99: Alien, But Make It Dudes

I listen to The Big Picture podcast semi-regularly, part of a steady diet of movie podcasts for the times when I'm driving alone or when I'm working on something that doesn't require too much thinking. This past week, regular guest Chris Ryan brought up a complaint about the Alien movies only ever really being about women: Why can't we have a single Alien movie that has a male protagonist? He expressed the desire for an Alien sequel that resurrects Bill Paxton and Michael Biehn's characters from Aliens and drops them into a war movie, but with xenomorphs. One of the hosts immediately gave him grief for it (what Ryan described was literally one half of the movie Aliens, just without women), and I think the take was just self-aware enough that Ryan knew he was on thin ice voicing it. It made me laugh, and then it made me think.

On a surface level, the take fails to account for the fact that while Prometheus and Alien: Covenant have female protagonists, the arc of both movies together is much more interested in Michael Fassbender's antagonist David, an android who's coded male. His character is braided together from elements of Frankenstein, Frankenstein's monster, and John Milton's Satan; he's resentful of his place in the world as a created being, subject to the imperfect beings who made him, and resentful of humanity as a whole. His experiments in creating xenomorph variations are an attempt, like Frankenstein's, to take procreation out of the creation of new life. The result is a warped monster that erases the personhood of anyone unlucky enough to come into contact with it, a monster that, among many other things, serves as an effective shorthand for the fear of rape. The Alien movies aren't "about" women, even if their surviving protagonists are all female. They're about the caustic effects of evil, shown through a gender-inflected lens. Having a lone male survivor at the end of an Alien movie would be more subversive on a horror-genre level than on an Alien-movie level, because we're so used to seeing "final girls" make it to the end of the film regardless of subgenre.

I don't think it's inherently harmful to have an Alien movie about a squad of male soldiers. I just think it's an uninteresting premise; we've covered the territory of dudes shooting monsters many times before. Having a group of men threatened by xenomorphs isn't anything new. The very first Alien movie features John Hurt as the alien's first victim, partly to demonstrate that the threat isn't just against the ship's two female crew members. Alien movies are at their best when they're complicating the developments of the movies that came before them, and the movies have made so many interesting statements on gender that removing any complexity would feel like a kind of flattening.

I'd be more interested in an Alien movie that queers its premise; the films take the genders of their protagonists for granted, and I'd like to see what an Alien movie could do with a handful of trans and nonbinary characters instead. (To be fair, the series has already touched on this topic, though not thematically: Aliens includes a brief screen that reveals Veronica Cartwright's character from the first film was assigned male at birth. It's so matter-of-fact, and so tangential to the story, that it doesn't really have any bearing on the proceedings.) Maybe this is a recipe for disaster, but then again, depending on your point of view, half the Alien movies are disastrous to some degree. A disastrous experiment sounds so much more interesting than a premise that walks back the big swings its predecessors have made. We've already got plenty of shooting in Aliens anyway.

What I wrote about:

For Seeing and Believing last weekend, I wrote about Love Lies Bleeding, a lesbian new-noir set in 1980s New Mexico that I cannot shake.

And for Seeing and Believing this weekend, I reviewed Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

What I'm planting:

Gardening season is officially here: it's warm enough to plant rose bushes. Last fall in a fit of hubris I ordered three bare-root roses. They came yesterday in a cardboard box, wrapped loosely in a thick plastic bag almost as though they were corpses in a TV crime procedural. They don't look like much right now, just three ungainly starbursts of twigs and roots, with thorns and small soft green leaves to indicate which side should stay aboveground. I'll be planting them in the backyard when this email goes out. Hopefully next spring they'll bloom. I've had this exact kind of rosebush before; I bought one in the early hopeful spring months of 2021 and grew it in a container on my apartment's balcony, where the wind was simply too harsh on it. It died the following winter, although it did give me a couple of neon-pink blossoms before it went. I'm hoping these next three will be glorious, which feels appropriate for the Triduum, I think. Have a blessed Easter weekend, everyone.