PART TWO: ‘The option to override the reality-distruct sequence has now expired...’
A more transcendent view of Alien.
Once again, spoilers aplenty!
All the interpretations I have listed above are in accord with the idea that what we see in the film is supposed to be real. If this were a clear story of a hapless crew who encounter a monster and die trying to defeat it, then I contend that all of these images and symbols in the film point to the underlying political, legal and emotional framework that informs their judgements and their mistakes.
However, we can look at it as a film about transcendent reality, in which several ‘wake-points’ are embedded, at any of which the characters could question the nature of the events surrounding them. These are points where they could become aware of the unreality of their situation and emerge into a higher consciousness, understanding that the world around them is not real. This need not mean escaping the illusion itself, but achieving lucidity within it, and thus the opportunity to gain control over the ‘dream’. I believe there are clear pointers in the film itself that we should see it that way and first among them is the close comparison that can be made between this film and a story in which the characters are within an illusory world and are presented with many such occasions to stop and question the solidity of their universe.
There are a good number of plot-similarities between the film Alien and Philip K Dick’s 1970 novel, A Maze of Death. In the Dick novel, an ill-matched group of colonists arrive on a small planetoid, Delmak-O, but soon find themselves threatened by a demon-like monster that lives there. It is called the ‘Form Destroyer’ and it kills them one by one.
Although it is not quite so close a match that it could be said that Alien is actually an adaptation of A Maze of Death, there are, nevertheless, a great many very clear parallels between the two narratives. One of the colonists in A Maze of Death, Betty Jo Berm, talks of “unusual life forms beyond the perimeter of the colony.” In order to investigate, they would have to “go deeper, farther and farther away from the colony.” There is nothing else for them to do because they are waiting to “receive ... instructions from the satellite.” Their purpose on the planetoid is supposed to be explained by a radio transmission from a satellite, but the message is garbled and accidentally erased. Likewise, the crew of the Nostromo receive a distorted and incomprehensible ‘message’ that could explain why they are on their planetoid. The colonists “have one vast fear, and that is this: there is no purpose to us being here, and we’ll never be able to leave.” All of them came in a small shuttle that could land but not take off again. In, Alien, the Nostromo very nearly does not take off again, so badly damaged is it when it lands.
In Dick’s novel, colonist Ben Tallchief is the first to die. “Cold wind licked at them and they shivered; they drew together against the hostile presence of Delmak-O...” Tallchief’s body is brought into the colonists’ living quarters and placed “up on the high, metal-topped table” ready for Dr. Babble to do his autopsy, just as Kane’s (still-living) body is delivered to the medical section and placed on a table by ‘Dr’ Ash.
In the film, Alien, there is a strange crashed vessel on the planetoid. In the novel, on Delmak-O, there is this mysterious ‘Building’ which may contain some clue as to the monster’s true nature. The colonists learn that “there’re things out there that we don’t understand. There is a ... big gray building - really big - with turrets, windows, I would guess about eight floors high.” Vaguely like a description of the alien craft, but it may be worth noting here that in Dan O’Bannon’s original script for Alien, there was not only an abandoned spaceship on the planetoid, but also there was a big, grey building. This was a large pyramid: ‘a crumbling, ancient edifice, made of eroded grey stones, windowless, tapering toward the top... As they draw near, it becomes clear that the pyramid is roughly 50 feet tall.’
The Delmak-O colonist, Morley, wonders if this building is inhabited but no-one had gone too close to it, it was too “forbidding.” Each of the surviving colonists sees a different sign over the door of their building as they approach it. When the Form Destroyer attacks early on, like the alien creature in the film, it appears to them in a much smaller guise. We are told that it has come from the Building. “It’s a sort of offspring, I suppose,” Susie says. “Anyhow it’s exactly like the Building but smaller... It’s alive...” Susie feels protective towards the tiny building. “Don’t hurt it,” she says to them. “...It’s harmless.” Remember what Ash says when the smaller version of the alien appears: “Don’t touch it!” Susie is also wrong in saying that it is harmless.
“Do you think we should arm ourselves?” one of the colonists asks, “If there’s someone after us to kill all of us...” The Nostromo’s crew certainly think they need weapons.
As Ripley suggests the surviving crew-members do, the colonists “vote by a show of hands” although this is a vote for a leader, not to decide who will be next to die, although the language Ripley employs echos that of colonist Wade Frazer in the Dick novel. “Is that satisfactory to everyone?” he asks and, as in Alien, there is a note of dissent: “There was a sardonic undertone to his voice, and Seth Morley did not like it.”
Colonist Susie Smart tells them that, “Jung believed that our attitudes toward our actual mothers and fathers are because they embody certain male and female archetypes...” she says, pointing out that he held that there was “the great bad earthfather and the good earth-father and the destroying earthfather, and so forth...” In this sense, it is even more telling that the Nostromo’s computer is called Mother.
“Where are you, mighty Form Destroyer, you decayer of life? Come and fight with me!” calls Tony, eager to engage with it, as is Captain Dallas when he is searching in the ducts. When we do see it, the Form Destroyer does have a lot in common with the alien creature:
“A bent shape which crept blindly, as if accustomed to the darkness within the Earth. It looked up at him with filmed-over gray eyes; he saw and understood the shirt of dust which clung to it ... dust trickled silently down its bent body and drifted into the air. And it left a fine trail of dust as it moved... It was badly decayed. Yellowed, wrinkled skin covered its brittle bones. Its cheeks were sunken and it had no teeth.”
