Alien (1979)

The perfect organism.

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator Pitch

The crew of cargo-hauling ‘space truck’ The Nostromo are told to respond to a mysterious signal from an unknown planet. After one of the crew gets too friendly with an egg, an alien creature gestates inside him, resulting in a particularly gory ‘birth’. This Alien, getting increasingly toothy, picks off the crew one by one. Warrant Officer Ripley discovers that the crew had been tricked into responding to the signal, and that Science Officer Ash is a robot working for their corporate masters, who want a live specimen of the Alien. Eventually, with everyone but her dead, Ripley saves Jones the cat, kills the Alien and escapes.

Alien owes its existence to George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977). When the latter was an unexpected global smash, Fox Studios were anxious for a follow up. And the only script featuring rocket ships they had hanging around was Alien.

The two films are very different in lots of ways. Alien is a horror movie, not a feel good adventure; it is grounded and ‘realistic’, rather than full blown fantasy; and while there is no sex in Star Wars, the titular character of Alien is a big walking pile of terrifying mutant genitals. But they also have more in common than you might think. Both are science fiction, obviously, and science fiction of a very particular type; both use set designs with a grimy, lived-in look. They are deliberately built to be the opposite of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969), which is all gleaming white wipedown interiors. They are both also love-letters to B-movie sci-fi, taking situations and tropes from cheap movies of the ‘40s and ‘50s and reinventing them for an age blessed with more ambitious special effects. 

Most of all, though, both of them owe a lot to Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel Dune (1966). With its desert planets, internecine aristocratic conflict and mysterious wizard clans Star Wars obviously borrowed a few tropes from the book, but Alien owes it a more direct debt. In the ‘70s, unhinged Chilean film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky was trying to get a film version of Dune off the ground (both Orson Welles and Salvador Dali were supposed to be in the cast). To this end he employed a crew of some of the best concept artists in the world to help him visualise his dream, including the French comics master Moebius (Jean Giraud), British painter Chris Foss – whose spaceships graced countless sci-fi paperbacks – and none-more-goth Swiss artist H. R. Giger. And an American called Dan O’Bannon, the man who would give birth to the Alien.

Along with director John Carpenter, O’Bannon had made a student film called Dark Star (1974), a comedy about a bunch of blue collar slackers working on a commercial spaceship. It was something of an underground hit, and O’Bannon was thinking about revisiting it as a horror movie, an idea which eventually became the first draft of Alien. When Jodorowsky’s magnificent dream fell apart, he found himself back in the States with the contact details of a group of brilliant artists.

One of Alien’s advantages is the absolutely stellar (pun intended) talent that was lavished on its design. Foss’s spaceship designs, industrial designer Ron Cobb’s interiors, Giger’s creepy biomechanoid landscapes and creature: these all work together to elevate a monster movie much higher than it had any right to be. As director Ridley Scott himself said, they were making a B-movie to A-movie standards. His visual ability coupled with that design reveal the strange depths beneath Alien’s apparently shallow pulp surface.

One way of thinking about pulp fiction is as the dreams of culture; it deals in the monsters that live inside our culture, usually unseen. The attention, craft and care lavished on Alien propels these hidden horrors into the foreground, where they are clear and horribly fascinating. Alien is the inchoate and chthonic terrors of the late ‘70s compressed down to a diamond and placed in a setting from which it is hard to look away.

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Delights

The other reason why Alien is far better than it has any right to be is the standard of the acting. A canny mixture of British and American character actors - Ian Holm, John Hurt, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton - conveys that these are everyday working stiffs, not the hip young ‘space hairdressers’ of Star Wars (to paraphrase Malcolm Tucker). The ability of actors like Veronica Cartwright and Tom Skerrit to rattle through sci-fi technobabble with an offhand weariness is key to making the horror work. The setting needs to be believable if the alien intrusion into it is going to seem sufficiently uncanny.

A good deal of credit is also owed to Alan Ladd Jr., who was, at the time, Vice President of Creative Affairs at Fox. To be honest, a great deal of credit is owed to Ladd for many things, including getting Star Wars off the ground and making Blade Runner (1982) happen. In this case, though, as well as being a supporter of Alien, he made one crucial decision.

The script had been written with only surnames, with the intent of keeping the parts gender neutral. It was apparently Ladd who suggested giving the key role of Ripley to  a woman and thus, eventually, to Sigourney Weaver. This was her big break and her performance is terrific, all nervous steel. But having a female lead in a sci-fi film didn’t just change the way the film read, it changed the genre.

There are smaller delights too, too many to list, but my favourite is Ron Cobb’s ‘Semiotic Standard for all Commercial Trans-Stellar and Heavy Element Transport Craft’. As part of his work designing the spaceship interiors Cobb developed a whole suite of icons describing the functioning of the ship in ideogrammatic terms. You wouldn’t notice them on first watch; you might not notice them on twelfth watch, but they’re amazing. Not just as pieces of design, but as pieces of worldbuilding. As an example of the amount of thought and skill that went into trivial pieces of set dressing they are emblematic of the whole film’s approach. These tiny details matter because they add up to an all-encompassing sense of a real place and real lives, and they turn the movie into something extraordinary.

