Alien Civilization
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When we speak of the Alien franchise, we rightly mean the Aliens franchise. It’s a credit to how successful James Cameron’s sequel was, widely seen as one of the better sequels, and also a recognition of the crossover appeal of Aliens that, for better or worse, pushed the intellectual property down a path to an expanded universe that echoes its mood, motifs, and sense of dark adventure. Video games and action figures, comics and novels, guides and technical manuals, a theme park in London ushered by actors playing heroic Colonial Marines, real nerd stuff like role playing games and every outer reach of regretful fandom all flourished because of the sequel. It’s because of Cameron’s Aliens that H.R. Giger’s nightmares are many of ours, and Giger had next to nothing to do with the making of Aliens.
20th Century Fox took Alien, a film that was honest about what it wanted to be, and forced an element of dishonesty into its continuation out of wont of money, and it snowballed into ever greater regrets. It’s not my contention that the original Alien was morally and artistically pure, denuded of its integrity through a shameless bowdlerization of its hoary animalistic dread to sell action figures to children. If you look closely, all of the seeds of the franchise’s crass materialism are right there in the marketing of the first film. Cameron’s masterpiece wasn’t the actual film, however highly we regard it, but rather the building of a commercial empire for Fox out of an obscure arty glorified B film.
Questions of personal taste aside, the first film is set apart from everything that followed in several ways. Its harried, overly dramatic, and litigious production was a case of capturing lightning in a bottle: striking a balance with an inchoate and fluid set of massively talented egos to forge miraculous new life. It was a film that wanted to turn the fear of sexual violence back around on men with walking and jumping rape metaphors. It was a metaphor for the darkness brought back by colonialism and in the chthonic depths industrialization strip mined from our souls. It contained uncivilized truths plucked from our reptilian instinctual past we evolved out of hundreds of millions of years ago. It was theorized endlessly in academic papers and feminist analysis. It was high art in a then-low brow genre.
The franchise that came in Alien’s wake wasn’t always so interested in returning to most of that, save for ever-hollower imitation. Aliens brought the audience back safely to the beginning of the roller coaster ride, unnaturally setting us at ease with the nightmares. The synthesis left us ready to affirm our society. Cameron played a dazzling trick by turning a squad of courageously cool and relatably funny Colonial Marines first into facehugger bait, and then raised them from the dead into eternal icons who’d live on in comics and toys to protect us from those uncivilized truths in a tidy narrative. An indication for how much Ridley Scott’s imprimatur was on the franchise can be seen in how his determined return in Prometheus and Covenant evinced a hewing to Cameron’s formula with the roller coaster monster-got-loose ride, and Ridley using the erroneously fan-boosted term for the Alien, ‘Xenomorph’ to describe it occasionally in promotions.
Commodification wasn’t the sin of the ensuing franchise alone. Alien was obviously commercialized. It exists for no reason other than Star Wars giving Fox dollar signs in their eyes. There was a Pac-Man-esque video game for it. Like a Che Guevara T shirt, nothing about Alien doesn’t also play into the gravity of the culture industry, that absorbs opponents and exceptions only as a pressure valve, returning audiences to their jobs dutifully after they wake up from their purge in the Dionysia of their dreamscape. The positive ending to Alien may have enabled the acceleration of the story into Mammon’s remit. Unlike in the third film, a clean death for Ripley at the end of the first one may have spared the world the tedious degradation of fear to come.
The lie at the heart of the franchise can be seen in what it wants to be, which often contrasts with what Alien was. As many involved in the series have said, Alien was an extremely good B movie. It melded the real nightmares of H.R. Giger and Francis Bacon with tropes and ideas from a few shlocky genre antecedents like Planet of the Vampires into a now canonically prestigious work. The franchise though, was an attempt to capitalize on this triumph for the low purposes B movies couldn’t hope to exploit. It wanted to civilize the hybrid’s nightmare and put a cardigan on it for irony’s sake — have a laugh at our inner demons the film tried to represent; whoop their ass because we’re tough hombres, and then synthesize those demons with our comfort and ennui until the Alien is processed into Memberberries for fandom’s tyrannical narrative demands.
