Alien

I'm cramming furiously and contentedly for my film and philosophy module, and I expect many posts in the days to come will be sci-fi related. Here's one of them. What you are about to read is sort of like really drafty notes to be turned into lecture notes.

I just read Stephen Mulhall's On Film (Routledge, 2002). Because On Film is NOT on film. It's about the Alien quartet - a.k.a. the four Alien flicks. And Mulhall's a philosophy prof, so I thought that held out the prospect of something I could use. I approached with some trepidation, however. The book is part of that sketchy "Thinking In Action" series. And Mulhall has read maybe a little more Stanley "This New Yet Unapproachable" Cavell than is good for anyone but Stanley himself (who seems to thrive on the stuff.) But Mulhall more or less won me over. It's a good book, with moments of ludicrous excess. But writers on film always seem to have those when they write whole books. And in this case those bits are downright funny, hence not annoying. Like if this little Stanley Cavell exploded out of your chest and started lecturing about Emerson or Kierkegaard with all its little mouthparts. That would be funny. (Not my chest. Your chest.)

For starters, the book has a thoroughly sensible structure. The idea is that the four directors have such distinctive visual signatures and directorial sensibilities that we proceed not just vertically down the series but laterally. So we start with Scott and Alien. And Bladerunner. Then Cameron and Aliens. And the Terminator films. Then Fincher and Alien3. And Se7en.Then Jeunet and Alien Resurrection. And City of Lost Children. This is so simple and obvious, really, but it works very well. It's a framework from which you hang whatever philosophy you've got. And it can hold a lot. It puts an X right on the most filmically distinctive feature of the series: it's defined by radical disjunctions of style and sensibility, due to the revolving door direction. In the interest of making at least one labored alien anatomy analogy: it's like the series sheds not just its skin but its skeleton - it's exoskeleton - as it develops from stage to stage.

Do the films complement each other? Is it just a mostly fun mess, with a lot of artistic energy wasted scrawling graffiti on previous installments, and all the little good bits best seen not against the backdrop of the series, but against that director's other work. The whole less than the sum of the parts, but quite a few mouthparts? These are the questions that the four lateral moves provoke. If Alien makes sense next to Bladerunner, but not Aliens; but Aliens works OK side by side with Terminator, and so forth, then the connected storyline is just one of those embarrassing things that happens sometimes.

Let me just say a few words about Mulhall's on each film.

Alien: Life's a bitch
I have a vague but solidifying plan to talk a lot about Schopenhauer in my six-lecture series. I wrote my dissertation in part on Schopenhauer. His influence on the early Wittgenstein, in particular. Now I want go back, dig into that stuff again, and lecture about The Matrix, Dark City and Alien, all in terms of The World as Will and Representation. Mulhall obliges me by really doing a good job allegorizing the alien as The World As Will. As sinister, mindless Life principle. (Best of all, he doesn't mention Schopenhauer, so I don't have to figure out how not to plagiarize.)

The alien species appears not so much to follow nature's imperatives as to incarnate them. This is not because it is driven to survive and reproduce, but rather because it is so purely driven, because it appears to have no other drives - no desire to communicate, no culture, no modes of play or pleasure or industry other than those necessitated by its own continuation as a species. The alien's form of life is (just, merely, simply) life, life as such: it is not so much a particular species as the essence of what it means to be a species, to be a creature, a natural being, it is Nature incarnate or sublimed, a nightmare embodiment of the natural realm understood as ...

OK, I'll cut him off there. He does tend to write four sentences saying the same thing when he finds a thought he likes. (But who am I to cast the first stone?) And actually what I just quoted is the relatively obvious bit. He then does a good job of contrasting the alien mode of existence with that of the crew, who live within this massive tug, asleep most of the time. "When the crew finally emerge from their ship's hibernation pods so that they can respond to the unidentified radio beacon signal, the ship's need for them in these unusual circumstances only emphasizes their superfluity in normal circumstances." Which seems right. Ergo:

