Everyone with a blog is contractually obliged to write a post about the 2024 U.S. election result, here’s mine.
So that’s how it is.
There’s something kind of freeing about it: we’re in the bad timeline. The majority of U.S. citizens who got off their backside to vote wanted Donald Trump in the chair. Despite. (Or, in a non-trivial-but-unclear-%-of-cases, because.)
“He is a danger to democracy and the world” was true and far outweighed every other thing at stake, but it was apparently poor messaging.
“Inflation and immigrants are out of control” was apparently great messaging. It was also not true.
What we can learn from this is: when fascism is on the rise, it’s important not to say anything about it because it’s a turnoff? hmm doesn’t seem right.
***
Social psychology is my area. I have enough expertise in it to know I don’t have any expertise in it. But here’s what I can say with some confidence:
With rare exceptions, human behaviour isn’t reasoned out from information.
But this doesn’t mean the information environment – Fox News as the background noise of an entire swathe of the U.S.A. – isn’t meaningful or influential. We are all surrounded by stories, and they are extremely powerful.
We remember stories that explain the emotions we feel when looking at our local situation.
We like the stories that make us feel good about our emotional reactions. We call these stories “important” and “true”.
We dislike the stories that make us feel bad about our emotional reactions. We call these ones “unimportant” or “lies”.
We like it when our neighbours agree with us about which stories are true and which ones are lies. We can repeat those stories a bunch, getting more assertive every time. It’s a way of validating our emotional reactions, and building an alliance with those who share the same feelings.
Fox News and similar are very good at circulating and repeating stories that validate a certain set of emotional reactions, and ridiculing stories that could undermine those emotions. That’s the whole game.
An entire generation has grown up in the bubble of these social norms. The specific stories have changed – a few years ago, the story about Trans people changed in a major way, for example – but the underlying emotions have not.
The information environment is really a normative environment. It’s an enormous permission machine, saying it’s okay to feel angry and afraid and disgusted, in fact it’s expected. All you need to do is look around you. You’re not alone.
The people who voted for President Trump, even the so-called “low-information voters”, know enough about what he is: the consensus choice for people who feel the same as they do.
And feelings don’t care about your facts.
***
It is possible to shift social norms by transforming the information in an information environment, but it’s much easier to do so by transforming the emotions experienced by ordinary folks. Homosexual law changes didn’t arise from information, but from people meeting gay folks in their own lives and finding they were just ordinary folks. Different emotions at ground level changed the whole thing.
It’s bloody hard for a political campaign to shift either emotions or information. The media can, sometimes. Unfortunately 21st century journalism has decided that’s not its job. Easier to report on the horse race than to try and actively shift the profound misunderstandings held by one voting bloc about fundamentals like crime and the economy.
***
It’s not good, is it. But before all is said and done, I reckon a few more Nazis are gonna get punched in the face.
It’s a tabletop roleplaying-game, like Dungeons & Dragons, only it is for playing horror.
I like horror, even though I’m a bit of a scaredy cat. Sometimes I have to turn a movie off and finish it the next day while the sun is up.
And I really like horror in games. There’s something about scary times and playing creative games with your buddies that really works for me. I think it’s just a special thing to do. So making this game has been a nightmare come true.
FiveEvilis being released by Handiwork Games. It is on Kickstarter now! It has already funded at basic level and we are trying to keep spreading the word so we can make the book exceptional, with more amazing art by Scott Purdy, and a bonus extra scenario by Gar Hanrahan, and more treats!
Getting the word out has been incredibly hard. Social media has collapsed as a way to share the creative projects we are all working on. Specialist journalism has also mostly collapsed so most of the outlets that might have covered us are missing in action. It’s tough!
If you are reading this – and you know someone who might like FiveEvil – please tell them! It might be the only way they could ever hear about it!
Alien: Romulus: I liked it and it worked, except for the bits that didn’t, three stars. Mark it down to two point five stars for the surprise cast member.
Right about the middle of the film there’s a set piece that pays off the swarms of facehuggers we saw earlier on. They’re sitting around like scorpions and our heroes need to get through the room. What to do? Lets infer they hunt by heat and sound (sure, they don’t have eyes, why not) and then we just need to make the room body temp (ugh that would suck) and walk real slow and quiet.
And they do. And the facehuggers sit around, tensing up when the characters gasp at a dead body or scrape against furniture. Slowly, slowly through this room… it’s a good tense sequence, a thoroughly engaging moment. Don’t breathe or they get you.
But it’s also, on a deeper level, kind of inert. It takes the nightmare of a spidery alien thing that latches on to your face, and makes it a video game obstacle. It’s tense, but not uncertain: the idea is good so it’s obviously going to work, and it’s obvious they’re not going to keep it going all the way because that wouldn’t be exciting, so you’re just waiting for the moment when they drop the ball and run and just make it, because it’s obviously not time for any of these characters to die. And so it proves. But the development and resolution to this set piece, while absolutely matching expectations, is executed well so you have to respect it anyway.
That’s Alien: Romulus. Make exactly the right moves, the safe moves, match the temperature. Then a mad sprint for the end.
The Stars My Destination
But morgue what did you THINK of it??
I liked the babby.
I liked the ship manoeuvring around the facility to different airlock connection points.
I liked the solves: Rain’s smart ideas in desperate situations.
I liked the cold equations. That was a game that felt new, even though it was using old material, going right back to Alien. (But here’s a trick: in Alien, Ripley was the one who refused to open the door. In this film, Rain was desperate to open it. What the significance!)
I liked the characters. Cailee Spaeny’s Rain was a nervy centre of gravity and David Jonsson’s Andy was superbly layered. The wider ensemble were perhaps thinly drawn, but also engaging and well-performed, even the requisite Annoying One.
I liked how they were believably smart, and they made good choices. The characters are teenagers but they’re not dumb teenagers. (I also note that the perplexingly widespread view that a proper alien film needs middle-aged protagonists disappeared without trace on the day of release.) They take risks but they’re, mostly, not foolish risks, they’re reactions to a desperate situation.
I loved the mining colony. Perfect.
