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Man Meets God, Then Becomes Him

Human Transformation, and Transhuman Aspirations, in Ridley Scott’s Alien, Prometheus, and Blade Runner

Jessica Lempit Film Criticism Lab Prof. James Final Paper Due 12/11

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Slick, advanced technology, strange or dystopian politics and the rich mysteries of space are the most common subjects of speculative or science fiction films. Transformation is typically achieved through engineering or complex socioeconomic systems. In Alien (1972), Blade Runner (1982) and Prometheus

(2012), director Ridley Scott imagines earthier and perhaps more familiar future transformations: those of the human body in conversation and in conflict with technology and biology. Ridley Scott positions the human body as a site of transformation and vulnerability in the future, simultaneously making our familiar anatomy foreign, and suggesting that our technological feats may soon outpace our physical capacity. The motifs of evolution, reproduction and violent transformation are leylines in these three films, presenting visions of the future in which human biology is no longer the pinnacle of nature’s innovations but a fecund ground for more advanced life—either as hosts for alien forms, or as the creators of artificial intelligences (AI) and synthetic life.

Alien opens onboard the commercial mining ship Nostromo, en route to Earth after completing its venture, its crew resting in hypersleep chambers. However, the crew is woken prematurely when MOTHER, the ship’s computer, intercepts a message broadcast from an intelligent origin—and the crew, legally, must investigate it. Nostromo lands on a foreign planet wracked by a violent storm.

Crewmembers venture into an abandoned, alien ship, finding first an enormous humanoid skeleton, ribs broken open, seated before a weapon, and then a vast room filled with eggs. Kane (an incredibly young John Hurt) approaches an egg, which opens—and an alien lifeform attaches itself to his face, its tail tight around his neck Lempit 3 and an appendage deep in his throat (this organism is now commonly called a

‘facehugger’). Nostromo leaves after determining there are no survivors to rescue.

Soon it is evident that the alien threat remains on the ship, picking off crewmembers until Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the sole survivor, finally overcomes it.

Alien was Ridley Scott’s second feature film, and remains one of his best received works. Scott’s early background as a BBC set director/designer and TV commercial director are reflected in Alien’s meticulous visual construction and narrative economy. The Nostromo is a marvel, with a solidity and realness that comes from Scott’s attention to details like steaming pipes, wall texturing, and the complex tangles of electronics inevitably found on a spaceship. Alien is filmed in contrasts of dark and light, and obfuscating effects like flashing emergency lights, deep shadows and broken pipes heighten the fear and suspense felt by the audience.

Though some of its visual effects have aged, particularly the nuclear explosion that finally destroys the Nostromo—which looks more like a faded illustration on a math textbook than a mushroom cloud—and the clunky, off-white computers, the alien

(or xenomorph) effects have remained frightening and disturbing, due in some part to their imaginative design by artist H.R. Giger and their physical, rather than digital, execution by special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi. However, much of the xenomorph’s—and the facehugger’s—staying power as objects of viewers’ fascination, fear and revulsion are their traumatic interaction with humans, their resemblance to and exaggeration of familiar human forms—and their transformation of the human body into something alien. Lempit 4

The famed “chestburster” scene from Alien exemplifies Scott’s transformation of the human body. Kane is brought back to Nostromo quickly after the facehugger attacks him, having eaten through his glass helmet with a release of acid, penetrated his throat with a slick, tentacle-like appendage, and wrapped his face and neck in its fleshy body, crab-like legs and muscular tail. Kane is sedate, unresponsive, presumably being fed air by the creature, whose lungs inflate and deflate gently over Kane’s cheeks. The ship’s Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) and

Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm) attempt to remove the facehugger, accidentally releasing a powerful acid that eats through the ship floor when they cut one of its

‘fingers.’ They perform a scan that reveals the organism is pumping oxygen, and perhaps a fluid, into Kane’s body, and ultimately determine there is nothing they can do to remove the alien without killing Kane or endangering the crew.

The medical scanner shows the facehugger pumping oxygen, and perhaps genetic material,

into Kane.

