Space Jockeying, Ctd.

I’ll confess that the universe of “Alien” and its attendant sequels are based around a creation that scares me more than anything in any other movie I’ve seen (with the possible exception of the gigantic larval vaginae dentatae that devour the Gollum dude in the recent “King Kong”). The titular creature, or “xenomorph,” as it is properly and awesomely called, is the Geigerian specter that lurks in the dark corners of my life, ready to turn my skull into a tongue ring. That being said, I love all four of the “Alien” movies-- AVP I have avoided, as it can but cheapen the majesty of the version of that story that exists in my imagination. I love them for their manifold achievements in a wide array of cinematic ass-kickery, which I trust will be well enumerated by my blogging cohort.

Because our purpose here is to discuss the peripheral qualities of the films’ surrounding sci-fi universe, rather than the not infrequently gory details, I want to hone in on a couple of bio-mechanically intertwined aspects of scene-setting mythology. The first is the shadowy Weyland-Yutani corporation, an inscrutable and all-powerful military-industrial behemoth that looms over the Alien universe like a greedy thundercloud. In the films, it is mostly referred to as “The Company,” because it employs most of the main characters. The ending of “Alien” reveals Weyland-Yutani's sinister plot to use a ship’s crew as bait in order to capture a living xenomorph, setting the bar for high-stakes interstellar skullduggery pretty goddamn high. Throughout the series, representatives of The Company conceal hidden agendas and, in a couple of cases, evil android anatomies that appear to be lubricated by semen. The vague, unexplained malaise of a vastly powerful conglomerate puppeteering everything in the galaxy is just fucking cool, and gels perfectly with the film’s dystopic take on a space-traveling society. Paul Reiser is spot on as a Company apparatchik in the first sequel, James Cameron's "Aliens," with a goofy smile that camouflages his cutthroat allegiance. The fact that Weyland-Yutani also has a hard-on for keeping 8-foot man-slaughtering pets that bleed acid is just an added bonus. Don’t believe me about the hard-on? Check out Brad Dourif’s uber-creepy performance in “Alien: Resurrection.”

Connected to the corporate-horror theme is a …resurrection of what I will term “Merchant Marine Fiction,” a genre that I associate with only one other artist: fin-de-siecle Polish-English writer Joseph Conrad, colloquially known as "Heart of Darkness Guy." The correlation has to do with the fact that the movie is about the crew of a freighter, contracted to haul a large cargo (which they do not own) across a time-consumingly vast distance, a situation effectively analogous to the travails of Conrad’s characters in The Shadow Line, Lord Jim, and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', and a number of his other works. While many other space-traveling sci-fi fictions have attuned themselves to the inherent parallels between antiquated seafaring and futuristic space-faring (cf. underrated animated adventure “Treasure Planet"), none of them do it quite as well as “Alien.” This is principally because the film adapts the remunerative concept of the crew’s “shares” in the cargo and the journey, a crucial element of many of Conrad’s stories. The characters in “Alien,” like the characters in Conrad, are paid a set fraction of the cargo’s worth once they complete their journey. “Alien,” like Conrad at his best, places the character’s conflicted loyalties to their jobs, their cargo, and their lives in constant competition, ratcheting up the tension of their dire situation and provoking pervasive distrust and mercenary rivalry. The moviemakers seem to have adapted this dramatic catalyst knowingly, given that the spaceship in which the movie takes place is named “Nostromo,” after Conrad’s 1904 novel. Nostromo is a lengthy chronicle of an eventually disastrous attempt to colonize a fictionally untamed part of South America, and treats with the conflicting loyalties and fate of various corporate actors and their subordinates. It is a setting that the geologically extractive space-colonizing of the Alien series maps onto effortlessly.