A further aspect of the alien's incarnation of nature also serves to subvert one of our most familiar ways of representing our own creaturehood, of understanding our humanness as other to our embodiment. For this alien is, of course, uniquely well-equipped to defend itself ... [skip four sentences saying the same thing] ... In short, its body is its technology [ah, there we go!] The alien thereby represents a mode of evolution that is not dwarfed by or in thrall to (say, alienated from) it's technology, as the crew of the Nostromo appear to be and more specifically, it undercuts our tendency to imagine that our social and cultural development, our ability to evolve beyond the limitations of the body by evolving tools and technology (to reduce our vulnerability and improve upon our natural powers), is the means by which we transcend our naturalness rather than a further expression of it, simply the exploitation of the biological endowment that is distinctive of our species. The alien's monstrously intimate incorporation of our horror at the thought that culture as such is in fact our second nature - not something other to our naturalness in which our humanity might safely reside, something from which we must accordingly think of our incarnate selves as alientated, on pain of annihilating our humanity.

No doubt this theme will be explored in-depth in the upcoming Alien vs. Predator film. And let me be the first to say that I have full confidence in it's tag-line: "No matter who wins, we lose."

No, seriously. I think there's something right about that block I just quoted, although it's a little overdrawn. Then there is some good allegorical discussion of Ripley and Ash and Mother that more or less builds well on the 'so if the alien is life, then life is bad' logic, in ways that seem plausible to me.

I normally am deeply suspicious of allegorical readings of sci-fi films. They are always available (and that's one good reason to think they are going to be cheap.) And they often seem to pretend to be explanations of what makes a film good, or bad, when - even if they are plausible - they seem like secondary or tertiary elements, or extras even, getting a swelled head about having been part of a movie. Ideas as special effects. Probably I'm just getting into this one because I want to talk about Schopenhauer and the World as Will.

Well, enough about Alien. I think I want to talk a bit about how the Nostromo is like a haunted house, and the Alien - weapons are useless against it - is sort of like a ghost. So the movie has the same structure as a classic ghost story, complete with exorcism. Does that seem smart or dumb to you?

Aliens : When Vietnam Syndrome Attacks!
This bit of Cameron-bashing seems mostly in order. A classic case of 'don't ask directors about their philosophical ideas because these folks are always crazy':

Cameron has more than once acknowledged that he conceived the Marine mission to LV 426 as a study of the Vietnam war - in which, on his analysis, a high-tech army confident of victory over a supposedly more primitive civilization found itself mired in a humiliating series of defeats that added up to an unwinnable war. To be sure, this analysis allows Cameron to criticize certain aspects of American culture - its adoration of the technological, its ignorance of alien cultures, its overweening arrogance [yes, yes, just spit it out, man]. At the same time, however, the generic background of his film, together with its specific inheritance of the alien narrative universe, ensures that the structure of his criticism works only by placing the Vietnamese in the position of absolute, and absolutely monstrous, aliens; and it rewrites the conflict it claims to analyse by allowing the Marines to win the war by destorying the planet in a nuclear explosion. It thereby supports the vision of American political hubris and xenophobia that it claims to criticize.

Alien3: Always Already Boring
if you haven't seen it, the beginning gives away the ending (so it's not like I could spoil the plot if I tried, but I won't bother). Furthermore, the ending is annoying. Furthermore, everyone looks the same and you never get to know anyone until one second before they die, you can't tell what's going on and don't care. And didn't anyone tell Fincher there are more than two colors in the universe: green-grey and grey-green? I'll give you the long version of this criticism, couresty of Mulhall:

It is the general failure to recognize this opening sequence as Fincher's way of refusing familiar cinematic pleasures that accounts, in my view, for the relative lack of critical and commercial favour accorded this film in the series. Particular disappointment was expressed with the film's concluding half, in which Ripley and the convicts attempt in various ways to trap the alien in the maze-like corridors of the foundry: the audience acquires no overall sense of the geography of the refinery, and is barely capable of distinguishing one shaven-headed male from another before the alien catches and kills them, let alone of recognizing one strategically significant intersection of corridors or sealed door from its less fateful counterparts. But Fincher is not here trying, and failing, to generate the usual structure of suspense and fear: the terrain of his final hunting of the beast is unsurveyable, and the unfolding of its events is disorienting and uncompelling, because Fincher has always already lost (and has already done his utmost to deprive his audience of) any faith in the intrinsic significance of such narrative artifacts.

