Alien 9781838713614, 9781844577880

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ALIEN

'Alien' Introduction In 1977, a heavily revised script optioned by Twentieth Century-Fox entitled Alien went through the hands of several Hollywood directors. Peter Yates passed on it. Robert Aldrich passed on it. The veteran Jack Clayton, director of the brilliant ghost story The Innocents (1961), dismissed it as 'a stupid monster movie'. The Screen Directors Guild then went on strike. Eventually, the English director Ridley Scott was signed up in February 1978. Scott had a long track record in advertising but not so much experience in studio film production. He had released his first feature film, The Duellists, in 1977, which was not strongly promoted by Paramount. It had shown in precisely one cinema in Los Angeles. When Alien opened in May 1979, with a saturation ad campaign, it was to lukewarm reactions. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby warned that it provided 'shocks of a most mundane kind' and called it 'an extremely small, rather decent movie of its modest kind, set inside a large, extremely fancy physical production'. The Monthly Film Bulletin praised only its 'commercial astuteness', complaining at its 'moribund' narrative which 'seems to dispense with dramatic structure altogether' and mourned its general 'lack of invention'. James Monaco in Sight & Sound thought it had little intellectual content and 'has no other reason for being except to work its effects on audiences'. 1 This is not a promising start for what became one of the most potent myths of modern cinema. Alien did in fact do well commercially: it was the fourth largest grossing film of 1979 (earning $60 million in America). But texts give birth to myths once stories escape the bounds of their local plot and float free from their origins. Gothic fictions have done this continually across the centuries:

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Shelley's Frankenstein, Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or Bram Stoker's Dracula have each provided powerful icons, condensing something about what it means to be human in the modern world with such incredible economy and force that they broke their literary bonds and became embedded in the general culture. Alien undoubtedly has the same force as its Gothic forebears, bursting out of its modest origins and coiling itself around our darkest imaginings. So far, Alien has spawned three direct sequels (1986, 1992 and 1997), many revised versions and directors' cuts of each film in the series, a sort of prequel (Prometheus, 2012) and an associated franchise - Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007). More films in these series are slated for development. The 1979 Alien appeared immediately as a novel, a comic and a 'foto-book' (helpful for those, like me, who were too young to see an X-rated horror film but could pounce on the stills instead). Aliens (1986) was followed by the launch of a series of comics from Dark Horse, then a set of novelisations exploring this shared world. When video games became a significant income stream in the 1990s, the plotting of Alien proved highly conducive to the shoot-emup gaming format and several games based on the film have appeared since. Special DVD box sets, anniversary editions and associated merchandise continue to pour out, as does a vast archive of writing by academic critics and equally learned fans. In 2 0 1 1 , Fox released the book Alien: Vault, another account of the making of the film, replete with exhaustive memorabilia. On the thirty-fifth anniversary there was yet another official book, Alien: Archives, a new video game, Alien: Isolation, two comic series (one each in the Alien and Prometheus world) and a brand-new set of Alien novels. Fox also announced the first Ripley collectible action figure, as well as related 'plush toys and bobbleheads'. 2 None of this looks likely to stop any time soon. What was it in this creaky Old Dark House in Space, this interstellar slasher, that gave it the evolutionary advantage to survive

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Scott and Weaver on set

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the late-1970s glut of horror hybrids? The story of how Alien came together in the form it did is a series of glorious accidents, a chance result of arguments and compromises that would surely have wrecked a hundred other films. Cinema, like myth, rarely springs from a single intent, and Alien was moulded, at every level, by the forces of something collective, beyond itself, that pushed it into a shape that nevertheless felt instantly necessary and preordained. This book is an attempt to account for the cultural fascination Alien has generated. For me, it is a boundary fiction, a film that rests on a number of cusps. These kinds of films do a lot of cultural work for us, negotiating limits and meanings. It is why we keep returning to them. Alien is a late-1970s studio film, given the green light by a studio keen to repeat the success of Star Wars (1977), yet it retains a late whiff of that independent spirit of the New Hollywood and even a dash of European art-house sensibility. An efficient thriller plot, honed by tough-guy director Walter Hill, was ornamented to baroque excess by the extraordinary concentration of artistic talents that came to work on the film. Low trappings came with high style. After Alien it is difficult to recall how innovative was its appearance in the liminal zone between science fiction and Gothic horror. In 1980, the first serious academic study of science-fiction cinema, Vivian Sobchack's Screening Space, struggled to parse the difference of these genres, recognising that there was a 'a limbo of films between horror and science fiction', films featuring BEMs (Bug-Eyed Monsters) that were abjected as ridiculous by purists in both camps. 3 For a long time, science-fiction criticism premised the virtues of the genre on it being scientific, cognitive, future-oriented and sublime, explicitly contrasting it against the lowly Gothic for being religious, over-emotional, tyrannised by the past, and always willing to pull the sublime down into the monstrous and grotesque. Science fiction deals with future possibilities, the Gothic with the dread inheritance of the past, the doom of repetition. But what happens when a film overthrows these conceptual oppositions and entirely fuses the genres? Alien offers a vision of an industrial future

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where the technological sublime is begrimed by the terrors of the deep ancestral past: this felt very new. It taunts the shiny NASA narrative of the Apollo missions in their dying days. It is the dark shadow of the science-fiction spectacular of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, creeping up behind it in the blockbuster charts of 1979 with new kinds of cinematic intensity and affect. It is because of this location between genres that Alien launches its grand theme: an investigation of the boundaries of what it means to be human in a hostile universe teeming with other kinds of biological and artificial life. Anxious fantasies of origins and sexual reproduction are at the core of the film's horrific appeal, as they were in so many horror films of the 1970s. But Alien's science-fictional Gothic expands the palate from demon babies and toddler Antichrists, brooding more expansively on evolutionary time, the biological inheritances not just of the past but the monstrous possibilities of parallel alien development or future mutation. These threats hem in the human element in an uncertain zone in the spectrum of being. The fragile boundaries of the body will be menaced from within and without. Of course, it is that scene, the birth of the alien, which exists like a post-traumatic flashback in our culture, tempting us back to revisit the horror again and again. The franchise chases this inaugural shock, hoping to tap its primal energy. But twists in the expectations of how gendered human beings act are also amongst the most interesting things about Alien: the abject male birthing, the feminisation of the hero, Ripley. This is not all: Alien actually offers a whole spectrum of beings, from the primordial creature they disturb on the asteroid to the computerised Mother that directs their every living breath, to the android that hides in their midst and computes actions to the dictates of an unseen, inhuman corporation. And this is to say nothing of the cunning role of Jones, the ship's cat. If Alien is about the failure of community or coexistence with others (survival can be conceived only in terms of do-or-die), then this is because the film, shot in 1978 and released in 1979, is also on the cusp of utterly different eras. It was first given a limited release in

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late May 1979, only a matter of weeks after the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain, and given a full release in November 1979 just as the Republican Ronald Reagan won the American presidential election. This was a moment of decisive shift from the economic and political crises of the 1970s to the rise of what would come to be known as neoliberalism. Although it cannot know this about itself, Alien registers this epochal shift with ominous portents. 1

What's the story, Mother?'

The origin and development of what became the film Alien is buried in a mass of competing accounts. Even before the film's release, the original writer, Dan O'Bannon, was in the press letting people know that 'the production ended up being a battle between camps'. 4 He was hired and fired several times, forbidden from seeing daily rushes and then banished from the set. The writers fought for credit, eventually requiring arbitration from the Screen Writers Guild. The artists and designers bitched about each others' work. The actors and producers whined continually about the rookie director. The director began avoiding the actors on set. Production time seemed slow and always behind schedule. Somehow, out of this wreckage, a terrible beauty was born. Dan O'Bannon's first script for a B-movie called Star Beast inevitably wore its pulp sources heavily on its sleeve, and was conceived as a low-budget monster movie in the Roger Corman style. Broke and ill with an undefined stomach complaint (eventually diagnosed as Crohn's disease), O'Bannon had written it whilst living on the sofa of his friend, writer and producer Ronald Shusett. Star Beast emerged from various half-finished scripts, including one about an American B-17 bomber returning from a bomb run on Tokyo, the crew menaced by a nasty set of gremlins on board. O'Bannon had been writer, effects designer and one of the stars of John Carpenter's student film, Dark Star (extended and released at feature length in 197r4), a downbeat comedy of catastrophically bored astronauts on a mission to blow stuff up. The new extended

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scenes were all based around the comical alien on board, a malicious beach-ball with ugly feet that menaced O'Bannon's Sergeant Pinback in the lift shaft. The grimy mise en scene of Dark Star - all graffiti, no toilet paper and sullen exchanges with uptight computers - was to have a huge influence on a certain strand of 1970s science fiction, Alien most particularly. The squeaky clean staging of 2001 (1968) was to be replaced by truckers in space, living in a greasy, rundown, jerry-rigged world. O'Bannon had failed to persuade Carpenter to share the directorial credit for Dark Star (source of another legendary grudge), but at least the design work had been noticed. In 1975, O'Bannon had spent six months in Paris, working as a visual designer on Alejandro Jodorowsky's planned production of the science-fiction epic Dune, adapted from Frank Herbert's sprawling ecological space opera set on a desert planet featuring gigantic worms and vaguely North African stylings. It was a mad idea, with the vast sets to be designed by very different artists. When Jodorowsky's lunatic project collapsed, O'Bannon returned dejected to LA, took his typewriter out of storage and sweated out his screenplay on Shusett's couch. Scott, pensive on set (with Director of Photography Derek Vanlint)

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There is no stealing in pulp science fiction, only the recirculation of ideas that have worked before and are put to work again. 'I don't steal from anybody,' O'Bannon said, 'I steal from everybody.' 5 O'Bannon had been steeped in this culture from childhood (like Stephen King and George Romero, he was another 1950s kid ruined by scandalous EC Comics). For Alien, he was open about borrowing the idea of a crew landing on an apparently empty planet and finding only evidence of the horrific deaths of previous Dan O'Bannon as Pinback in Dark Star (1974); the beach-ball alien in Dark Star

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visitors from Mario Bava's visually stylish Planet of the Vampires (1965). Although Bava's effects are rudimentary, the sequence of a disastrous expedition to an utterly alien spacecraft, built to a wholly other geometry and which includes the skeleton of its xenomorphic pilot, survives unscathed into Alien. There are also echoes of the Corman-produced Queen of Blood (1966), in which a spaceship crew respond to an 'organised signal', perhaps an SOS, from an alien source on Mars. The last survivor of this alien crew is carried on board, with the scientific imperative of bringing the being home for study. A mildly bewildered Dennis Hopper is the first victim of the Queen's vampiric need for blood, and his corpse is zapped out of the airlock in another scene echoed in Alien. The remainder of the crew discuss what it means to harbour an 'intellectual insect' without conscience in their midst. That film ends with the death of the Queen, but in the last scene the dumb Earthlings triumphantly carry off her tray of eggs, presumably set to infect the home planet. Other direct sources include A. E. Van Vogt's first published science-fiction stories, 'The Black Destroyer' and 'Discord in Scarlet' (both 1939), which appeared in the classic Golden Age pulp magazine, Astounding Science Fiction. In both adventures, the crew The alien pilot in Planet of the Vampires (1965)

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of the Space Beagle encounter seemingly primitive but actually superintelligent aliens of various kinds, the human crew's Darwinian confidence repeatedly rattled by wholly different biological beings. In 'Discord in Scarlet', the last survivor of a species waits for aeons in space to further its race by laying its eggs in a host being; once aboard Queen of Blood (1966); very pleased with alien eggs in Queen of Blood

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the Beagle, the alien captures the crew one by one, stows them in the air-conditioning ducts, paralyses them and plants eggs in their stomachs. In 'The Black Destroyer', the human explorers encounter an alien wandering around the remains of a collapsed civilisation; first dismissing it as a benign 'pussy', they take it on board. Once in the ship, it reveals an implacable destructive survival instinct and starts systematically killing the humans on board. 'They looked up, paralyzed, before the nightmare of claws and tentacles, the ferocious cat head and the hate-filled eyes.' 6 Van Vogt's tales of the Space Beagle had clearly influenced the B-movie It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), scripted by Van Vogt's friend Jerome Bixby. It! features another spaceship on a rescue mission, another Martian alien stowed away on board, using the air ducts to move around, killing and stowing the crew one by one. Eventually it is killed by the crew when they suit up and open the airlock. Van Vogt had let these similarities pass, but the ageing

The alien in the air ducts in It.' The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)

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Golden Age SF writer did sue Fox over Alien, a case they agreed to settle out of court. The ambition of the team making Alien was to avoid the rubber-suited Bug-Eyed Monsters typical of 1950s B-movies like Jack Arnold's Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). All the same, there are large debts to that cycle throughout the series: Aliens in fact borrows much of its plot (and some of its best lines) directly from Gordon Douglas's Them! (1954), including the final rescue of children from the giant ants' nest, which is then destroyed with flame-throwers. Another obvious source for O'Bannon's script was Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks's The Thing from Another World (1951), adapted from John Campbell's classic SF story 'Who Goes There?' (1938), in which an alien being crash-landed on Earth starts to kill the team gathered at an Antarctic scientific station. In defeating the monster, Campbell's scientists were truly heroic figures of rational science, but Hawks lauded the brute force of the army over the scientists. In The Thing, the suspiciously Aryan and intellectual science officer Dr Carrington is the ally of the alien, intent Scientist as Aryan Nazi in The Thing from Another World (1951)

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on keeping it alive for study at whatever cost. Ash in Alien owes much to the icy Carrington, and Ash will later echo Carrington's praise of the alien for experiencing 'no pain or pleasure as we know it. No emotions. No heart. Our superior. Our superior in every way.' A typically feisty Hawks heroine added to Campbell's all-male crew might also have planted a seed in the mind of Walter Hill and David Giler when they came to rewrite O'Bannon's script. Ripley is nothing if not Hawksian. The extent of O'Bannon's influence on the final production of Alien depends on who you believe, but the point about myths is that there is no single origin. It is striking how similar the narrative trajectory of Alien is to John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), for instance, although Scott's acknowledged reference point for the plot of a community picked off by an implacable killer was Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers (1939). Yet Alien arrived at the head of the rush of 'slasher' horror films in 1979 and 1980, its reception embedded in a genre the makers presumably had no sense was The crew

