“Get away from her you bitch”
“Game over man, game over”
“They mostly come out at night, mostly”
-Selection of classic quotes from Aliens (1982)
During my younger years in elementary through middle school, I discovered video games. I played Pokemon almost religiously, and it was always my favorite way to unwind. I still partake fairly often, as it’s a good healthy way to relieve stress (as long as I keep it in moderation), and I’m sure I will keep up with the video game industry potentially for the rest of my life.
As I grew a bit older, my dad introduced me to some of the games he played when he was a little bit younger. The particular game that managed to capture my interest the most was Starcraft. I loved Starcraft. In fact, I still do. It’s a real-time strategy game in which you construct a base and train units to fight other players and complete a single player campaign. Starcraft is set in space (perhaps obviously), and there were three distinct races to play as. The Terrans which are just humans with better vehicles and space suits, the Protoss, a highly intelligent and complex, bipedal alien race, and, my favorite, the Zerg. The Zerg are an insect-like race controlled via hive mind. They are extremely aggressive, varied in size and shape, and incredibly creepy and H.R. Giger-like.
The reason I bring up one of my most favorite video games of all time is because I want to point out the specific type of alien that I will be talking about in this essay. Since we have never encountered a real alien race, it is completely up to our imaginations when we want to use aliens for a story. This means that there are an infinite number of different kinds of aliens, and I think that Starcraft did an incredible job of defining the two most common types that we come up with: aliens that are psychic, incredibly intelligent, and technologically advanced far past the human race (Protoss), and aliens that are aggressive, combat-effective, killing machines that serve simply as a threat that teaches us about our own human nature (Zerg).
This week, the latter aliens are what I have chosen to study. This essay won’t have any commentary on our treatment of a more advanced race that we can’t communicate with or on the possibilities presented to humans through the technology of those from beyond the stars. This week’s aliens were all about wiping out humans, reproducing, and just being plain disturbing. Also, important to mention, in last week’s “On Malevolent Forces,” I claimed that this week’s “On Aliens” would basically double as “On Paranoia.” I think that will be made even more apparent as I begin to describe the titular aliens I encountered in my research this week.
So, let’s jump in, with the first of my three films that I watched this week, Alien (1979). Funnily enough, the Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise actually were designed by H.R. Giger himself. This film is so classic, that it’s actually incredibly difficult to find someone who doesn’t at least know of the film or even just the famous commercial with the instantly recognizable line: “In space… no one can hear you scream.” The film is about the crew of cargo space ship Nostromo who come across a horrible alien that kills them off one by one. I think that the atmosphere of this film is so thick with paranoia that it’s nearly impossible to deny that this is one of the scariest horror films of all time on first viewing. It’s established early on that the alien is basically the ideal killing machine. Two mouths, sharp teeth, incredible speed, sharp claws, acid blood, the capacity to move stealthily through small spaces, and an inability to be reasoned with make it a quintessential alien antagonist that falls perfectly on the hive mind side of the Zerg-Protoss spectrum.
As the crew of the ship starts to become smaller and smaller, the chance to escape or kill the creature starts to feel impossible for the increasingly paranoid crew. The stress ultimately becomes too much for the navigator, and when she freezes in the face of the alien, she manages to get herself and the reliable engineer killed exceedingly quickly. It’s very interesting to watch the horror unfold, and once everyone is dead but the indomitable Ellen Ripley, the tension on the ship is thick enough to cut with a knife. Ultimately, she manages to keep her cool long enough to eject the alien from the air lock, blow up the ship, and get out in an escape pod. She even manages to save the cat.
Alien is a textbook study of fear, and how certain people react to it. Fight and flight reactions are on display and in the end what it took for our hero to win was to overcome her own fear and use her head under pressure to eliminate the threat. Interestingly, I feel as though I had a similar experience last night. As I went to go to bed, I noticed a gigantic mosquito hawk on my wall. I close my window when I sleep, and I sure as hell don’t want to go to sleep knowing that thing is locked in with me. I decided to get rid of it. I admit, my resolution was not strong enough to try to guide it outside, so I opted to kill it. I stood there for a good 30 seconds in fear. I was the one with the power, so what stopped me? It really made me think about Alien. Here I am, with my own giant, threatening insect. All I have to do is keep a clear head under pressure and eliminate the threat…
As a follow up, I watched the sequel to Alien: Aliens (1986). I don’t actually have a lot to say about it that I didn’t say about the original. Aliens is more of an action film, about a team of cocky, unprepared marines unwittingly stumbling into an alien hive and having to fight their way out. Though the paranoia is lessened with the threat being less ambiguous, the soldiers being picked off one by one with the alien ranks being seemingly endless manages to reinvigorate the tension pretty effectively. Also, so many classic quotes. Such an entertaining movie. A must-watch for basically everyone.
