INTRODUCTION

The four members of the Alien series (Alien [1979]; Aliens [1986]; Alien3 [1992]; Alien Resurrection [1997]) managed to combine popular success and critical interest in a way matched by very few films produced in the last two decades of the twentieth century.1

They focus on Flight Lieutenant Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) as she confronts the threat posed to herself, her companions and the human race by the spread of a hostile alien species. But this description hardly begins to capture their peculiar economy of simplicity and power – the charismatic force of Weaver’s incarnation of Ripley’s despairing but indomitable courage, the uncanny otherness of the aliens, and of course the alien universe itself, stripped of the clutter of social particularity to reveal receding horizons of mythic significance. It now seems as if it was clear from the outset that it would take more than one film to explore those horizons, and thereby to unfold the full meaning of Ripley’s intimate loathing of her foes. But there are, of course, more specific reasons for choosing to

focus on this series of films in a philosophical book on film – reasons having to do with what one might call the underlying logic of the alien universe they depict. For these movies are preoccupied, even obsessed, with a variety of inter-related anxieties about human identity – about the troubled and troubling question of individual integrity and its relation to the body, sexual difference and nature. What exactly is my place in nature? How far does the (natural) human ability to develop technology alienate us from the natural world? Am I (or am I in) my body? How

sharply does my gender define me? How vulnerable does my body make me? Is sexual reproduction a threat to my integrity, and, if so, does the reality and nature of that threat depend on whether I am a man or a woman? These are themes that emerge with quasimathematical elegance from the series’ original conception of an alien species which involves human beings in the furtherance of its own reproductive cycle, and which thereby confronts its human protagonists with the flesh-and-blood basis of their existence. This issue – call it the relation of human identity to embodiment – has been central to philosophical reflection in the modern period since Descartes; but the sophistication and self-awareness with which these films deploy and develop that issue, together with a number of related issues also familiar to philosophers, suggest to me that they should themselves be taken as making real contributions to these intellectual debates. In other words, I do not look to these films as handy or popular illustrations of views and arguments properly developed by philosophers; I see them rather as themselves reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about them in just the ways that philosophers do. Such films are not philosophy’s raw material, nor a source for its ornamentation; they are philosophical exercises, philosophy in action – film as philosophizing. Furthermore, the Alien series’ interest in the bodily basis of

human identity inexorably raises a number of inter-related questions about the conditions of cinema as such. For the medium is itself dependent upon the photographic reproduction (or, better, transcription) of human beings, the projection of moving images of embodied human individuals presented to a camera. In one sense, in one frame of mind, this phenomenon can appear utterly banal; in another, it can seem utterly mysterious – as fascinating as the fact that a human being can be portrayed in paint, or that ink-marks on paper can express a thought. One might say that cinematic projections, with their unpredictable but undeniable capacity to translate (and to fail to translate) certain individual physiognomies into movie stardom, are one of the necessary possibilities to which embodied creatures such as ourselves are subject; and we cannot understand that subjection without understanding the nature of photographic transcription as such,

hence without understanding what becomes of anything and everything on film. These questions, about the nature of the cinematic medium,

are perhaps those which we might expect any philosophical book on film to address – they are what is typically referred to when philosophers refer to ‘the philosophy of film’; and this book does indeed find itself addressing such questions in a number of places. But it does so because it finds that these films themselves address such questions – because it finds that, in their reflections on human embodiment, they find themselves reflecting upon what makes it possible for them to engage in such reflections, upon the conditions for the possibility of film. In other words, a fundamental part of the philosophical work of these films is best understood as philosophy of film. But the series has developed in such a way that its individual

members have ineluctably been forced to grapple with a range of other conditions for their own possibility. To begin with, each film sits more or less uneasily within the genre of science fiction, with more or less strong ties in any individual case with the adjacent genres of horror, thriller, action, war and fantasy movies; and, although each film can be regarded as self-contained or selfsufficient, hence capable of being understood on its own terms, each succeeding film has also been created in clear awareness of its relation to its forebears. The distinctive character of each new episode in the series is thus in part a consequence of the increasingly complex nature of its thematic and narrative inheritance; but primarily it results from a commitment on the part of the series producers (Gordon Carroll, David Giler and Walter Hill) to find a new director for each episode, and preferably one with great potential rather than with an established cinematic track record. The series so far has used the talents, and helped to make or to consolidate the reputation, of Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Each episode can therefore be seen as an early step in the development of a highly influential and acclaimed cinematic career, and hence as internally related to such original and substantial films as Blade Runner, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, Terminator and Terminator 2, Se7en, The Game, Fight Club and Panic Room, and The City of Lost Children and Amelie.