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emerging. 7 Initially, this surely explained why reviewers felt they were seeing just another rehash of an already hackneyed plot. But the glut of slashers also helps us see the inventiveness of Alien, its reshuffling of sources. Films that embed myths need that context, but also the blind luck of good timing. The script for Alien found a natural home with Roger Corman's production company, which was happy to produce a low-budget monster-movie quickie with O'Bannon as director. But Shusett's friend Mark Haggard persuaded them to hold out for a better deal. The legend states that Haggard handed the O'Bannon and Shusett script through the ground-floor window of the Brandywine production company, directly into the hands of the director and writer Walter Hill. Hill had set up Brandywine with the producer Gordon Carroll and scriptwriter David Giler. Hill is known for his pared-down, lean and violent action films: during the development and production of Alien, he made one of his purest pieces of pulp existentialism, The Driver (1978), in which a blank and virtually wordless Ryan O'Neal drives getaway cars through the industrial ruins of Los Angeles. He then went on to make the controversial futuristic street-gang shocker The Warriors (1979), Greek legend retold in the urban decay of New York's outlying boroughs. Hill and Giler thought the Alien script was terrible, saved only by one astounding scene. They worked on several redrafts, stripping it back, adding a robot to the crew. In the wake of Lucas's Star Wars and Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the attitude of the major studios towards science fiction changed radically. After many stalled years, a Star Trek film was in production; so was Superman. Twentieth Century-Fox was therefore interested in SF scripts to repeat the Star Wars trick, and the studio head, Alan Ladd Jr, contributed the idea (presumably driven by a desire to widen the audience demographic) of changing two of the crew of the spaceship to women. It was initially thought that Hill would direct, but he wasn't comfortable in the genre of science fiction. He remained only as producer (as he has for the whole Alien

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series). Because of their producer roles, neither he nor Giler were acknowledged for their script work, the accolade eventually going solely to O'Bannon, but only after O'Bannon (who had initially been removed from the credits) had battled for a ruling from the Screen Writers Guild. The deal with Fox in place, and with a modest budget of $4.2 million, the search for a suitable director for Alien began. It did not get off to a good start. Ridley Scott was by the end of the 1970s one of Britain's bestknown directors of commercials, nailing a certain atmosphere of post-war English melancholia in his famous Hovis bread advert of 1973, along with other striking work for Benson and Hedges cigarettes and Chanel later in the decade. The son of a shipbuilder and military man who had worked in the War Office during World War II, he had grown up in industrial north-east England, but his father also spent significant time in the ruins of post-war Germany, where he was posted with the army. Scott trained as a graphic artist in Hartlepool and later won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, where he used the sole 16mm camera in the building to shoot his first film, Boy and Bicycle, in 1961, a short starring his brother Tony Scott that was heavily influenced by the French New Wave and the English Free Cinema movement of the late 1950s. Scott went into television as a set designer, eventually directing episodes of Softly, Softly, Z Cars, Adam Ant Lives and The Informers for the BBC. He then set up an independent company, Ridley Scott Associates, in 1965, focusing on advertising work. Scott was a wealthy media entrepreneur at an early age. After several false starts in film (including a sadly unmade medieval Gothic horror called Castle X, designed as a vehicle for the Bee Gees), Scott directed The Duellists in 1977. David Puttnam had taken the film to Paramount and secured a budget of $1.5 million, but it was only given the go-ahead when Scott himself took on the financial risk of the completion bond. This pressure made him an efficient planner of the whole arc of production, from development to the advertising campaigns for the finished film. As a graphic artist

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and advertiser, he developed the method of storyboarding whole films, prioritising mise en scene over everything else. These boards, which he still uses, are known to his crew as 'Ridleygrams'. To persuade Fox that he could do Alien, Scott storyboarded the whole film in three weeks using images that were realised to such a degree that the studio promptly doubled their investment. The Duellists, which was adapted from the Conrad short story T h e Duel', was beautifully composed, if heavily indebted to Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, and won best first film at Cannes. The very limited Paramount release positioned it as an art-house curiosity, though. Scott was developing an adaptation of the Tristan and Isolde story when Puttnam took him to Hollywood Boulevard to see Star Wars, a film he watched three times that same week. It coincided with an interest in the Metal Hurlant (Heavy Metal) comic, a French science-fiction magazine famous for the immersive worlds of Jean 'Moebius' Giraud's strips. Scott had been reading copies whilst filming The Duellists in the Dordogne. Lucas's medieval romance in space trumped Tristan, and Scott immediately switched his ambition to science-fiction film, a genre about which he knew very little. An unashamedly commercial director, he was perhaps keen to emulate George Lucas's elevation from the student art-house oddity of THX 1138 (1971) to the genre blockbuster of Star Wars, which transformed Lucas into a mega-bucks Hollywood mogul as the studio system continued to fragment. But Alien is a far more interesting hybrid of Hollywood and European sensibility than Star Wars, and Scott's eventual conversion to Hollywood power-player would take another ten years. The studios continued to meddle and interfere not just with Alien but also nearly sank Scott's deeply troubled followups, Blade Runner (1982) and Legend (1985). By the time he returned to the universe of Alien in Prometheus thirty years later, however, Scott had reached the engine-room of the Hollywood machine, turning out $100 million product almost every year at the head of his own major production company, and was in complete control of the

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whole process. Lack of creative constraint and heavy capitalisation, however, has not always been a good thing for Ridley Scott. The final and crucial element in the overall design of Alien was the collapse of Jodorowsky's Dune project. The end of Dune not only forced O'Bannon to return in desperation to scriptwriting. Fox began pre-production on Alien before Scott had become involved; O'Bannon was put on the payroll as 'Visual Design Consultant' and he reassembled a crucial part of the artistic team that had been involved in designing Dune, His friend, the counter-cultural cartoonist Ron Cobb, had been a big influence on the scruffy working interiors of Dark Star and had also worked on Star Wars after Dune. He was brought in to design the interiors of the Nostromo^ the cargo ship in Alien. The task of designing the exterior was given to the British science-fiction artist Chris Foss. O'Bannon also called on Moebius. His biggest coup, once Scott was signed on, was to persuade the director that Alien could really benefit from the weirdest member of the Dune design crew, the Swiss artist Hans Rudi Giger. This team of artists worked on designs and schematics for Alien for six months. Cobb's designs for Dark Star and Star Wars were marked by a geeky fascination with technical specifications and engineering diagrams, in the search for an odd kind of reality effect that translated into the lived-in spaces of the Nostromo. The interiors evolved over time, Cobb's realism combining with Scott's professed

The Nostromo

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love of 'layering' detail to make for an immersive mise en scene. Foss is an illustrator of the technological sublime, whose artwork is often used for dramatic book cover designs, his massive bits of fantastic hardware and spaceships bristling with lovingly airbrushed phallic weaponry that always dwarfs any human elements. He poured out loads of possible designs for Nostromo's floating refinery. Moebius and O'Bannon had killed time during the Dune debacle by creating the comic strip The Long Tomorrow (1976), a future noir fiction that heavily influenced the look of Blade Runner and was an acknowledged influence on William Gibson's founding cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer (1984). In the end, Moebius's only direct contribution to Alien was his designs for the faintly samurai look of the spacesuits, designs that caused the actors much misery. Giger, however, was a transformative presence. Initially, Giger was expected only to have a small advisory role in the production. A fantasy artist who emerged from the Zurich counter-culture in the 1960s, H. R. Giger had designed several avantgarde film environments, including F. M. Murer's film Swissmade 2069 (1968). But Giger was more renowned for his nightmarish paintings of 'biomechanicals', feverish couplings of bodies and machines, erotic horrors that he dredged up from his unconscious. He provided open commentaries about the sexual terrors that induced these perverse visions, the dreadful birth trauma fears that hounded him, murmuring dreamily about these visions in his black leathers. These images had already crossed over from the underground into the mainstream: just before Alien, Bob Guccione had published fourteen pages of Giger's images in Penthouse magazine, and the artist provided much of the visual style for the glossy Omni science-fiction and futurology magazine, which Guccione also funded. During the production of Dune, Giger had been asked to design planetary environments and had also envisioned spectacular interiors, building some baroque, skeletal furniture out of monstrous beasts for Baron Harkonnen. Since Harkonnen was scheduled to be

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Three aliens: Giger, the model, the painting

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played by the ageing Surrealist artist Salvador Dali, Giger had visited Dali at his bonkers house in Port Lligat, north of Barcelona. In a photo taken of Giger and Dali at the time of the Dune project, two of the most exhaustive explorers of perversity in the history of art are fleetingly seen together. Although other designers would become involved in Alien too, including Roger Dicken, Ridley Scott happily acknowledges that the pivotal element of the film came together when O'Bannon showed him the illustrations of the monstrous creatures in Giger's cult book, the Necronomicon (1977). All along, Scott had wanted to avoid the rubber-suited Bug-Eyed Monster. When he saw Giger's paintings 'Necronomicon I V and ' V , he knew he had his beast. The Necronomicon was Giger's realisation of the occult grimoire invented by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft in his gruesome pulp tales of the 1920s and 30s. Also referenced by Sam Raimi in The Evil Dead (1981), this book collected together the panoply of Lovecraft's Old Ones, ancient interstellar beings with an implacable hatred of humanity. There was the weight of a century of pulp terrors in these images. Giger's role in the production remained ambivalent for a while: Scott was infected by O'Bannon's enthusiasm, whilst the producers thought Giger and his unholy images were 'sick'. Giger was paid for his sketches, paid off, then asked to return with a more substantial design role, working directly on the sound stages for six months. In the end, he designed not only the Big Alien but also the derelict alien ship and landscape of the planetoid. Ron Cobb's realism would be brilliantly balanced by the hallucinatory weirdness of Giger. The Swiss artist's eccentricity provided some memorable oddities during the production. 'I want bones,' Giger intoned in his rather stilted English, and, as someone working on the set recalled: All these trucks pull up one day loaded with bones. They had been to medical supply houses, slaughterhouses, and God knows where else, and the next day the studio was full of bones and skeletons of every possible description ...

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You'd go into Giger's studio and you'd see this guy looking like Count Dracula, dressed all in black leather, with his black hair, lily-white skin and blazing eyes ... I don't think he dares take off these clothes, because if he did you'd see that underneath he's not human. He's a character from an H. P. Lovecraft story.8 The team had finally come together. Alien was shot in sixteen weeks at Shepperton Studios, west of London, between July and October 1978, on the sound stages where Star Wars and Superman had been filmed. It is the town where science-fiction author J. G. Ballard lived, then at work on the feverish fantasy of The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) which turns Shepperton into a weird zone of eroticism and death, and just beyond the tangle of roads that featured in Ballard's piece of sex-and-death provocation, Crash (1973). The film stretched across five sound stages, including H, then the largest sound stage in Europe, where the surface of the planetoid was constructed. Stage H is now a 1980s housing estate, perhaps haunted in a Poltergeist kind of way by these vanished screen ghosts. Scott would buy Shepperton outright in 1994, no longer a

The crew with Giger's Space Jockey

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pressured hired hand of pushy producers criticising his slow work rate but a full-scale media mogul in his own right. The Nostromo Something unholy keens over the minimalist title sequence, something between the grind of gears and the snarl of a beast. This is exactly where we will be for the rest of the film, stuck between biology and technology. Ominous slabs of white accrue at the top of the screen, tricking us into belated semantic recognition of the single word: ALIEN. It is a brutal reduction of the wordy scroll of backstory that opens Star Wars: we need to know only one monolithic, dreadful thing in this primal encounter. Another legendary talent went uncredited for the forceful economy and anticipatory dread of this opening: Saul Bass. Bass himself had been thinking about clever beasts and dumb humans in the 1970s, having recently directed Phase IV (1974). For the opening scenes, the camera prowls through the empty spaces of the Nostromo, a battered, lived-in hulk. It drifts down these corridors in hesitant glides, unsure of what is around the corner. The point of view wobbles slightly, as if embodied and nervous, rejecting the smooth trajectory of Carpenter's Panaglide opening of Halloween or the Steadicam that, just a few miles away and at exactly the same time, Kubrick was experimenting with in the hotel corridors of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980).

Title as monolith

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Scott's camera rarely stays static, always sliding away from what it reveals as if appalled. This is true of the whole film, Scott's framing always asymmetric, off-angle. Jerry Goldsmith's restrained score lets space open up between the notes, and the subtle heartbeats on the soundtrack shadow the camera to suggest a perplexingly withheld point of view. The score is another work of reduction, Goldsmith's initial composition rejected late on as too lush, and this is the minimalist result. It was rushed enough to need patches from one of Goldsmith's other scores - John Huston's Freud (1962), appropriately enough. There is something spooky about the emptiness of these corridors, an object-world that moves on its own - the riffling papers, the dipping bird toy, the primitive computer screens that beep to themselves, reflected in vacant space helmets. It is a world that has only the barest traces of the human. This introduces us to the emblematic architecture of Alien (and indeed the whole series of films): the corridor, the duct and the tunnel. There are corridors in Star Trek but they are nice and shiny; someone keeps the Death Star's corridors shipshape in Star Wars, presumably wanting to avoid any criticism from Darth Vader, who spends most of his time striding up and down them. And instead of the pristine spaces of 2001 or the research facility in The Andromeda Strain (1971), Alien offers clogged pipes, improvised ducting and rusty metal grilles. The set was built from tons of junked electrical equipment and dismantled aircraft that the set designers collected from dumps and bolted together. It is a classic Scott set: busy, layered, lit low, bursting with information. The closer to the aliens we get, the more baroque and organic these interiors become, the walls of the derelict craft cast directly from rib bones. For the Nostromo, Scott had observed that the ceilings were never visible on spaceship sets, so built them deliberately low, creating claustrophobic enclosures where the tallest actor, Yaphet Kotto, continually had to hunch over as if trapped by his technological environment. The sets were completely immersive, the whole crew having to clamber inside them every day.

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Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979): shiny corridors .