And there were plenty of grace notes that felt sweet on the screen. Walking in bare feet on the sand in the cargo bay. Seeing the sun for the first time. The moment that quietly revealed the identity of the baby’s father.
It delivered a solid story with proper stakes and I was on board the whole way. I liked it and it worked,
except for the bits that didn’t.
(It was an Alien film with too much Alien film in it.)
(We’re not going to disturb anything. We are exactly the same temperature. We’re taking every single step with such great care. Don’t you see this is exactly what you want?)
Three stars.
i contain multitudes (derogatory)
Me: I just want creators to take big swings! To do stuff we haven’t seen before, to try and go to new places, even if it doesn’t work I want to see it!
Me after seeing Prometheus: not like that
Me after seeing the Romulus trailer: squeeeee
Me after seeing Romulus: huh. Hmm. huh.
factor analysis
The setup is this: a bunch of scientists set up a space lab to study the aliens, to try and domesticate them, and of course they end up getting absolutely monstered as the creatures run rampant and kill everyone. The film is actually about the folks on an independent ship crew who get caught up in the mess because they were willing to cut corners and end up buying a lot more trouble than they bargained for. Soon they have to find a way from one side of the infested station to the other, as time ticks down on them. There’s an ambiguously heroic synthetic, alien underwater POV shots, and a major set piece in an elevator shaft, but the final act of the film swerves in a completely different direction with the birth of a human/alien hybrid baby, pale and tall and weird as hell. Then it gets sucked through an acid hole into space, and the survivors get to contemplate an entirely new life together.
I am of course describing Alien Resurrection (yes I know you guessed it at line one shush). Alien Romulus is a remake of Alien Resurrection, and an accidental one, it seems, from some of Fede Alvarez’s comments. Which is fascinating, right? Because it shows that the water flowing downhill from Alien and Aliens leads to a consistent place!
Personal anecdote of relevance: In December 1997 I coordinated a big roleplaying game event set in the Aliens universe TM. A bunch of scientists had set up a space lab to study the aliens, and of course they got absolutely monstered as the creatures run rampant and kill everyone, the folks on an ethically shady independent ship crew had to find their way from one side of the infested station to the other time ticks down major set piece in elevator shaft ambiguously heroic synthetic ALL OF IT WAS THERE (except the babby). A bunch of us who were part of the game went to see Alien Resurrection on its NZ release one month after the game and there was widespread amusement that so much of what we’d created turned up there too.
But it’s not a surprise, it’s just what follows from Alien and Aliens and Alien 3. It’s what has to follow. The scientists finally get the alien and it kills them and then i guess some nice people need to go across a spaceship. And maybe there’s a babby.
(Prometheus did not do this. It did not follow from Alien and Aliens and Alien 3. It is best understood as a remix in which the big horseshoe from Alien was in fact an attempt to assassinate Jesus.)
(No, really, that’s actually the plot of Prometheus.)
This film tries to follow the water-downhill path from the Prometheus stuff too, but it couldn’t assassinate Jesus a second time so surprise, it ends up with Babby again. (GIANT BABBY! We’ve made TOO MUCH NOISE and the facehuggers know we’re here RUN RUN RUN FOR THE END!!)
So this feels promising! We have the messy data of Alien being resolved down to distinct variables. We’ve solved it, the true meaning, this is a star map, and it points the way to – no wait wrong film – this is the distilled core of Alien, the special juice, the black goo – no DAMMIT –
Another day older and deeper in debt
FILMMAKER: I want to explore the nature of humanity itself in the context of a hostile universe and strange alien life inimical to our own, and the ways in which our own societies enact and succumb to structures that treat us with the same indifference,
THE STUDIO, ENTHUSIASTIC: yes and then something burst out of chest?
A few years ago a Kiwi journalist sparked a big round of twitter discourse by wondering if Alien was a horror film. I said it was, but only because of the company sending the workers into danger. Otherwise it was a science fiction film with monsters. This argument was not mounted in entirely serious fashion, but it has something serious at its core: the Alien film series is about work.
It’s about working a shitty job for a big company, it’s about working as a soldier and going where you’re told, it’s about working at a prison with nowhere else to go, it’s about working freelance and taking dubious contracts that eventually bite you in the arse. The alien is just an expression of the bosses failing to take your safety seriously.
(Prometheus, of course, is also about work, presenting the answer to the question “What if everyone was highly paid but extremely bad at their jobs?”)
(Alien Covenant is not about work, that film is about “what if two Michael Fassbenders kissed?”)
Alien Romulus begins on a mining colony that is a grimy, crowded nightmare of industrial labour exploitation. Rain is an indentured worker, trying to earn her way out of the planet. The company can just change the terms of the deal. It’s brutal, and honestly it feels like an excessive caricature until you remember, like, history.
So this is the Alien film most about work since the first one. But really it isn’t actually that much about work? That’s the context for the desperation of the protagonists but it doesn’t really shape the narrative other than that. Rain doesn’t actually do any work that we see, and it’s not clear what the crew of the Corbelan do either. This mining outpost seems incredibly cut off from anywhere, nine years from resupply, and beset by illness and lack of care that mean workers die easily. More tellingly, there’s a super-strong robot on a hard-labour work site where everyone keeps getting sick, and it is left in a junk heap because *checks notes* it reliably follows simple instructions? These are details, little handwaves that make the plot go, but they feel off. You have the company in the mining colony trying to get the most value from everyone, you have deadlines and quotas and warnings, you have Andy overexploited not derided, you have someone take notice that a hauler is burning a bunch of fuel on an unauthorised mission… that’s how you make it about work. And Romulus doesn’t.
Look who’s talking now
Alien isn’t about WORK you idiot it’s about REPRODUCTION. It’s about hard organs penetrating orifices and vulval openings and something alive kicking the inside of your ribs. It’s a man having a nightmare imagining what if he was pregnant instead of his wife. It’s about the irreducibly gross content of our bodies, all that bone and intestine and teeth, and how that’s what life is, and what if we remixed life so it was just bone and intestine and teeth, what would that look like, oof, pretty freaky, *riiiip*
There are two babies in this film. Three female characters and two of them give birth. There’s also a weird bit where the annoying guy sticks an instrument into the giant alien vagina and tries to electrocute what’s inside it which is, i’m pretty sure, not actually a political commentary but it felt pretty weird.