The thing about this is that I think it's exactly right. Except that it's also totally wrong. Fincher really is trying to do exactly what Mulhall says, and Mulhall is right about the reasons. It's a big thumb of the nose at Cameron, an attempt to effect a thematic return to the original Scott film - but cubed. The philosophical message is that hunting and being hunted by aliens is not significant. So all the marine heroics in Aliens was stupid, childish, shallow stuff. Now the victims all look the same because it would be an illusion to suggest that they are individually important. Now the tactical situations are unclear because who the hell cares about tactics? In the first movie the same effect was achieved by making the beast basically unhuntable, most of the time.

The point is really classic Schopenhauer, if I may ride my hobbyhorse. (No, I have no reason to believe that Fincher read Schopenhauer.) What you need to do is get your eye off these distracting but meaningless causal chains that govern events in the World as Representation. There isn't any meaning to be found in the surface dimension. Train your mind's eye on the meaning of the world. Which is, of course, that it is really the World as Will. What does the alien signify? What does Ripley signify? Fincher's movie is trying to make a metaphysical point, and one that I think sort of fits with a correct allegorical reading of the first film. But Mulhall seems to conclude that therefore the film deserves more critical and commercial favour than it got. But why should that follow?

If all the man wanted to do was make some sort of philosophical point, but there was no way to make that point allegorically, in a movie - except by making the movie no fun - then was it really wise to make a movie rather than write an essay? This seems like a glib and shallow question but it is actually quite important and critically central, and not just to this one work: which is more important, fun or meaning?

I would contrast Alien3 with Dark City in this regard. This one theme is the same: ignore meaningless surface events. There is Rufus Sewell as the guy with the power to see what's really going on, and there's the detective - William Hurt - who is just chasing clues in the wrong dimension. He's trying to solve the mystery from within the illusion. There's got to be a way of artistically conveying that this is meaningless without simply boring and annoying the audience.

I wonder whether the stock of Alien3 hasn't been quietly rising for several years. Have people been privately convincing themselves they liked Alien3, after all, because Se7en and Fight Club were good. (I haven't seen the latter, but I liked the former.) Maybe I'll watch it again and decide that really its a brilliant metaphysical allegory.

Alien Resurrection: Why won't you let me die?
Unintentionally hilarious passage:

Is Alien Resurrection a sequel to Alien3, and hence to the previous two 'Alien' films? It may seem that the presence of the aliens, together with that of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, guarantees this; but in fact, it merely displaces the question. For can we simply take it for granted that the aliens are the same species that we encountered in the earlier films, or that the Ripley of Alien Resurrection is the same person whose vicissitudes we have followed from their beginning on the Nostromo? After all, David Fincher's furious, purifying desire for closure in Alien3 resulted in the death of Ripley and of the sole surviving representative of the alien species inside her. Hence Jeunet's film, helping itself to the resources for self-renewal that science fiction makes available to its practitioners, can recover the queen and her host only by positing the capacity to clone them from genetic material recovered from the medical facilities on Fiorina 161. But as his renegade military scientists make clear at the outset, the cloning process produces another, distinct individual from this genetic material; it does not reproduce the individual from whom the material derives. Their clone of the original Ripley is not Ripley herself - her body is not Ripley's body (however much it resembles the one consumed in Fiorina's furnace), and her mind has no inherent continuity with Ripley's (it must be stocked with her own experiences.) As Call puts it, she is 'a strain, a construct; they grew you in a fucking lab.'

First, if a movie can show it contains DNA from another movie, that should be enough to prove paternity, for franchise purposes. Second, I'll bet you already knew what a clone is. No need to lecture us like we were grown in a lab yesterday.