In effect, Fox wanted to stop my mother and godmother at the emergency exit. Their gut reaction to the Chestburster scene in 1979 was to run out of the theater and go get pizza. Fox wanted to try different angles to tamp down on the instinctual response to broaden the audience. Fox and related businesses dealing with the property found their in with kids like me. They realized there was an untapped market for toys mined from the awful terror inscribed in the film’s DNA. They took raw instinct and subverted your flight response to your purchase/consumption addiction. The franchise was the taking of the primal and rending it into the sins of civilization: “celebrate Alien Day on April 26th by purchasing these cute goodies with promo code #rapemetaphor.”
and then some other bullshit happens
James Cameron’s Aliens is my imaginative birth. It remains the fiction that spurred all of my creativity and interest in the arts and much else. Any criticism here is out of deep love, make no mistake. But unlike a great deal of the fandom, I make zero claim to either it or Alien or anything else. These are not my property to profane or avenge. I may find Aliens vs. Predator Requiem (please notice the second Alien vs. Predator movie has an ‘s’ after Alien) depressing and disappointing, but my personal investment has already paid its dividends. I can appreciate Weaver’s Oscar-nominated acting or Mead’s designs and Horner’s score for what they are, and not need an Alien 5 to make me whole, even if I’d be there on opening night, and eagerly anticipate Fede Alvarez doing for this franchise what he did for Evil Dead.
If Aliens has many weaknesses that loom larger every year we mature (Colonial Marines are almost cartoonishly goofy; the Aliens have gone from ominous self-sufficient demon to Power Ranger Puddies and cannon fodder; being a Vietnam movie in space absorbing Cameron’s unused Rambo II themes makes it extremely awkward when our returning veteran unloads her PTSD with a rocket launcher on stand-ins for the Vietnamese, etc.), it still has undeniable strengths. Cameron made it into an effervescent and fun epic. It was gracefully ’80s, fitting sleekly within the golden ratio broken by Arnie and Sly’s muscles. While meeting with producers Giler and Hill to explore an Alien sequel, they fed him some tough guy military patrol ideas, “Ripley and Soldiers”, and left it to him on the outline, writing “and then some other bullshit happens.” Cameron turned that bullshit into gold.
Other films, such as the original Westworld, have attempted the roller coaster ride structure of corporate stooges fouling up with hazardous results. But Aliens set the mold, especially within its own franchise. Cameron’s formula showed the limitations of reason leading to chaos (F-4 Phantoms vs. bamboo pikes), rather than the first film’s more narrowly targeted corporate malevolence. The android Ash in the first film and the corporate stiff Burke in Cameron’s film are similar in their sabotage, but Burke is operating on his own with incentivized potential reward from the company if he can smuggle specimens past quarantine. Ash is the embodiment of corporate directives. The breakdown of order in 1 is intentional on Ash’s part, and in 2 incidental on Burke’s. 1 is a critique of corporate power’s evil, 2 of its incompetence in the face of nature. 2’s structure would reappear in Jurassic Park, with a vengeance in Alien Resurrection, in both AVP movies, and more complicatedly in the prequel series.
My mommy always said there were no monsters
Today, we’re finally seeing some attempts to move beyond ‘Rambolina’, as Weaver called Cameron’s reimagining of Ripley in the sequel. This is the Ripley who echoes most in the culture today, and bears some responsibility for influencing female saviors like Captain Marvel, et al.. She was a love letter on some sub-level to Gale Anne Hurd, Cameron’s creative and life partner at the time, whose career is evidence of a self-possessed, intelligent, and competent woman making it in a business world that includes many psychosexual monsters. When the various (male) writers of Alien 3 looked at how few women were going to see either Alien or Aliens, the production considered going in a Ripley-less direction, but the studio wouldn’t have it, and went out of their way to drag Sigourney’s character from death in an attempt to sell the kickass momma in Resurrection as well. All of this is really overheated when you consider Ripley began simply as a woman gaslit by an unprofessional Captain, a malevolent droid, and a nonchalant crew who all drew shorter straws than her. In other words: a normal person in extraordinary circumstances, and not a mythic figure herself.