The big babies then eat their mums.
So this is the Alien film most about reproduction since the first one. But really it isn’t actually that much about reproduction? The baby in the lady is a motivation to go see the sunrise/to open the door PLEASE, but the biggest plot clang in the movie is when Kay decides to inject herself with black goop because the weird android who just let her get taken by monsters said it might be useful, when Rain who she trusts was like NO DON’T. The film could have sold this beat, but they didn’t take the time to do so. If Kay is struggling to get to cryo, bleeding out, her body failing her, she’s fading on the floor everything going blurry and she touches her belly because that’s her motivation not to give up and THEN she takes the goop and injects it and with that coursing through her system she rises up and SURGES to the cryo chambers… An easy solve. Its absence is just another of the ways this is all not deeply felt. It doesn’t feel right.
See also Navarro’s experience as a host for an alien creature. She gets grabbed by a facehugger, it gets yanked off her but maybe she’s already got one inside her? She and Bjorn make a break for it then, what, six or seven minutes later there’s something coming out of her chest?
The rapid gestation time of the alien is very different to what was presented in the first three films (although in Alien Resurrection a similarly rapid gestation was seen, there’s that film again). Obviously, this process needs to move at the speed of the plot: Romulus is on a tight countdown, and you can’t do a slow gestation that fits. (A famous deleted scene from Aliens was removed for this exact reason.) And you know what? It doesn’t actually matter that it’s different. Let it be different! Gestation time of an alien creature is the kind of detail that should not be held sacred, it does not need to be slabbed in canonical perspex! Except.
The problem with a rapid gestation time is it undermines the whole sensibility of this kind of body horror. Maybe just at a subconscious level, but still in a way that can be felt. The horror of the facehugger laying an embryo inside you and that bursting out your chest isn’t just that something’s in your throat and then something punches out your ribcage, it’s that you are a host for this thing. It is using you, parasitising you, growing from you, using you as part of its own reproductive cycle. Kane was so hungry, but apart from that he seemed fine to everyone, even to himself. That’s part of it, that’s important.
The incredibly short embryo time is a dramatic necessity to make the thrill ride work, but it takes away the sense of process. Gestating inside the body for less than ten minutes? What can any organism get out of that? Sure, black goo accelerated life cycles accumulating mass from the air itself etc., but it feels wrong. It feels weightless. Navarro should feel hungry. Her baby should use her, not just wreck her. That’s how you make it about reproduction. And Romulus doesn’t.
Okay fine so what is it about then mr clever brain
The company creates a gigantic and incredibly well-resourced space station science analysis centre and conducts elaborate experiments there that could change the nature of human existence
And then it goes wrong and whoops i guess that’s the end, it just floats there and is forgotten, no distress beacon no company ship going to investigate no automated check in noone who knew about it and wanted to go find it nothing, “Well it was a secret project” but even secret projects like EXIST “and then they lost it because it was so far away in space” well yes but why would you set up your secret project nine years or whatever from company oversight that makes no sense you can put a space station anywhere you’d make it more accessible than that just for supplies, “harumph harumph it drifted” ok yes that explains everything except doesn’t the film begin with a mission that manages to find one Nigerian visual artist floating in the vastness of space, even if he is nearly 7 feet tall that signals a bit of commitment to finding things that are drifting,
And the facehugger chestburster timeline, and Andy being ignored, and the crew just being able to fly up there without anyone noticing, and how does any of this square with Aliens, if this whole Romulus thing has happened and the company not only got an alien it managed to breed and cryo store huge numbers of aliens and figured out how to synthesise the black goo out of them, it did the full science and won the prize ring and hit the hammer to ding the gong, if this all happened BUT THEN a bit later on Carter Burke and Ellen Ripley are facing off over whether the same company will get its hands on an alien… doesn’t that make those stakes, the ones in Aliens, the ones Ripley sacrifices herself for in Alien 3, doesn’t it make them feel a bit…silly?
When you start looking at it, all of it, carefully, none of it makes sense, not without a lot of special pleading. That’s the problem with plugging stuff into gaps. When you have a gap, and you stick something into the gap, if you zoom in you have just created a bunch of new gaps all around the thing filling the gap. (I think this is called ZeNo More Gap’s paradox.) (No More Gaps is a popular gap filling product here in New Zealand, this is a very good joke, thank you.) (If you think the joke should be Xeno’s Paradox you have committed a nerd reference and you have to sit in the corner.)
So why plug this story into the gap between Alien and Aliens? Nothing in Romulus needs to be before Aliens. Right? All of it could come later. All of it. But it’s in between. So why do it whyyaa]ggh
we must hold godfather part 2 responsible
FILMMAKER: We begin in deep space, the cold expanse of stars, and a space-travelling ship enters our field of view, its metal curvature and hard corners a mighty achievement of humankind, our ambition reaching so very far yet dwarfed and humbled by the immensity of
THE AUDIENCE, EAGER: when does burst a chest tho
There have been five* films with gigerian (please pronounce both gs as in GIF) aliens in them since Alien Resurrection, and a new TV show on the way, and every one of them is set in the past.
*no i’m not going to talk about those two**
**they are in fact in a separate continuity***
***hahaha sob no really they are officially in a separate continuity and if you know what “in a separate continuity” means i’m so so sorry we have to sit in the corner with the other nerds
Five films and a telly series gone backwards. Plus the only one of the video games anyone ever cared about. backwards. (some of the other video games do go forward but only by a tiny tiny increment so you can also be colonial marines shooting aliens wheeeee)
So much backward. What makes it so hard to go forward?
Here’s part of the answer: the aesthetic attractions of the original. Setting Romulus between Alien and Aliens gives you unselfconscious access to the design specifics of those films. When you see in a five star review of Romulus the phrase “all the love and care that went into it” it means “they made the console buttons big and chunky and different colours like in Alien and they used the pulse rifle sound effect like in Aliens”.