That said, there is an interesting question implicit here about the nature of fictional subcreation. It's the question Mulhall is getting at, but he gets all wound up about sequelhood and clones and never really gets there. Each of the four movies is so stylistically distinctive that it's like the whole world changes. Yes, the storyline - the DNA evidence - ties the movies together in a way that it would be quite tedious to deny. But that connection is not aesthetically significant. It's tolerable at best and gimmicky at worst. We feel as though subcreation is a profoundly aesthetically significant act (don't we?.) So there is a some temptation to say that, to the degree things have gone well, there are really four different fictional worlds here. Everything that goes well drives the movies apart, everything that ties them together is insignificant. That's an exaggeration. But there's something to it. I sort of want to think more about the nature of subcreation. Don't really have a lot of thoughts yet.

As a sort of anti-philosophical counterweight to Mulhall, I have David Thomson's The Alien Quartet waiting in the wings. I am sure it will be delightful and resolutely unphilosophical. His big fat Biographical Film Dictionary sat behind the toilet in our bathroom in Berkeley, CA, for a couple years, getting a lot of use. No, really. We didn't use it for toilet paper. You read one entry at a time. After a while you know a lot about film. Thomson will refuse to read the movies allegorically since he hates that stuff. I only wonder whether the man will be able to restrain himself from going on about Howard Hawks and how Howard Hawks is the universal yardstick of filmic goodness. Alien is a long way from Bringing Up Baby.

I open and read at random (I'm used to doing that to Thomson): "Let us, by all means, endorse the rather pretty way in which Wren is dispatched by the very monster that leaps out of Purvis's chest." Well, that sounds reasonable.

Comments

[spacetoast]

I think the ghost story thing is right, though, I'd add, complete with false exorcism. What that suggests to me, though, is that those movies are more horror movies than SciFi, at least up to the (confused) one with Wynona. I guess I'll buy the story about the interfusion of "naturalness" with technology, but, it seems to me, that's more a matter of the particular palette the monster is composed from. It's a pretty paradigmatic instance of Noel Carrol's idea of monster qua transgression of standing conceptual categories. And, which speaks to its horror-ness against it's SciFi-ness, the transgression really isn't elaborated or geared toward reconceiving the relationship between the apparently contrary categories in any detail; or to the extent that this does happen, it is in the interest of intensity first and foremost. The main thing is to ellicit affect, it seems to me. I think the Schopenhauer angle is pretty clever though. Also check out John Carpenter's The Thing (not the original The Thing) on that stuff.

And quit dissing "Alien vs. Predator," you bastard.

[spacetoast]

er...yeah, those transgressed things are supposed to be either conceptual boundaries or categorical boundaries, and not "conceptual categories."

[Carlos]

I like the ghost story thing too. So much of science fiction is old plot with new rationalization -- Case halfway through life's road, with his Dixie Virgil in a cartridge -- but the glitter can be distracting.

Though I kinda wish Henry James wrote about chest bursters.

[bob mcmanus]

"Alien is a long way from Bringing Up Baby."

But not so far from "Thing From Another World"

(1951, Hawks,Lederer,Hecht)

Hmm, I bet this was an intentional allusion.

[Gary Farber]

"But not so far from 'Thing From Another World'"

aka "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell.

[spacetoast]

Damn, now that I think of it, Howard Hawks had a hand in the original The Thing.

[spacetoast]

...which Bob already picked.

[Laura]

Alien is like a ghost story, specifically a gothic ghost story. Quite a few scholars have written articles about how Alien follows a typical Gothic narrative structure of flight and pursuit. I think Devandra Darma's The Gothic Flame has a chapter on the movie. The Nostromo is like a castle and it is certainly a dark and stormy night (all weather in Alien is bad). You also get the classic Gothic family dynamic (someone in my family is trying to kill me) with Ash and Mother representing authority.

[Cryptic Ned]

What's a "module"?

[jholbo]

An undergraduate course. We call 'em 'modules' for some reason.

