Where to begin with Alien 3? Its lengthy and disastrous production history makes it far easier to talk around than about. The early nadir which David Fincher managed to crawl out of, a textbook case of studio interference, a William Gibson what-could-have-been, Pitch Black’s distant cousin, a plethora of scrapped ideas like Xenomorphs invading Earth or a planet made of wood… better to consider it in these respects than as an actual movie. Making things worse is that when it came time in 2003 for a home release, Fincher refused to have a hand in the extended cut; what we have is an editor’s cut based on decade-old director’s notes. Layers upon layers of speculation. And while The Assembly Cut does an admirable job in patching together plot holes, the result is a lumbering two-and-a-half-hour Frankenstein picture. Regarding the confusing-but-shorter theatrical release, Anthony Lane remarked how the plot “sputters instead of pushing on, but when the chase is on, all is forgiven” — giving the same consideration one does to a disappointing family member.
Before we gather the grace to forgive it, it’s already ruined Sunday dinner with its dour presence. Ripley’s found family from Aliens is promptly killed off during the title sequence. While spending the previous two movies in the blue-collar company of space truckers and colonial marines, she’s now in a derelict prison. The inmates are all maximum-security types, many of them rapists, and all of them have turned rapturously Christian (a relic from Vincent Ward’s wood-planet script). Religion keeps them in order. A woman’s appearance has the potential to topple it, better to keep her out of sight. With Ripley there must also come at least one Xenomorph. The idea of an alien killing machine prowling the halls is worth at least as much as a woman to the prison’s social order, besides the fact that few trust a woman who just crashed on their doorstep, comatose. Until the Xenomorph shows up in the middle of the cafeteria, Sigourney Weaver plays Cassandra: she knows too much, she’s grown numb from the trauma, and to anyone who doesn’t share her knowledge, she’s just hysterical. What she can’t predict is that there is now a gestating Xenomorph queen inside her. A team from Weyland-Yutani is arriving soon to extract it for examination, but Ripley knows better — along with anyone who’s seen the series’ previous entries. The corporation will possess something beyond their control, which they likely have a sinister purpose for in the first place. And prisoners are just as expendable as truckers or marines.
Ripley’s realization – and this is when the film gets to be a real downer – is that she has to die before her would-be rescuers arrive. After much insistence upon this, and after reluctantly postponing it to hunt and kill an already-hatched Xenomorph, alongside the prisoners and their self-ordained priest, Dillon (played by Charles S. Dutton), she does get what she wants. What we’re left with is Ripley’s awkwardly green-screened body drifting into a lake of fire, arms outstretched (Zach Snyder often gets pot-shots for blunt imagery like this, but he learned from the best — the man even got his start doing music videos within a production company Fincher started!).
Counting six movies (or eight if you count the Predator crossovers) among a genre rife with shovelled-out sequels, the Alien franchise is a bit of an outlier. Nonetheless, it’s Alien 3 that not only feels disappointing as a sequel to many, but also seems to question its own value. When the big twist comes and Ripley has her own end in mind, there’s still an hour left. It’s not a stretch to think of her impatience as a bit meta, or that Fincher, Weaver, or one of the five credited writers just wants to stop making Alien 3. Sheer ennui seeps off the screen and into the very idea of sequels of science fiction and of horror. What’s the point of it all? I do genuinely hold this movie dearly, and to understand it, it has to be understood on its own terms — that of a cultural product tasking itself with transcending its origins. Alien 3 really is a family affair, one which moves from sensation to the intuitively intimate, burying itself deep in a Lovecraftian surrounding.
