ABSTRACT
If this film resembles its predecessor in any respect, it is in its rejection of the expected way of noting its own status within the series of Alien films. James Cameron’s title avoided the number ‘2’ altogether (whilst discovering it obsessively within the film itself); David Fincher’s incorporates the necessary numeral, but only after subjecting it to a radical displacement. In one respect, to present the number ‘3’ as a superscript simply emphasizes the fact of the film’s belatedness (its appearance after not one but two highly idiosyncratic directors have imposed their very different personal visions on a very distinctive original idea), as if Fincher feels that anything he might do with his film will be superscriptural, a writing over the writings of others, as if this third film in the series cannot but constitute a palimpsest. But such a constraint is also a liberation, a form of empowerment; for the creator of a palimpsest can either reiterate the work of his predecessors, or obliterate it without trace, or subject it to radical displacement. More specifically, the advantage of directing ‘Alien III’ is that it means making a contribution to a series, not a sequel. For Cameron, there was no distinction between the Alien universe and Ridley Scott’s realization of it, or at least none until and through his own reworking of that original realization; but for Fincher, Cameron’s response to his inheritance opens up the possibility of distinguishing in each case between the director and his material, and gives him the chance critically to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their specific inflections of that common subject-matter. And given that Fincher’s structural
belatedness links him more closely to Cameron than to Scott (with his enviable, truly creative and ineliminable priority), we might expect him to be rather more sensitive to his immediate predecessor – rather more concerned to establish a critical distance between ‘Alien II’ and ‘Alien III’. But, of course, to attach a number as a superscript to a preceding
symbol typically denotes the result of a mathematical operation – that of multiplying the symbol by itself a given number of times. Applying this to Alien3, we get: Alien Alien Alien. What might this indicate about the film thus named? To begin with, it acknowledges that the film is dealing with the third generation of the alien species (the alien stalking the convicts on Fiorina 161 is the offspring of the alien queen ejected from the Sulaco, who was herself the offspring of the alien queen who laid the eggs on LV 426), and it signals in advance that it will itself directly be concerned with three aliens (the facehugger on the Sulaco, the alien offspring of the convict’s dog, and the new alien queen). It further suggests that the film takes itself to be a certain kind of intensification of the Alien universe with which we are by now familiar: its nature has been determined only by those elements present in the first film in the series; all other (essentially extraneous) material has been eliminated, and what results is a kind of condensation or sublimation of the essence of the Alien universe. Beyond this, we might recall that Alien3 could also be rendered ‘Alien cubed’ – and think of the coming film’s unremitting emphasis upon various attempts to confine its alien (in a toxic waste container, in a maze of corridors, in a lead mould and ultimately in a sheath of supercooled lead). The setting of these attempts – the oppressively enclosed, maximum-security prison that is the film’s world, and that is itself closed down in the film’s epilogue – only intensifies the implication that Fincher’s primary preoccupation as a director is with closure. His aim is not to open up the Alien series but to shut it down; this step in its unfolding will be its last.