[Jim Flannery]

You might want to take a look at two articles about On Film, and Mulhall's response, from Film-Philosophy last summer (scroll down to August 2003). (Although none of 'em talk about Schopenhauer there either)

[Kip Manley]

Oh, just some quick comments: Alien as haunted house flick is a pretty popular reading, the only problem with which is that the haunted house, traditionally speaking, is the thing that's bad (what's the line from Haunting of Hill House?), whereas the poor Nostromo is contaminated by the thing that's brought aboard (which would sort of make the planet they stop on the haunted house, and the Nostromo the car they try to flee in, but that's getting silly, and anyway, depending on how you read the monolithic corpse that's sitting on the telescope-thing, the planet maybe was also contaminated, way back when).

Um. Oh, yeah: Alien 3 was always well-liked in my circle. —Maybe because we had not so much a visceral dislike of Aliens (popcorn being popcorn) as a visceral dislike of everyone around us telling us how astounding and cool and brilliant and magnificent Aliens was. Which would make us predisposed to like (and thus always-already liking) Alien 3. But I also tend to like storytellers in massmarket mainstream stuff who get away with things like killing off Newt and the Last Surviving Marine in the opening credits just about, because liking that sort of thing makes me feel cleverer than all the people who rail against it. So there's that.

And you might want to take a look at the troubled production histories of 3 and 4: I understand, for instance, that the attempt to retroactively do a "director's cut" of 3 results in a very different and improved movie, and a reading of Joss Whedon's original screenplay for 4 might give you some further raw matter to mull over on the whole sub-creation aspect. Which is the angle I like best, but I'm just egging you on to get more! more! more! on the topic.

AVP? Dracula v. Frankenstein. (Or maybe the Wolfman; I've never seen any of the Predator flicks.) —I wonder who's playing Abbott..?

[Backword Dave]

I go along with Alien as a haunted house/slasher movie. But I disagree with Kip (above) about 'the poor Nostromo'. While the ship is not exactly evil, it is supposed to be a trap. The Ian Holm character tells them, after they knock his head off, that they can't kill the alien: they were diverted to pick it up deliberately by the company. Like a Greek tragedy, the ending is supposed to be foretold - they all die. (So Ripley and the cat survive. It's Hollywood.) The backstory is this very nasty avaricious corporation which will sacrifice employees in the interests of acquiring this invincible weapon.

Into that backstory, I've managed to read two further things. One, Ian Holm was supposed to survive and pilot the ship back to earth with its cargo (now the crew have done whatever they did on their mission, they're superfluous) and the Alien which is to be investigated. Two, the success of the Alien as a killer wiped out whatever was on the planet (whether they were its creators or those creators' adversaries is unclear). From two, it seems to me, that one is capitalist hubris. The Alien destroys everything. As it continues to do in the rest of the series.

[Hogan]

First Freddy v. Jason, now Alien v. Predator. What is it about this cultural moment that makes people think we want to see not people fighting monsters, but monsters fighting monsters?

[jholbo]

Thanks, everyone. I didn't know half this stuff. Thanks for the gothic fiction reference, Laura. And thanks for cluing me in that Hawks was an (uncredited) director on The Thing, bob. That's really funny. And thanks for backstory about Josh Whedon's script getting wrecked, Kip, which I can believe. (You don't happen to have a copy of the original screenplay, do you? Ah, well. Can't have everything.) And first prize goes to Jim for the link to the useful exchange that Mulhall had with Baggini. Baggini's argument is one that I mean to discuss, and it's nice to have a clear statement of it. I think I take Mulhall's side of the argument. (With Schopenhauer on top.)

[Kip Manley]

No, you can't have everything. But some stuff you can.

[jholbo]

Thanks! Now will one of you also volunteer to give a guest lecture? You are all being so darn helpful. Warms my heart.

[Nicole Wyatt]

Nothing useful to add philosophically, just wanted to chime in and say that yes, imo the directors cut of Alien3 was indeed a much better movie -- and I didn't hate the release version as much as some.