Are the Alien movies actually Lovecraftian? Is there such a thing as a Lovecraftian movie in the first place? There’s a belligerent sibling-rivalry between horror film and the idea of Lovecraft’s oeuvre. It’s easy to say that his allusive purple prose is particularly unadaptable — that it is anathema to the camera. At the same time, the horror genre has to deal with the long shadow his influence has cast. When an interviewer compared the two, Clive Barker brought up the anti-Lovecraftian notion of making “precisely imagined and elegantly photographed villains,” and this precision is unavoidable. Alien 3 adds allusions between the Xenomorph and Cthulhu – how Paul McGann’s weak-willed Golic worships it, calls it “the dragon” – but the former’s appearance is far from phantasmagoric. After a dramatic emergence, the first shot we see of its body is a wide pan; the Xenomorph takes up the smallest fraction of the frame as it bounds away. Still, the look is what drives Lovecraft’s prose. If what it sees is indescribable, the technique is still meticulous. “Polaris”, one of his earlier and shorter stories, serves as a prime example of this. Although, to call “Polaris” a story feels inadequate. Lovecraft’s prose is rough here, making it more of a hodgepodge of the tropes which he would later refine — including the most ridiculous of his invented proper nouns.
The story’s narrator is haunted by the glare of the north star. Looking at it leads him to dream of the seemingly far-flung city of Olathoë, in the land of Lomar. Day by day the dream-city looms closer, until he is “no longer a stranger in [its] streets.” But just as it supercedes waking life, the Inutos – “squat, hellish, yellow fiends” from an unknown, far-off land – are announced to have conquered the city of Daikos and now have Olathoë in their sights. A military defense is shored with the narrator’s closest friend, Alos, leading the charge. The narrator himself, however, is feeble in every aspect, save for his vision; he must keep watch from afar and give signal in case of an ambush. Eventually the dream fades, though to the narrator it is wholly real and his friends are nightmares making him fall asleep on the job, thus letting the city fall. The story ends with the narrator once again staring at Polaris, desperate to know the fate of Olathoë, but the star “recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.”
The narrator’s friends try to bring him into reality by asserting that it has been home to no one, “save for squat yellow creatures, blighted by the cold, whom they call ‘Esquimaux’.” That name ends up blending in with Lovecraftian gibberish like “Pnakotic” and “Zobnarian” — and there is the rather unsubtle description of “squat” and “yellow” to describe both them and the Inutos. The people currently residing in the Arctic, whom we call indigenous, are implied to be preceded by a more “civilized” society. In other words, Polaris’ horror is that a “great replacement” has already happened. Of course that fashionable theory is about white people being bred out instead of conquered, but for Lovecraft, racial and sexual paranoia were inextricably linked. A body which differentiates itself is horrifying: it ruptures perception; it does not know its place. And when viewed scientifically, race differentiates itself endlessly. More than any one race, Lovecraft was against intermixing: “the real problem is the quadroon and octoroon — and still lighter shades.” The Louisiana cultists in ‘The Call of Cthulhu‘ commit mass slaughter and are, of course, “mixed blood, and mentally aberrant.”
These racialized caricatures which pervade Lovecraft’s writing are a compulsion he would rather avoid, ignore, and obliterate. “Polaris”’ narrator completely misses the Inutos’ arrival, and fathoms the existence of “Esquimaux” to be a bad dream. Lovecraft’s antisemitism relaxed not because of his brief marriage to a Jewish woman, Sonia Greene — who left him partially because of his antisemitic tirades. Rather, it relaxed after he saw how orthodox Jews in New York preserved their culture, that is, how they refrained from mixing with the white population. Even sex itself is a sort of contaminant. Nobody’s subjective existence is free from it: our origins trace back to conception, and Lovecraft was writing at the same time Freud was studying how endemic it is throughout life. The only way the racial Other ceases its rupturing is when it is completely abjected from its self. The narrator of “Herbert West—Reanimator” assists the titular mad scientist in using the corpse of a black man who tied in a boxing match as a test subject, described as “a loathsome, gorilla-like thing [….] [It] must have looked even worse in life.” The mere implication of life is ugly: the corpse as the only end to sex and its contamination.
When attempting to read Lovecraft’s racism into his stories, it’s easy to view those slumbering gods – which drive one mad at their very sight – as substitutes for the Other. In this case abjection is never complete banishment, but a deferral. I find it more likely that they are a strange comfort: an endpoint to rational thought reflecting his own attitudes, which manage to exhaust description in its purity, and provide an origin to humanity which escapes sex. “At the Mountains of Madness“ makes this patently obvious, for all its looming dread. An asexual, atheist author, who developed socialist ideas late in life conceives of the Old ones — ageless masters of science who reproduce asexually and whose “government was evidently complex and probably socialistic.”
