Alien Audiences

Remembering and Evaluating a Classic Movie

M. Barker, K. Egan, S. Ralph, T. Phillips

• Editore: Palgrave Pivot
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137532060
• Argomento: Médias et arts de la scène
• Categoria: Direction et production de films

Released in 1979, Ridley Scott's Alien has come to be regarded as a classic film, and has been widely written about. But how have audiences engaged with it? This book presents the – sometimes very surprising – results of a major audience research project, exploring how people remember and continue to engage with the film.

1

The Alien Memories Project

Abstract: Chapter 1 explains the background to and reasons for our project, and the story of the making of the film is briefly retold. It examines the extent to which Alien has become a point of reference and reuse within a wide range of kinds of popular culture. It also explores its highly unusual position within academic debates, and illustrates the role that claims and assumptions about ‘the audience’ play within these debates. The rationale for the design and methodology of our project is outlined, including a consideration of the role of specific kinds of cultural knowledge within this. A first summary of results is given, with particular attention to how our participants perceived and understood Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), and H. R. Giger’s alien.

Keywords: academic debates; Ellen Ripley; Giger’s alien; Intertextual references; quali-quantitative survey.

Barker, Martin, Kate Egan, Tom Phillips and Sarah Ralph. Alien Audiences: Remembering and Evaluating a Classic Movie. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137532060.0005.

‘Everyone remembers the first time’. So begins Ian Nathan’s (2011) retelling of the making of Ridley Scott’s (1979) film Alien. Of course that’s not literally true – plenty of people would struggle to put flesh on their recall. But there’s a deeper truth to Nathan’s comment, which is reflected in the ways people talk about the film. A Google search on the phrase ‘I remember watching Alien’ yielded over 14,000 hits. People’s memories of the film matter to them. But to get at that deeper truth, we have to ask some complicated questions – questions which could make sense of the differences between these two search results:

I saw the original Alien just after graduate school when it first came out knowing NOTHING about it. Scared the living bejeezus out of me and became one of my favorites of all time. (http://www.prometheusforum.net/discussion/1/basic-info-introductions/p13)

I remember watching Alien when I was about 10, but I wasn’t too scared, then my dad sneezed and it echoed through the room and that’s the scariest part I remember about that movie as a kid. (http://chatabout.com/answers/first-movie-you-saw-in-theaters-that-you-remember)

To do anything useful with memories as different as these requires some complicated research. This book tells the story of a research project undertaken to try to do just this: to gather people’s memories of Alien in a way which could allow us to understand differences and see patterns. To do this, we have to unpack a lot of assumptions inside Nathan’s remark. He presumes that the memory is equally important to everyone who saw the film. He presumes everyone is likely to remember particular things about the film – say, the notorious chestburster scene (rather than a dad’s mighty sneeze ...). More trickily, he risks presuming that people will remember it now as they experienced it then – whenever that ‘then’ might have been (1979, on first release? 1993, after seeing one of the parodies? 2012, after Prometheus?).

Why Alien? The same questions could be asked of many films or indeed television series – and in a few cases, they have been (often, though, around their stars (see, for instance, Moseley, 2003) or around periods of film-going (see, for instance, Stacey, 1993)). Our reasons varied. But alongside its continuing importance to fans, Scott’s film has attained a rather special position among critics and scholars. More than 100 substantial essays and books have examined the film in detail. But only rarely do these publications talk about their writers’ actual experiences of the film. Instead, as we will see, they are prone to searching the film for ‘deep meanings’ that might affect viewers without them even realising. In short, many of the publications about Alien were content to talk, without evidence, of what ‘the audience’ must be making of the film.