Here’s another part of the answer: fandom, in the aggregate, doesn’t want to go forward, it wants to plug gaps. It wants to mark out the edges of the Thing Fanned, then fill every tiny inch of it with precise/baroque detail, expunging all ambiguity and uncertainty. Full perfection will be achieved when the Thing Fanned is completely explicated, when no CinemaSins video is possible. In 1977 the clone wars was a phrase that fired the imagination and imbued everything with rich potential, and in 2024 the clone wars is an incredibly dense page on wookiepedia. Of course Full Conceptual Saturation can never be achieved, see ZeNo More Gaps’s paradox above, ah but the journey! Also the very important business of complaining online when it seems like stuff from outside the edges might get in, like yuuzhan vongs or woke.
Here’s the biggest part of the answer though: Alien is a bad IP.
I do not like Alien Day you cannot make me like it
Alien is a phenomenal film. It puts a great character in a vivid environment facing off against an extremely memorable creature. Everyone thought it was brilliant. Let’s do another one.
Unfortunately, that construction doesn’t allow for an easy sequel. If you want to keep the great character, how do you contrive them back into the same narrative? If you keep the creature, does it just do the same stuff all over again to a new bunch of spaceship dwellers? Sure it’s not easy like Star Wars 2 where you just say Darth Vader builds another death star, but come on it’s not rocket science, look at Jaws 2! Roy Scheider vs A Shark Again! And pretty soon we’ll have Jaws 3 and Jaws 4 and the idea of the eternal Jaws franchise is so obvious and undeniable that it’ll be the premise of a hilarious visual gag in the hugely popular sequel to the hit family film about mummy-son incest vibes!
So we’re gonna do Alien Twosies and it’s going to be great!
(SIDETRACK: The only good franchise IPs are about JOBS. If it’s a job, you can keep making new stories. If the story is an interruption to a job (Alien) then repeating it is going to be hard work. Good job IPs in films:
James Bond (Bond’s job is to stop the new villain with the crazy plan)
Mission Impossible (Tom Cruise’s job is to stop the new villain with the crazy plan)
Friday the 13th (Jason’s job is to kill all the new people who came to Crystal Lake)
Knives Out (Daniel Craig’s accent’s job is to solve a fiendishly deceptive murder mystery)
No doubt you’ve noticed that this is also the recipe for like 90% of scripted television. The format is called the procedural: medical shows where you try and save this week’s patient, detective shows where you solve this week’s mystery, lawyer shows where you try and win this week’s case, navy intelligence shows where you do whatever navy intelligence people do i’ve never watched any of those.
In general understanding: film is not meant to do procedurals. Film is meant to chronicle a transformative journey, an epic experience for a protagonist that leaves them forever changed, we know this because of the three holy books Hero’s Journey, Save the Cat, Story. Procedurals, with fundamentally static characters, are for TV and similar pathetic and weak and disgusting narrative formats. (Mission Impossible was a TV series. James Bond was a series of novels. Knives Out was inspired by series novels.) But if film is to be Intellectual Property That We Can Exploit Forever then that means it needs always sequels. This is the way of the world. Imagine that I build out this idea into a big elaborate joke making a parallel between the film where the Company exploits the aliens and here where the company exploits Aliens and I do such a good job that you laugh and also stroke your chin, why he made me laugh but also he made me think. SIDETRACK OVERRR)
Aliens matches the original because Jim Cameron came up with a whole bunch of fantastic ideas on which to hang a sequel and instead of choosing one he did all of them. He gave the good guys guns, he added a kid, he added a new big monster, he made it about Ripley overcoming the trauma of the first film, he advanced its thematic focus from childbirth to motherhood. (He also did this develop many good ideas use all of them schtick for Terminator 2. Please do note though one of his big ideas for Rambo 2 was “John Travolta as comedy sidekick” so they’re not all winners Jim.)
Anyway that’s how we got an incredible sequel to an incredible original, a brilliant follow-up that demonstrated sequels can go on forever and then we can make merchandise of the IP and every year on a special day that only makes sense as a film reference if you do your calendar the wrong way around like the USA insists on doing, on that special day we’ll release like some art prints and bobble head dolls!
Then there was Alien 3.
Cute kid autopsy scene
Everyone hated Alien 3, including everyone who made Alien 3, except me. Its reputation has been rehabilitated over the decades since and while it remains controversial a lot more people accept that I was right all alo^H^H^H see it as a good film now. The thing that upset people was that it felt like a careless and inconsiderately callous rejection of the hopeful conclusion to Aliens. And it wasn’t that: instead, it was a careful and considerately callous rejection of the hopeful conclusion to Aliens.
Alien Cubed’s bleakness makes Alien and Aliens fall into line with it as a coherent, if confrontational, tryptich. Alien depicts a horrific world where human life is worthless and unwelcome; Aliens depicts the same but still ends on a hopeful note with trauma overcome and a happy family of survivors blasting off to safety; and Alien 3 says nah remember the first one and even the bulk of the second one, the logic of this world is very clear, that hopeful note Jim ended on was too convenient because in fact and properly, everything is fucked, and let’s really lean into it and fulfil the promise made in both earlier films, and whoops it turns out the only thing you really can do is try to die right. So let’s all die.
Note that this trilogy forms an inversion of the story structure to which we are most accustomed from the three sacred texts Journey, Save the Story, and The Hero’s Cat: things are kinda ok, then things get really bad, and then through meeting the challenge things end up settled and good. Here, things are bad, and then through meeting the challenge things end up settled and good, but then they end up really really bad, THE END.
Given the development hell of Alien 3, my favourite factoid being at one point they had spent more than the entire budget of Aliens and they still didn’t have a single page of script they could shoot, given that chaos it’s a miracle it was about anything at all. But it was. My theory is that the emotional logic was so powerful that once the idea was in place there was no getting away from it, and it was just a matter of going there. Which is of course just the same as the film.