Regarding the Alien’s Xenomorph, the Nostromo’s science officer, Ash (played by Ian Holm), has a rather Lovecraftian view: “I admire its purity.” This line is uttered soon after the Nostromo’s crew is revealed to have been duped into picking up the Xenomorph and delivering it to Weyland-Yutani corp (that horrifying message from the computer monitor: “CREW EXPENDABLE”). Concurrent with that reveal are two more: that Ash was in on it from the start, and that he’s an android. A completely asexual being enraptured by the purity and horror — and of course the surviving crew who confront him are its two women and one black man. In a movie which practically made H. R. Giger an eponym for horror art, Ian Holm’s performance still manages to compete in terms of monstrosity. It’s subtle, to be sure: Ash is always off to the side whenever the crew is complaining about the food, or the pay. Especially upon rewatch, the way he looks at everyone is oh-so-conspicuous. He always seems to be anticipating something: “Kane’s son” (blunt biblical imagery was there from the start!), and what beautiful corpses the crew would make. Early drafts of Alien’s screenplay included casual nudity and free sex among the crew — ideas which the 80’s would soon make dated, but which would have further elaborated Ash’s alien relationship to his coworkers. During the pivotal scene in which Ripley tries to prevent an ambiguously infected Kane from entering the ship, a shot of her manning the control station cuts to a reverse of Ash in a different room; his contemptuous gaze stitches the two of them together.
With Ash’s presence then, Lovecraft’s narrators are displaced from being the story to being in it, coolly lurking from the outset. Two movies and thirteen years later, there is nobody present to measure, examine, or manipulate… Ripley has no task, nor a crew; there is no destination. All that remains to linger are those existential questions — What’s the point? Where can we possibly go from here? The cultists have all been put behind bars, and we are locked up with them. Susan Sontag once wrote that “every major event is haunted, and not only by its representation as an image [….] [O]ur reaction to events in the present seeks confirmation in the mental outline, with appropriate calculations, of the event in its projected, ultimate form.” Thus science fiction. In the case of Alien 3, this projected image is not just a prognosis of the future, but a wild flinging across time and space. Mass incarceration is meant to be ignored — so, with the appropriate calculations, is an entire planet solely for that purpose thrust lightyears away from view, not its ultimate form?
Upon discovering the evil lurking inside of her, Ripley doesn’t turn immediately despondent; at first she copes by going jagged and sardonic, knowing the Xenomorph won’t kill her. The evil on the outside, scurrying around like a rabid dog, is the closest thing she has to family. She knows where to find it too: “It’s just down there… in the basement.” Aaron (played by Ralph Brown), the prison’s security officer, protests: “This whole place is a basement!” “It’s a metaphor,” she replies. A metaphor for what? Too much and nothing at all. As I’ve already mentioned, the prison planet on its face is a metaphor for actual prisons, whose presence and population in the US began dramatically increasing from the late 80’s to early 90’s. And prison is Hell; Charles S. Dutton’s ecclesial elocution as Dillon makes that fact clear. Hell is all he and his fellow inmates know. Yet his faith is not blind contrition, as his speech during Aliens’ Newt’s funeral makes clear: “Why? … Why are the innocent punished? [….] She won’t ever know the hardship and grief for those of us left behind. We commit these bodies to the void with a glad heart. For within each seed, there is the promise of a flower.” That scene is intercut with the Xenomorph’s emergence from the hanging corpse of an ox; following the last line is its ironic fulfillment in a close-up of birth viscera. In both the funeral and birth the camera constantly pans and dollies: settling just to anxiously start moving again. Each scene moves in opposite directions to form a suffocating counterpoint.
I mentioned earlier the nonchalance of the Xenomorph’s full appearance, but the edit gives it weight. Each shot other than the Xenomorph – the funeral attendees, the panoply of butcher’s equipment, and the larger body it emerges from – is a jigsaw piece which hints at the massacre to come. The husbandry/butchery of the planet’s oxen is the inmates’ Protestant vocation/prison labour (the distinction is blurry on this basement/prison/Hell/planet), and via match-cuts between the hanging ox, Ripley, and Dillon, humans and animals are shown to share a common fate. They are all test subjects.
