Socialists have inflicted much
impenetrable prose and lugubrious narrative upon the world, but their
outsider status and extensive reading of theoretical texts
often give them insights denied to us drones in the mainstream. At
the Socialism 2014 conference in Chicago last month, Nicole Coleson
enthralled a packed room with her brilliant presentation on “Capitalism
and Horror,” a connection that only seemed obvious to me once
someone else had made it. She noted Upton Sinclair's early success in
presenting capitalism as a horror story in The Jungle (1906),
wherein work in an industrial slaughterhouse converted workers into
machines or worse. Coleson then discussed the importation of
Sinclair's themes into two seminal horror movies of the 1970s*, The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (whose villains had themselves been
slaughterhouse workers) and Alien.
In the
latter movie, with which I suspect my readers are familiar, a
nameless** Company demands obedience from its employees, even Captain
Dallas – things on the ship Nostromo
happen, he tells protagonist Ripley, “because that's what the Company wants to happen" – sets them against one another with a hierarchy
of rank and pay, and sends them to retrieve a hideously
dangerous but valuable alien species which uses human beings, in
Coleson's words, “as its eggs.” This is figuratively true in the
case of crew-member Kane, whom the juvenile alien “cracks open” in
the film's most memorable scene. It becomes literally true in a scene
cut from the original theatrical release, in which Ripley discovers
that the adult alien has begun converting the captured Dallas and
Brett into egg pods, presumably to incubate the “facehuggers”
that restart its life-cycle.
The
filmmakers intensify the characters' alienation from their employers
by introducing two additional non-human characters who, we gradually
learn, outrank the humans: the ship's computer, “Mother,” who
informs the surviving crew members that they are expendable, and the
science officer, a concealed robot who has been studying, protecting,
and admiring the alien all along. Officer Ash's description of the
alien as “a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or
delusions of morality” reminds one of the profile and behavior of a
modern corporation, like the Company. Arguably, everyone on the
Nostromo has been working for an alien
intelligence all along.
Ash the robot
science officer is the model of a good employee***: he keeps his own
counsel, obeys his orders, and admires the alien, which
suggests he probably also admires the corporation which employs him.
The others are less ideal: they decide in the end to blow
up the giant factory-like ship in which they work, along with its
payload – “the money,” as Dallas called it. Take that,
capitalist swine!
Incidentally,
Dan O'Bannon, Alien's
scriptwriter, hated the idea of making Ash a robot and creating a
conflict between the Company and its employees. To the extent that
this conflict makes Alien
a more engaging, more relevant, and more humanistic movie, the credit
belongs to co-writers Walter Hill and David Giler, and to Ridley Scott, whose subsequent descent into crapulence
should not obscure our appreciation of his earlier work. But, then,
Scott began his career as a director of television commercials, so he
knew rather more about capitalism and popular demand than the average
sci-fi fan. If he has turned from thoughtful speculations
on alienation and the human condition to mindless spectacles like
Gladiator, perhaps
this says more about audiences than directors.
*Coleson
also discussed, at length, the novel and film versions of The
Shining, both of which include a
critique of American upward mobility: as the plot progresses, Jack
Torrance becomes more loyal to his employers than his family, and
eventually starts taking orders from the wealthy ghost-patrons of the
Overlook. They reward him with a permanent invite to one of their parties.
Stanley Kubrick always did like happy endings.
** Nominally identified in the film as “Weyland-Yutani,” but you'd have to look pretty close to catch that.
***
Not surprisingly, since the word “robot” means “worker” in
Czech. It first received its modern meaning in Karel Capek's play
“R.U.R.” (“Rossum's Universal Robots).” James Cameron, in the
sequel Aliens (1986),
took Isaac Asimov's robots, rather than Capek's, as the model for the
android character Bishop. Notably, Bishop is much more concerned for
his co-workers than his employers.
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