With Alien: Romulus in cinemas, a look at how Ridley Scott’s original Alien emerged from the New Hollywood of the 1970s and anticipated the blockbuster 1980s.
People often recall Alien primarily for the final act, in which Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, the ‘final girl’ on the good ship Nostromo, faces down the titular monster in the dark. With good reason, too. It is a thrilling climactic beat to Ridley Scott’s masterful ride in futuristic suspense.
What audiences often forget, to my mind, is everything else Alien does that signals it as a particularly important feature in a key Hollywood transition. A move away from the ‘new’ of the artistic auteur, who reigned supreme across the 1970s, and toward the imminent 1980s era of colourful, showy, blockbuster-baiting American excess.
Alien arrives at the tail end of one of American cinema’s more fascinating eras. The ‘New Hollywood’ arrived pistols drawn, as numerous historians including Mark Harris is his exemplary Scenes From A Revolution, the year 1967. Films such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie And Clyde or Mike Nichols’ The Graduate pushed at decades old Hollywood conventions regarding portrayals of sex, violence and shifting cultural mores, flinging open the doors wide to a new age of cinema.
This all took place amidst the backdrop of profound socio-political change across the 1960s, a febrile decade of political assassinations, Civil Rights unrest, and emerging counterculture among a sexually and emotionally liberated post-World War II generation. The hugely divisive Vietnam War threw this into sharp relief, triggering waves of activism connected to the ‘make love, not war’ movement.
As American society changed, so did Hollywood. The crumbling of the archaic, reactionary and conservative Hays Code, which strongly curtailed portrayals of controversial content on the big screen, coupled with the steady decay of the traditional movie studio system and their legion of contracted stars, allowed for a perfect storm of vibrant, renegade filmmaking by artists who saw an opportunity to make films truly reflective of their age.
The ‘New’ Hollywood gave birth to many of the iconic filmmakers who shaped the next half century of American cinema: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, the list goes on. Not to mention actors who became household names and later living legends. It’s easy to forget that Spielberg, someone so synonymous with what would now be Hollywood tradition, could have arrived initially as an outsider challenging convention.
You may be wondering what all of this has to do with Alien, especially as Ridley Scott can hardly be classed among New Hollywood filmmakers. Yet from my perspective, a film such as Alien could not have existed in the form we have venerated for over 40 years without the cinematic revolution of the American auteur. Scott might be British born, but he has always made films with an American sensibility – and that began with Alien.
What makes Alien, therefore, akin to New Hollywood cinema? We should look at ideas in play within Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s screenplay which often get overlooked in the science fiction horror theatrics. Noah Hawley, developing a new Alien series currently, described it so to Vanity Fair: “You know, one of the things that I love about the first movie is how 70s a movie it is, and how it’s really this blue collar space-trucker world in which Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton are basically Waiting For Godot. They’re like Samuel Beckett characters, ordered to go to a place by a faceless nameless corporation. The second movie is such an 80s movie, but it’s still about grunts. Paul Reiser is middle management at best. So, it is the story of the people you send to do the dirty work.”
Hawley describes Alien as a ’70s movie’, by which he means a film that often eschews fantasy, theatrics and escapist folly in favour of raw, gritty, often adult themes that would parallel America’s place in the 1960s hangover. Since the heyday of counterculture, Vietnam had turned into a morass of Cold War proxy horror, Charles Manson and his gang gave birth to the modern murderer, and even the President, Richard Nixon, was exposed as a crook. This combined with a gloomy economic landscape as the post-war boom years finally receded made for a relatively glum picture.
Alien feels like a signature reaction to the world of space escapism and space fantasy. Spacecraft in Alien don’t fire lasers or phasers, nor do they fly about space with super-powered engines faster than the speed of light. Their ships aren’t sleek cruisers exploring the galaxy, nor are they fighter craft capable of loop the loop rolls and strafe manoeuvres. Their crews are not naval officers, freedom fighters or scoundrels, and only a few of them are scientists. The world of Alien presents a future grounded in the cultural and sociological reality of the 1970s. It could almost be seen as a breakwater between earthy, paranoid 70s American cinema and the escapist, fantasy resurgence we would see in the 1980s.
