething (1989–1991, Emmy-nominated), Allen Hughes on Once and Again (1999–2002), and a recurring role on Six Feet Under. He has been a working television actor for forty years, with an unusually high rate of guest credits on prestige drama (The West Wing, Mad Men, Damages, Boston Legal).
Clennon has also been one of Hollywood's most public political voices — a refusenik signatory to a 2010 statement against the Toronto International Film Festival's Tel Aviv spotlight, a long-time anti-war activist, and a writer of letters and op-eds in The Nation and Counterpunch.
Selected filmography
| Year | Film | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1979 | Being There | Dennis Watson | Hal Ashby |
| 1982 | Missing | Phil Putnam | Costa-Gavras |
| 1982 | The Thing | Palmer | Carpenter |
| 1984 | The Falcon and the Snowman | Larry Rogers | |
| 1985 | Sweet Dreams | Patsy Cline's manager | |
| 1989 | thirtysomething | Miles Drentell | TV; Emmy-nominated |
| 1995 | The Cure | Dr. Stevens | |
| 1999 | Once and Again | Allen Hughes | TV |
| 2007 | Damages | various | TV |