. and spaceship as shiny fetish

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It is striking how quick and perfunctory the exterior model shots of the Nostromo's passage through space are. Scott, who hurriedly reshot the model work himself at the very end of the shoot, abandons the spectacular spaceship sublime of science-fiction cinema that so often halts narrative progress to fetishise the special effects. These work purely to display 'scenes of seductively awesome technology' 9 - the delirious swoops over the glinting helm of the USS Enterprise at the start of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, for instance, or the final reveal of the Mother Ship in Close Encounters, or running the gamut over the barnacled details of the Death Star in Star Wars. For the most part, this grammar of science-fiction film is discarded by Scott for Alien (only to return with a vengeance in the opening shots of Blade Runner). Instead, we are largely stuck inside, in the Gothic world of the twisted corridors of the old dark house. These are the architectural volumes the camera moves forward to investigate, and in the opening sequence we are introduced to the spaces in which the characters will be cornered and die. This corridic world copies its outer spaces from the inner cavities and passageways of bodies. It is the classic psychic topography of the Gothic romance, where the castle is figured on the twisted interiors of the body. Haunted houses always have puzzling, unmappable interiors, and ghosts are often sensed as we pause at the door in the corridor, like Dr Holden in The Night of the Demon Another Mother: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1980)

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(1957) or Danny trying the handle of Room 237 in The Shining. The corridor is an odd mediating space that is actually of relatively recent invention, a key innovation in modern architecture. What was introduced as a transparent and rational form of connection or communication, however, also produces fantasies of its other, just as the Gothic itself shadows Enlightenment thought. The rational constructions of modern architecture are full of unnerving holes and blank spaces: 'Modern buildings, like modern subjects, thus come to contain unspeakable cavities ... Those who work in design and construction are familiar with these obscene and recessive spaces, how they contradict the resolved bourgeois exterior. Simply put, they are a mess.' 1 0 It is from these hidden, dead spaces that the alien launches its attack, upsetting every plan the humans ever devise, because it is an emanation of the unconscious of their own spatial modernity. The ship comes awake, the camera hovering on the threshold of the cryogenic pods where the crew repose in hypersleep. The petals open and they awake in a series of soft dissolves, gently birthed from their dreamless sleep in spotless whites (Scott had wanted them naked as the day they were born, but the Fox accountants calculated how many world territories they would lose). These are not innocents: this is a trucker crew - bolshy, badtempered company Joes with their eye on the pay packet and the end

Kane: the first to awake

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of a shift. N o hierarchies are established, no chain of command: this is not the world of the Mobile Infantry in Robert Heinlein's militarised Starship Troopers (1959) (the book that inspired the depiction of the Marine Corps in James Cameron's Aliens). Instead we are thrown into the chaotic disorder of their banter, messy eating and rolled-up fags, the cynical talk of 'the bonus situation'. 'Quit griping,' someone says, soon enough. 'I like griping,' Lambert responds. The captain cannot establish authority over his skittish crew, who soon realise that they are nowhere near home, most of them folded uncomfortably into the cramped spaces of the bridge. It takes Ash, the prissy and precise science officer, to dictate the letter of the law and establish the constraints of their choices, not the captain of the ship. They have to go off track to respond to a beacon signalling a message into space or forfeit their whole wage. This portrait of discordance is why we are on a ship called the Nostromo. These are not the courtly exchanges of the bridge of the USS Enterprise. In 1904, the Polish emigre writer and early Modernist Joseph Conrad published Nostromo, a murky story of a commercial company involved in a corrupt and corrupting colonial project to expropriate wealth for shadowy western investors in a fictional South American country. The character Nostromo (his name an Italian contraction of 'our man') is a great local hero of the revolution, but a man corrupted by the prospect of keeping the silver from the mine he is meant to protect. The 'accursed treasure' of that silver corrupts everything it touches: 'There is no peace and rest in the development of material interests,' a cynical doctor intones. 'They have their law and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and force that can be found only in a moral principle.' 1 ] The merciless diktat of 'material interests' is the leitmotif of the novel. This might be another arm of 'The Company', the only reference used for the owners of the rubber concessions up the Congo River in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899). This, of course, is the name adopted for the bosses in Alien.

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The Alien series seems to want to signal a specific set of debts to Conrad. The shooting script had an epigraph from Heart of Darkness ('we live as we dream - alone'). The Nostromo has an escape pod called Narcissus in the script (not named in the film), recalling Conrad's early tale of tempestuous seas in The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), in which the narrator explains, 'discipline is not ceremonious in merchant ships, where the sense of hierarchy is weak, and where we all feel ourselves equal before the unconcerned immensity of the sea'. 12 The first sequel continues this game: the ship is called the Sulaco, the name of the town below the mining concession in Nostromo. But there are other echoes. Conrad was fascinated by the afterlives of captains who had made queasy moral judgments and were forced to live with the consequences. In Tord Jim (1900), the central figure is a first officer who joins the captain in jumping ship when they collide with a derelict boat. In 'The Secret Sharer' (1912), the inexperienced captain impulsively hides a man accused of murder in his quarters, a shadowy figure who becomes his uncanny double, an echo and a ghost. Are the ambiguities of Captain Dallas meant to evoke Conrad's compromised sailors? Of course, The Duellists had been adapted from Conrad's short story about a mania for masculine honour gone oddly awry. And Scott's hopes of adapting Heart of Darkness had recently been scuppered by Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). This is a density of literary reference that is worth pursuing: one wonders how much Alien's vision owes to Conrad's pessimistic view of the universe as driven by violent and implacable forces, where individuals are, to quote Nostromo again, 'swallowed up by the immense indifference of things'. 1 3 Or is this entirely a red herring? After all, the ship in Alien was first called the Snark in O'Bannon's script (after Lewis Carroll's 'The Hunting of the Snark' [1876]). By the time it had gone through Hill and Giler's hands, the ship had been renamed the Leviathan^ perhaps an echo of Thomas Hobbes English Civil War political tract. But this is no commonwealth built from the combined will of a nation behind a

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titular leader, but an argumentative group of individuals unable to act collectively. So is Conrad meant to be the Modernist mark of alienation and the corrupting power of money, providing the gravitas for this pulp monster movie? Maybe. Maybe not. Scott confesses in one interview, 'To be truthful, I'm not an admirer of Conrad. I find him heavy going.' 14

Kane Kane is the first to wake, the first to speak, the first to volunteer. Are we being misdirected as to who will be the principal character in Alien} In his rakish bomber jacket, he guides the ship down to the surface of the planet (the hull breach that will hold them up already a hint at how easily fragile skins can be punctured). He is the keen

Kane: maybe don't look in there; 'some horrible d r e a m about smothering'

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enthusiast on the team, perhaps the English accent adding to the sense of his officer class. He is obedient to his captain, the only one on the ship who is. When he volunteers to investigate the source of the signal in the midst of a howling gale, Dallas merely sighs at his headboyish enthusiasm: 'Figures.' As Lambert bitches about struggling across the planet's surface in dangerous conditions and is repelled by the strange alien structure they see on the horizon, Kane is always striding forward: 'We've come this far. We must go on. We have to go on.' It is Kane who pushes ahead into every new space in the exploration of the derelict spaceship. He peers into the egg, but it is not Narcissus he finds reflected in that dark pool. Poor Kane. His first line is to speak that impossible sentence, 'I feel dead', yet soon enough he will lie suspended somewhere between life and death, which is something like the punishment that the 'mark of Cain' portends in the book of Genesis, outcast, unfavoured. But curiosity is sometimes just stupid: if only Kane had grasped he was in a horror film, that the derelict they discover is going to be grotesque and not sublime. The rearing up of the derelict spaceship is an early indication that Alien has thought properly about alterity: to spook the audience with a genuine feeling of otherness. The ruin of the alien craft first flickers into vision through the fuzzy interference on camera feeds, a shape that will not compute, which then looms over the astronauts (played in these scenes by Scott's young sons to increase the sense of humans dwarfed by scale). This flung horseshoe, this coil of ominous otherness, howls in the wind, the same indecipherable noise, somewhere between wounded animal and grinding metal. At just about the same time, back on the Nostromo, Ripley thinks the electronic beacon may not be a distress signal but a warning. The search of the craft is rigorously uncanny, in Freud's sense that what seems the most dreadful and unfamiliar leads back to what is most 'homely': the mother's womb. The sexualised architecture of the ship was consciously constructed that way, and they let Giger

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have free play with the design of the interiors: vaginal openings into the derelict craft, the uterine, organic corridors resembling the extruded mastications of an insect nest, the appalling scale of the fossilised Space Jockey they find peering into a telescope or perhaps down the barrel of a giant, phallic gun. This set was a brilliant realisation of Giger's fusion of the biological and mechanical. Kane rushes on in his investigation, barely interested in what the skeleton tells Lambert and Dallas about a sudden, violent death, or the fact that the mystery of the derelict is now about two aliens, an alien within an alien, otherness squared. Kane finds an entry into a cavernous womb below, hot as hell, where the eggs await their innocent hosts, bathed in an elegant blue light (created by a laser Scott borrowed from the rock band The Who, who were rehearsing their stage show in the studio next door). The derelict; the Space Jockey

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The allure of erotic investigation, Kane's sin of curiosity, is savagely punished. Something stirs down there in those leathery pouches, the skeletal skitter of something lizard-like. The egg folds open. What looms inside was built out of sheep intestines and the delicate tracery of 'Nottingham lace' (cow stomach). Giger's first designs for the eggs were so overtly vaginal that Fox executives again worried about being banned in Catholic countries; Giger solved it by making it a cruciform shape (an act of sacrilege to the Cross that the same execs failed to notice). The leap of the thing is also directly at us, down the lens of the camera, making us flinch, the violence of the act redoubled by the jump-cut. John Hurt has a melancholy face and gravelly tones, perfect for Beckett, for classical roles. He had played the decadent emperor Caligula in 7, Claudius in 1976 and would immediately go on to play Raskolnikov in a TV version of Crime and Funishment (1979) after Alien. Hurt was then John Merrick in David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980), unrecognisable beneath his prosthetic makeup, but another character obsessed with monsters and sentimental about mothers. Hurt had about six hours to prepare for the role of Kane. He had been first choice but was committed to another film project, and Scott went with another British actor, Jon Finch, who had played the lead in Polanski's Macbeth (1971). Unfortunately, Finch collapsed on the first day of filming, one of several disasters in the first week. It was a bad time to discover that he suffered from severe diabetes. Scott drove to Hurt's home, pressed him to join the film until midnight, and by the next morning Hurt was on set. He has been nominated for two Academy Awards, but did he know as soon as he made Alien that his brief scenes in this monster movie would guarantee his cinematic immortality? We cut to Kane's body stretchered back to the Nostromo and a tense stand-off at the airlock when Ripley, assuming temporary command of the ship, refuses them entry. Who is this woman? She doesn't seem very collegial. Ash simply lets them on board,

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overriding her order (in a deleted scene, Lambert takes a swing at Ripley for that cold, calculated decision to keep her desperate colleagues outside). What is it with Ash, his strange little tics and dances? Kane's face is covered with the creature that on set was christened the Face-Hugger. Its air sacs pulse gently, its skeletal fingers somewhere between one of those nasty tarantulas from Lucio Fulci's The Beyond (1981) and Death's judging hand. He is probed and prodded by Ash, who deflects Ripley's enquiries. The thing is feeding him oxygen, a tube down his neck, and the prehensile tail tightens around his throat when it senses threat. It is unbudgeable; it bleeds acid that comes close to breaching the hull, another demonstration of fragile skins and boundary anxiety as a gush of the stuff burns through several decks. It seems to exist in queasy symbiosis with its host. But then the spidery thing apparently dies, with some old-time comic shocks (improvised on the day) as the crew hunt for the vanished beast and its spindly husk lands in Ripley's lap. Kane awakes; his colleagues are delighted; they can return to hypersleep and get back home. But Kane is hungry: surely there is time for a last meal, a last act of oral gratification? Another riotous communal scene, overlapping backchat and suggestive banter. Ash's looks don't follow this talk, but another set of signals no one else can see. Kane stops, coughs, chokes, collapses, The Face-Hugger

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goes into seizure. A red stain spreads, giving his shipmates pause. Then the beast erupts, roars its tiny roar from metal teeth like a demonic lamprey, unfolding from its bath of blood, and shoots off across the table. Against the pristine white of the table and Kane's clothes, the blood is shocking (even so, not as much as was used in the first take). The brilliant detail of the hands that flutter in the last death throes is another element the cinema has borrowed ever since. Alien's occupation of our cultural imagination is located in the chest-bursting scene. It is one of those moments of horror that pass into the collective memory: watched, rewatched or never watched, but nevertheless supremely well known. 'For better or worse, Alien brought believable, graphic gore into the mainstream.' 1 5 It is staged and restaged as if to master and contain that first moment of trauma, Lambert gets the short straw; 'Kane's son'

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a classic instance of repetition compulsion, as if the wound opened in May 1979 has never quite been able to close and heal over. It has been ceaselessly parodied, from Mel Brooks's Spaceballs (1987) (where John Hurt sighs 'Oh no, not again' when the beast emerges, puts on a top hat at a jaunty angle and dances off the table) to Shrek 2 (2004) and an episode of The Simpsons (1994), but even mockery cannot quite dissipate its horrific effect. In commercial terms, each sequel longs for the same shock effect, but is doomed only to dilute it. The shooting of this scene is an essential part of the myth: it is said that the crew's horrified response was genuine, because the actors had been kept in the dark about the precise nature of the special effects. The script direction stated only, with admirable restraint: 'The alien exits from Kane'. Only John Hurt knew what was about to happen. The other actors had no idea about the quantities of offal that had been packed into the fake torso that writhed on the table. They arrived on set, however, to find the crew dressed in coveralls and the cameras protected by tarps and glass. When the beast erupted in the first take, Veronica Cartwright, who plays Lambert, was knocked off her feet by the spray of fake blood. She was 'near hysterics', O'Bannon recalled, cackling with delight. The writer felt sorry for Kane, though: in Life force (1985), scripted by O'Bannon for Tobe Hooper, he gets promoted to Colonel Caine and this time is the last survivor of yet another predatory alien invasion. When the film was first shown to early audiences, the responses proved somewhat biological too. At a test-screening in Dallas, the physiological reaction was extreme: the toilets were full of terrified people vomiting and stuffing paper into the speakers to block the soundtrack being piped in. I had thought these stories were apocryphal, played up by a hungry publicity department, until I met an eminent professor of Gothic literature who confessed that she had thrown up in shock on seeing Alien in its first run in 1979. This is what sensational horror is meant to do: to slice through aesthetics and hot-wire the nervous system itself. As Jonathan Frome has pointed

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out, the heartbeat soundtrack of the scene increases to a stressful 110 beats per minute before calming to 55, the immersive experience of cinema ensuring an effective kind of 'emotional contagion'. 16 Late-1970s horror twisted the notion of bodily threat like never before, no longer just threatening bodily integrity from the outside but literally getting under the skin. David Cronenberg had been doing this for several years in his perverse Canadian body horrors, whilst The Exorcist (1973) had brought some of this low cultural energy into the mainstream, but Alien inserted B-movie gore into the Hollywood science-fiction blockbuster. It is analogue, visceral and nasty. We have not quite recovered yet. One down, six to go.