Alien 3 is a sequel that gathers up every implication of ‘Intellectual Property’ and chucks it into the molten lead furnace. There Is No Story Universe Here. The Alien films are about humanity encountering what’s out there and dying and it sucks and nothing comes after this. THE END.
Then came Alien Resurrection, which was the first fanfiction Alien film.
They don’t let the alien wear a tuxedo any more because of woke
GAME MASTER: Tonight we are playing the Alien roleplaying game! We begin in a dive bar on a crowded colony world. The bartender nods, “Evening friends,” he begins,
PLAYERS, ENGAGED: We aim every weapon we have at his chest and get ready for something to burst out of it
In 1997 Dark Horse Comics had the Aliens license and they published a story in Aliens Special #1 by horror author Nancy A Collins that was a very amusing pastiche of Lovecraftiana, pasting the Mythos into an Aliens space colony context and identifying the jijerian creature with Mr Cthulhu and his friends. It was a joke told very well, and of course as any fule kno, also a friendly nod to the long-admitted influence of Lovecraftian ideas on the first Alien film. Very well done.
Alien has a canon now. Did you know that? A carefully maintained canon that says what happened in which year of future history and what planets are where and how the video game things interact with the elements of the unmade William Gibson script, for it incorporates, as well as the movies, all the new novels and video games and comic books and with a stretch it also incorporates all the other comic books and games and unmade William Gibson scripts and random paraphernalia from the past.
There’s a game, Alien The Role Playing Game, and it’s definitively part of the canon, and in one of the game books it catalogues the universe, and the Nancy A Collins planet is there, the Lovecraft joke planet is there, it’s part of the canon, it’s in continuity, officially when you watch Alien officially and canonically somewhere off screen there’s some canonical guys in robes and they are canonically chanting TU LI TU!
This makes me wince.
What does anyone gain from this? What does this give the audience? What is the point of canon?
The Sherlock Holmes canon shenanigans were created as a game, approached in good spirits with a wink and a nudge, and the satisfaction was in playing it cleverly and well. I like also to think of my friend Jon Preddle and his ridiculous/glorious Timelink project in which he assembles a full coherent continuity of Doctor Who, which mission he undertook for the brain-bending fun of it because of course Doctor Who’s approach to continuity is to lovingly point at the past and then immediately contradict it. That stuff is fun.
But an Alien canon, into which everything falls or doesn’t, an official future timeline?
The point of canon is that fans like how it feels, but when they like that feeling over and over and over, it makes everything *smaller*. And it’s already small because the thing the punters pay to see is the chest being burst open by this one specific alien species. So the canon becomes an entire universe consisting of repeated encounters, over and over, like a wallpaper pattern.
This is how we end up with Amanda Ripley as an active character (IMO the worst idea anyone has ever had in connection with the Alien films and I include the Kenner toys in this). This is how we end up with a whole novel about the Vasquez character from Aliens called Aliens Vasquez. This is how we end up with Alien Romulus with chunky buttons and the pulse rifle sound effect and Andy saying Get away from her you bitch 37 years before Ripley says it. Worst of all, this is how we end up with a bad face swap animation of Ian Holm in his Ash costume saying “perfect organism” over and over. (Deducting half a star, but no shade to Ian Holm’s estate, get that bag why not.)
All of this, the canon, the references, the godforsaken face swap animation, all of it could be cut from this film and none of it would be missed. None of it is load bearing. It’s all extraneous, it’s all there to scratch that itch. It’s there because Alien is a story universe with fans now more than it is a film named Alien (and a film named Aliens and even a film named Alien Cubes). And it takes this film and makes it slow when it should be swift. It hurts this film. And it is all the more frustrating because it’s such an unforced error.
But apart from that I liked it.
(Okay also the black goo/meaning of life stuff is a story element that fights against the format of a “claustrophobic slasher house” horror, as both Prometheus and Covenant discovered, and Ian Holm saying it’s a miracle cure isn’t enough to fix that here.)
(I wanted moments of silence. I wanted the camera to gaze upon the alien creatures, instead of taking them for granted, I wanted to see the characters take a breath.)
(Facehuggers have the ability to acid their way through barriers, which we saw in the literal first seconds in Alien when facehuggers were introduced with the critter melting right through Kane’s faceplate, so when that one scared Rain at the window but just scrabbled there… but Jim Cameron waved that off in Aliens too so, fine.)
(The x-ray torch gets used precisely once and it would be better if it was just in the teenager ship all along it didn’t need an intro scene.)
(Apart from THAT I liked it.)
This book belongs to _____
“The Alien universe is a richly designed and expansive science fiction possibility space where all human endeavour and frailty has stretched out across the galaxies, an imagined future channelled through the deeply grounded and inimitable industrial design work of such luminaries as Ron Cobb and Moebius and imperial-phase Jim Cameron, but with a particular interest in the point of view of the humble ordinary worker as opposed to heroic explorers or leaders who often become the focus of narratives in such imaginative environments; as such it is uniquely positioned to provide a humane and relatable engine for unbounded storytelling. Also in every story a little phallus with teeth gotta burst out of someone’s chest.” – The Official Alien Publications Guide and Story Bible, presumably
I have a children’s storybook about ants, called Cyberantics. It’s about a scientist who creates a clever robot ant and sends it into an ant hill to learn all about ant society. “What a fine little ant,” the scientist says at the end. At the back of the book, there’s a biography of the author, and it’s a bit weird, because it turns out he was born in 2131.
This book is an Alien book from the story universe of Alien. Alien Romulus didn’t have to be this way.
Romulus isn’t about anything except the Alien films, plus that jarring bit at the end when it’s about the Prometheus films, and it is built to desperately display that aboutness, barreling the camera flop sweat wink to reassure the fans that it can be trusted do you hear this bit of music it is from one of the previous movies, as if that will keep the facehuggers calm.
It’s doing Alien very well but it’s also about Alien, and that means there’s too much Alien in this Alien film, Alien-ness on all sides, crowding everywhere, all that matters is to think about the Alien, so don’t breathe, stay calm, and step in exactly the right places. The room is the same temperature as you.