However, the creature detaches of its own accord some time later, leaving Kane apparently healthy. The facehugger’s corpse is found later. The crew is relieved, and Lempit 5 decides to eat with Kane before reentering hypersleep. Kane eats, relaxes with the crew, and appears to be enjoying himself—when suddenly, he begins choking, then seizing, laid flat on his back on the table. The crew attempt to stabilize him when a burst of blood appears through his shirt. Still seizing, the bloodstain grows larger until a snakelike creature erupts from his chest. Erect, slimy, and sharp-toothed, the creature seems to look around the room before screeching and slithering quickly out of the room, to the horror of the assembled crew. Kane twitches gently, but is clearly dead.

This parasitic lifeform transformed Kane from a functional human being into an incubator or ‘womb’ for a more advanced species—a “perfect organism” in the words of Ash, its “structural perfection” complemented by its lack of “conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Kane’s male body is un-gendered by the alien, who penetrates him in a quasi-sexual manner, impregnates him with its young, which later is ‘birthed,” bloody and violent, out of his body, which had sustained it during growth. This reading is supported by Scott’s direction of both the medical exam and birth scenes: the phallic tentacle in Kane’s throat is releasing something into him, represented by pinkish particles on the scanner screen; the crew surrounding Kane at the table resembles a medical team aiding a woman in labor, crowding tight around opened legs and wearing white coats. Scott perverts traditional human reproduction, making the natural process of insemination, gestation and birth strange through the alien’s mimicked process. Humans have outpaced by xenomorphs, advanced creatures that bastardize our reproductive systems to use us as fertile ground for their own young. Scott proposes that this Lempit 6 transformation makes humans unfit for life in the far future; our imperfect bodies, with no natural defenses and beleaguered by conscience, are little better than fodder for organisms with stronger instincts and a more aggressive nature. Our bodies are vulnerabilities in the future, not strengths.

Prometheus is Ridley Scott’s 2012 return to the universe of Alien, after three sequels of varying quality were produced under the direction of James Cameron,

David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, in addition to several ill-conceived crossovers with the Predator franchise. In Prometheus, Scott refocuses the Alien franchise’s narrative from the creature-feature formula of its sequels back to the more philosophical bent of the first film. Prometheus, which visually recalls much of Alien, though with a clean, contemporary aesthetic, centers on the work of archaeologists

Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), who have collected enough evidence from various ancient cultures suggesting an alien race in a far cluster of stars to convince a dying corporate chief, Peter Weyland (Guy

Pearce) to fund an exploratory space mission. Weyland, and Shaw, are obsessed with finding their “makers”—an alien population they believe is the original source of human life. The team, led by Weyland’s reluctant, cold daughter Meredith Vickers

(a stiff Charlize Theron), travels in hypersleep to a distant planet, discovering the remains of enormous, humanoid creatures in a buried spaceship, as well as metal casks seeping with a black liquid. David (Michael Fassbender), the ship’s AI, introduces the liquid into a drink he offers to Holloway, curious about its effects.

Holloway and Shaw sleep together. The next day, the crew returns to the alien ship Lempit 7 to continue their research. David discovers a live alien, still in hypersleep, and a map projection with a highlighted path to Earth.

Holloway becomes violently ill during the mission, necessitating a return to

Prometheus, their vessel. It becomes clear that some alien material has infected

Holloway; Vickers, fearful of allowing him back onto Prometheus, burns him alive at his request. Shaw is devastated, but is even more horrified when David informs her during a medical check that she is three months pregnant—when she had been infertile. Shaw is revolted and terrified and self-aborts the alien fetus with an automated surgical pod. Meanwhile, David has woken the humanoid alien—an

Engineer—from hypersleep, intending to interrogate it for Weyland. The Engineer attacks David and Weyland and attempts to pilot the ship, containing the deadly black liquid, to Earth. Shaw convinces Janek (Idris Elba), the captain of Prometheus, to destroy the alien ship, which he does. However, the Engineer is still living, and attacks Shaw, the last survivor, who feeds it to her offspring—a now enormously huge, tentacled monstrosity occupying the surgical room. A xenomorph bursts from the chest of the now-dead Engineer. Shaw, with David’s functioning head, manages to escape, seeking the Engineer’s home planet.