Parker and Brett Parker and Brett, the greasers of the Nostromo, begin bitching about the 'bonus situation' almost as soon as they're awake. Do they get extra for a rescue mission? Will they get full shares? 'Don't worry,' Ripley says menacingly, 'you'll get what's coming to you.' Yaphet Kotto had recently starred in Paul Schrader's Blue Collar (1978), playing Smokey, a working-class assembly-line worker in a car factory who turns hapless thief and accidentally uncovers a conspiracy. In his memorable final scene, he is killed by robot-arm paint-sprayers, mastered by the unseen forces of the union and company. As the material interests corrupt the workers, the last words of the film are spoken by Smokey: 'They pit the lifers against the new boys, the young against the old, the black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.' Kotto is cast in exactly the same role in Alien, as he and Brett play a slightly parodic version of 'I'm all right Jack' union men. Harry Dean Stanton's monosyllabic support for his union rep constitutes a blunt resistance to the demands of management. 'How long will it take to fix?', the captain asks. 'Seventeen hours,' Brett suggests. 'A minimum of twenty-five hours,' Parker relays. Alien plugs directly into the social and political crises of the 1970s through these characters. The world of the film is an oil-shocked,

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cancelled future, riotous and riven. The West felt the effect of the 1973 Middle Eastern oil crisis very badly. In the US, industrial collapse, urban unemployment and crime, and the rise of the 'rust belt' marked a traumatic end to the long post-war boom. In Britain, it produced runaway inflation and union blocs demanded massive pay rises, coming out on indefinite strikes until their demands were met. Heath's government fell in 1974 when the miners rebelled against an incomes policy and their strike resulted in extensive power cuts and a three-day week. The new Labour government acceded to the miners' demand for a 32 per cent pay rise and tried to manage further rises through a corporatist strategy, running the economy through agreements between government, industry and unions. By 1978, however, a weakened and bankrupt minority government could not control pay rises and a general strike seemed close at hand. Some thought the apocalypse was even closer. 'CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS?', The Sun newspaper mocked the Prime Minister in January 1979. On the left, commentators like Tom Nairn spoke of 'The Twilight of the British State': 'a motorized wheelchair and a decent funeral seem to have become the actual horizons of the 1980s'. 1 7 Brett and Parker are the resentful core of workers, resisting their masters, defying their authority in every muttered syllable, every slow gesture. They have no respect for Dallas's office, and he knows it, so the captain defers instead to the technocratic rationalism of Parker and Brett

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Ash. They hate the managerial Ripley invading their workspace, leaving the compressors running so they can't hear her as she tries to up their work rate. The Company is not given a name in the first film, but it has always been the 'Weyland-Yutani Corp', named deliberately to echo both the British Leyland car company (then in financial crisis and riven by debilitating strikes, shortly to collapse entirely) and Toyota, the wave of the Japanese economic future, their robot factories emptied of mass-industrial workers. Suspicion of corporate entities and their global reach was flowering in the cinema, from the great Alan Pakula conspiracy theories of the 1970s through to The China Syndrome (1979) and Silkwood (1983). Ridley Scott was making the film as the crisis reached a crescendo in England with the 'Winter of Discontent' in 1978-9. The streets of major cities were full of uncollected rotting garbage, bread was rationed, the army was standing in for the emergency services, and the dead were left unburied in some cities. Militant feminism attacked patriarchy; Black Power attacked structural racism; punks were openly nihilist or anarchist, resisting every armature of the state. In response, right-wing movements like the National Front grew in popularity, and ex-military groups planned private militias to hold back the rot of communism and welfarism. Dystopias dominated British science fiction, from Terry Nation's Survivors (1975-7) to the last outing for an ageing Quatermass (October and November 1979). Christopher Priest's Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972), about complete social disintegration, was written long before the zombie apocalypse trope took over the cinema. Some of the strictest union 'closed shops' were actually in the movie business: interestingly, Dominic Sandbrook's history of the period, Seasons in the Sun, opens with a description of the effect union restrictions had on the working day at Elstree Studios during the filming of Star Wars in 1976. Scott was working under pressure from American studios in similar British conditions, and O'Bannon claimed that Scott only came into contention for Alien because of a

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Screen Directors Guild strike in Hollywood in 1978. Some of Brett and Parker's dialogue must have been pretty close to the bone on set. In fact, Scott soon started to avoid Yaphet Kotto, because the actor kept trying to ambush the director with a stream of ideas about the character every morning. His improvisatory style is clear in the film; it plays off wonderfully against the classical constraint of Ian Holm or Sigourney Weaver. On his last day, Kotto was determined to persuade Scott that Parker should not die. Bolshy indeed. A lot of commentary on the film regards it as a political allegory of social and economic disintegration: from very early on, Marxist science-fiction critics cautiously embraced Alien as a critique of the patriarchal Company that oppresses its workers but whose white bosses are steadily losing authority in front of the women and blacks they ostensibly control. The film portrays a 'microcosmic class struggle', unusual in the depiction of a spaceship crew, but also charts the defeat of coUectivist action. 18 Ash is the machinic voice of deathly command that the workers must overthrow. As an extension of Mother and servant of the secret orders of the Company, Ash is ultimately aligned with the beast on board, because the monster embodies the unfettered rapacity of the new capitalism of multinational corporations. Subversive potential definitely exists in the film's mix, but it is not fixed or coherent. Brett and Parker are not working-class heroes, but another sign of discordance and collective collapse. Robin Wood found the film symptomatically ambiguous in its politics. At the time, Wood was exploring the divide between what he saw as 'progressive' horror films that offered searing social critique from the margins, allowing expression of the political unconscious of 1970s America, and 'the reactionary wing' of horror that became increasingly dominant in the 1980s. Where was Alien, in the cusp year of 1979? 'It clearly wants to be taken ... as a "progressive" movie, notably in its depiction of women,' Wood noted, before dismissing this as a sheen that 'masks (not very effectively) its fundamentally reactionary nature'. 1 9

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Even if Alien was a piece of leftist science fiction, the core of the myth could be inflected the other way. James Cameron's Aliens would be a defiantly Reaganite version of the story - pumped, militarised, libertarian and driven by a staunch defence of the nuclear family. The anti-corporate jibes are merely the gloss on individual survival. Alien is a symptom rather than a fully formulated political diagnosis of confused, transitional times. In crisis, the crew of the Nostromo temporarily pull together, building improvised cattle-prod weapons and rigging flame-throwers to push the primitive beast towards the airlock. Ash devises a sensor to detect its movements, a device that responds to micro-changes in air density ('Micro-changes in air density, my ass,' Ripley mutters, a self-reflexive joke about science-fictional jargon but also a measure of her increasing suspicion of Ash's passive-aggressive behaviour). In a ship riddled with pipes and tubes, ducts and corridors, this seems a hopeless plan. Plans are always hopeless in Alien films, utterly hopeless. Two teams: Ash, Lambert and Dallas stay up above; Brett, Parker and Ripley head down below, pathetically armed with a net. They need to stay together at all times, to collectivise, which of course no one ever does in horror films. We are in old dark house territory, the haunters and the haunted, ghost-busters with their jerry-built detectors. Jonesey the cat jumping out at them rather than the alien is an example of textbook horror: building tension, offering comic relief. But there is something extraordinary and poetic about Brett's last walk. He follows Jones into a vast space of cooling towers, a cathedral of darkness, where the chains clank with echoes that suggest the Nostromo impossibly contains a cavernous space. As always in the Gothic, this space does not quite compute. Brett leans into a cascade of water, the sound of it hitting his baseball cap redolent of summer rain. The film takes in this stillness, this moment of reflection (we think now of Harry Dean Stanton in that baseball cap again in Paris, Texas [1984], the silent traumatised man walking out of the desert). Brett treads on the shed skin of some animal, and we guess before he does that the alien has transformed again,

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evolving beyond that nasty grub that burst from Kane. Jones finally seems to respond to his coaxing and takes a few tentative steps into the open. But there is something in the chains behind Brett, something you don't see in the first few viewings, something vast, animate, like a dinosaur's tail which raises Jonesey's hackles. Brett turns and we have our first glimpses of the mature alien, vicious tail, jaws and teeth within teeth. Brett is dragged away, screaming. Two down, five to go.

An alien primer We have now glimpsed all the stages of the alien. It has a fast and brutal life cycle, but we get only jarring, disconnected snapshots of its developmental stages, and the puzzling gaps ensure that it snares the Brett's last walk; first glimpse of the adult alien

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audience in terrified speculation. Scott carefully constructed this tactic: 'The most important thing ... is not what y o u see, but the effect of w h a t y o u think y o u saw. It's like a sort of afterburn.' 2 0 This monster will inhere in its incoherence. O'Bannon had conceived the life cycle of the alien very early, as his notes to Giger suggest: Spore Pods. These are leathery, egg-shaped objects about one metre tall, which contain the larva of the Alien. They have a small 'lid' in the top, which can pop off when a victim approaches. The Alien, First Phase. This is a small, possibly octopoidal creature which waits inside the Spore Pod for a victim to approach. When someone touches the Spore Pod, the lid flies off and the Small Alien leaps out and attaches itself to the face of the victim. The Alien, Second Phase. Once the Alien (First Phase) has attached itself to the face of a victim, it lays eggs in the victim's stomach and the egg grows into the Alien (Second Phase). This is a small creature which bites its way out of the victim's body. The Alien, Third Mature Phase. Having left its victim, the Alien promptly grows to man-size, whereupon it is terrifically dangerous. It is very mobile, strong and capable of tearing a man to pieces. It feeds on h u m a n flesh. This creature should be a profane abomination. Our producers have suggested that something resembling an over-sized, deformed baby might be sufficiently loathsome. In any event, we wish you to feel free to create your own design. 21 Giger w a s responsible for envisaging these stages, first as concept artist and then as fully engaged designer o n set. His contribution to the third adult phase w a s clearly transformative, shifting the cliched nightmares of the producers onto another plane, fusing it with his Necronomicon

'biomechanicals'. In fact, whilst Giger solved the

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design of the eggs, the Face-Hugger and adult alien, he proved unable to realise the Chest-Burster. His design for this version of the beast resembled, in his own memorable words, 'a degenerate plucked turkey'. Consequently, the team brought in the special-effects designer Roger Dicken, who had worked on 2001, The Witch finder General (1968) and had animated the dinosaurs in The Tand That Time Forgot (1975). The temperamental Dicken let Giger know in no uncertain terms that he found his designs nothing less than 'repulsive abortions', a description, needless to say, Giger took as a great affirmation. 22 Meanwhile, the mechanical animation of those terrifying jaws was given to the Italian special-effects man Carlo Rambaldi, who had spent much of the past year or so making the cute creatures that populated the bar in the spaceport in Star Wars. None of this production or design history can tell us what the alien means, though, why it has burnt into the retina of the cultural imagination. What might it signify? In her influential book on the Gothic monster, Judith Halberstam has called the most effective Gothic creatures 'What big teeth you have'

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'technologies of monstrosity', because they offer 'a remarkably mobile, permeable, and infinitely interpretable body'. 'Multiple interpretations are embedded in the text,' she argues, 'and part of the experience of horror comes from the realization that meaning itself runs riot.' 23 Monsters demand to be read allegorically, don't they? These are, as Stephen Asma puts it in his longitudinal historical study of monsters, 'metaphors that organize the world'. 2 4 And since Frankenstein (1818), the human has been defined by the inhuman terrors that crowd at our boundaries. The continual mutation of the alien in Alien ups the ante on this observation, and we need to shuffle the shards of these nightmare associations to get at the full range of resonances suggested by this primordial beast. Let's try to gather together some possible readings. The predominant academic reading of Alien is that the glimpses of the reproductive life cycle are a perfect realisation of Freud's psychoanalytic insights on childhood fantasies about sexuality, sexual difference and reproductive origins. There are several avenues we could take within the elaborate edifice of Freudian theory. Most explicitly, the chest-bursting scene evokes what one of Freud's early allies, Otto Rank, called 'the trauma of birth'. Rank claimed that this original trauma was a universal fear but also the subject of a primal repression, which therefore meant it could only be remembered through displaced symbolisations and symptomatic anxieties, most particularly the cultural fear of uterine spaces and the more explicit horror of female genitalia. 'The common characteristic of all infantile birth theory', Rank claimed, 'is the denial of the female sex organ.' This was the route of all perversions, too. Rank interpreted the sexual violence and murder of the sadist as unresolved 'infantile curiosity', an obsession with 'blood and bowels', with violent explorations of 'the nature of the inside of the body'. 25 Rank also noted a fairy-tale obsession with cutting open bodies, heroes birthed without birth, not from woman born. The male birthing in Alien is therefore at once an evasion of, and a monument to, this foundational trauma of birth. The film opens with the ship's

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computer, Mother, rebirthing the crew from their pods, parthenogenetically. Kane is the one who drives the exploration of the uterine alien derelict spacecraft, venturing through the vaginal openings first, penetrating the uterine space where the alien eggs rest awaiting their awful reanimation. Reawakening from his induced coma, he remembers only vague and terrible dreams of smothering, a suppression of his traumatic coupling. Giger was clearly aware of Rank's theory, and spoke of his work as driven compulsively by birth trauma. Rank was actually expelled from the psychoanalytic movement for providing a too general and inflexible theory of anxiety. Perhaps, then, Alien is more amenable to Freud's own writings on infantile sexuality. For Freud, what he calls the 'sexual researches of childhood' are driven by an obsession to uncover origins. Childhood speculations are full of anxious misconceptions, murderous couplings and animalistic fantasies, particularly about parental sex acts. In his case study 'The Wolf Man', Freud argues that his patient's animal phobias, his fear of insects and repeated nightmares about wolves all lead back to a primal scene in which a glimpsed sexual coupling of his parents is misread as an act of devouring, animalistic aggression. Such a fantasy derives, Freud suggested, from the early, pre-Oedipal phase of development, the oral-cannibalistic phase (long before the mature genital phase), in which pleasures are focused on the mouth and the sucking of the breast. 26 But where there is pleasure, there is also danger, the risk of loss, separation or violence. One of Freud's followers, Melanie Klein, turned these kinds of infantile fantasies into full-scale Gothic nightmares, the rage of the infant coming back as persecutory and devouring mothers and bad breasts, intent on tearing up babes in arms, resulting in anxious, schizoid infants taunted ceaselessly in their fantasies by terrible monsters. Consequently, there have been rigorously Kleinian readings of Alien, which argue that the film 'goes on to create a world much like Klein's view of the infant's early months of life'. 27 The film does seem to offer a vision of an insatiable, destructive, devouring beast,