Discomforts

Well, it's a horror movie. And it’s a horror movie about biology. About, to a great extent, sex. The alien starts life as an egg, but an egg with labia, before becoming a pair of hands that clasp the victim’s face and orally violate them. That victim then becomes pregnant with a toothed penis that eats its way out of them before growing into a much bigger penis on legs that has, at one end, a vagina dentata, in which is hidden a penis dentata, with which it violently penetrates its victims.

Freud, in other words, would have a field day.

If he could be persuaded out from behind the sofa.

You admire it, don’t you?

I admire its purity.

Can we show the kids?

Can you? They should be made to watch it.

To be honest, I have no idea what a contemporary audience would make of Alien. It would probably be too slow for them; the Alien itself would probably be too obviously a man in a suit; and, crucially, such was its impact that countless films since have been influenced by and have paid homage to it. The ‘strong female lead’ alone is practically a cliche now. Too many films since Alien have imitated the designs and characteristics that initially felt innovative and exciting.

However, that’s probably why it should be watched. It exemplifies a certain moment in Hollywood history, and is key to understanding how contemporary popular film has ended up where it is.

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Is it as good as you remember?

I can only repeat myself: Alien is far better than it ought to be. It is just a pulp sci-fi horror story, but it opens out those tropes to expose the philosophical problems they spring from. The Alien’s gruesome biology refers to the mind/body conflict in which rational self-consciousness is prey to base biological urges. The company that is willing to sacrifice its employees for a possible new revenue stream dramatises the dangerous interrelation between the individual and the (capitalist) system. The cosmic horror illustrates the insignificance of humans in a universe that is not so much indifferent as actively malign; a universe in which we are but fleeting specks who die in horrible ways.

It opens these things out so successfully because – like the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, the man who is arguably the father of both pulp sci-fi and pulp horror – it is aesthetically irresistible. It is a uniquely cinematic experience, sensorially and experientially overwhelming. It demands and holds our attention, making us concentrate on these ridiculously but pregnant premises in a fully embodied and imaginatively engaged way. We wonder, we jump, we are engrossed and grossed out. We are trapped on that spaceship with the crew and the Alien, and we are forced to grapple with it.

What stands out about Alien is that this is not the work of a single, brilliant auteur. You can plausibly argue that 2001: A Space Odyssey is a Stanley Kubrick film. Like everything else he directed, it displays his style and his obsessions; and, like everything else he made, it is made interesting and important by his craft and attention. But Ridley Scott is not an auteur. There have been many films in the Alien franchise and it is noticeable that Scott, as director, is responsible for the very best, the original Alien, and probably the very worst, Prometheus (2012). (This does not include the Alien v. Predator movies, obviously.) Scott is an undeniably gifted director, but he is very much not Stanley Kubrick. Alien is not a Ridley Scott film.

Alien is a Hollywood film. It is the work of a dedicated team given just enough latitude. Hollywood money brought together a team of extraordinary individuals who built on each other’s strengths to create this fearsome object: persuasively performed, thoughtfully designed, beautifully directed, precisely edited, and machine-tooled to scare, delight and make money and memories.

Hollywood also imposed restrictions. There were layers and layers of producers, from Dan O’Bannon trying to protect his gruesome baby to Walter Hill and David Giler, who gave O’Bannon and Shusett a deal with their Brandywine production company and then started to mutate it (in the process giving us Ash, the robot, and thus the corporate paranoia that constitutes a deep strain in the lore of the Alien films). On top of that there were the studio producers, desperate to keep a young and enthusiastic Ridley Scott within budget. Stories are told of producers prowling the labyrinthine set, trying to get pieces torn down even as Scott encouraged his team to build yet more, just for detail’s sake.

But these restrictions are good. Creativity needs boundaries. As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out, tennis is no fun without the net. In pushing against restrictions, creativity is sparked and redoubled. Without restrictions you are left with nothing but self-indulgence (viz Prometheus).

The body horror works because of H. R. Giger’s design, but it also works because of the technological restrictions that meant that the monster had to be played by a man in a rubber suit (an unbelievably tall graphic designer called Bolaji Badejo). This in turn meant that like the malfunctioning puppet shark in Jaws (1975), the Alien couldn’t be fully shown; it had to hide in the shadows, lurching out of the darkness, making it increasingly mysterious and awful.

The capitalist horror works because of Ron Cobb’s obsessively branded interiors, his rendering of a corporately mandated workplace; and because of the performances, particularly Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton’s kvetching space janitors and Ian Holm’s literally soulless company man. The cosmic horror is lent strength by the fact that they didn’t have the motion control cameras that enabled Star Wars to have all its whooshing, zooming spaceships, so everything in space was rendered tentative and laborious. The cosmos is a dangerous place that has to be approached with caution and a manual.

Like the fictional corporation from the film, Weyland-Yutani, Hollywood has repeatedly tried to recapture and harness the power of Alien, and they have repeatedly failed. It is a glorious and uncontainable monster. Just as the Alien takes on the attributes of the creatures it gestates within, so the talent of the cast and crew leached into the eventual film. 

Just as Casablanca (1942), is the perfect example of the old Hollywood studio system working as it should, pushing together contract performers, directors, designers and musicians to make an unexpected and unwarranted gem, so Alien shows how the Hollywood of the ‘80s could still produce works of accidental art.

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Alien star and indie movie stalwart Harry Dean Stanton has featured in The Metropolitan before. Because of course he has.