Though multiple body transformations occur in Prometheus—the self- destruction of an Engineer to seed Earth with DNA, the mutilation of a crewmember by an alien organism, Holloway’s infection, and the Engineer made host by Shaw’s parasitic offspring—the most disturbing is unquestionably Shaw’s impregnation with an alien fetus and her self-abortion. Shaw’s terrified protestation that she can’t be pregnant, and her desperation to abort, speak to the powerful wrongness of her Lempit 8 pregnancy. She runs to the surgical pod, yelling “Get it out, get it out,” hurriedly injecting herself with pain medicine before the machine slices open her improbably bulging abdomen, and removes the slimy organism from her womb.

Dr. Shaw self-aborts the alien fetus in the automated surgical pod.

She rips its umbilical cord out of her, panicking as the fetus’s tentacles spread and it begins to struggle in the pod’s claw. Shaw barely waits for the surgical machine to staple her incision before scrambling out of the pod and attempting to kill the fetus with automatic decontamination protocols. Shaw battles immense pain from her wound for the rest of the film, but eventually is the Prometheus’s sole survivor.

The self-abortion scene in Prometheus makes explicit what was implied in

Alien: the human body is the transformative element in the future, and in space. The stasis of the Engineers and their liquid “black death” is only interrupted when human actors interact with them, acting as nourishment and vectors for alien organisms, becoming transformed physically from peak beings into parasitic hosts, knocked down the evolutionary chain. Scott again makes the natural process of Lempit 9 insemination, gestation and birth strange to us through Shaw’s xenomorph fetus, which represents the ultimate horror—an unwanted, unknown life growing inside her, feeding itself parasitically from her body, perhaps even a too on-the-nose rereading of an unwanted human child. Shaw becomes mother to an abomination, an enormous, many-limbed alien that parasitically reproduces like the facehugger in

Alien. Scott makes our biology further strange to us by showing that the Engineers are our genetic ancestors, suggesting that human bodies in fact fit into the horrific cast of the facehugger, chestburster and the xenomorph. However, we are not the same as these alien forms—we are lesser. Shaw’s biology has been transformed, re- purposed, by a species evolved to take advantage of human bodies. The crew of

Prometheus did not have sufficient technology or training to prevent the exploitation and transformation of their bodies. The technical innovations that allow for space travel and exploration could not refit human bodies, arcane and ancient, to succeed in the future. Scott introduces another type of bodily transformation—that of the human into the automaton, or into synthetic life—that demonstrates what humanity could transform into, if able to keep pace with technology.

Automata and synthetic humans are better equipped for the challenges of the future, suffering few of the vulnerabilities that humans struggle with in Alien and

Prometheus. Both of these films feature AI in human form—the mutinous Ash, revealed only at the end of Alien to be robotic, and the curious but cold David, in

Prometheus. Ash has a scientific directive to gather as much data as possible on the aliens for his corporate owner, who perhaps sees an economic opportunity. His manner is careful and considerate, but remarkably cold and unsympathetic. David, Lempit 10 however, is perhaps a more advanced intelligence, incapable of feeling true emotions but certainly capable of understanding them in others, and responding appropriately. He has a true learner’s disposition, spending years studying language and watching films with almost childlike curiosity while the crew rests in hypersleep. Unlike the human crew, his mind is unfettered by irrationality, anger, jealousy, or the “morality” derided by Ash. His body is healthy, perpetually young, and suffers none of the vulnerabilities produced by biology; he can’t get sick, age, or be injured in the traditional sense. He doesn’t need to breathe, or sleep. He would be the perfect vessel for a mind, save for the fact that his will and curiosity is in the service of his creator—Peter Weyland. The suggestion that artificial intelligences are the solution to the problem of human biology in Alien and Prometheus is taken further in Blade Runner, in which the engineering of synthetic life has come so close to recreating humanity that ordinary humans would become obsolete.

