Becoming Alien

The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction's Most Idiosyncratic Film Franchise

Sarah Welch-Larson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781725283008
  9781725282995
• eBook ISBN:
  9781725283015
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Alien films are perceived to be a fractured franchise, each one loosely related to the others. They are nonlinear, complicated, convoluted: a collection of genre movies ranging from horror to war to farce. But on closer examination, the threads that bind together these films are strong and undeniable. The series is a model of Catherine Keller's cosmology as a cycle of order out of chaos, an illustration of her concept of evil as discreation. When viewed through the lens of Keller's Face of the Deep, the Alien films resolve into a cohesive whole. The series becomes six views of the idea of evil-as-exploitation, its origins, and its consequences. Each film expands on the concept of evil set forth by its predecessors, complicating that conception, and retroactively enriching readings of the films that came before.

2

An Express Elevator to Hell

Aliens

Alien is small, as self-contained as the ship the film is set in. It depicts, simply, the exploitation of one small crew by one heartless Company order, one undercover android, and one unwelcome passenger—high stakes at relatively small scale. True to its title, Aliens gives the audience more: more aliens, as well as more characters, with more capacity for greater evil. Aliens raises the stakes by compounding the scale of the story being told: instead of a single ship and a crew, the setting and cast are a planet and a colony. Alien revealed that evil is not just an abstract possibility; it is real and tangible as well as existential. Aliens fleshes out the world of its predecessor, imagining what the realities of living under an exploitative company would be like. Where Alien was concerned with the horror of discovering the existence of evil, Aliens is concerned with the action that is necessitated by this discovery, and the reality that asserting control over chaos is impossible.

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Aliens takes the raw-boned universe of Alien and adds meat to its skeleton. The audience watching Alien understands that the Nostromo is a microcosm, a snapshot of a much larger universe with all the bureaucrats, red tape, class tension, and societal structure that a disagreement during breakfast over a simple pay bonus can imply. The story told in Alien raises more questions than answers:

• Where did the alien come from? Are there more of them out there?
• What will happen to Ripley, now that she is the last survivor? Will there be any repercussions for the destruction of the alien or the deaths of the crew of the Nostromo?
• What kind of a company would knowingly send a crew of seven to their deaths?
• What kind of a universe is this, that such a company appears to be profitable? Is the Company an aberration, or do people disappear all the time without anyone questioning their absence?

James Cameron, who picked up the threads of the story that Ridley Scott left behind, chose not to answer all of these questions. Cameron’s version of the story is forward-looking, not interested in origins or whys, only in what nexts. Questions of the existence and origins of other life in the universe are left behind, and so remain a mystery.27 The audience—and the characters in the story—learn nothing more about the origins of the alien. Any questions about the skeleton in the derelict ship from the first film are abandoned; any ideas about the intricacies of a possible alien society are left by the wayside. The audience knows there are more aliens in the universe, thanks to the film’s plural title: the question about the existence of other life in the universe is answered before the film has even begun.

The rest of Cameron’s answers are logical extensions of the world of Alien. A company that would carelessly send seven of their employees to investigate a malevolent life form with the intent of monetizing that life form would do so again without thinking twice. Such a company would care only about profits and outcomes, unconcerned with the human cost so long as their ledgers remain in the black.

Aliens expands the world of Alien, leaving the stifling world of the Nostromo behind, but not abandoning it entirely. The sequel presents variations on the themes first apparent in the original, similar and yet different: branches from a fractal that spiral out and inspire questions of their own.

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The film opens much like its predecessor, with a slow pan over deep space to a small ship, drifting its way between the stars. This time, the ship has a familiar shape. No towering refinery spires, just an escape shuttle—the very same one from the end of Alien. Every surface inside the ship is covered with glittering dust. The lighting is no longer the yellowy gray of Alien’s color palette, but a dark blue, cold and deep. The shuttle has been drifting for a long time. When a deep-space salvage team carves its way through the door, they do so with a laser at the end of a block-shaped robot arm, blunt-edged and menacing.

The crew find Ripley sleeping in the shuttle, and bemoan their lost salvage (and lost pay). The universe kept spinning while Ripley was asleep. Her rescue took sixty years, instead of the expected six weeks. In the intervening decades she herself lost everything: ship, crew, the life she once had, the family she left back home, her career, her peace of mind, her credibility. She may have outwitted the alien sixty years before, but she cannot outrun the consequences. While she recovers in the hospital, and even after, she endures nightmares about the alien that decimated the crew of the Nostromo. In all her dreams she too is made a victim, with the alien head rearing impossibly high beneath the skin of her stomach. Every night she wakes up screaming, covered in sweat, massaging her chest, as though the dream-alien has just broken through her own flesh.

The scenes after Ripley’s rescue are lit cold and white, clinical and sterile; she might be back among other human beings, but she is just as isolated as she had been when she was asleep on the shuttle, haunted by bad memories and by the Company’s disinterested disbelief in her report of the alien and the destruction of the Nostromo. Later, when the film becomes a rescue mission, and then a war movie, its aesthetics will take on a muddy flavor, colored by Ripley’s PTSD and the braggadocio of a squad of Colonial Marines, heavily armed and eager for a fight.

Like Alien, Aliens is about a crew investigating a possible encounter with extraterrestrial life, and finding a situation they are unprepared for. Unlike Alien, the characters in Aliens go into their investigation clear-eyed, aware of the existence of alien life; the investigators are not civilian space truckers diverted from their ordinary shipping schedule, but a squad of soldiers already experienced with close encounters; the team is rounded out by an android and a Company man, with Ripley as their consultant. The planetoid where Ripley’s crew found the first alien is now a colony, populated by Company employees; when the Company loses touch with their colony, they call in the Marines to exterminate a possible alien invasion.

Aliens is consumed by war.28 When Ripley joins the Marines on their mission to the colony, she trades the pale palette of the hospital for an environment that is dark blue and green in hue, the surfaces stained like fatigues. The score is laced with the staccato of a snare drum performing a parade march. James Cameron’s boxy machinery, heavy and militant, permeates the aesthetic of the film. The camera glides across the muscles and guns of the Marine characters, setting them up to be, as their sergeant declares, “absolute badasses.”29 These characters (men and women both, as the Nostromo’s ungendered division of labor extends to the armed forces, still a novelty in the 1980s) are people of action, spoiling for action. Their own actions will spiral out into myriad unintended consequences, which will demand further decisive action in return, a feedback loop of action and uncertainty. To freeze, according to Aliens, will...

Table of contents

• Becoming Alien
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Crew Expendable
• An Express Elevator to Hell
• Ripples in the Water
• I’m a Stranger Here Myself
• God Doesn’t Build in Straight Lines
• Nothing Beside Remains
• Epilogue
• Bibliography