The Making of Alien

The story of the production has been well told by a number of people besides Nathan (e.g., Thomson, 1998; Sammon, 1999; Scott, 2001; Luckhurst, 2014), and we only briefly touch on it here. It is in many ways a standard Hollywood story, with an idea evolving to a script and screenplay over a long period, with many hands contributing along the way – and many more again making a difference to the shape of the final product. Beginning from a 1970 script outline titled Star Beast by Dan O’Bannon, the idea was picked up by Ron Shusett, who had links with Fox. (Roger Luckhurst is excellent in recounting the various sources that O’Bannon drew on, precursor ideas mainly from SF novels – he recalls that Fox had to settle out of court a claim from veteran SF writer A. E. van Vogt over use of ideas from his ‘Voyage of the Space Beagle’ stories.) At Fox, another player – Gordon Carroll – saw potential for a crossover with the horror genre. While in script development, Walter Hill at Brandywine Productions introduced the notion of adjusting the gender balance among the ship’s crew. Fox’s Sandy Lieberson, who had recently seen Ridley Scott’s The Duellists raised the idea of Scott directing. Scott came to the script on the back of having seen Star Wars and realising that he wanted to shift away from art house-style films. But perhaps (as David Thomson captures it) he retained something of that in a distinction he drew: he thought this could be more than horror film: it could be a film ‘about terror’ (Thomson, 1998: 10).

Once confirmed as director, Scott was introduced by O’Bannon and Shusett to the work of Swiss artist H. R. Giger, and was completely taken by some images of aliens from his Necronomicon. This chimed with Scott’s discovery of heavy metal (metal hurlant) as an aesthetic attitude and style. Alongside these came the introduction of a ‘grubby aesthetic’ from Ron L. Cobb, from whose hands came the image of the spaceship as a ‘tramp steamer’. Scott reinforced the gender interest by pressing for Ripley, the ultimate survivor, to be a woman – and then both screen testing and casting Sigourney Weaver (for the princessly sum of $33,000) – against the wishes of Fox. The film’s budget rose gradually from a preliminary $1M to an eventual $9M, and was shot in the UK in 1978. It was given a slow, somewhat nervous release by Fox (who worried that the film would be found too visceral and scary). But from slow beginnings, and running over into 1980, the film’s receipts proved they had a hit on their hands. And it became a classic reference point for discussion, not only among many individuals, but also in other forms of popular culture.

Alien’s invasion

Albert: They’re a bit like Facehuggers, aren’t they?

The Doctor: Face ... huggers?

Albert: Yeah, you know. Alien. The horror movie, Alien.

The Doctor: There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you.

‘Last Christmas’, Doctor Who. BBC1, 25 December 2014.

The above exchange, taken from a Doctor Who Christmas special episode, occurs when a scientist remarks to The Doctor the similarities of a set of attacking alien creatures (‘‘dream crabs’’) to Alien’s Facehugger. Even without such specific acknowledgement, these similarities may have already been evident to those familiar with the imagery of Alien and, indeed, dream crab designer Rob Mayor has acknowledged the influence on its design, noting ‘I can’t lie, [Alien] was a reference, but it’s such a classic film that as soon as you have spider-like creatures running around attaching them to people’s faces, you can’t help but make that comparison’ (Holmes, 2015). Yet despite the design similarities between the creatures, the dialogue’s explicit reference to Alien – the casual acknowledgement of the concept of such a thing as a Facehugger – hints at the extent to which Alien has pervaded popular culture. That such stark reference was made to a film some 35 years after its initial release, in a prime time scheduling slot on Christmas Day, to a viewership comprising nearly a third of the audience share (BBC News, 2015), constitutes an acknowledgement of Alien’s continuing power and relevance. How can we account for its persistent inclusion in the popular cultural landscape?

Take Spaceballs (1987), for example. Released eight years after Alien, Mel Brooks’ sci-fi parody features a scene in which John Hurt – reprising his role as Kane – once again falls victim to a chestburster during dinner, lamenting an exasperated ‘Oh no! Not again!’ before dying (with the alien exiting whilst donning a hat and cane and singing a chorus of ‘Hello! Ma baby’). In 2004, the chestburster was again used for comedic effect on a large scale, with Nik Naks crisps screening an advertisement in the UK in which a giant crisp burst from a man’s stomach before dancing around to the Chic song ‘Le Freak’. These prominent examples belie the countless times reference has been made to the chestburster scene across various media, including The Simpsons, Robot Chicken, Family Guy, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Toy Story.