Blade Runner, unlike Alien and Prometheus, takes place on Earth, in Los

Angeles. The year is 2019. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) walks the neon-lit, perpetually raining and gloomy streets. LA, blue-grey, dim, and grimy, with hovercars and bursts of flame crowding the night air, resembles more a rainy Tokyo underworld than the sunny metropolis of today. In this dystopian neo-noir film, he is a retired Blade Runner, a police officer whose task is to track down Replicants— synthetic, engineered humanoid beings—and “retire,” or execute them. Replicants were banned on Earth after a bloody mutiny, and are now used only for slave labor on off-planet colonies. Deckard is contacted by his former boss who needs his expertise to track down a group of four Nexus-6 Replicants, an advanced generation Lempit 11 that is almost indistinguishable from normal humans. The main trait that differs in

Replicants is their four-year lifespan. Deckard starts his search at the Tyrell

Corporation, which produces Nexus-6 Replicants and developed the “Voigt-Kampff” test, a series of questions designed to provoke emotional responses in humans and confusion in Replicants, measured by a monitor trained on the subject’s eye dilation.

Deckard discovers that Dr. Tyrell’s assistant, Rachael (Sean Young) is a Replicant when she fails the test after 100 questions—lasting five times as long as a normal

Replicant. But Rachael doesn’t know she is a Replicant. Deckard pursues Pris, Roy,

Zhora and Leon, the escaped Replicants, and simultaneously pursues a romantic relationship with Rachael, whom he has informed is a Replicant. Throughout his investigation, Deckard seems less and less convinced that Replicants are really subhuman, culminating in Rachael’s killing of Leon, a fellow Replicant, and in Roy

(Rutger Hauer) saving Deckard’s life, though Deckard was hunting him.

Ultimately, Deckard must confront the fact that save for their short lives,

Replicants have matched and surpassed humans. Though he derides Rachael’s false memories—implanted to give her a false childhood and therefore an “emotional cushion”—he is forced to recognize the truth of Roy’s memories, which he imparts in the seconds before his lifespan ends. Roy tells Deckard:

I have…seen things you people wouldn't believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those…moments…will be lost in time, like [coughs] tears…in…rain. Time…to die…

Roy’s impassioned monologue reveals the Replicant’s humanity; he has a capacity for wonder, nostalgia, longing, despair, despite the belief that Replicants as artificial Lempit 12 life lack the capacity for real emotion, or anything resembling a soul. Roy is the exemplar of the transhumanist fantasy of Tyrell. He is a perfected vessel, strong, sure and enhanced, driven by an emotional mind tempered with consistent rationality. Scott emphasizes Replicants’ superiority to humans by displaying their physical prowess in action scenes, surefooted and quick where Deckard lumbers behind; this physicality is especially impressive when Roy, near death, lifts Deckard with one extended arm to safety. Scott also achieves this gentling their physicality during emotional revelations; for example, when Roy meets his maker, Tyrell, his false eyes lightly reflect red in the dim candlelight, though his face expresses feeling naturalistically.

Roy’s engineered eyes reflect red in candlelight as he confronts his maker.

He is humanity engineered beyond its vulnerabilities, while maintaining its essence.

Rachael represents the future of this achievement; she is an experimental being, with all the traits of Roy and his generation and the implanted memories that save her from the offworld Replicants’ anger and distemper. It is also unclear how long she has been living, and how long she can live. Perhaps Tyrell succeeded in extending Replicant lifespan with Rachael where he failed Roy and the others. Scott Lempit 13 suggests a post-human future in which our best features are distilled and engineered into beings more equipped to handle the future, physically and mentally.

In Alien and Prometheus, Ridley Scott presents a future in which humans’ physical and mental vulnerability has made them unfit to their circumstances. He shows human bodies as strange and arcane, using alien transformation to highlight the backwardness of biology in a technological future. He plays on our fear of childbirth, likening human fertility and pregnancy to traumatic parasitical relationships with horrific results. The biological vulnerability of humans is contrasted in these films and in Blade Runner with the emerging possibility of artificial intelligence and synthetic life, which in their intentional engineering, escape the dangers faced by humans. What Ridley Scott imagines is terrifying—a future in which the most precious essence of the human soul, emotions and empathy, is quantifiable, reproducible, and marketable by multinational corporations. But these films also imagine the ultimate frontier in speculative fiction: not just the transformation of the world or of space through technology, but the transformation of the body and of life itself.