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teeth within teeth tearing through the 'skin-ego' of all these vulnerable humans. The pleasures of the adult alien are articulated through a mouth that happens to drip with KY Jelly, the tendons around the mouth of the models built out of condoms. In what reads like a conventional theory of horror film as catharsis, the Kleinian theorists Krin and Glen Gabbard explain: 'People line up to see movies like Alien in order to remaster powerful unconscious anxieties while retaining a sense that they have some active control over the situation the second time around.' 2 8 Do they, though? Is the appeal of horror as neat and tidy as the theory of catharsis suggests? A related psychoanalytic account, one of the most influential in terms of Gothic criticism, links these reflections to the theory of 'abjection', first espoused by Julia Kristeva in 1980, just a year after Alien was released. The 'abject' is what gets discarded in the process of the formation of the subject and the emergence of a clear boundary between subject and object worlds - the development of a sense of our bounded individual selves, in other words. Anything that does not respect 'borders, positions, rules', anything that is indeterminate, that overflows boundaries, that oozes from the body, like blood, urine or faeces, is abject, a source of repulsion, fenced off by cultural taboos. Kristeva's litany of abject stuff also included structures 'within the body, a non-assimilable alien, a monster, a tumour, a cancer'. Mothers, the sticky origins from which we must separate to individuate, are abject too. Abjection in culture - for instance, the horror film obsession with ruined and opened bodies - is for Kristeva an echo of 'the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be'. 2 9 Alien was one of the key routes by which theories of abjection came to dominate horror film theory for a time. Perhaps this was because it coincided with all those body horror films - Seth Brundle slowly shedding his human skin, becoming increasingly insectoid and vomiting up disgusting, abject goo in David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986). One of the most influential readings of Alien was Barbara Creed's exploration of the 'monstrous-feminine' in body

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horror, Alien's alien embodying the 'archaic mother', 'the parthenogenetic mother, the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and end'. 3 0 The path of each film in the Alien series involves a precarious defeat of this annihilating figure and a temporary restoration of normative human order. The first film is perhaps the purest articulation of the terrors of female reproductive power amongst a cluster of 1970s films, from Rosemary's Baby (1968) via Larry Cohen's delirious It's Alive (1974) to Donald Cammell's cerebral Demon Seed (1977), all of which Gothicise birth as utterly abject. These interpretations are all more or less compelling, according to taste, but run up against a paradox. If the alien is truly a figure of horrifying otherness, it is striking how easily this chimera is accommodated into a series of frameworks that domesticate its otherness. The Other ingeniously conforms to our theory, strokes us narcissistically about how clever our explanations have been, whilst secretly continuing to hide itself away from our presumptuous interpretations. The smoother and more total the explanation, the less it touches a text that merely mirrors back the theory. This is perhaps why Judith Halberstam warns against the comforting familiarity of psychoanalytic explanation, yet I have to say that her own brand of 'queer theory', which sees the monster's body as 'pieced together out of the fabric of race, class, gender and The m o n s t e r within: Demon Seed (1977)

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sexuality', 31 is only another kind of domestication in an updated yet entirely expected set of categories from contemporary identity politics. The philosopher Jacques Derrida speculated on the chances of thinking the absolute alien Other (significantly enough) when, one morning, he is caught naked by the gaze of his own cat. Western philosophy, he suggests, has never been able to think the genuine otherness of the animal from the side of the non-human other, instead sweeping it into a hierarchy that helps only consolidate the superiority of the human over all the other beasts. Yet, Derrida thinks, the gaze of the animal other is 'uninterpretable, unreadable, undecidable, abyssal and secret'. It is an existence that 'refuses to be conceptualized'. 32 This is also what science fiction tries and continually fails to do: to imagine beyond the horizon of the familiar and the same, and conceive of genuine difference and otherness. Perhaps, then, to acknowledge this limit of interpretation, we also need to recognise that one of the ways that the alien retains its enigmatic alterity is to ultimately refuse any over-coherent theoretical explanation. So let's return to Alien and begin to recognise the many resonances that have so far fallen out of any regard in this short primer of the alien life cycle. Perhaps we should start again, thinking more literally about the physical animality of the alien, not what it symbolises. The crew put together the stages of this imaginary creature by fusing a nightmare of body parts. The egg was stuffed with forty feet of sheep intestines and a cow's stomach. When Ash picks at the dead Face-Hugger, his tweezers are picking at a dish of fruits de mers, bits and pieces of oysters and fish guts shipped in to the studio every day. The ChestBurster looks like a lamprey, one of those nasty evolutionary backwaters that latch onto corpses rotting in the water. Monsters have traditionally been 'mosaic beings', made up of grotesque hybrids that serve as allegorical 'creatures of boundaries'. 3 3 The classical dracontopede was a serpent with a female head; the manticore, according to Pliny the Elder, had 'a triple row of teeth like a comb, the face and eyes of a man, grey eyes, a blood-red colour,

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a lion's body, and inflicts stings with its tail like a scorpion'. 34 This medley brings us closer to the biology of Alien. As Harvey Greenberg says of the alien in the film: 'It is a Linnean nightmare, defying every natural law of evolution, by turns bivalve, crustacean, reptilian and humanoid.' 3 5 In Van Vogt's source stories for the film, particularly 'Discord in Scarlet', the creature owes much to the life cycle of parasitic wasps. We tend to highlight nasty social wasps like hornets and yellow jackets, but the majority of the thousands of species of wasp are solitary and parasitic. Predatory parasitoid wasps have some evil tricks: the adult female uses its sting to paralyse prey such as caterpillars, which are then dragged to a nest, where the wasp uses its ovipositor to plant its eggs. The parasitic larvae grow by eating the caterpillar from the inside out, keeping the host alive for as long as possible by avoiding any vital organs. The Ichneumonidae species of wasp, one entomological guide explains, prepares the caterpillar 'by chewing it with their mandibles, working from one end to another without breaking the skin'. The larva then breaks out of the host with 'sets of lateral thoracic and abdominal teeth'. 36 Although the creature in Alien is an imaginary animal, a chimera like a manticore, the moment when the larva bursts out of Kane's chest (and the way this creature cocoons its prey) is meant to echo the life cycle of the wasp. 'A Linnean nightmare'

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This is not just phantasmatic natural history in Alien, but a significant ideological choice. The cruelty of this wasp's reproductive cycle has actually made it a pivotal case in the argument for the presence or absence of intelligent design in Nature since the earliest days of evolutionary theory. The wasp played a key role in Charles Darwin's ebbing of faith. He wrote to American naturalist Asa Gray in 1860: I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.37 The ability to track the emergence of sociality in Hymenoptera-like wasps also made them a crucial area of research in the rise of sociobiological theory in the 1970s, a key aspect for the attempt by sociobiologists to theorise the 'selfish' evolutionary motivation for cooperation. The biologist who coined the term 'sociobiology', E. O. Wilson, published The Insect Societies in 1971. It was followed

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a few years later by Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976). Ridley Scott's alien is similarly conceived only in murderously competitive terms, as if setting out to illustrate Darwin's observation in On the Origin of Species (1859) that species in closest competition 'will generally press hardest on its nearest kindred, and tend to exterminate them'. 3 8 The 'Darwin Wars' restarted in the 1970s, when the claims that all social behaviours could be deterministically reduced to evolutionary choices were contested by rival, more liberal theorists, such as Stephen Jay Gould or Steven Rose. 3 9 The model of the wasp is not purely a biological reference point, then, but an intrinsically political one. The selfish gene, the notion that evolutionary struggle is an implacable arms race dependent on the destruction of the proximate species, is only one school of Darwinism, but one which has spoken eloquently to the neoliberal times that were beginning to emerge out of the crisis of the late 1970s. Van Vogt's stories or 1950s monster B-movies typically ended in precarious victory for human scientific rationalism, a register of a certain confidence in man's superior position in the evolutionary scheme of things. This is typical of Golden Age science fiction. The Alien cycle is distinctly less confident. Insects were rebelling throughout 1970s cinema, from the super-intelligent ants of Saul Bass's Phase IV to the bees of The Swarm (1978) and all those sharks that come out of the deep water to prey in the shallows after jaws (1975). 40 The Alien series has developed during a period of revolution in molecular biology, DNA coding and the politics of increasingly malleable 'life itself'.41 The alien changes from solitary parasite in the first film to the eusocial cooperative collectives of the sequels, and as the imaginary beast modifies through the series, it is also a cultural register of a biological revolution. It is this focus that lets us see Alien as an early harbinger of the extraordinary revival of Lovecraft's particular take on biological body horror in modern Gothic/science-fiction fusions.

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Lovecraft repeatedly imagined the dethronement of humanity by ancient tentacular, slimy beings with names like Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth. Degenerate races were spawned by miscegenation with profane, demonic creatures, producing the biological fantasia of the 'Dunwich Horror' or the 'Shadow out of Innsmouth', horrific hybrids of man and beast. Lovecraft's anti-heroes suffer the revelation that superior extraterrestrial beings slumber in the Antarctic wastes or the Australian outback, merely awaiting the chance to return and overthrow humanity again. After Giger had cross-pollinated the Alien franchise with Lovecraft, the series has repeatedly returned to Lovecraft as an inspiration (Prometheus most of all). It pulls into the orbit of the films Lovecraft's powerful philosophy of 'cosmic indifferentism', devolutionary fantasies and slime dynamics that are thoroughly Darwinian, materialistic and historical. 42 The alien invokes myth, natural history and pulp horror, but also high art. The Chest-Burster is meant to echo the right panel of Francis Bacon's famous triptych from 1944, 'Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion'. That it does is no surprise, as Ridley Scott suggested this as a reference point to Giger when he was All hail the ant queen: Phase IV (1974)

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designing the alien. But did they discuss all of the resonances that the painting brought along with it? Bacon regarded this triptych as the inaugural work of his mature phase, and tried to destroy or d i s o w n everything that had c o m e before it. W h e n 'Three Studies' w a s first s h o w n in L o n d o n at the Lefevre Gallery in April 1 9 4 5 , alongside more renowned artists, the responses were violent. John Russell recalled: To the right of the door were images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut snap at the sight of them. Their anatomy was half-human, half-animal ... They caused a total consternation. We had no name for them, and no name for what we felt about them. They were regarded as freaks, monsters irrelevant to the concerns of the day, and the product of an imagination so eccentric as not to count in any possible permanent way 43 Lovecraft tentacles: Prometheus (2012); 'Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion', c.1944, Francis Bacon (1909-92), © Tate, London 2014

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Herbert Furst declared himself 'shocked' and 'disturbed' by them: 'Perhaps it was the red background', he said, 'that made me think of entrails, of an anatomy or vivisection.' They were, to another early viewer Raymond Mortimer, 'symbols of outrage rather than works of art'. 44 Bacon's monstrous images have produced their own struggle for interpretation. Jonathan Littell has argued that 'Commentary is useless. The thing is there, and must be read as it exists, even where it is built to escape all understanding, or to trap it.' 45 These biomorphic monsters resist reading, closed down in their refusal of category. But others have read a psychodynamic allegory here, interpreting the right panel as a portrait of Bacon's punitive father (the patch of grass a reference to his father's life on the turf, breeding racehorses). This is the screaming rage of a violent patriarch. Bacon was obsessed with drawing screams, concentrating on the lower half of the face, rarely painting the eyes, draping or concealing them, or simply letting the upper face vaporise into thin air. The crucial part of the design for Alien was to resist giving the creature eyes, abolishing any chance of mutual recognition, of a look that could be returned. Bacon possibly knew Georges Bataille's short essay 'Mouth', in which Bataille spoke about the mouth as 'the beginning or, if one prefers, the prow, of animals, in the most characteristic cases, it is the most living part, in other words, the most terrifying for neighbouring animals'. It is from the mouth, Bataille says, that the most 'explosive impulses were to spurt directly out of the body, in the form of screams'. 46 All of this feeds the alien's pure orality. Bacon also claimed that his forms were meant to evoke the screaming Furies from Aeschylus's drama the Oresteia, those demons of primitive vendetta-law - female ghosts of the vengeful dead who 'loose a lethal tide to sweep the world', smiling at puny humans through bloodied teeth. 47 One of the most important sources for 'Three Studies' was Bacon's collection of photographic images cut from newspapers and

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magazines. It is thought, for instance, that this right-hand panel echoed an earlier painting, 'Figure Getting Out of a Car', now destroyed, which was based on a press image of Hitler emerging from his car at a rally in the 1930s. Bacon's photographic sources at this time did constantly return to images of European fascism, including press shots of Goebbels, Hitler and Mussolini. Bear in mind, too, that T h r e e Studies' is often seen as the inaugural painting of our post-war world because of a gruesome accident of timing. The triptych caused a sensation when first displayed in April 1945, partly because this happened to be the month in which the first revelations about the Nazi concentration camps appeared in the western European press, following the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. The scream was a common trope in painting about fascism and the Holocaust, and Bacon was indebted to this tradition. His paintings announced a new scale of horror in the world: 'We are meat, we are potential carcasses.' 48 Are we able to fold this atrocious history back into the ChestBurster that emerges from John Hurt's ruined body? Well, Nicholas Chare has recently written a whole chapter in his book After Francis Bacon reflecting on Alien as an evocation of Bacon's visual universe. 49 What he doesn't mention is the other Fascist resonance. Ridley Scott used Leni Riefenstahl's iconic images of Nubians as a visual reference for the adult alien. These trips to Africa took place after Riefenstahl's controversial role as the outcast film-maker of the Fascist body beautiful in Triumph of the Will (1936) and Olympia (1938). Her Nubians, problematically, represented something outside the fallen history she was trying to escape. In Alien, the monster, who was actually, after all that fuss, a man in a rubber suit, was played in the film by a six-foot-ten-inch-tall Masai man called Bolaji Badejo whom Scott met in a pub on the Tottenham Court Road. The implications of borrowing this racial dynamic and how this problematic politics might play out in the implacable struggle for survival aboard the Nostromo were apparently never considered by the crew. Can we say that behind those murderous vagina dentata of Alien, these atrocities of the twentieth century lurk?