I had a lovely time watching The Terminator with the 13yo. (Who is categorically too young for this film, but actually not really, except for the sex scene which is never something you want to watch with your Dad and the skip forward button may have been deployed by them at that point.)
I noted something that hadn’t stood out to me before: the story is entirely and definitionally complete. You know everything that happens by the end of it. (That is: computer nukes the planet and proceeds to try to exterminate humanity, humanity fights back led by brave leader John Connor, machines are defeated, but just as humanity wins the machines send a killer back in time to change history.) The entire future history is defined; the only question mark is whether it can be changed. The film shows that it cannot, and in fact (by way of a bootstrap paradox) it never could have been.
The Terminator‘s narrative is a perfect and complete circle. It leaves no questions unanswered, and no space for any sequel. The war with the machines is done! It’s a brilliant piece of science fiction writing that successfully tells a complete future history mostly through a series of chase scenes in the 1980s.
And that’s why there was no sequel to this cult hit film. How could there be? Creator Jim Cameron did too good a job with the construction of his film, and left no avenues open for further exploration. How foolish!
Breaking: i am advised there somehow HAVE been sequels to the terminator 1984 ?? seems fake ?
So it seems someone released a film called Terminator 2 Judgement Day after The Terminator? A sequel? And apparently one of the most commercially and critically successful sequels in cinema history? Hmm. How?
T2, as it was styled, managed the seeming impossible because director/writer/auteur Jim Cameron is very very VERY good at what he does. To make a decent sequel to The Terminator, you need a very strong new idea, and Cameron understood this. In fact, I would argue he managed to thread the needle with T2 because he didn’t just stop at one good idea: instead, he had no less than five separate strong new ideas, each of which could have been the basis for a decent sequel by itself.
Strong New Idea One: What if we make a sequel to The Terminator but this time Linda Hamilton isn’t playing the resourceful ordinary person, instead she’s a full-on action star, holding space like Arnie and Sly do in their big films?
Strong New Idea Two: What if we make a sequel to The Terminator and we build the concept of the enemy robot around an entirely new form of special effects that no-one on the planet has ever seen before?
Strong New Idea Three: What if we make a sequel to The Terminator and we make the point of view character a kid so it’s kind of a Spielberg/Goonies action adventure? (To be fair this one is not necessarily a good idea but it is the kind of strong new idea that you can build a sequel around so.)
Strong New Idea Four: What if we make a sequel to The Terminator and Arnold plays the robot again but this time he’s a good guy?
Strong New Idea Five: What if we make a sequel to The Terminator and it’s all about whether the foundational concept of the first film, that the future is set and therefore no sequels are possible, can be broken?
Jim Cameron was the right kind of maniac at the right time, and T2 absolutely justifies its existence as a result. But also, it kind of closes off the space for strong new ideas. Where else can you take The Terminator as an idea? A bunch of sequels followed but none of them had enough strong new ideas to stand tall. Some of them didn’t have any strong new ideas at all (I think, I haven’t watched a single one of them all the way through).
Tentative proposal, then: to make a truly great sequel, you can’t get by with just one good idea executed well, you need a whole stack of good ideas executed well. I think if you look at the acknowledged Great Sequels – Godfather 2, Toy Story 2, Aliens, Empire Strikes Back – and compare them to the acknowledged Well I Guess This Also Exists Sequels – [too many to list] – this will be seen to be true.
But I’m not going to write that blog post.
Thanks to Katherine H for the conversation that inspired this post!
Photo of Meow Wolf Las Vegas by Kate Russell, taken from this article
Simon Arcus, chief executive of Wellington Chamber and Business Central, thinks the city could do with some new attractions, such as the previously pitched World of WearableArt (WOW) museum or the interactive and immersible creative installations of Meow Wolf, a Sante Fe arts collective.
This paragraph deep into a newspaper article about Wellington’s limited offer to tourists caught my eye, or more correctly, it made both my eyes roll right back into my head while I laughed incredulously. The city’s big business guy throwing down Meow Wolf as a new attraction possibility, even as an aspirational example of original thinking (or however you might generously frame it), lands with a massive clang, the clang of failing to really understand what you’re talking about.
Short version: Arts is hard, business guy.
Meow Wolf is an arts project (originally a collective, they incorporated somewhere in the last decade-half) that specialises in huge, immersive experiences featuring the work of large numbers of artists. Based in Santa Fe, they have also opened permanent exhibition locations in several other US cities. The vibe is like Disneyland meets Philip K. Dick, at least that’s as I understand it from far away, i haven’t been lucky enough to visit a Meow Wolf. They do cool stuff.
Wellington, of course, has a bunch of stuff that directly overlaps with what Meow Wolf do: we have lots of artists here. We have a busy games/tech sector. We have a huge engine for creating fantastic worlds in the Wētā studio system. We have smart creative people. Can’t you just see a Meow Wolf-type thing working in Wellington? I can! It seems to fit right in!
Here’s why the idea clangs: to get a Meow Wolf you need a lot more on your side than ambition.
Most obviously, a Wellington Meow Wolf has a size problem. It has to be big, not just to copy what worked overseas, but because if you’re doing an immersive attraction, it needs to have some breadth to it, or folks are going to wander through in ten minutes. And it also needs some depth to it, or it isn’t delivering on the ‘immersive’ side. So you’re right away looking at a large (not huge, but large) installation, and the investment needed to fit it out to a high standard and keep it refreshed and engagement-ready. Embedding the work of artists, and paying them properly, too. None of this is cheap but that’s fine because we’re going to get an audience of cruise ship passengers and return visit locals and out of towners and…
Not so fast. Scale is the devil for immersive; the economies of scale don’t kick in like they do on other projects. Even when you don’t have performers, as is normal for the Meow Wolf model, you still need to hand-feed every experience to a certain extent, and the more people you include, the more uncertainties dilute the reliability of the experience and make it impossible to actually do what you want to do.
A local Meow Wolf is devilishly hard. We’d need some big installation spaces, and a lot of customers willing to pay significantly to offset the rents and ongoing labour involved, as well as covering off the heavy investment of setup costs. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard.
