Related Papers
Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology
Alien and Storytelling in the Anthropocene: Evolutionism, Creationism and Pseudoarchaeology in Science Fiction
2021 •
Sonja Zakula
This paper analyses the change in the metanarrative of the Alien franchise initiated by the movie Alien (1979), directed by Ridley Scott, and continued with a series of three sequels. The franchise was revived in 2012 with the prequel Prometheus. The story of the first four movies is set at the end of the anthropocene, and it deals with the horror of alien life forms, offering an evolutionist approach to the development of the human species. However, the revival of the franchise with the movie Prometheus changed the metanarrative from evolutionism to a creationist and pseudo-archaeological metanarrative with Biblical motifs. This paper points to the dangers of popularizing creationist and pseudo-archaeological narratives in science fiction. Responsibility for life on Earth and in outer space, lacking evidence to the contrary, remains in the hands of humans collectively and not alien Others.
Monstrosities made in the interface: the ideological ramifications of 'playing' with our demons
2020 •
Jesse Warren
Matić, Uroš and Žakula, Sonja. 2021. Alien and Storytelling in the Anthropocene: Evolutionism, Creationism and Pseudoarchaeology in Science Fiction. Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology
Uroš Matić, Sonja Zakula
This paper analyses the change in the metanarrative of the Alien franchise initiated by the movie Alien (1979), directed by Ridley Scott, and continued with a series of three sequels. The franchise was revived in 2012 with the prequel Prometheus. The story of the first four movies is set at the end of the anthropocene, and it deals with the horror of alien life forms, offering an evolutionist approach to the development of the human species. However, the revival of the franchise with the movie Prometheus changed the metanarrative from evolutionism to a creationist and pseudo-archaeological metanarrative with Biblical motifs. This paper points to the dangers of popularizing creationist and pseudo-archaeological narratives in science fiction. Responsibility for life on Earth and in outer space, lacking evidence to the contrary, remains in the hands of humans collectively and not alien Others.
PAAKAT: Revista de Tecnología y Sociedad
Alien as arena of cultural dispute: Technology, Capitalism and Otherness
2022 •
PAAKAT Revista de Tecnología y Sociedad
This paper analyzes different interpretations of the Alien franchise and how they divide the world regarding issues such as economic exploitation, technology and Otherness are analyzed. Cultural sociology allows us to understand how the interpretations are articulated through binary sets that see the franchise at the same time as a critique and an apology for: a) colonial and technological capitalist rationalism, b) the exclusion of the Other and the monstrous; and c) feminism, sexual and gender identity. The interpretations are analyzed as condensations of hopes and fears regarding contemporary social processes. The dispute over control of the meaning of Alien allows us to understand how fears and hopes are articulated about economic and technological rationality and gender relations.
Gender and Contemporary Horror in Comics, Games and Transmedia
Horrific Things: Alien Isolation and the Queer Materiality of Gender, Desire and Being
2019 •
Merlin Seller
A critical reading of Alien: Isolation (Creative Assembly, 2014) in relation to Thing Theory and Queer Theory, focusing on the creative resistances of, and slippages between, player and props/objects/materials. Isolation deals in the horror of remediation and the exposure of Thingness – thematically, procedurally and technologically. Beyond psychoanalytic readings of symbolism in the Alien franchise, I argue we should embrace the Thing – the obsolete, the fragmented and ambiguously ‘real’ materialities evidenced and enacted in this game – a radical non-hierarchical perspective on being. We are desynchronized but also embodied between times and ontologies. The tactile feminine and genderqueer object-subject-player comes to find a place in the wider ecology of things in labour which queers the border of object and subject, game and player.
Depicting Otherness: Ridley Scott's Alien and Christopher Nolan's Interstellar as Responsive and Allegorical Films of Their Time
Christina Kutscher
Keen to learn more and expand into the universe, humankind has always been fascinated with unknown creatures. During the last century, aliens in particular have become a pop-cultural phenomenon. However, the depiction of extraterrestrial life, or the otherness, in films as well as other media has changed over the years. One aim of this paper is to show in how far the depiction of otherness has changed, exemplified by Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). By comparing both films, I attempt to provide evidence for the thesis that possible differences in the depiction occur due to socio-political contexts and how this has changed throughout the last decades.
Eugen Pfister
Callaloo
"Space, That Bottomless Pit: Planetary Exile and Metaphors of Belonging in American Afrofuturist Cinema."
Ramzi Fawaz
In his utopian 1974 film, Space is the Place, the avant-garde musician Sun Ra would claim to a group of disaffected African American youth, “Everything you desire upon this planet and never have received will be yours in outerspace.” Ra’s vision of racial uplift based on a fantasy of the black race’s willful relocation to another planet explicitly repurposed the meanings attached to outerspace as a site of white colonial expansion, linking the physical disorientations of space to a figurative disorientation of traditional social hierarchies. This article tracks the evolution of the trope of “planetary exile” in a series of Afrofuturist and science fiction films in the late 20th century to argue that the depiction of outerspace as a material and discursive haven for black communities simultaneously worked to articulate the experience of blackness to other previously ignored marginalized identities, namely the categories of “woman” and “queer.” Through close readings of Sun Ra’s Space is the Place, John Sayle’s The Brother from Another Planet (1984), and David Fincher’s Alien3 (1992), I show how Afrofuturist film conceptually attached the social experience of “blackness” to the category of “queerness,” or non-normative gender or sexual identity, in order to argue the real-world necessity of acknowledging the shared social interests of African Americans, women, and the LGBT community in the post-Civil Rights era. In so doing, Afrofuturist films increasingly abandoned a narrow ideology of racial uplift that accompanied Civil Rights rhetoric, celebrating instead a collective rejection of “upward mobility” and a conceptual embrace of outerspace as a directionless void where previously unimaginable alliances across difference could be forged.
“No Man Needs Nothing”: The Possibility of Androids as Lockean Persons in Alien and Prometheus
2017 •
Chris Lay
Alien and Philosophy: I Infest, Therefore I Am, First Edition. Edited by Jeffrey Ewing and Kevin S. Decker. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Most of us probably take it for granted that “human beings” and what philosophers and lawyers call “persons” are one and the same thing. The Alien franchise often challenges this idea, though. To first‐time viewers of Alien, seeing Parker knock Ash’s head clean off his shoulders while the android’s body continues to fight back is just about as jarring as the Xenomorph Chestburster exploding out of Kane in the middle of the Nostromo mess hall. Why? Because, up until that point, Ash looked and acted like a perfectly normal human person (albeit an emotionally detached one). In Aliens, the synthetic Bishop balks at being called an android, demurring, “I prefer the term ‘artificial person’ myself.” When someone else calling himself Bishop shows up on Fiorina 161 at the end of Alien3, Ripley elects to throw herse...
Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy
Jaws Within Jaws: A Cosmopolitical Ecology of Alien
2022 •
Eric Macedo
This article investigates multi-species relations in a group of science fiction narratives featuring extraterrestrial beings, paying particular attention to the Alien movie series. The concept of "cosmopolitical ecology" is elaborated as a tool to map relations between the different kinds of beings that populate the modern imagination in SF, especially those between humans, machines, animals and alien entities. Two apparently opposing modes of relation are highlighted in the narratives: domestication and predation. But those modes, intrinsically connected to a broader colonial imaginary, seem to be themselves entangled in complex ways. If modernity is marked by what Ghassan Hage calls "generalized domestication," then what is the place of predation in modern metaphysics? An ambiguous position often attached to a dangerous other, the role of the predator also emerges as a feature of modern humans, a trace that they sometimes recognize in themselves when they look at an alien mirror.