Next, I watched John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and boy, if Alien was an effective study in paranoia, The Thing is a flawless one. The Thing is a film about a group of Americans at a research outpost in Antarctica. When a mysterious dog being chased by Norwegians makes its way among them, they defend the dog and put it in their kennel with the others. This was ultimately a bad move, as the dog wasn’t a dog, but a horrific alien lifeform that can disguise itself as anything it manages to infect through extended contact. Once it reveals itself, it twists and contorts the original form of its host into a disgusting, many-appendaged, violent horror that fortunately is very flammable. The creature is also beyond reason, and its only goal is seemingly to survive and infest other hosts. Once the team of researchers realizes this, it becomes their goal to kill it wherever it may be, and by whatever means necessary so that it doesn’t spread throughout the whole world.
The films makes such an undeniably perfect study in paranoia, since the creature is able to so convincingly imitate its hosts. The humans have no idea who among them may be “one of those things,” and the main drama is centered around characters clashing about who is or isn’t infected (and thus already dead). Like Alien, The Thing is effective at conveying to an audience how different people react under pressure. Kurt Russell’s MacReady is like Ellen Ripley in Alien. Calm, badass, and hell-bent on defeating the threat. The doctor that first makes the discovery destroys the helicopters and tries to shoot everyone in the station because he becomes so afraid of what the creature could do to the outside world. Others are like the ill-fated navigator of Alien and are frozen in horror so much that they are simply overtaken.
Another huge theme that I haven’t talked about yet is the will to survive. The will to survive is what keeps the crew of the Nostromo and the band of marines going in the Alien films, and in The Thing, the alien creature and MacReady are locked in a battle where victory will ensure the other’s demise. Ultimately, the alien in The Thing can’t even really be classified as evil. It’s mysterious and it definitely kills people, but to it, we are the aliens and it is simply fighting to stay alive. If one of us were to drop onto an alien planet would our instincts not drive us to survive, even if that meant killing whatever attacks you? Then again, the creature would infect the entire world given the chance, so are the humans not equally correct to try to eliminate the creature entirely? It’s an interesting question to think about, but ultimately, we will side with the humans because of our empathy for the members of our own race.
Finally, this week I read The Color Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft. This story doesn’t tie in quite as much with paranoia as the other two, but it most certainly is a story about the will to survive. The story is about an alien creature that crashes on a family’s farm on earth. It is described simply as some kind of sinister color, one that we can’t even imagine since it comes from another planet. Initially, no one suspects that the color is alive, but it most certainly reveals itself to be. Though the family isn’t aware of it yet, the color starts living in the well, and the farmland slowly succumbs to a form of corruption caused by the colors presence. The family too is eventually driven mad, and their bodies rot away along with the land, crops, and animals. Everything in a certain radius on the farm eventually began to glow the same alien color as the color itself, creating an eerie ambience. When a friend of the family is escaping the corruption of the color with a group of police investigators, he looks back and sees that the color truly was alive, as it begins to crawl up from the well, and shoot up into the sky. In a classic Lovecraft twist ending, some of the color wasn’t strong enough to leave the atmosphere, and the man saw it retreat back into the well. He’s driven mad knowing that such a destructive force remains on that piece of desolated land.
And we arrive again at a scenario where we ask ourselves what the alien was doing. Hint: the answer is just trying to get along. The alien was probably just trying to build up enough power to leave earth, and the corruption it caused was probably it draining the flora and fauna (humans included) of all of their lifeforce so that it could grow strong enough to shoot into the sky. Again, I won’t say that it didn’t just kill a family though, and ultimately it seems like a pretty awful creature.
I think that alien stories are great ways to tell narratives about moral dilemmas and human nature. Having some kind of foil from another planet allows us to more easily look inward. Something that comes up incredibly often is a question of how we treat those that are different from us. District 9 (2009) was an amazing story that effectively showed us the evil of apartheid in South Africa by portraying a group of aliens living in a slum being treated cruelly by humans. My stories this week have made me think more than any of my other weeks. I’ve mostly been thinking about how well I act under pressure. Am I a bad person if I’m not strong when confronted with horrible odds? How can I change so that I keep more of a level head? For that reason, this week has undoubtedly been my favorite week.