But this is actually the wrong end of the conversation. Because all this assumes that you are doing a Meow Wolf by taking an overseas success story and just copying it here.
The truth is, you don’t get a Meow Wolf that works without growing it at home. It’s artwork, and artwork has to cook from local ingredients or it’s going to leave a bad taste.
And here’s where the real clang comes from, for me. Because to get a Meow Wolf, you need to cultivate and support a community of artists over many years. You need a city that gives them space to live affordably, and allows them to mix and develop. You need to put money, real money, on the table for artists to try things and explore and do stuff. A lot of those things will fail as commercial attractions.
Put it this way: the road to a local Meow Wolf is through dozens of failed local Meow Wolfs.
So my eyes rolled back when I read Mr. Business Guy tossing out Meow Wolf as a thing we would love to have. Because where is the support for artists in this city? Where are the business leaders advocating for the kinds of conditions that would allow artists to survive? Where are the businesses putting money for emerging artists to make the city more interesting? Where are the business notables lobbying local and central government for the kind of support that would make art viable here? Where are the rich business folk putting money on the table for art collectives to try weird stuff?
It’s easy to say we should have a nice thing. Harder to recognize that the nice thing is the output of years of effort and risk and support. Even harder to say “if we want Wellington to be a good destination we need to invest in our artists”. Ultimate difficulty level to say all that and add “And I’m demanding our government make changes that would help this situation.”
Because that’s it, right? Unless you engage with the politics, it’s all just smoke, You want a better Wellington, business guy, well the National government you love so much isn’t gonna get you there. Be honest about it.
(I’ve been involved in a couple of attempts to develop some kind of immersive something for Wellington. Both of them ran out of steam early on because the difficulties are substantial. But I do think – no, I feel – there’s going to be some clever hack to circumvent all those logistical limits and set something up that could work here in a sustainable way. I haven’t found it yet myself, but, you know, I’m thinking.)
Podcast Where Eagles Dare has returned to their loving, detailed coverage of 1980s British kids adventure comic Eagle with the dramatic moment of its merger with the long-lived Tiger. I remember it well from the first time around. I was 9 years old when this landed in NZ, and listening to the podcast describing these stories (and pulling out the issues from a box in the shed) brings me right back. I remember walking to the local newsagents where I had each issue put aside for me, I remember the shocking panels of death and destruction, and I remember the taste of the muesli bars with the little pieces of dried apricot that I’d eat while I flipped the pages.
I’m closing in on 50 now, so I’m the perfect age for nostalgia; indeed, it sometimes seems that the entire entertainment industry is tilted towards monetizing my generation’s hazy-fond memories of a simpler time. (Mostly I find that trend frustrating. The exceptions are, I think, instructive: Doctor Who never stopped (even when it was off TV) and has always operated on a healthy disrespect for its own past; Twin Peaks The Return delighted in thwarting any nostalgic impulse a viewer might have sought, resolving its past in a more profound way; Slayers operated as an act of redemption and penance for the failings of Buffy The Vampire Slayer; the Dungeons & Dragons movie was an honourable return to the deeper themes of the final episode of Freaks & Geeks.) Mostly, I’m not interesting in reboots and reimaginings and returns, but in the original material itself.
So, returning to the Eagle comic, and also enjoying dipping into old Doctor Who episodes, and The Twilight Zone and The Prisoner and classic Star Trek and more.
I suspect that my renewed interest in old stuff is partly due to the age of cultural overload in which we live. There is simply too much content these days. I long ago stopped trying to keep up. (In fact, I stopped trying to keep up in the 90s, I still haven’t seen Star Trek Deep Space Nine or The Sopranos.) But it’s not just that: there’s also something pleasant in the pace of this old material.
Old TV was created to a different plan, serving a different social need. It’s distant enough from the present, and I’m old enough now that I can disentangle it sufficiently from my own direct experience, so that I find part of the pleasure of old stuff is seeing the implied world created by what’s on screen.
When I watch old TV, it almost feels like I get to sit alongside a family gathered around their giant television at teatime, tuning in for the latest episode of a show they like. The old episodes invoke their own perfect audience. I get to experience the past, reflected on the screen.
There’s just so much there there, packed into the cultural products of the past. You can unfold so much from them (TV show as an unfolding text, one might even say). And when I watch or read things of which I have personal memories, like those comics, that historical moment is overlaid with personal sense memory. It’s a rich sensation. There’s an appeal to it, a kind of seeing-clearly, holding the weight of the past in a different way. It makes me more kindly disposed to the past, and to its denizens. They tried, we all tried, and they all just wanted to be scared by the slimy monsters Under The Mountain and laugh when Billy T James showed up for an incoherent cameo.
The golden age of science fiction is 12, and the golden age of music is 17, and there’s no mystery to me why we keep returning to these things as we age, why I go back to them now: we’re not done with them yet. The worlds and emotions and sensations created by art go deep, unfathomably deep. We’ll never touch bottom. I can return forever to Nirvana’s In Utero and Stephen King’s The Long Walk and Jim Cameron’s The Abyss and I’ll never scrape bottom. Other generations have their own touchstones that go just as deep, and I’ve been enjoying watching them, imagining the way they burrowed into the hearts of their era’s audience, but these are mine, and I’ll treasure them.
In Eagle & Tiger there’s a story about an alien who manufactured a plague to destroy humanity and was defeated but escapes death and sets about murdering everyone he meets. There’s also a story about an alien who comes to earth to ride a BMX because BMXs are cool. And that’s just the way it should be.
Twenty years ago this month Caroline and I went to Palestine. We travelled with a group called Olive Tours, whose mission was to give people an opportunity to see directly what was happening there, and the nature of the occupation of Palestine by Israel, by meeting people (both Palestinian and Israeli) working for peace. It was a time of change in the region: the recent deaths of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall had turned international eyes towards the behaviour of the Israeli state, and the separation wall was in the process of being assembled, transforming the nature of security between Israel and Palestine.
The twenty years since have brought little further change. Arafat died, then Hamas was elected in Gaza, and things calcified into an ongoing situation of ratcheting oppression, countered by continuous peaceful protest, studded with acts of violence; until October last year, when everything changed again.