[Keith]

A fine study in the nature of subcreation lies within Robert Radriguez’s El Mariachi trilogy (El mariachi, Desperado, Once Upon a Time in Mexico) Most of the people I talked to who didn’t like Once Upon a Time in Mexico didn’t understand that the movie wasn’t so much a sequel as it was a remix. It takes the same basic premis and spins it in a new direction. The Ur story is present in each of the three films, but has added dimension and meaning by the various tellings. Sort of how the Robin Hood of the thirties is still Robin Hood even though it’s nothing like Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Theives or Disney’s Robin Hood, in which all the characters are animals. The ur story is the same but the text is unique, as it is based on the aesthetic of the various storytellers. That each film in the El Mariachi trilogy is so wildly different, yet has the same cast (mostly) and writer/director is where the real study lies.

[Keith]

First Freddy v. Jason, now Alien v. Predator. What is it about this cultural moment that makes people think we want to see not people fighting monsters, but monsters fighting monsters?

Bush Vs. The Terrorists. Art imitating Life.

[Matt McGrattan]

Re: the indistinguishable shaven headed guys in Alien 3.

They're not indistinguishable to me. Most of them are well known minor British character actors who a British audience will have seen time and again in small movies and TV shows. They might not be able to put a name to them but the faces will be familiar.

It would be like if they had filmed it with a bunch of guys who'd done decent but undistinguised work in NYPD Blue, the Sopranos and E.R. (to pick 3 random US tv shows with fairly big casts). They'd no longer have been anonymous shaven headed guys. It'd have been "why is that guy who plays the security guard on E.R. got a shaved head?"

Still doesn't solve some of the problems with the film (although I still like it).

[jholbo]

Quick response to Bryan. How odd! I myself would never use the word 'humanoid' as a synonym for android. Ah, well. As to your point about how there is some logic to what Morpheus and co. do. Well, yes, that's why the movie is good. My mocking tone no doubt made it sound as though I think infolock is a sin. But it obviously isn't - not necessarily; no more so than infodump is, so long as its done in a plausible way. (There are some wonderfully well-managed infodumps in the world of s-f.) Those scenes with Morpheus are great; they are now some of the classic moments of sci-fi cinema. And they are dramatically necessary. The movie certainly wouldn't be better if Morpheus just pulled Neo aside and said, 'look, kid ...' And as you say: sometimes it's true to tell people that they have to see for themselves. Nevertheless, it's strained to keep doing so, or so extremely. The movie pretends that it is necessary to withhold info from Neo longer, and in more theatrically elaborate manner, than is really plausible. And the pattern repeats precisely in lots of movies. It turns out to be a major control for regulating the narrative flow.

[Stephen Frug]

Just a minor point about the Alien(s) movies. I've always thought it was an interesting example of this fact in American culture, that people will accept The Corporation (big, nameless) as a villan -- ready to do anything to make money, controlling everything, and generally Source of All Evil -- more or less instantly. There's no disbelief that The Corporation would act this way.

So why isn't it easier to get people to see that corporations do nasty things -- not up to the 'try to implant woman with Alien monster embryo' level, but nasty things -- in the real world, as a political point? I admit this is getting a bit better recently (e.g. Haliburton), but for the most part there isn't much suspicion of corporations as entities at all. Yet we all believe, at once, that they'd act villanously in movies. Now, of course we believe thing in movies that we don't in real life -- in aliens, say. But it stil does seem to indicate there's some untapped cultural suspicion there.

Incidentally, since so many people are praising it, I thought Alien3 sucked. A dull retread of the first film. Haven't seen the director's cut, though.

SF

[ajay]

I wouldn't say Alien is a ghost story; it's a slasher movie. Just as Aliens is really a creature feature.
And therefore Alien is Thatcherite-conservative, like all slasher films, while Aliens is old-school big-government liberal, like all creature features.
I have an elegant discussion of this subject, but this comments box is too small to contain it:
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2004/09/burt_gummer_spe.html

Is there really so much of a contrast between humans and aliens? Basically the first three films are all about things emerging from pods, killing, dying, and metamorphosing - think of the changes that Ripley goes through in the course of the three films; the visual similarity (intentional, I'm sure) between the opening scene of Ripley's shuttle being scanned and cautiously explored in Aliens, and the scene of Kane making his way into the hold in Alien.