The franchising is oriented towards boys with toys, but Fox firmly believed in their mother figure’s centrality to the story because of the Oscar-nominated role Cameron penned (ironically so because at first Fox didn’t want to bring Sigourney back and Cameron put his involvement on the line for her), and they were thus at Sigourney’s mercy on 3. It just so happens she had some very unbankable ideas about cutting out all the Pulse Rifles and Smart Guns for 3, a move the fanboys would never forgive the series for. The Sega game for Alien 3 ignored mother entirely, using 3’s aesthetic with 2’s guns. Like how the knuckleheads who made Aliens vs. Predator Requiem went for the hard R rating to make up for the loss of edge in the first AVP’s PG-13 rating, Resurrection was hard overcorrection into fetishized gunville to make up for what Fox thought went wrong on 3. The original film, I might remind you, had one gun — a flame unit that didn’t even work. Some of my creativity was borne from having to work around that when I played Aliens with my toy guns as a kid by Alien rules.
People of discerning taste will turn their nose up at the Alien vs. Predator films, the point in the series most led astray by undiluted greed. Fox undercut both Scott and Cameron who were angling for a joint return to the series in favor of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Godzilla vs. King Kong wrestling matches, as Ridley lamented. But nobody accelerated the series towards this destination more than Cameron himself. By turning the various guns into characters themselves (prompting Weaver’s reluctance to continue in 3 without removing the guns), and by successfully realizing Hill and Giler’s tough guys on patrol in space idea, Cameron dramatically distanced the series from its cult peers like Blade Runner and brought it into the realm of kids playing with guns. And, mirroring the original Aliens vs Predator comics, Sanaa Lathan stepped into the Ripley role, becoming a sidekick of a Predator.
Confirming Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry thesis, an overgrown fanboy dressed in Colonial Marines gear appeared onscreen at the 30th anniversary of Aliens at Comicon, recounting how it was the last film he saw before joining the actual military, and it was the first thing he saw when he got out. How many people became long haul truckers because of Alien, or bounty hunters because of Blade Runner? Quite fewer people, I’d reckon, than those who joined the military because of the Alien franchise’s new peer: Predator (I distinctly remember a Discovery channel documentary about Marine Corps war games in Hawaii with one grunt admitting he joined the Marines because of Predator). But how many women felt easier in dangerous professions because of ‘Rambolina’? Or rather, how many actresses got action roles because of Weaver’s Oscar nomination and Aliens’ high grosses? That snowball is still growing.
The Rise of the Fanocracy
The two AVP films brought the series to its lowest point of debasement, and yet figure as perhaps the point of its widest diffusion, concurrent with the various Aliens vs Predator video games. A large portion of the comedic representations in cartoons, memes, and such today feature their joined appearance. The fans were allowed to form a collective nerd tyranny over how the series unfolded from Resurrection through the two AVP films. The vituperations spat over Alien 3’s brutal departure from Cameron’s ending shook the studio, and with Hill and Giler no longer acting as a buffer between the studio’s naked greed and the creatives’ work, there was little to save Resurrection from becoming a pandering cliche-ridden mess in hackneyed dialogue with Aliens fandom in wink after wink. It was Clerks but with a special effects team.
Looking back today, Resurrection was reminiscent of the dramatic overcorrection into studio-pressured hollow fan service that was The Rise of Skywalker. The fans’ reactionary ownership of both franchises divined a very discrete, contradictory, and childish formula that’s impossible to satisfy after being emotionally wounded by The Last Jedi and Alien 3. The opening line of Resurrection, where Ripley’s clone is remembering Newt saying “My mommy always said there were no monsters — no real ones. But there are” is exactly the autoreferential pandering that would communicate to the audience “we’re here to respect your comfort, as a valuable customer, whom we want at work tomorrow morning after enjoying this Proustian madeleine shorn of all the memory’s initial dread.”
The nature of Alien 3’s reception demonstrated the fandom’s true allegiance. The film was radically different from its immediate predecessor, but far more like the original. The outrage at it implicates Aliens in reaffirming culture industry standards as cultural soporific, meanwhile acquitting Alien. The problems typically cited have to do with Alien 3’s jarring discord with commonly understood structure promoted and regulated by industry norms, the lack of development of characters we’re told we have to sympathize with, and what Lance Henriksen called its ‘nihilism’. The roller coaster was abandoned, and we were ushered back into the uncertain coldness of space. Cameron’s action adventure that lightly criticized the sclerotic corporate bureaucracy and valorized glorified corporate cops became the aberration in intention and theme. The people with the Pulse Rifles in this movie were unequivocally baddies without visible faces — Blackwater Pinkertons. Fox’s insatiable hunger for profit, which made them churn through a handful of other writers and directors before dropping Fincher in by air to finish the picture with two hands tied behind his back, gave them a film with a bald female martyr and a dozen rapist-murderers frustratedly seeking absolution in the darkest shadows of space. It was a sacrilegious gut punch for everyone misled into feeling safe by the dashing Corporal Hicks and the charming girl Newt.
