ABSTRACT
Above the sparse opening credits, as the camera pans slowly from the outer rim of a planet’s Saturnian rings across the pitch black of its surface and back out to the opposite rim of those rings, the title of this film is indicated in a slowly emerging sequence of vertical strokes. It thus appears to emerge from the surface of the planet itself, the place from which the alien creature after which the film is named emerges; and it is indicated rather than spelt out, because some of its constituent letters (not being wholly composed of (near-)vertical strokes) are rather implied or suggested, their precise identity left for the viewer to determine in her imagination – just as this film’s director will leave implicit the overall appearance and exact nature of the alien creature itself until (and in some respects beyond) its end. Perhaps, then, we should not expect the exact nature of this film to be any less alien to us than its eponymous protagonist – any less unpredictable from what we think we know that a science fiction or horror movie must be, any less unaccommodated by our existing sense of what the medium of film as such can allow or achieve. Next, the camera watches the enormous expanse of the Nostromo
approach and pass by, with its substantial command module utterly dwarfed by the industrial landscape of domed cylinders and stackpipes (containing 20 million tonnes of mineral ore) in tow behind it. We cut to the interior of the ship: the camera reveals an octagonal corridor, neither spacious nor oppressive, then turns to look down its junction with another corridor; it pans unhurriedly
across a table in a communal area, then down another corridor to a space cluttered with monitor screens and banks of instruments. There is movement – the flutter of paper in a draught, the dipping head of a toy bird – but it is mechanical, devoid of human significance. Then one of the display screens lights up as a computer begins to chatter; we see downscrolling symbols reflected in the visor of a helmet. As the ship absorbs and reacts to this burst of activity, we cut to a doorway: coats flutter in the draught induced by the doors as they open, and the camera takes us into a blindingly white, sterile room, dominated by an array of glass-lidded coffin-shaped modules, each oriented towards a central stem, like the petals of a flower. The lids rise, to reveal a number of human bodies: in a series of stately but fluid dissolves, we see one of them sit up, remove a monitor pad and stand up. He is wearing a loincloth or a pair of shorts, the whiteness of the material combining with that of the room to accentuate the pallor of his skin; his eyes are closed, he rubs his face, as if unwillingly acceding to consciousness. His face – deeply lined and weary, marked by some kind of suffering from which it has not yet escaped – is instantly recognizable as that of John Hurt, whose name was perhaps the most famous of those which appeared during the film’s opening credits. We think we have finally arrived at the human centre of the film that is about to begin. And we are wrong (as we are wrong in taking Janet Leigh’s
character to be the protagonist of Psycho). But we have been shown a great deal in this prologue that is true to what will follow, true both to this director and to his tale (as written by Dan O’Bannon). The slow, calm, controlled movements of the camera have established the basic rhythm of the direction – unhurried but supremely confident that what we will eventually be shown is worthy of our investment of interest. We can also see Scott’s confidence in his sets and special effects, even in the wake of 2001 and Star Wars: they can bear up under close scrutiny in the absence of human activity, and thus make more credible the normalcy or everydayness of that activity when it finally begins. This is not a cartoon or fantasy of space technology and interstellar travel; it is a working ship in the real world of the human future – a world quickly shown to have inherited our predilection for social hierarchy
and salary disputes, whose bickering inhabitants can barely summon an interest in their fellows or themselves. Beyond this, the camera’s unhurried scrutiny of the Nostromo’s
empty spaces points up the imperturbable self-sufficiency of the ship, its ability to guide itself safely across interstellar distances in the complete absence of conscious human control. This subtly inflects our sense of the relative dependence of human beings and their technological tools. When the crew finally emerge from their ship’s hibernation pods so that they might respond to the unidentified radio beacon, the ship’s need for them in these unusual circumstances only emphasizes their superfluity in normal circumstances. They appear as useful creatures for the ship’s purposes, as if a kind of pet or parasite, and the significance of their own purposes and fate is correspondingly diminished. Indeed, when we come to realize that the planet and the ship of the prologue constitute the entirety of the coming narrative’s locations, and hence that we have been shown the terrain of the film as a whole before its inhabitation by character and narrative, as if demonstrating the world’s continuation beyond our participation in or knowledge of it, this prologue underlines the essential belatedness and relativity of human concerns, their insignificance in the face of the universe which makes them possible. Most important of all, however, is the complex manner of the
crew’s entry into consciousness, and into their own story. On one level, the suddenly deadened soundtrack and sequence of overlapping dissolves that chart Hurt’s emergence into conscious awareness seem to mimic the mode of that emergence – as disorganized and disorienting as his first perceptions appear to be to him, as if he were awaking from a dream. But it could, of course, equally well characterize the process of beginning to dream, of being translated from consciousness to that mode of awareness in which nightmares come; and we have already been shown that nightmare landscape, the source and context of their coming trials. On another level, the crew appears to be undergoing a kind of rebirth.1 They emerge like seeds from a pod, as if extruded by the ship itself, almost as naked as the day they were born; and Hurt’s dazed face registers the impact of the world on his senses as if for the first time. However, his umbilical cord is a monitor
pad and line, the pallor of his body is barely distinguishable from the sterile whiteness of his technological womb, and his sexual organs are covered over; and the presentation of these details through a silenced soundtrack and overlapping dissolves, with their subversion of the conditions of ordinary perceptual experience, now suggest a displacement of reality not by dream but by fantasy. We are being given a picture of human origination that represses its creatureliness, that represents parturition as an automated function of technology rather than of flesh emerging noisily and painfully from flesh – as essentially devoid of blood, trauma and sexuality. Does this fantasy originate in the director, or in the characters
themselves, or in the society to which they are returning? Does it represent a consummation devoutly to be wished, or (given the scene’s conjunction of this fantasy’s realization with the onset of nightmare) are we rather meant to see that the monstrousness of life is not so easily to be avoided? It is, at any rate, umbilically linked to the nightmare that is about to penetrate and overwhelm the Nostromo.