In the introduction to his Alien Vault, Nathan claims his book ‘is a search, a divination for Alien’s secret magic’, arguing that, although the iconic chestburster scene shattered taboos and is now one of the most famous moments in film history, ‘Alien is much more than one provocative sequence’ (2011: 6–7). Indeed, a quick glance at intertextual references to Alien across media since 1979 confirms that this film plays host to not just one iconic scene, but many iconic scenes. Yes, the chestburster scene has been frequently referenced in media from the subtle to the more explicit, but Alien’s invasion of popular culture – its ‘secret magic’ – has seen a multitude of moments make their way into other media. There is, in fact, a website devoted simply to documenting all the known references to Alien in other branches of popular culture.¹

For example, amongst a plethora of references to the film in The Simpsons, one standout moment from 1994 episode ‘Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadasssss Song’ sees an aping of Dallas’ fatal foray into the Nostromo’s air ducts, featuring Principal Skinner as Ripley, watching the fate of a hunted Groundskeeper Willie via a scanning machine. Blurring the lines between textual and extratextual, the Nintendo videogame series Metroid (1986–) features an antagonist named ‘Ridley’, with a design heavily inspired by H. R. Giger’s Xenomorph. The explicitly extratextual influence can be seen in Alien’s famous tagline ‘In space no one can hear you scream’, which has been endlessly reused and remixed, such as in reviews for other space films Apollo 13 (1995, ‘... see you exaggerate’), Gravity (2013, ‘... hear your one-liners’), and Interstellar (2014, ‘... hear you speak’).

These iconic moments mean that, persistently since 1979, Alien has been a recurring aspect of popular cultural experience. As a result, is it any wonder that Alien keeps returning to get us?

But – and it is an important ‘but’ at the very heart of this book – who is this ‘us’? While there’s no doubt that popular culture (in the sense of widely circulating texts of many kinds) has been thoroughly soaked in references to Scott’s film, how have different kinds of audiences (beyond those important one who make all those texts) responded to its ever-presence? How are people’s pleasures in the film, their memories of it, affected by all this? Who tells whom about it, passing on their own interests in it? What comes to stand out from the film, and thus, in important senses, to stand in (as iconic references) for it? These are the kinds of question we decided to try to answer, through an investigation of Alien’s audiences and their memories of watching the film. It is an undeniable fact that no film gathers identical responses from everyone. But recognising and accepting that there is variety in responses is one thing; it is much harder to ask and find out what patterns and themes there might be within all the variation. It was with the ambition of taking this further step that we conceived and carried out our investigation into people’s memories of watching Alien.

Academic discussions of Alien

It is important to give a context to our study. We are hardly alone in being interested in understanding the meaning of Alien to its audiences. Film critic Tom Shone, famously sneery towards film scholars, recently asked in his preview of Prometheus: ‘Why are academics so obsessed with Ridley Scott’s movie and its sequels?’ (Shone, 2012). To prove his point, he offers a bibliography with 24 academic references, suggesting that this ‘cottage industry’ is just an indication of typical academic obsessions with finding meanings in films that no one else can see. If only he knew. Our bibliography of significant discussions of films in the franchise currently stands at well over 100 items. But – sneers aside – Shone does have a point. There is something very intriguing in the depth and persistence of film academics’ engagement with, especially, the first Alien film. There are things going on inside this continuing fascination which are relevant to our study. Indeed, they are among the formative reasons for our undertaking it. There are several features to the debates which warrant attention: first, how widespread they have been, and in a wide range of publications. People were publishing commentaries in journals devoted to film, popular culture, American studies, philosophy, science fiction, feminism, psychology, psychoanalysis, speech studies, literary and gothic studies, and religion.

Second, many of the contributions have claimed to disclose wider or deeper meanings in the film. The debates began early, with a set of special essays in Science Fiction Studies (1980), followed by essays in philosophy and psychology journals. Then, in 1986–1987, five analyses appeared, around which much of the subsequent debates would take place. First, Lyn and Tom Davis-Gemelli (1986) wrote an account in the now-defunct Film/Psychology Review arguing that the film embodied a deep humanist commitment to the future, with Ripley embodying the ‘feminine’ qualities we will need in order to save humankind (this account would trigger antagonistic responses from, among others, psychoanalyst Harvey Greenberg [...