There is of course debate as to whether Alien should be classified as a science fiction film at all. Many consider Scott’s film to be a haunted house story, or indeed an out-and-out horror. There is a strong case for both of these arguments. The world Alien shows us is not a world where the heroes save the day and escape cleanly in the nick of time. There is no Luke Skywalker with Jedi powers to aid these characters. There is no starship Enterprise that can beam them out before the ship explodes. The people in Alien could very readily be us. None of them look or sound like ‘future people’, as Starfleet officers in Star Trek (particularly post-1960s) frequently do. They don’t ascribe to archetypes, perhaps beyond Ellen Ripley. If anything she helped formulate one, being a key example of ‘Final Girl’ theory in horror film criticism and study. Alien could be the 1970s, were it not for the fact it is set in deep space.
In truth, thanks to largely non-canonical sources, Alien is set in the year 2122, now around a century away from our current time. While human development suggests it unlikely we will be ferrying ore in vast cargo ships across deep space in a mere hundred years, Alien nevertheless is concerned with commerce and capitalism to a degree few science fiction movies are (or were at the time), with the aforementioned characters of Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and Parker (Yaphet Kotto), frequently discussing pay and contracts with the constant sense they are underlings being fleeced by faceless bureaucrats who see them as nothing more than numbers on a spreadsheet. In an America of economic funk, characters in Alien bemoan their own financial circumstances.
Moreover, a strong streak of paranoia runs through Alien, mirroring conspiratorial anxiety across New Hollywood cinema in memorable thrillers such as The Parallax View or All the President’s Men, the latter of which explores Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Alien’s revelations expose how the Nostromo workers are intended victims of a shadowy plot by ‘the Company’ to recover alien bio-technology, via Ian Holm’s android Ash and his secret order. The crew are literally described as ‘expendable’. Tom Skerritt’s seasoned, wily Dallas quite rightly tells Ripley, “I don’t trust anybody”.
Sometimes you’re not paranoia and they really are out to get you.
This feels like a lesson of 70s cinema, where cynicism reigned in an era where Americans had lost faith in the political and economic system, and Alien can be read as a reaction to that world. The xenomorph itself, one of cinema’s more brutal examples of the external alien ‘other’, replete with all kinds of violent sexual imagery and subtext, equally serves to be a cautionary tale against the rampant forces of capitalism who would exploit for their own gain.
Ripley’s explosion of anger at ‘Mother’, the ironically named computer system that guides the Nostromo, attacking the software while screaming “you bitch!” once she realises the truth, is forgotten under her memorable cry at the end of Aliens of “get away from her, you bitch!”, but the comparisons are key. Mother in Alien is the faceless corporate system. ‘Mother’ in Aliens becomes the vicious Queen, seeking to kill the child, Newt, who Ripley has come to mother herself. In James Cameron’s film, motherhood morphs into something more outwardly benign, whereas in Scott’s film, that care and stewardship is something altogether more shadowy and sinister. As Alien is a movie of the 70s, Aliens is deep-rooted in 1980’s social mythology.
Yet we must also appreciate Alien’s existence in the wake of Star Wars, which almost immediately transformed American cinema into an entirely new paradigm, one that arguably informed Hollywood for the next half-century to a greater degree than any other. Star Wars reintroduced the idea not just of science-fiction but escapism to the masses, as did Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, which coupled with Jaws a little earlier, showed Hollywood a new direction that nicely complimented Reagan’s neoliberal, free market America. That of high concept, star-driven storytelling, built on action heroes and fantastical concepts, which pulled families back to the emerging multiplexes with ‘blockbuster’ scheduling and marketing.
Aliens served as just one of many hugely anticipated sequels in the 1980s that served this new blockbuster dynamic, where the auteur – still active, of course – became subject to the whims of a dollar-driven system. Some, like Spielberg, adapted and thrived within it. Others, such as Coppola, arguably struggled. Scott, never being part of it, didn’t have to worry about it consuming him, but there is little doubt Alien – existing in the wake of Star Wars but a little before the dawn of this new paradigm – serves both masters. It is both crowd-pleaser and gritty, sometimes understated horror that crawls under your skin, railing against heartless capitalist forces and displaying a paranoid cynicism for a world that did not turn out as everyone hoped.
One of the joys in Alien is in rediscovering something new and compelling on each watch. There are undoubtedly more hidden truths and realisations in Scott’s film, and ways it will speak to both the 1970s and our world today. It is, in that regard, truly timeless.
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