The Perfect Organism - Part 1

As a gift for my 20th birthday this past Tuesday, I received Ian Nathan's excellent book... box... thing, Alien Vault: The Definitive Story of the Making of the Film. I'm a big fan of Alien, and have been for some time, insofar as that I consider it one of my two 'favourite' films. So, inspired by Ian Nathan, here's my own relatively-short look at the film and why I love it so.

For anyone that hasn’t seen Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), please stop reading right now, go watch the film, and then come back and read this.

*SPOILERS FROM HERE ON IN*

Alien is a rarity. In science fiction, in cinema, in culture. It is a transcendental work, a piece that cannot be tied down and labelled under measure of genre or type. A picture as elusive and indescribable as its titular character. In fact, the title itself represents so much more than it first seems.

At first reading, a title as simple as ‘Alien’ evokes very little about the film and its inner workings. But on closer study, and perhaps after a first viewing of the film, there is so much more to it, and there are few other names that could so perfectly encapsulate every aspect of Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece.

As a description of the character (I choose to avoid the term ‘villain’ here, because we are given no indications of the Alien’s motivations) it refers to, it hits the nail on the head. In noun form, it shows that the creature is indeed an alien, and in adjective form, it shows that the creature has an alien appearance, has alien behaviour, and perhaps most importantly, has alien reproduction.

But beyond the creature, it describes so much more within the diegesis. The alien world on which the human protagonists land; the alien ship within which the facehugger is found; the alien situation that the crew find themselves in. And it is the situation that is possibly the most key to the reading of the title. From the very introduction of the ‘xenomorph’, the crew’s control begins to completely collapse. For all their assumed knowledge and experience, their attempt to manage their altered circumstances is one long exercise in futility. The egg is alien, Kane’s new friend is alien, its purpose is alien, the chestburster and its birth are alien, the xeno’s behaviour is alien, and its resting state in the shuttle is alien. There is nothing about the creature that the crew or the audience understand.

It is this that lends the horror to the film, and further meaning to the title. Horror as a genre works best when the protagonists and the audience are dealing with something unknown, something we don’t understand ("and you always fear what you don't understand"). When both ourselves and the characters are dealing with the unknown, we can more easily place ourselves into the position of the characters, and therefore augment the experience of fear. Alien achieves this in many ways, not just through the unpredictable actions of the creature, but also through the lack of screentime the creature is given. We don’t know what it is, we don’t know where it is, and we are given a mere glimpse of what it looks like. This is why seminal horror films like Jaws and The Thing stick so vividly in our minds. Their respective ‘villains’ are barely shown, leaving our imaginations to run wild and create the scares ourselves.

When Ridley Scott blends this pure horror with the film’s science fiction roots, the title fits like a glove. Prior to Alien’s release in 1979 (and following the slew of schlocky B-Movies of the 50s), science fiction had very much been a pleasant, exciting, family-friendly territory, one that made us crave adventure and exploration. Some of the biggest pre-1979 pieces include Star Wars, Star Trek, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But then Alien came along and changed the game, making sci-fi a much less welcoming subject. Not only this, but the two genres blur together, as the film could not exist without both. Without the science fiction, there is no context for the horror, no setup for the creature’s invasion, no reason for the crew’s isolation, and no basis for the memorable tagline (“In space, no one can hear you scream”). Without the horror, the sci-fi is missing a crux, the disturbing HR Giger design wasted, the picture merely a dystopian vision of the future. This blending of genre is alien. Unseen before, unsurpassed since. An unforgettable assault on our senses.

To be continued.

(Kudos to anyone who knows where that fear quote comes from.)