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Why evoke the horrors of 1945? Alien is constantly pulled into the orbit of World War II. O'Bannon's script was initially about a bomber flight, not a spaceship. The set was built from bits of junked bombers, whilst the models of the Nostromo were encrusted with elements taken from model Airfix kits of World War II planes. Is Scott's childhood as the son of a senior military man showing through here? Rather than a direct evocation of the war, I think it is more that the crisis of the 1970s, the disintegration of the British post-war settlement, necessarily recalled the origins of that era of consensus, now coming to catastrophic collapse. In reflecting on an end of an era, Alien also evokes its beginning. None of these resonances, echoes or suggested meanings are meant to be final or determining, but they swirl around the film as allegorical potential. Some of these readings do not coincide and of course actively contradict each other. That's only what the monster demands: the act of over-reading. In a suitably Scott-like image, the critic Colin Davis has argued that 'over-reading ... dreams of a Promethean foray into uncharted territory, to steal and recover some trace of a work's hitherto unspoken knowledge'. 50 Over-interpretation is sanctioned as the only appropriate response to the 'mosaic beings' that the bizarre condensations of the alien represent. Such manic interpretive activity drives some viewers mad: Tom Shone has spluttered about the huge academic industry around Alien, the 'termite-like deconstruction' that never ends and piles ridiculous significance onto mere 'pop-artifacts'. 51 My only defence would be to say that I have only tugged on threads that are already in the film, rather than impose any alien theories on it. I might have pursued these lines far too earnestly, of course, but isn't it just another form of insult to think that 'low' culture cannot carry this burden or range of reference?

Captain Dallas Many Gothic stories begin with the dysfunction of the father-figure whose failure of authority creates the conditions for disorder,

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invasion or haunting. It is the usurpation of the rightful father that unleashes the supernatural horrors of the very first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765), and the slasher film cycle of the late 1970s was premised on the absence of any parental authority, from Halloween onwards. Rather like the absent-minded, ineffectual and very much dead Commander Powell in Dark Star, Captain Dallas is the patriarch without authority in Alien. Dallas has exclusive access to Mother, sitting in her bee-like honeycomb, but the computer runs rings round his stupid questions. Ash leeches all his authority. Ripley will not obey him. Parker and Brett openly defy him. Dallas simply can't command his crew. At one point, he retreats to the escape shuttle, listens to Tine kleine Nachtmusik, perhaps contemplating abandoning ship, reflecting on moral cowardice like Dallas contemplates Lord Jim?; Dallas, trapped in Mother's honeycomb

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Conrad's Lord Jim. He is perhaps a distant echo of the Captain Dallas in the 1950s TV version of The Quatermass Experiment, but I wonder if he was named for a site of atrocity, that primal American wound of the execution of a president in Dealey Plaza in 1963. Tom Skerritt plays Dallas with a sense of deflation and defeat. He wants only a simple contract, a quiet life, and is exasperated by this deviation from a standard run back to Earth. In Dan O'Bannon's first script, his name was entirely appropriate: Chaz Standard. As an established Hollywood actor, Skerritt in fact objected to the endless waiting around on set, and worried that Scott was far more interested in the staging and special effects than his actors (he was), and so perhaps this exasperation is real. Dallas knows that he has been called to his doom by the beacon, and volunteers to enter the air ducts to flush the beast towards the airlock. 'What are my chances?' he asks Mother. 'Does not compute,' she replies. Sacrificial logic sends him down the tubes, lit by the lone flame on his flame-thrower. As he moves forward, they seal the ducts behind him, the apertures closing like the iris diaphragm of a camera. He is trapped in the mechanism of a camera that pulls focus elsewhere, never on him. In his last moments, he is hemmed into this entirely enclosing frame. In those tubes, we don't know which way is up or down, backwards or forwards. Lambert screams that the alien is coming at him, but Dallas sees nothing except the last flash, a shock glimpse of the creature from the black lagoon. His blip disappears from the sensors. The role of Dallas was ruthlessly cut back, perhaps another reflection on his ineffectual leadership. There was meant to be a sex scene between Dallas and Ripley, an unsentimental question of 'relief for crewmates after the death of Kane. It continued the neutral, routine treatment of human sexual difference amongst the crew. Although it was said to be Scott's favourite scene, it was wisely cut from the script. Another scene featuring Dallas was filmed, however, which has seeded much of the subsequent horrors of the sequels. Scott left it in

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until late on: it exists in Alan Dean Foster's novelisation of the film which was written from the shooting script. Scott restored this scene for the restored and extended edition of the film released in 2003, but it often features in deleted scenes extras on DVD releases. As Ripley dashes through the corridors of the Nostromo, she encounters the alien's nest. At last we can grasp something of the cycle of the creature in this sequence, because the body of Brett has been fully transformed into one of those eggs, whilst Dallas is still just alive, cocooned by the alien. Dallas utters the line 'Kill me!', and a traumatised Ripley eventually consents to bathe him and the nest in lakes of fire. This paralysed, undead state, astride of the grave and awaiting a new kind of birth, is restaged in nearly every iteration of the Alien franchise. On one level of the early PlayStation version of the Aliens game, you are menaced by a voice whispering 'Kill me' in the dark over and over again. The franchise has found another incredible concrete image to fill the empty phrase 'a fate worse than death'. It is Dallas who is the typically absent father of this repeated scene, a powerful concentration of the biological and existential extremity of the encounter with the alien. That this scene was cut leaves the fate of Dallas rather unclear. Early viewers of the film suspected an Agatha Christie twist, borrowed from the plot of Ten Little Niggers, in which Dallas didn't die and was scheduled to return to rescue Ripley in the final scene The missing fate: Dallas cocooned (Director's Cut)

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where she confronts the alien in the escape shuttle. Of course, Dallas wouldn't be able to do that. Yet as viewers, we have forgotten that his simple disappearance, his non-return as the male saviour at the end, is truly remarkable for a Hollywood narrative at this time. There will be no restoration of male authority. Three down, four to go. Ash Alien is an education in situating humans within a spectrum of other types of being, a harsh lesson in human dethronement. The film makes this not just a question of biology; Ash is the cyborg whose secret sabotage of the crew's efforts to survive is discovered way too late. In the early acts of the film, it looks like Ash is merely providing a standard lesson on the role of science common with much sciencefiction cinema: a demonstration of the inhumanity, the unworldly lack of empathy, of the detached scientist. Ash is a progeny of Victor Frankenstein via Dr Arthur Carrington, the foolhardy scientist in The Thing from Another World who allows the alien creature to live and kill again purely out of autistic experimental fascination. He shares something of the inhuman research imperative that drives Dr Jeremy Stone in his pristine underground labs in The Andromeda Strain or the obsessive Dr Hubbs in his futuristic geodesic dome in the desert in Phase IV. Ash is a stickler for order and rules, for unblemished uniforms and tidy workstations. There is something closeted about him, in every way. He is the one whose word-perfect recall of their contractual status sends them after the fateful signal, whose inexorable logic grinds potential mutiny down. In his glass blister pod, plugged into his seat and monitors, he looks down on his captain and crew as they depart for the derelict and stretches his fingers like a puppet-master setting to work. There is the suspicion of another agenda as soon as he promptly overrides all protocols and lets the stricken Kane and the alien creature back on board, in direct contravention of all contamination procedures and Ripley's seniority

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in the chain of command. His decision infects the Nostromo, and his ineffectual role in the medical investigation of Kane and his lacklustre contributions to their plans of attack fuel suspicions. He has nothing to add, he is still 'collating', he says. Ripley splutters her contempt. After the death of Dallas, Warrant Officer Ripley is in command of the Nostromo and has access to Mother. She proves much better at asking the right questions in the white womb of the computer interface and uncovers the secret orders of the Company: to retrieve the alien at all costs, 'crew expendable'. The corporate conspiracy begins to blossom, but there is no time for Ripley to absorb the implications of this secret command: that surely their entire trip and this 'accidental' re-routing to a distress beacon has been engineered from the beginning. Ash is suddenly at her side. He finally reveals his violent intent, finding a merciless strength to begin beating Ripley to death. In a significant last act, he rolls a pornographic magazine and tries to force it into Ripley's mouth (like the robot arm that orally rapes Julie Christie in Demon Seed). In one symbolic moment, this neatly aligns Ash with a patriarchal Company that fucks its employees, and the alien Face-Hugger, which forces its smothering proboscis down the throat. When Parker is forced to smash Ash off Ripley, the blow decapitates him. Ash's strange seizure echoes that of Kane, but here the gouts of gore are white fluid, like semen or milk. Ash, Parker fulsomely declares, is a 'goddam robot'. A trickle of disquiet

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This is less The Stepford Wives (1975) than Yul Brynner in Westworld (1973) all over again, the Gunslinger's face smashed off but the killer still inexorably bearing down. In each core Alien film, the alien is always coupled with the robot or symbiont as the other vector of threat to human integrity. This is a properly cybernetic understanding that humans must now be placed in an array of systems and environments, that the ecology of our lives extends beyond the biosphere and now includes technological ensembles like the Nostromo, its interstellar networks and its autonomous machines. When they plug Ash's head back in, the mouth gushing milky goo, the symmetry of machine and beast is emphasised in Ash's brilliant encomium to the alien (largely composed on set at the last minute): 'It's structural perfection is matched only by its hostility ... I admire its purity. A survivor. Unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.' 'You have my sympathies,' he concludes, giving that taut, prissy smile one last time. They pull the plug on Ash, hose him down with fire. Ash is an uncanny doll, an automaton mistaken for a human being. He is both a supremely modern corporate machine and rooted deeply in myth. It is inspired that he oozes white, because the ash tree secretes a milky sap often used in folk medicine. In Norse mythology, the ash is the World Tree that holds up the universe, and it was a The implacable Yul Brynner, rewired in Westworld (1973)

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long-established tradition for ailing children to be passed through the cleft of an ash tree to cure them of their ills. There is something sarcastic in the way Ash and Mother subvert this tradition of maternal care. There are old echoes in Ash's severed head, too. Very early stories of automata were about magicians who constructed talking mechanical heads that acted as prophetic oracles. This appeared in various accounts from the twelfth century onwards, whether in wild rumours about Bishop Grosseteste, who laboured for seven years on a talking brass head, or Roger Bacon, who used his mechanical head to summon the devil. It is only when Ash's head is plugged back in that he speaks the truth and issues his stark prophecy. The talking oracular head, Minsoo Kang suggests, is always a symbol of dangerous, esoteric knowledge, a device that mutters dark secrets that can only disrupt the social order. 52 But it is the blurring of human and machine in Ash that causes the most anxiety. In a conspiratorial world, we often suspect others of being machines or else being controlled by hidden machines. In 1918, Victor Tausk delivered a lecture on the common delusion of schizophrenics about 'influencing machines' that secretly command the world. 53 Of course, Scott in his next film, Blade Runner, engaged with one of the most complex investigations of human/android relations, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? As he revealed in his fiction and talks in the 1970s, Dick suspected Ash, 'the brazen h e a d '

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that androids would shortly display more empathy than humans hollowed out of feeling by a post-industrial, technologically saturated world. 'As the external world becomes more animate, we may find that we - the so-called humans - are ... inanimate', Dick predicted. 54 Scott was clearly drawn to the ambivalence of this alarming insight, given that in the five different cuts of Blade Runner extant so far, the blade runner Deckard both is and is not a replicant, depending on which version you see. This ambivalence about the cyborgs in our midst is retained through the Alien cycle, where the valence of the replicant shifts and changes. The 'artificial person' Bishop is rebooted as benign in Aliens, although the plot keeps toying with expectations that he will reveal a secret corporate agenda programmed into his actions. It is reversed again in Alien3 (1992) when Bishop's human doppelganger proves to be the head of the Weyland-Yutani Company at the bitter end of the film. Winona Ryder is an ineffectual symbiont in Alien Resurrection (1997), an echo of a device rather than any contribution to the grand human theme that the series unfolds. In contrast, amidst all the CGI noise of Prometheus, the genuine eccentricity of the replicant David, alone on board and endlessly watching Lawrence of Arabia to perfect his Peter O'Toole impersonation, is one of the few high points of that otherwise disastrous film. Four down, three to go.

Lambert Lambert, the other woman on board the Nostromo, taps her cigarette, looks resentful and angst-ridden. Her eyes are liquid, haunted, always on the edge of tears. She whines and complains: 'Let's get out of here.' In the first take of the chest-bursting scene, she got a face full of blood and guts and was knocked off her feet. She knows Dallas is doomed to die in the air ducts and all she communicates to him is the inevitability of his doom. No wonder she looks haunted. Veronica Cartwright had read for the part of Ripley, and in the first script Sigourney Weaver had

wanted the role of Lambert. Lambert in that first version had been ballsy, a clear rival to spark back at Parker. 'In the first script I read, she just cracked jokes the whole time ... and she didn't crack up until the end', Weaver recalled. 55 Cartwright arrived on set and asked wardrobe for Ripley's outfit: it was only then that she was told she was playing Lambert. What happened to the role? Lambert acts like she has already seen all of the slasher films that will come in the wake of Alien or Halloween. She awaits the furies with whiny passivity. Lambert knows she will not make it to the final reel, but is one of the intermediate figures who need to die for the plot to reach its last confrontation. The final edit was not kind, either. A snipped scene meant that Lambert's fierce swing at Ripley for leaving them outside with the Pensive Lambert; weepy Lambert

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stricken Kane got cut (in interview, Cartwright has a devilish glint in her eye when she recalls that this was no stage punch, but took Weaver fully on the jaw). Lambert was meant to die in an elaborate airlock scene, which was cut for economy, instead leaving her to be caressed by the prehensile tail of the adult alien, highly suggestive of a rape that the camera is too appalled to show. Perhaps as an actress, Cartwright looks so miserable because she is watching unfold on set the birth not of a monster but a new star in Sigourney Weaver. Weaver bursts out of Alien as if fully formed: she had virtually no prior film experience at all. She recalled: 'On Alien there was some resentment toward me because I came from New York and got such a good part.' In contrast, Cartwright had been in the movies since she was a child. She had already been menaced by an inexplicable alien force, playing the daughter Cathy Brenner in Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), repeatedly attacked in the schoolroom, the cafe and in the last sustained offensive on the Brenner house. She survives the attack. The year before Alien, Cartwright had made it through to the very end of Philip Kaufman's remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), only to be caught

Not again 7 Veronica Cartwright in The Birds (1963)

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at the last by the pod-version of Donald Sutherland. Her haunted face conveys that she has met the doom of the supporting actor many times. Inexplicably, the escape shuttle needs coolant. Coolant? Bottles of the stuff. So much of the plots of the Alien films are full of pointless red herrings like this, but they also emphasise that the plans of the humans remain unutterably stupid. So Parker and Lambert descend into the belly of the Nostromo for coolant. In the cathedral where Brett was hauled away, Parker is punctured with those terrible teeth and Lambert cowers before a fate that might be much worse than death. And then there was one.

