ESSAY: Are the ALIEN Films Dinosaur Movies?
NOTE: This essay contains spoilers for the film ALIEN: COVENANT (2017, Dir. Ridley Scott)
At first glance it’s a question that appears to be a total non sequitur. After eight films and countless comics, novels and video games there has never once been any indication that the Xenomorphs – the genetically engineered, black skinned, bio-mechanical, shape-shifting “perfect organisms” at the heart of the ALIEN franchise - are dinosaurs, let alone a product of terran evolution. Even the Xenomorphs’ most direct literary antecedent, the Coeurl from A. E. van Vogt’s 1939 short-story “Black Destroyer,” is decidedly mammalian – feline to be precise – in nature.
Nevertheless these facts apparently were not enough to give scholar W.J.T. Mitchell pause while writing his groundbreaking cultural study of dinosaurs, The Last Dinosaur Book (University of Chicago Press, 1998), in which he posits that…
“Ridley Scott’s ALIEN films are an exception to this rule in their adherence to the most pessimistic logic of dinotopia. The initial discovery of the petrified alien creature is presented as a paleontological find. The space travelers descend into the fossilized belly of an ancient subterranean dragon, a vaulted, cavernous labyrinth supported by enormous ribs. Their presence revives the dormant eggs waiting in the giant womb, and unleashes the rebirth of a monster whose blood is not merely cold, but composed of metal-eating acid. The reborn monsters are ‘body-snatchers’ who breed by using human bodies as temporary wombs until they are ready for their ghastly and deadly ‘birth.’ The monsters are regarded as a potentially valuable military technology by the intergalactic corporation financing the expedition. The alien, it becomes clear, is actually the ‘monstrous double’ of the very corporate state that wants to exploit its power.” (p. 38-39)
When Mitchell uses the term “dinotopia” he is not referring to the acclaimed series of illustrated novels by writer/artist James Gurney. Rather he means any fictive world in which dinosaurs and humans are imagined as coexisting. The “rule” of such imaginary realms, which Mitchell observes here, is the often inherently violent conflict for survival which dinosaurs and humans appear to be perpetually engaged in. Moreover, in most instances it is the humans who emerge triumphant: “Dinotopia seems to require a happy ending for mammals, no matter how arbitrary.” (p. 38) The ALIEN movies then are an exception to this rule in that the human characters always loose. Oh true, there may occasionally be survivors of encounters with the Xenomorphs, but as was the case with the series’ early protagonist Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) survival is no guarantee of a happy ending.*
But even if this is true, it is an idea still predicated on the notion that the ALIEN movies are somehow dinosaur films. How could this be? The screenplay for the original ALIEN (1979, Dir. Ridley Scott) was written by screenwriter and director Dan O’Bannon (1946-2009) who openly acknowledged on multiple occasions that he owed the idea for ALIEN to a number of different cinematic, sequential and literary sources; one of the most significant film influences being the 1958 sci-fi film IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (Dir. Edward L. Cahn) about a reptilian humanoid extraterrestrial that sneaks adored an Earth bound spaceship departing from Mars and subsequently begins picking off the human crew one by one until they can eventually blast it out the airlock (Valaquen).
But while ALIEN may borrow IT!’s narrative structure, the film’s thematic elements come from none other than American horror icon H.P. Lovecraft. O’Bannon was a huge devotee of Lovecraft and even wrote and directed several films based on Lovecraft’s stories with ALIEN owning much of its affect to Lovecraft’s seminal 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness about an Antarctic expedition lead by a team of paleontologists/geologists who subsequently stumble upon the ruins of a prehistoric alien city buried in the ice. Exploration of the city leads to the shocking discovery that these aliens were probably responsible for the creation of human life and the horrifying revelation that the synthetic shape-shipping monsters, called Shoggoths, which did them in are still alive and on the prowl. Of all the films in the ALIEN series it is PROMETHEUS (2012, Dir. Ridley Scott) which makes the greatest use of the themes of “cosmic horror” found in Lovecraft’s novella (McWilliam, 531-545), but nearly all the films – even 2004’s ALIEN VS. PREDATOR (Dir. Paul W.S. Anderson) – owes a slight debt to this story.
As maybe evident from the occupation of the protagonists, Lovecraft scholars are largely in agreement that H.P.’s primary influence for writing Mountains was his reading of contemporary paleo-fiction beginning with Katherine Metcalf Roof’s now painfully obscure 1930 short-story “A Million Years After” about a revivified dinosaur egg (Joshi and Schultz, 11) as well as classic Edgar Rice Burroughs’ works including 1914’s At the Earth’s Core (Fulwiler, 64) and 1918’s The Land that Time Forgot (Debus, 79), as well as John Tain’s 1929 novella The Greatest Adventure about an Antarctic expedition which discovers a lost world of mutant dinosaurs created by an ancient technologically advance race (Price, 141 & Debus, 77-78). As in Lovecraft’s Mountains, the scientists in Tain’s novella discover that the ancient race which created the mutant dinosaurs ultimately wiped themselves out when their experiments lead to the cultivation a deadly parasitic spore – a plot point which leads us back around to latest installment in the ALIEN franchise; ALIEN: COVENANT.