And how did the fandom process Alien 3? Not well! As a sign of how the fandom established a reading of 3, in the video game Aliens: Colonial Marines, they attempted to hamfistedly explain how Hicks actually survived and that was somebody else on the escape pod in his place. The ol’ cryochamber switcherchoo. In recent years, Neil Blomkamp, famous from “That’s Chappie!”, has insinuated himself into negotiations to commit damnatio memoriae against Alien 3 and write an entirely alternate universe version 3 decades later with Ripley and Hicks. This is expectedly popular with fans still grieving from the third film’s unheroic and cruel reminder of the Alien’s heart-stopping origins. And thank god, it has some guns again! Unfortunately, Disney has not yet seen his Instagram posts intimating his desire to do this film. His hopes and dreams shall remain floating through the core systems in hypersleep.
Wreckage and Rage
The most obvious reason the genealogy of the Alien franchise is an utter abomination is, as mentioned before, how a creature that amounts to a rape metaphor has metamorphosed into children’s toys. This is made somewhat less disturbing by the fact that most of the children buying these toys are in their 30s and 40s, but only slightly. Its guilt is still preserved for getting fans there. This is less obviously the sole fault of the second film. Alien bears as much blame as anything that followed for this one. Straight out of the gate, Ridley Scott winked in an interview when asked why they didn’t go for the PG-13 rating that it’d eliminate the Chestburster scene, which we know was the one scene of Dan O’Bannon’s that Walter Hill and David Giler actually indisputably liked before gutting his script and taking him to court for writing credit. It was the explosively Freudian display universally understood to -make- the movie. Scott continued that, “I think the kids are gonna get it,” insinuating that some will sneak in with masks on. Brandywine producer Gordon Carroll said they went for the R rating because otherwise it’d take away its edge. Nevertheless, a board game advertised for kids was released simultaneously.
Although I own an original model replica of an Alien from 1979 that you build like a model airplane, toy figurines took a while to hit the market. I remember having to write in for some toy sets with the APC from Aliens advertised at the back of Dark Horse Aliens comic books when I was about 10, and receiving a return letter from the company saying they were discontinued. Actual toy figures that weren’t unmistakably adult-oriented collectibles like metal minis were, as far as I can tell, non-existent until after Alien 3. In the early ’90s, Kenner and another company released some action figures inspired by Aliens. Kids aren’t stupid. We knew that it was slightly funny that the Jurassic Park T Rex toy proved evolution because its torso and thighs looked exactly like a roast chicken, but we also knew that it was extremely funny that the Alien’s head, when popped off, looked exactly like a stiffy. Scott was right about that, so far. We just couldn’t hope to understand the context of a bunch of guys in the ’70s with dress shirt collars popped out of their poorly matching suits musing about how to munk around with the final girl trope by having a demon that looks like a dick chase her.
There is some relief that, as far as I can tell, propriety has limited Alien 3 action figures to only a few characters who were -not- the sex criminal prisoners. That would have been screwy on the level of child killer Freddy Krueger having toy figurines. But nevertheless, there’s plenty bizarre dishonesty in having Chestburster toys as plush hand puppets, considering how its origins are representing the judgmental homophobia of Francis Bacon’s father in his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. On Scott’s recommendation, H.R. Giger and the practical effect team dutifully recreated these figures into the loveable murder penis we know today. But it took the franchising of the property to turn paternal rejection and disgust into a plastic toy.
Really, it’s not so much that Fox and Kenner are wounding impressionable minds here. Who hasn’t seen Cthulhu merch these days? Everyone’s a little bit warped. Far worse is that we’re driving that original meaning into an utter estrangement from the franchise in total. And it wasn’t always thus. In between Alien and Aliens, Fox studio head Norman Levy put a sequel in the freezer for a time because in spite of the first film’s fantastic grosses, Sci-Fi / Horrors “were barely a step above pornography.” This franchise is still so afraid of its uncouth roots, often keeping keen consideration of its current anodyne place in the culture, that we have to watch the owners pathetically rename a making of documentary in the Blu Ray Anthology “Wreckage and Rage”, after Eliot Goldenthal’s quite easily searchable “Wreckage and Rape” track in Alien 3.