Ripley One of the disorienting features about the opening scenes of Alien is the lack of a focalising character. It takes a while for Ripley to emerge as the survivor, a middle-ranking officer who thrives in desperate conditions. For a part that was casually switched from male to female by Alan Ladd Jr, and from Veronica Cartwright to Sigourney Weaver, the sheer accident of how this became one of the most iconic roles in modern cinema comes close to magic. 'I didn't want to do it,' Weaver Not again, again? Veronica Cartwright in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

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recalled. 'It was sci-fi and I wanted Shakespeare.' 56 She even managed to be insultingly late for her first audition. A stage actor in New York, Weaver already had some clout as the daughter of Pat Weaver (the head of NBC) and the English actress Elizabeth Inglis, who had had a small part in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935) and co-starred with Bette Davis in Wyler's The Letter (1940). Her absolute confidence comes through in very early interviews: 'I was highly recommended to everyone involved with Alien\ she told Danny Peary, and was certainly in the unusual position of being screen-tested reading through the whole script on set. 57 Nevertheless, she got the part in the end because Alan Ladd Jr gathered together all the women secretaries on the Fox lot and took a Warrant Officer Ripley; b u t c h Ripley

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straw poll. They liked Weaver. This is not the kind of girl power we normally associate with a proto-feminist Ripley. Weaver, used to working with writers to reshape plays in rehearsal, wanted to take an active part in the script improvisations necessary on Alien. This would become more significant with each return to the Alien universe. She would get a producer role for Aliens and a $5 million fee. For the troubled Alien3y Weaver received $11 million, a fair bit more than the whole budget of Alien put together, and contributed significantly to inverting the values of Aliens, removing any guns from the prison planet in the discussions with director David Fincher. Tn many ways,' David Thomson reflected, 'the actress had become the auteur, defying anyone else to know the story better than she did.' 58 When Winona Ryder signed up for Alien Resurrection, she spoke about the effect of the first appearance of Ripley on her generation of women: T remember the impact it had on me. I had never seen a female character like that. It was the first female action hero that I had and that any of us had.' This time, radically, no man - no Captain Dallas back from the dead - will step in to rescue her. Critics like Thomson coo dreamily over Sigourney Weaver's feminine charms, but it is her lanky androgyny, her masculine height, that reinforces the sexual indifference of the working Joes of Nostromo's crew, at least at first. This is what appealed to lesbian viewers, Ros Jennings has argued: a woman not particularly coded as butch or femme, but not straightforwardly heterosexual either. 59 Crucially, Ripley was a screen for identification for many different kinds of spectator. She has a rather undefined role in the hierarchy, checking comms, running computer checks, inspecting Brett and Parker's manual labour, pushing in aggressively on Ash's laboratory space. It is only once she shows unsentimental steel in directly refusing her captain to admit Kane back into the ship that she comes into focus as a force to be reckoned with. In the Alien series, men will repeatedly fall into hysterics around her as she assesses the odds for survival with cold calculation (never more so than amongst the

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punctured marines of the first sequel, where hypermasculinity rapidly wilts in combat). As her survival instinct becomes more assertive in Alien, the attacks on her do become more sexualised - Ash with his porn magazine, that 'bitch' of a Mother's indifference to a daughter's extremity, the alien's slasher voyeurism in the bedroom. Ripley is undoubtedly a pop feminist figure, an action heroine who resists the stylised cartoon of female power in Wonder Woman (1975-9) or the traumas of agency that trouble the Bionic Woman (1976-8). Scott has been consistently interested in strong women who straightforwardly invert rather than displace gender power relations, as in Thelma and Louise (1991) or G. I. Jane (1997). In the context of the late 1970s, Ripley seems much closer to the figure of Susan Wheeler in Michael Crichton's Coma (1978), a lone woman who takes on a shadowy corporate conspiracy that directly menaces her bodily integrity. The Alien series has been read as an exploration of abortion rights and the political pressure on women's reproductive rights in 1970s America. 60 Yet Genevieve Bujold's Wheeler, of course, had to be rescued by Michael Douglas in the final reel, leaving her 'progressive' representation compromised: Ripley determinedly wins alone. 61 But is Ripley really 'a woman who threatens destructive patriarchal desire', as Ximena Gallardo and Jason Smith claim? 62 Can she authentically be championed as an emanation of 'second wave' feminism, so prominent as a social movement in the late 1970s? In an early Science Fiction Studies symposium on Alien, Judith Newton thought that 'even Marxist-Feminist viewers' would approve of Ripley. 63 But what happens to the demonisation and terror of the 'monstrous-feminine' beast she struggles against in this reading? Aren't the feminine and the maternal consistently split between Ripley and her monstrous Queen Alien double in the series? Perhaps it is that Ripley is more like the 'Final Girl', the theory espoused by Carol Clover in Men, Women and Cbainsaws: that the last and always female survivor of the slasher film is merely a safely cross-gendered point of identification for the adolescent male

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viewer.64 This view, however, ironically ends up denying or marginalising the very women viewers who have so passionately invested in Ripley and the Alien series over the years. Much of this debate comes down to the final scene, as the triumphant Ripley has initiated the auto-destruct sequence of the Nostromo and barely avoided the explosion in the escape shuttle. She has been striding through those corridors, lit by the torch of her flame-thrower, a near-mythical creature herself by now. The beast is dead; she can set the course for home. As she prepares for hypersleep, Ripley is overtly sexualised for the first time, stripping off her gear, down to skimpy vest and pants. The scene would seem to be a textbook case of classical Hollywood's voyeuristic rendition of the

Femme Ripley; mythic Ripley in Aliens (1986)

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woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, stopping the narrative for the spectacle of erotic contemplation. 6 ^ Doesn't all this renege on the rigorous androgyny of the crew pursued this far? Slasher conventions do seem to prevail: any display of female sexual difference must bring punishment, and a languorous, bedroom alien unfolds itself from the pipes and folds in the walls to confront her for one last time. Here it seems that the polymorphous perversity of the alien is decidedly male, those extending jaws dripping juice over the sight of a semi-naked body. Ripley retreats into a compartment hanging with the new skins of the spacesuits. She steps into the legs of a spacesuit, opening her crotch directly towards the camera. Resealed in a new protective skin, she is bolder again. She sings 'You Are My Lucky Star' to the creature, a song borrowed from the end of Singin' in the Rain (1952), a brilliant off-kilter suggestion of the intimacy, perhaps even of the symbiotic love, that will develop in Ripley's relationship to the alien in the sequels. Secured inside the suit, she opens the airlock and reverses gender roles a final time, firing the phallic harpoon into the chest of the beast, at last making good on the promise to blow it 'the fuck into space'. Weaver herself had a really interesting take on this scene, deflecting eroticism for something more Darwinian, more attuned to alterity: 'you're almost seeing me through the alien's eyes. Suddenly I go from dark green animal to pink and white animal ... The alien isn't evil. It's just following its natural instincts to reproduce through whatever living things are around it.' 66 Above all, if Alien retains a focus on the nature of what it means to be a biological being, then it resists simple reduction down to an allegory of what is after all a rather local Freudian story of sexual anxiety. 'You've been in my life so long I can't remember anything else,' Ripley (and perhaps Weaver, the actor herself) croons to the beast she has brought with her to the prison planet in Alien3. This time, Ripley is hunting the creature down, radically shifting the dynamic from woman in peril and the violent implacable opposition of the first two films to a much more complex mutual

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coexistence. Funnily enough, the brilliant science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler had already reimagined the relation of human host and alien parasite as a terrifying yet ultimately loving interdependency in her short story 'Bloodchild' in 1984, slyly rewriting Alien away from the selfish gene towards the social gene, the theory of co-evolution. 67 By Alien Resurrection, there is a certain logic in Ripley's DNA being spliced with her old adversary, producing something utterly hybrid. Across four films, Ripley moves from a relation of implacable opposition to a kind of symbiogenesis. The longevity and slow mutation of that central relationship is the main achievement of the series, whatever the individual weaknesses of the films. The myth is carried by Sigourney Weaver's intense commitment to the role.

Jonesey When Ripley records her last log entry before sinking back into hypersleep, she calls herself 'last survivor of the Nostromo\ This is a blatant, jarring lie. Jonesey sits contentedly in her lap, and Ripley has risked life and limb to rescue the pesky cat from the clutches of the alien. Disappointingly, at the last gasp, the script reasserts the priority of humanism and discards any consideration of the cat. Hasn't my countdown of the deaths made a similar error from the start: that there are eight crew and two survivors? Big mistake. Didn't the

The unreadable Jonesey

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film-makers know that science-fiction fans love cats and that the genre has always known that they were secretly super-intelligent beings merely playing with us? At some point in my years rewatching this film, I began to realise that the humans might be incidental to Alien, that this is a film about the survival of that clever cat, Jones. There he is, sleeping safely in the pod at the end of the film having impassively watched Kane die, lured Brett to his death (and regarded it with utter indifference) and emotionally manipulated Ripley into carrying him into the escape shuttle. He is responsible for wrecking any systematic search for the alien. He pushes the rational Ripley to make idiotic decisions as Mother counts the Nostromo down to auto-destruct. Yet Jones will survive into the opening of Aliens (Ripley is delighted to be reunited with her only friend again). The cat will be wise enough not to travel back to that rock of a planet, though: it's only the humans that are stupid enough to undergo this kind of repetition compulsion. It's no surprise to find that the film critic and writer Anne Billson has rewritten Alien from the cat's perspective, as My Day by Jones, where the stupid humans are defined by their one useful function, as 'canopeners'. 68 There is a telling production detail that confirms Jonesey's priority. On one of the first days of shooting, Sigourney Weaver picked up one of the four cats used on set and immediately started to Jonesey, always there or thereabouts

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have an allergic reaction. She hid in her dressing room, appalled, thinking it very likely that she would have to be replaced (like Jon Finch), because it would be easier to find another non-allergic actor to play Ripley than source another four roughly identical cats. Weaver fortunately discovered that it was a reaction between the glycerine used to make the actors look sweaty and the cats' fur, and just about clung on to her job. It is funny how critics of the film see and do not see Jones in Alien. Where he features at all, it is either as another beast aligned with the alien that roams the corridors, or else, in contrast, the cat functions as a marker of Ripley's latent maternal instinct. 'The film leaves us with a woman and cat: domesticity restored', Tony Safford says. 69 It is an uneasy domesticity, because viewers already trained by one false ending perhaps suspect that Jones might be another vehicle for alien invasion (we have seen the alien investigating the cat-box in the last seconds of the Nostromo's countdown). Of course that doesn't happen, and in Alien3 it is one of those dumb dogs that is the carrier of an alien, not a cat. Is Jones left behind so early in Aliens because James Cameron wanted to concentrate much more directly and humanly on Ripley's lost potential for mothering? But I don't think that Jones is a first sketch for Ripley's surrogate daughter Newt: the cat is not a child substitute. Jonesey is in fact integral to the spectrum of beings explored along the self and other axis in the film. Against the implacable opposition of the alien, a relation conceived only in violence and a murderous struggle to survive, the cat is what Donna Haraway calls a 'companion species' for humans, a mark of 'the yearning for more liveable and lively relationships across kinds, human and nonhuman'. 7 0 This is not a cosy relationship, but a spiky, intermittent one of autonomous agents in symbiogenesis. Traditionally, whilst dogs are seen as faithful servants, cats are regarded as more autonomous. 'Indeed, rather than constructing the domestic sphere, a cat might well be understood to challenge it,' Erica Fudge has written. 'Our limited

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knowledge of the universe ... is challenged by the cat's refusal to be absorbed into our world view.' 71 We are back with the philosopher Derrida's cat staring up at his naked owner with glinting, utterly unreadable eyes. Whilst the main narrative arc plays out a story of the 'survival of the fittest', even unto death, the cat exists to make us think about co-evolution in symbiotic ecologies with others, what Haraway calls the relational ontology of humans existing amongst other animals rather than existing in structures of domination, subordination or extermination. In a rather clever way, Jonesey helps underline the central theme of Alien as a philosophical investigation of the range of possibilities of humans living with its alien others. Ripley and Jones, bathed in light, sleep the blissful sleep of the innocent, and the screen fades to black. Ripley has a long Via Dolorosa ahead. Jonesey, I presume, will outlive us all.