Looking back over this now, what stands out to me is the defensive crouch Israel entered as a result of its role as an eternal occupying power, to the point that we were interrogated in foreign airports and felt the need to dispose of a copy of Private Eye magazine before it was spotted; and the utter ordinariness of the Palestinian people we met everywhere, enacting the shared act of resistance that is holding on to their humanity.
I sent eight emails to my travel mailing list describing this journey. They’ve been unavailable for many years but I’ve pulled them out of archive and added them to this blog on the appropriate dates; also added are the photos from the trip (which had to be smuggled out of the country by sending the memory card separately so our images of Palestine wouldn’t be discovered by soldiers at the airport).
One of those basketball moments where all my teammates were like “whoa what a move” and the opposition guy I scored on was like “whoa nice move” and I have no memory of what I did
Last week I fell over
I posted the above on social media a few days ago, and I’m still thinking about it. That version is obviously tuned for self-deprecating comedy, but there are a few more layers. Like:
I love playing basketball right now. I am not the player I was, unsurprisingly now I’m in my late 40s, but in some crucial ways I am as good a player as I’ve ever been. Raw athleticism was never exactly a strength for me! Solid old-man basics work well.
This particular game did not start with fortune smiling upon it. I was caught in a traffic jam, presumably an accident somewhere in the dense network of Wellington, that saw me arrive when the first quarter was well underway. I hate arriving late, and it has been years since the last time I did so! Apart from letting the team down (at least we weren’t short that night) it means I miss the warm-up period, getting some movement into my body, taking some shots, moving the ball around. Anyway, I do some stretches as the quarter winds down and take the court for the start of the second, pleased to be there, pleased to see everyone. It’s a good team, a friendly and supportive team, and I truly enjoy getting out and playing with them every week, even the games that don’t turn out so hot for me. Like last week! I fell over, all right, lost my balance as I sprinted up the court for a long fast break pass, lost my balance as I lost any sense of where the ball was going so it bounced off me as I tumbled to the floor. Far from my finest basketball moment!
I was on the court for less than a minute before I set up at the top of the key and the ball was passed in my direction, and in perfect rhythm I caught and shot a lovely mid-range jumper that I knew was going in before the pass had even reached my hands.
Flow.
Overall it was my best game in a good long time, a year probably. I made passes that turned into easy baskets, I hit shots when I had them, I defended well. I was feeling good about it all when in the last quarter I took a position on down low with my back to the basket, another spot in which I’m comfortable, and their biggest and best defender locked his body against mine as the ball arrived in my hands, and
and then I was under the hoop and the ball had gone in and the defender told me that was a nice move.
Dropping the left foot past the defender, shifting weight, quickly pivoting to the basket, all while controlling the ball so it isn’t a walking violation; there’re just enough moving parts you have to line up just right that it’s hard to think yourself through it. I remember being 16 and in the St Bernard’s College gymnasium with Coach Tony Brown and doing the drop step over and over again (and trying to finish with a little jump hook shooting motion that I never really got on with). I remember thinking it: move my foot… plant it… and now turn…
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described a concept called flow in his work in the 1990s: a state of perfect engagement in a challenging task, where both time and reflective thought disappear. (Recently it has acquired a lot of prominence in research around video games.) It’s the absence of deliberative/conscious thought that strikes me as interesting about a flow state. There can be quite sophisticated navigation of knowledge and decision-making processes, but it happens so smoothly and easily, there’s no sense of working at it, of choosing. Linking back to my conception of free will (i.e. our cognitive system manages difficult processing tasks by bouncing them through an experiential/reflective system that is consciousness, our conscious experience functioning as a control and mediation device, what we experience as conscious choice is the unconscious sum of these conscious experiences), the connections are pretty straightforward: flow is highly active processing that doesn’t need to pass through the consciousness. And it feels good.
Basketball is a reliable highlight of my week because it gets me to this place. Even better for me, it gets there in a small group context; experiencing harmony with others is profoundly satisfying (in the psyc literature it’s called synchrony – this Nature article has an overview).
In the role-playing games I create and play, flow is also achievable, but trickier to find. The level of abstract manipulation required in these games is a block. Compare improvisors who perform imaginative tasks together without the underlying reference structure that RPGs usually impose, and who can hit a flow state more easily. But it happens often enough, when the wind blows the right way, where game and players hit the right rhythm together.
I’m not really going anywhere with this post, just tapping down a series of thoughts, but maybe I’ve arrived at a personal call to action. If flow is important to me, and it clearly is, maybe I need to make that more of a priority in the games I play. I’ve been doing so much gameplay as work for years now – constantly testing this or that new game system, layering cognitive work into the experience – perhaps I need to put flow on the table a bit more prominently, and try and create those conditions a little more purposefully. Sounds like a good aim. Okay then.
(While I’m thinking about basketball and flow: the deliberately ungrammatical title of my novel about four teenage boys renegotiating their friendship, in move, is an allusion to this kind of unconscious action – their various connected friendships shift into a new configuration with the the same kind of instinctive flow and adjustment their basketball coach is trying to introduce to their teamwork. I put in move into creative commons some years ago, read it online or download it as a free ebook for your kindle or iphone or whatever)
These are the reckons you produce when you don’t actually know what you’re on about. These are reckons that get embarrassed by the most basic research. These, of course, are reckons most loudly voiced by idiot racists and arrogant populists.
Either the new government are proudly sharing these genuine reckons because they are that stupid; or they are cynically sharing their pretend reckons because they are eager for the support of bigoted fools. (There is no shortage of reckon-happy voices in the media who will be happy to protect this government from the consequences of its failures.)
Either way, they must think it doesn’t matter whether or not they are wrong, and who will be hurt as a result. They don’t care about families doing it tough, or people on a benefit, or anyone hurt by youth offending, or meeting climate change targets, or reducing smoking in communities, or the nature of democratic participation, or the importance of the Treaty at the heart of this nation.
This is easily the most embarrassing and pathetic and inadequate and unserious government this country has endured in my lifetime. Probably for generations before that as well.