I fully expect this fig leaf over the Alien’s phallic penetrative double jaw to only get worse under the reign of King Mickey.
The Xeno
A self-defeating problem many franchises face is feeling the need to explore and explain the alluring mysteries, the unknown, the adjectival alien of the highly successful and higher quality original film, and this franchise serves as a case study for this principle. Whether this is bred out of a wholly unearned modern faith in scientism, I do not know. Speaking of his plans for the aborted Alien II, Ridley Scott said “What I missed most of all was the absence of a prognosis scene. There were no speculative scenes or discussions about what the Alien was and all that sort of thing either. I believe that audiences love those, especially if they’re well done. They give the threat much more weight.” In Prometheus and Alien Covenant, Scott’s need to fill in the old lacunae with bathetic demystification, and then proceed to haphazardly open up new lacunae, is certainly one way to play musical chairs with us.
The irresistible need to categorize and systematize is reminiscent of the rationalism that we’re reminded in Aliens cannot save us. Yet Aliens served as a Thermopylae or Alamo for this faith in reason — if only Bishop had the opportunity to study the Alien in peace with more Marines better equipped and rid of any ne’er-do-wells in their midst, the company might let him find a solution to contain them. If only we could visit the home worlds of the Space Jockey, it’d explain a lot more about the universe and our part in it. We just might be able to wipe out our trauma by colonizing the Alien.
Nothing embodies this arrogance to taxonomize everything Lovecraftian and intentionally undefinable which Dan O’Bannon translated into his original Alien script than the attempts to rationalize the error of naming the Alien. It seems very clear that the first mention of ‘xenomorph’ in dialogue in Aliens, and in Cameron’s earlier script that wasn’t related to Aliens, indicate it’s broadly meant for any extra-terrestrial, whether docile or the ‘perfect organism,’ not specifically our bug. Having very little to do with the writing of Aliens beside suggesting for Cameron that “and then some other bullshit happens”, Walter Hill and David Giler very likely mistook ‘xenomorph’ to be the Alien itself in Cameron’s film. The first instance of the Alien being specifically described as a ‘xenomorph’ occurs in William Gibson’s script for Alien 3 that was a Cold War in space story. Through all the subsequent rewrites by other authors and then the shooting script done by themselves, Hill and Giler never corrected this mistake. Its sole canonical appearance is in the computer terminal scene in the Assembly Cut of Alien 3, when Ripley and Aaron are asking the company if they can kill it.
It’s safe to presume then that Hill and Giler included ‘xenomorph’ in the treatment they initially passed to Gibson, especially now that they’ve referred to the Alien as a ‘xenomorph’ in their new 2020 treatment for an Alien 5 they attempted to drum up fandom support for before Giler passed away. Perhaps they’re cynically playing into the fact that ‘xenomorph’ has since been adopted by the fandom as the Alien’s de facto official name because of its proliferation in the merchandise, video games, and extended universe after Alien 3. The fandom’s highly detailed demonology of all the various types of Alien throughout the various fiction leaves one exhausted, bored, and regretful for the existence of this franchise draining feeling out of the original for as much as they can get in value.
But worse than that, it shows the obsequious and prostrate nature of fandom to assimilate obvious and comical blunders on the part of the Brandywine producers, as if their goofs are holy reliquaries lent to the canon by Corporal Hicks’ angel himself, and in need of theological justification. Goofing is fine. Going full L. Ron is a bit much, and speaks to something terrible throughout society that’s causing this behavior.
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The attempt to commodify a reflection of our own evil and box it up or turn it into a shoot ’em up game reflects not just a broader trend of watered down sequels in a Hollywood running out of ideas, but nothing less than the delusion of the Long ’90s writ large. Earnest technocratic know-how can solve our greatest problems, it can tame our darker nature, and throwing money and purposeful jobs at problematic or uncharted regions can turn terrorists, drug cartels, kidnappers, and guerrillas into suburbanites with stock portfolios and a good golf swing. Evil is reformable, though perhaps not lifers. The civilizing of the Alien and the franchising of its intellectual property makes both the producers and we the consumers the participants in our own self-fulfilling prophecy, a real life cosplay of the corporate fumbling story line that Aliens ostensibly warns against. We’re trying to ride out of this roller coaster with our bootstraps tied to the railing, and oh are we gonna pay for it.