'Did IQs drop sharply while I was away?': the sequels, the prequels, the franchise Ripley and Jones sleep on for fifty-six years, Sleeping Beauties awaiting their prince. Instead, in the opening sequence of Aliens, they get penetrative robot arms slicing into their safe retreat and the same old trouble, the same old salvagers hoping to profit, the same old Company shenanigans. Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots

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The Company execs do not believe her report. 'Did IQs drop sharply while I was away?' she asks. This is a question that might well be addressed to the diminishing aesthetic (if not economic) returns of the Alien series. There was a sudden boom in Alien-lite rip-offs in the early 1980s - films like Norman Warren's Inseminoid (1981) or Harry Davenport's Xtro (1983) - and O'Bannon let a voluptuous alien reach London and cause havoc in his script for Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce. The same trick was repeated in Species (1997), the same sexy but grotesquely tentacular alien bluntly reinforcing the predatory sexual selection of Los Angeles nightlife. The Brandywine team returned to the franchise in 1986 with James Cameron's Aliens. It is a brilliant but unsubtle fusion of Marine Corps action with the Alien mythos (as well as a sharply conservative change of direction), making the series a battle of big mommas over family values. The moment one of the alien hordes gets dispatched simply by being crushed under the wheels of the marines' assault vehicle, something of the mythic resonance of the original beast is lost (bug hunts were satirised far more potently in Paul Verhoeven's gleefully sick Starship Troopers [1997]). Nevertheless, for sheer efficiency of storytelling and its clever echoes and twists on Scott's film, Cameron executed one of the most effective science-fiction sequels ever made. Aliens realised about the same profits for the producers, which probably made another film inevitable. David Fincher's Alien3 is an early 1990s counter-reaction to Cameron's Reaganism, an austere and even avant-garde film that crawled out of the wreckage of development hell, involving abandoned scripts by William Gibson, a half-retained, half-jettisoned medieval concept contributed by the visionary director Vincent Ward, and a host of catastrophic late revisions and rewrites. The film reached a downbeat and wonderfully perverse crescendo that cloaks Ripley in the iconography of Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and kills her just as she births her own alien queen. Alien Resurrection wrecked the formal symmetry of a trilogy, the twisted and failed clones of Ripley found in the

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laboratory a dangerous metaphor for what happens when one returns to the same genetic source too often. Joss Whedon is a wonderful writer, and the film teems with ideas, but his postmodern ironic shtick offered levity where gravitas was needed. Ripley does not need wisecracks this late in her terrible post-human trajectory. The dim Alien vs. Predator sequels feel like the acts of a cynical Company, of a military-industrial-entertainment complex trying to ring out the surplus value of every last copyrighted idea they own. Even if the trajectory of the Alien series tells us much about the direction of American cinema after the end of the New Hollywood era, the risk is always to sentimentalise that late great 1970s Hollywood period. 'None of us ever talked seriously about a sequel', Weaver told Danny Peary in 1984, and one wonders what the world Sacrificial Ripley, Alien3 (1992); hybrid Ripley, Alien Resurrection (1997)

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would be like if this state of affairs had been allowed to persist. Would the film still exert its mesmeric influence on popular culture as a stand-alone accident? Alien was always a commercial product of profit-motivated producers, and the compulsive return to that primal, traumatic source tends to enable the myth rather than dilute it. We need these ordinary films to see how extraordinary Alien truly was. Ridley Scott's own return to the Alien universe in Prometheus was truly dire, though, a catastrophic piece of dumb 3D spectacle that makes no sense and cares less. It tramps through the baroque landscapes that Giger had used to evoke otherness and brutally reduces them all to the drearily familiar. The script is jaw-droppingly banal (geologists get to say things like T like rocks'), and the project tries to reach for a sublime philosophy to underpin the whole series, but stumbles only into vacuous pseudo-Christian mysticism. It offends its Lovecraftian materialist sources even as it tries to mobilise their horror. It is a film that is full of instructive lessons about post-classical, post-continuity Hollywood cinema. Steven Shaviro has defined post-continuity cinema as a particular effect of digital cinema: 'contemporary film editing is oriented, not towards the production of meaning (or ideologies), but directly towards a moment-by-moment manipulation of the spectator's affective state'. 72 His common example is the work of Tony Scott, but in Prometheus it felt like Ridley had outdone his brother in incoherent spectacle. One is never done with this series, because a myth, once effectively embedded, never stops being elaborated. In November 2013, Scott declared that the script for Prometheus 2 had been completed, and spoke confidently of a third film in the sequence. The jaws of a franchise will never let go and now Ripley has gone from the sequence, no one has the strength of character to act on that little voice that begs 'Kill me'.

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Afterword: Growing up with Alien Watching films, rewatching them, inhabiting them, is not just an intellectual exercise but an intensely emotional and personal one. Thirty-five years since the first film, most viewers enter the Alien sequence at different points, and I suppose one has to be over fifty by now to have experienced Scott's film on first release. Over this length of time, the films become inextricably bound into lives and friendships. It is odd to confess, but the gentle musical notes that open that strange passage through the empty Nostromo always feel like coming home. Typically, as a young teenager, I could not get into an X-rated film, and so I consumed the reviews and magazine articles and quickly read the Alan Dean Foster novelisation of the film. At least this had a set of colour stills inserted in the middle, and I could analyse Kane's death scene in glorious arrested detail. I could dream about what it might be like on screen. I first experienced Alien on VHS tape a few years later, and saw Aliens amongst rambunctious student audiences at university. That first time, I did not really distinguish Aliens from the alarming trend of endless cash-cow sequels in the brash postmodern 1980s. My friend Simon Barraclough and I were in our mid-twenties in 1992, just out of an MA in Critical Theory (his dissertation was definitely on Scorsese, whereas mine was sort of about David Lynch's Blue Velvet [1986]). The point of convergence for us was the narrative end of art house where it bled into Hollywood horror cinema, and what we called the 'clanking door' science-fiction film. The Alien cycle thus sat at the dead centre of this Venn diagram. In September 1992, we saw the first-run limited release of Alien3 on the biggest screen in Leicester Square, nipping round the corner to watch the re-release of Bunuel's Belle de jour (1967) straight

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afterwards. Back home, I watched Alien3 again on general release and shortly after sat transfixed through a multiplex triple bill, taking a short fag-break between each one, hoping to smoke out anything that might be growing in my lungs, seeing Alien then for the first time on the big screen. In November 1997, Simon and I met up again in Leicester Square to see Alien Resurrection, this time amongst flinching friends and partners, who endured rather than enjoyed this new exposure to the myth. We had broken the rules: it didn't end well. That disappointment scared us off the ritual for many years: the AvP films were straight-to-DVD fodder, consumed alone as guilty fast food. The returns to Alien now came through directors' cuts and that preposterous new word invented for the Alien DVD box set, the 'quadrilogy'. We would gift each other books like David Thomson's Alien Quartet, or Gallardo and Smith's Alien Woman. In 2012, though, on the very wrong side of forty, we honoured our younger selves, and picked the day of Queen Elizabeth's ridiculous rain-soaked diamond jubilee regatta on the Thames to pay homage to another queen by seeing Prometheus in 3D at London's IMAX cinema. Our investment in the Alien mythos and the overwhelming immersive spectacle of IMAX 3D blinded us temporarily to the catastrophe of Scott's return to Alien. We have been talking about this bamboozlement ever since. Is Prometheus in fact the very worst science-fiction film ever made? Grandiloquent claims: pub talk. In the meantime, I observe that the history of these encounters with Alien is also a history of the continually transforming technology of cinema and how we have consumed it since 1979, from analogue scarcity to digital ubiquity. Viewers find that the Alien mythos becomes imprinted in their memory and neurology. The film fan inhabits the spaces of their key films in intimate ways which are encoded into their everyday lives, but often in profoundly different ways. For better or worse, I grew up to be an academic and critic, specialising in science fiction and horror. Meanwhile, Simon Barraclough became a poet, with

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decidedly cinematic obsessions, full of knowing references, sly tributes, fantastical rewrites. His first collection, Los Alamos Mon Amour (2008), weaves together The Godfather, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Italian giallo horror. Simon conceived Psycho Poetica, first performed in 2010 at the British Film Institute, where twelve poets cut up Hitchcock's Psycho into twelve segments and each wrote a poetic response. 73 Since the Alien cycle exists for me absolutely in the dialogues I have had about it for over twenty years with Simon, and since this book is about how Alien compels us to think about alterity, it seems entirely appropriate to conclude with a different voice. Let's end with a poem by Simon. 'A Portrait of A L I E N as a Young Man' Once upon a time and a very good time it was, there was a signal coming down into the ear of every 12-year-old, every 12 seconds. Mother wouldn't let us chase this beacon, Nobodaddy Dean Foster was our guide. Pull out his eyes, Nouelise, Nouelise, Pull out his eyes. Snatched stills, radio trailers, schoolyard rumours from older brothers, fever dreams of suffocation, choking hazards, Heimlich birth pains, H. R. Giger counters. And this signal that iuas coming down met a nicens little xenomorph named baby cuckoo.

The adolescent wrecks the ribs of childhood with its bullet forehead, scalpel fingers, ferrous teeth. You could have quarantined my friendship but a special order intervened to put us all at risk and we've been drifting through core systems ever since The little learning in my throat was stillborn, while yours is using airshafts and is always in the corners, in the basement, in the shuttle. I have a tendency to want to nuke the site from orbit, but even then I know my obit will cite fire in the cryogenic compartment, although we will hear the drip of orchid goo, the crack of bony digital on glass, the acid hiss of perforated hull. My mommy always said there were no prequels - no real ones - but there are, aren't there? Yes, there are.

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Notes 1 Vincent Canby, 'Alien Brings Chills from the Far Galaxy: A Gothic Set in Space', New York Times (25 May 1979); Tim Pulleme, 'Alien', Monthly Film Bulletin vol. 46 no. 548 (1979), p. 191; James Monaco, 'AAAIIEEEAARRGGH!', Sight & Sound vol. 49 no. 2 (Spring 1980), pp. 80-2, p. 81. 2 Graeme McMillan, 'First Ripley Action Figure Leads "Alien" 35th Anniversary Merchandise', Hollyruood Reporter (18 February 2014). Available at: . 3 Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, 2nd edn (New York: Ungar, 1991), p. 43. 4 Ed Sunden, 'Dan O'Bannon on Alien: Alien Screenplay Writer Speaks His Mind', Fantastic Films (September 1979), p. 12. 5 Quoted in Jason Zinoman, Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gaue Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollyruood, and Invented Modern Horror (New York: Penguin, 2011), p. 193. 6 A. E. Van Vogt, 'The Black Destroyer', in Transfinite; The Essential A. E. Van Vogt (Framingham, MA: NESFA Press, 2003), pp. 19-45, p. 34. Both stories are collected into a series of linked tales, The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950). 7 See Richard Nowell, Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle (London: Continuum, 2011). 8 Unattributed c o m m e n t in Paul Scanlon and Michael Gross, The Book of Alien (London: Star, 1979), unpaginated. 9 Brooks Landon, The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction

Film in the Age of Electronic (Re) Production (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992), p. 68. 10 Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing, Horror in Architecture (San Francisco: ORO Editions, 2013), p. 129. For a history of the corridor, see Mark Jarzombek, 'Corridor Spaces', Critical Inquiry vol. 36 no. 4 (Summer 2010), pp. 728-70. 11 Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, ed. Jacques Berthoud and Mara Kalnins (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2007), p. 366. 12 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 15. 13 Conrad, Nostromo, p. 359. For a discussion t h a t touches on some of these connections, see Ted Billy, A Curious Case of Influence: Nostromo and Alien(s), Conradiana vol. 21 no. 2 (1989), pp. 147-57. 14 Scott cited in Donald Chase, 'Ridley Scott Directs The Duellists', in L. Knapp and A. Kulas (eds), Ridley Scott Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), pp. 3-10, p. 6. 15 John Kenneth Muir, Alien', in Horror Films of the 1970s (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), pp. 580-5, p. 583. 16 See Jonathan Frome, '"I Wasn't Expecting That!" Cognition and Shock in Alien's (1979) Chestburster Scene', in T. Brown and J. Walters, Film Moments: Critical Methods and Approaches (London: BFI, 2010), pp. 162-5. 17 Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 2nd edn (London: New Left Books, 1981), p. 76. Details in this paragraph also come from Dominic Sands, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-9 (London: Penguin, 2013), and Christian Caryl,

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Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the Truenty-First Century (New York: Basic, 2013). 18 Jeff Gould, 'The Destruction of the Social by the Organic in Alien', Science Fiction Studies vol. 7 no. 3 (1980), pp. 282-5, p. 282. This response was part of a symposium of six short papers on the film, recognising its early importance to academic circles. 19 Robin Wood, An Introduction to the American Horror Film', collected in B. Grant and C. Sharrett (eds), Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), pp. 107-41, p. 138. 20 Scott, quoted in Book of Alien. 21 Letter from O'Bannon to Giger, reproduced in H. R. Giger, Giger's Alien (London: Big O Publishing, 1979), p. 10. 22 All of these details are taken from Giger's diary entries in Giger's Alien. 23 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 21-2,2. 24 Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 10. 25 Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth (New York: Dover, 1993), pp. 32, 35. 26 For an outline of Freud's theories of infantile sexuality, see his 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality', in On Sexuality, Penguin Freud Library, Vol. VII (London: Penguin, 1991). 27 Krin and Glen O. Gabbard, 'The Science Fiction Film and Psychoanalysis: Alien and Melanie Klein's Night Music', in M. Charney and

J. Reppen (eds), Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and Film (London: Farleigh Dickinson/Associated University Presses, 1987), pp. 171-9, p. 171. 28 Ibid., p. 174. 29 Julia Kristeva, Poiuers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 4, 11,10. 30 Babara Creed, The MonstrousFeminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 17. 31 Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 3. 32 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. D. Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 12,9. 33 Stephen Asma calls t h e m 'mosaic beings' in On Monsters, p. 40. 'Creatures of boundaries' is a p h r a s e taken from Boria Sax, Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous, and the Human (London: Reaktion, 2013), p. 70. 34 Asma, On Monsters, p. 31. 35 Harvey Greenberg 'The Fractures of Desire: Psychoanalytic Notes on Alien and the Contemporary "Cruel" Horror Film', Psychoanalytic Reuieu; vol. 70 no. 2 (1983), pp. 241-67, p. 253. 36 David P. Cowan, 'Solitary and Presocial Vespidae', in K. Ross and R. Matthews (eds), The Social Biology of Wasps (Ithaca, NY: Comstock, 1991), pp. 33-73, pp. 46-7,45. 37 Letter from Darwin to Asa Gray (22 May 1860), Darwin Correspondence Project. Available at: . 38 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the

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Struggle for Life, The Works of Charles Darwin, Vol. XVI, 6th edn (London: Pickering, 1988), pp. 89-90. 39 For a quick survey of these disputes, see Andrew Brown, The Darwin Wars: The Scientific Struggle for the Soul of Man (London: Simon & Schuster, 1999). 40 See Kim Newman, 'The Revolt of Nature', in Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen since the 1960s, rev. edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 88-96. 4 1 For a discussion, see Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Poiuer and Subjectivity in the Truenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 42 Philosophies of horror have b e e n revitalised by e n g a g e m e n t with Lovecraft. See, for i n s t a n c e , Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 1 (Winchester, Hants.: Zero Books, 2011), or G r a h a m H a r m a n , Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester, Hants.: Zero Books, 2012). 43 John Russell, Francis Bacon (London: T h a m e s & Hudson, 1971), pp. 10-11. 44 Both c o m m e n t s cited in Matthew Gale's essay on the painting in the Tate online catalogue. Available at: