A couple of months ago, I sat down and rewatched Ridley Scott’s classic 1979 science-fiction horror film, Alien, a movie that was influential and unusual in cinema in large part because its sequels and spinoffs seemed bent on refuting it: Its well-received sequel Aliens, from James Cameron, deliberately went in a different direction, and the decidedly less well-received Alien 3 went in a different direction from that.
I recently saw a few of my mutuals on Twitter dissing the original film, calling it the product of a nihilistic era of cinema and accusing it of having few if any redeeming features. I am of a different opinion, so though I am ready to admit it has flaws, I am also happy to defend Alien as a great movie. But I think that greatness is at times despite, rather than because of, the film’s creators: There was a lot of pretentiousness behind Alien, but most of it either failed to make it to screen or was subtle enough that the average viewer could easily ignore it.
I wish to compare and contrast Alien with a short story by the late Octavia Butler, who in spite of her tragically short career and small corpus has over the last decade become something of a darling amongst the more vocally politically left wing of the science-fiction community. I read her story “Bloodchild” years ago, and it quickly became one of my favorites. It is in concept so similar to Alien that I convinced myself she meant it as a sort of answer to, or subversion of, the movie’s themes—which is not impossible, since she published the story in 1985, well after Alien made its appearance.
Perhaps I haven’t looked hard enough, but I have not seen anyone else discuss the parallels between these works. Although the subdued but sexually charged imagery of Alien has been interpreted (and over-interpreted) time and again thanks in large part to the unique creature design by the always-creepy H. R. Giger, most who discuss Butler are too busy obsessing over her black skin or her womanhood to grant her the place she deserves in the larger field of science fiction.
What characterizes both of these works, the horror film and the short story, is that they depict humans—vulnerable and mostly unwitting—coming into contact with an extraterrestrial species with endoparasitoid reproduction: That’s a two-bit way of saying these aliens spend their early life growing inside a host, which they then kill. In the real world, this kind of parasitism is known mostly from insects, but it’s creepy and disconcerting enough to make good fodder for sci-fi.
In both stories, the parasitically reproducing aliens are huge, powerful, and at times violent. Thematically, both Alien and “Bloodchild” use their basic concept for similar ends, presenting a sort of monstrous sexual menace involving a reversal of the usual roles, with men becoming “impregnated” and giving a gruesome kind of birth.
In this aspect, however, “Bloodchild” is the more successful of the two. The alien in Alien is simply a monster running on instinct. Although the screenwriter, Dan O’Bannon, described the action of the “facehugger”—an intermediate creature that implants the alien’s embryo—as performing “oral, homosexual rape,” this probably doesn’t come across to most casual viewers: The thing is an animal and acts like one. It’s a parasite, and what it does cannot, strictly speaking, be called either homosexual or rape.
By contrast, “Bloodchild” depicts the endoparasitic aliens (called “Tlic,” unfortunately) as intelligent and reasonably civilized, so the relationship between the Tlic and the humans who bear their young becomes a mutual one that is nonetheless fraught with tension. Butler herself described “Bloodchild” as a love story, and though that is likely to raise the average reader’s eyebrows as much as O’Bannon’s talk of homosexual rape does, she has more justification for that description.
By coincidence, O’Bannon originally planned something remotely similar for Alien: His original concept had the alien growing out of a ravenous adolescence into a calm and enlightened adulthood, and he envisioned an advanced alien civilization with an entire religion based around its inhabitants’ peculiar reproductive methods.
This of course never came to fruition, as the final version of the creature is simply a movie monster. Nonetheless, O’Bannon’s muse apparently grabbed Butler later to tease out the ideas he had left undeveloped.
Tomorrow, we’ll begin diving more deeply into the origins, plot lines, and themes of these works. Stay tuned.