Considering this lineage it is now possible to draw a line directly linking the ALIEN movies to paleo-fiction thus further legitimizing Mitchell’s claim. While the fact remains that the Xenomorphs are not dinosaurs in even the loosest sense of the term, it is possible to argue that they are still influenced by the kind of stories we tend to tell about dinosaurs.
On this latter point I am reminded of Joshua Bellin’s provocative book Framing Monsters (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005) which argues that the ALIEN and JURASSIC PARK film series both play off American cultural anxieties concerning the fear of infertility among the ‘right’ kind of people (i.e. white, patriarchal, heterosexual, married couples) in the face of the illicit and unregulated explosion of offspring among the ‘wrong’ kind of people whether that be “clever [LGBTQ] girls” who have figured out how to reproduce in a “single sex environment” as in JURASSIC PARK (1993, Dir. Steven Spielberg) or the black-skinned “super-predators” of ALIENS (1986, Dir. James Cameron) ruled over by their matriarchal Queen who Bellin sees as an embodiment of WASP boggart that is the unwed African-American welfare mother (Bellin, 106-136).
Whether one agrees with Bellin’s analysis or not depends on how convincing one finds his arguments in which case I would encourage those interested to seek out his book, but personally I do find them convincing insofar that I see both the ALIEN and JURASSIC PARK franchises as promoting a narrative which celebrates the archetype of the hetero-normative nuclear family while figuratively and literally demonizing – be those demons dinosaurs or extraterrestrials – those who by choice or circumstance do not wish to confine their future to the American dream of a married life in which the husband works and the wife remains in their white picket fenced home with their two kids and a dog. Indeed, those who reject such a lifestyle are either naïve workaholics – such as Claire Dearing of JURASSIC WORLD (2015, Dir. Colin Trevorrow) – who only need to be shown the folly of their ways and given the opportunity to redeem themselves by accepting the role of foster-mother to the children whose lives their refusal to be responsible parents has imperiled, OR they are mad scientists who, in an almost textbook example of the feminist interpretation of the myth of Frankenstein, have decided to try and take the process of baby-making into their own hands and as a result created something unnatural and monstrous.
This once again leads back around to the new film ALIEN: COVENANT which pushes this latter idea to the furthest limits it has ever been since James Whales’ classic BRIDE OF FRANKENSTIEN (1935), with its revelation that the Xenomorphs are the creation of PROMETHEUS’s sociopathic, sexually frustrated and now possibly gay (or at least bi) android David who has given rise to such horrors as a byproduct of his angst over his inability to [pro]create.
As Mitchell noted it does appear that, in the end, the alien – and dinosaur – are indeed actually the “monstrous double” of the very systems of social indoctrination and control which surround our everyday lives. And even more troubling, according to the ALIEN films, they’re winning.
SOURCES
Bellin, Joshua. Framing Monsters (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005)
Debus, Allen A. Dinosaurs Ever Evolving (McFarland Press, 2016)
Fulwiler, William. “E.R.B. and H.P.L.” in Black Forbidden Things, Edited by Robert M. Price (Starmont House, 1992)
Joshi, S.T. and David E. Schultz. An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (Hippocampus Press, 2004)
McWilliam, David. “Beyond the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror and Posthuman Creationism in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012)” in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts Vol. 26, Iss. 3 (Idaho State University, 2015)
Mitchell, W.J.T. The Last Dinosaur Book (University of Chicago Press, 1998)
Price, Robert M. “About The Greatest Adventure” in The Antarktos Cycle 2nd Ed., Edited by Robert M. Price (Chaosium Inc., 2006) Valaquen, “Alien and its Antecedents” (Feb 26, 2015) at Strange Shapes: https://alienseries.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/alien-and-its-antecedents/
* The ALIEN films are particularly notorious for ending on what seems to be a positive note only to pull the rug out from under the characters in the sequel. ALIEN ends with Ripley seemingly having survived her encounter with a Xenomorph only for the sequel, ALIENS, to reveal that she has been in hypersleep for 57-years with everyone she’s ever known and loved having died. ALIENS then ends with Ripley being granted a surrogate family in the form of Newt and Hicks only for ALIEN3 to open with the revelation that Newt and Hicks were killed while in hypersleep. PROMETHUS likewise seems to end on a somewhat positive note with Shaw having survived and it is only in ALIEN: COVENANT that we learn that Shaw was subsequently murdered and experimented on by David. COVENANT actually breaks with tradition by ending on an overt downer; it is clear in the film’s closing moments that Dany and everyone else onboard the Covenant is doomed.