Like the panopticon could implant the gaze of a prison guard without his presence being necessary, the scientific gaze is implanted in Alien 3’s prisoners. In a 2008 interview, Fincher said he was trying to make a movie where Ripley “galvanize[s] the wretched to self-sacrifice”; it is the predestination of genetic pseudoscience which prevents them from seeing their lives and deaths as meaningful. Each inmate has XYY chromosomes, purportedly making them predisposed to violent crime. This fashionable theory was yesterday’s style by Alien’s release — I doubt anyone took it seriously thirteen years later. (There were better excuses for injustice by then, like the job opportunities a new prison might provide.) It’s there as a convenience: one extraneous letter makes reproduction a curse. Diagnoses are molded into the bluntly self-deprecating term “Y-chromo boy.” And lest we forget the longest-standing pseudoscience, the inmates also redirect their self-loathing into mocking Aaron’s 85-point IQ.
The prison does have a doctor, Clemens (played by Chales Dance), but he is not the origin of the internalized gaze, nor is he excluded from it. His introduction – injecting Ripley with a nondescript cocktail and giving Newt an autopsy at her request – is rather deceptive in this regard. Dance’s performance is a cocktail of affability and condescension: Herbert West and the mad scientist characters who followed him have left too strong a mark for this to be trustworthy. After Clemens and Ripley have detached sex, he strips away the artifice of authority. It turns out he’s an ex-con and ex-morphine addict, though that isn’t what got him jailed. After clocking out of a 36-hour hospital shift, he “got a little drunk,” right before getting called back in and accidentally killing eleven patients via misdose. “So, do you still trust me with a needle?” Ripley responds silently; she just tilts her head up and gives a faint smile: the recognition of a kindred spirit.
Right on cue, the Xenomorph appears from the ceiling tiles and makes a meal out of Clemens. Like with the funeral speech, narration seems to summon the thing. When Ripley goes searching for it in “the basement” she just wants to talk. All these seem like holdovers from the Vincent Ward script, in which the wood planet’s monks perform an exorcism to release the demonic creature from Ripley’s body. Medical and spiritual diagnosis are reunited. The Xenomorph, and the general dejection permeating Alien 3 could also be seen the opposite way — not spiritual evil, but physical sickness. That line about needles calls AIDS in particular to mind. The Xenomorph queen lies dormant inside Ripley; she has no idea when, if ever, it will become a danger, nor what that danger will be. But as Sontag pointed out in “AIDS and its Metaphors” (which her previous quote also comes from), the epidemic is itself a part of the endemic practise of using plagues as a political metaphor. An oncoming plague is integrated with fear of foreigners, the idea of it reaching western society, and even more so the “average” citizen (white, heterosexual, and with no ties to drug use in the case of AIDS), is unthought of. In other words it is a metaphor for societal dejection; it comes from and remains with those who are not us. Reading the basement as a metaphor for AIDS makes it a metaphor for a metaphor. That oh-so-Lovecraftian act of speaking around something, displacing it into something similar, becomes a prison for those it is used on. After killing Clemens the Xenomorph crawls right up to Ripley’s ear, a mouth which speaks nothing and represents nothing.
In the end, the scientific observer arrives to properly diagnose the situation. In a film whose color scheme is the dirtiest of oranges, greens, and blues, the white lab coats of the Weyland-Yutani team are angelic. Clemens’ same offer of trust is extended by a man with the same face as Aliens’ Bishop. The queen could be extracted for study: “it would make a magnificent specimen.” The scientist desires something which fascinates, and that he can only describe in the vaguest of terms; Ripley knows she will be the one cast out in the end, not it. People like her, like those she has galvanized, are not subjects of their own under his gaze. When she starts backing up towards the lake of fire, the scientist instructs a film crew he brought to quit recording. Ripley’s death is a denial of the bindings of a rational image – a literal dissolve. Surely there will be no resurrection, but the act still ripples out as a call for the creation of new ways of speaking. It’s for those dejected and dizzied by their oppressor’s classifications to heed it.