Well, the alien creature in the film has teeth, right enough, and it leaves slime instead of dust but in most other ways, they would seem close cousins indeed.
The colonists are able to receive some guidance from a creature they call ‘the Tench’, but when they question it as to the nature of their world, it ‘dies’ and in doing so reveals that it was really a computer all along. When they ask the Tench for information about their own ship, it bursts. Dick tells us that the colonists “stood for a time, not speaking, gazing at the ruin that had been the tench. Gelatin everywhere ... a circle of it, on all sides of the central remains... Seth Morley... could distinguish electronic components under the gelatin, exposed by the tench’s explosion, the hidden core - and electronic computer - lay visible. Wiring, transistors, printed circuits, tape storage drums, Thurston gate-response crystals, basic irmadium valves by the thousand, lying scattered everywhere on the ground like minute Chinese firecrackers...”
What a fine description this would be of the disassembled Ash, too. Dr Babble asks if anyone knew it was not organic, but they had not known, just as the crew of the Nostromo had no inkling that Ash was not human.
In the end, we find that the planetoid was a hallucination, produced by the computer, the ‘Tench’. The ‘colonists’ are members of the crew of a starship, trapped in orbit. They indulge in this role-playing, virtual reality game to distract themselves from their fate and to prevent insanity. They discover, however, that each time they play, they fall victim to their own inner emotional conflicts, which are externalised by the ‘Form Destroyer’. This being a Philip K Dick novel, there is a strong hint to us that even this outside ‘reality’ may also be another illusion, in which the ‘Form Destroyer’ lurks too.
When they are ‘awake’ again, colonist Mary accuses Russell of wanting to “try to take over the ship ... take it away from Captain Belsnor.” But Russell denies this. “All I’m interested in is keeping the peace. That’s why I was sent here; that’s what I intend to do. Whether anyone else wants me to or not.” How very like the sort of answer Ripley would give.
In their despair, one of them fantasises about breaking out of the spaceship. “I could open vents here and there,” he thinks. “Our atmosphere would be gone. Sucked out into the void. And then, more or less painlessly, we could all die. In one single, brief instant.” A foreshadowing of Ripley’s defeat of her monster at the end of the film, perhaps?
“He placed his hand on the emergency release-lock of a nearby hatch vent.” He does nothing, because in this moment it is “as if time had stopped. And everything around him looked twodimensional.” This is the point where the ‘real’ outside reality is at its most unreal.
The Dick story ends with the ‘colonists’ waking from their dream vision to find themselves back on their spaceship, reassuming their identities as crew-members. Although Delmak-O was an illusion, so much of what they experienced there was real to them and based on subconscious desires that they brought with them to it.
The plots of A Maze of Death and Alien are remarkably similar in many ways, although it is hard to say for certain whether the book directly influenced the film. It is likely that it was one of a range of science-fiction models and archetypes O’Bannon and Shusett were juggling in their minds while writing their original script, although probably near the top of the list. However, there is a most important difference between the two stories. The conclusion of the Dick novel is that the ‘reality’ it has presented is revealed to be an illusion or dreamscape. At first sight, the film appears not to suggest this. At least, so it would seem. That is, until one looks closely at the control panel of the Nostromo and digests the fact that buttons are labelled ‘Pranic Lift’, ‘Agaric Fly’, ‘Trip’, ‘Shakti Excess’, ‘Yoni’, ‘Lingha’, ‘Aum’, ‘Padme’ and ‘Hum’. These would be beyond absurd on any realistic piece of astronautical equipment. The film has, up to this point, been fairly short on jokes. What, then, if this is meant to be serious? It would connect the film and the Philip K Dick novel much more closely.
The experience of the colonists on Delmak-O is a hallucination but one which telegraphs its falseness to them in a series of ‘wake’ points. They encounter events of such strangeness that these begin to alert them to the possibility that their world is not real. In the same way that a lucid dreamer may be able to recognise indicators that what they are seeing cannot be part of the ‘real’ world but instead an opportunity to become aware that they are dreaming, the colonists are faced with strange and peculiar things that are so surprising that they make them question the reality they are seeing.
The first of these is surely the existence of this mysterious ‘Building’ on this small world, for which there is no plausible explanation. Next, the idea that the Building has tiny little ‘off-spring’ which are just like it, but alive. This is so peculiar that it ought to raise the question at once as to whether this is real at all. The fact that everyone sees something different when they approach the Building is another very curious thing, which, if questioned would undermine the illusion. Then there is strange nature of the ‘Form Destroyer’ itself, apparently native to the planetoid but like nothing that could ever have originated there. The way in which the ‘Tench’ is then revealed to be a computer instead of a living being is another shocking moment which has all the hallmarks of a dream. In fact, it is then revealed that it is a dream, or, more accurately, a virtual world created by the spaceship’s own computer. The ‘game’ is over only when the sole survivor, Seth Morley, crashes and ‘dies’ too. The everyone ‘wakes’ to the ‘reality’ of their ship, the Persus 9.
In Alien, there are a number of very similar ‘wake-points’ - things so strange that they should encourage someone to ask: ‘Is this real?’
The film begins with everybody on board fast asleep. We then see a series of awakenings. The computer systems ‘wake’ up and reflect their light onto fake heads (helmets) while air currents blow empty coats, making them seem ‘alive’. We have a display of false animation... ‘life’ that is not real.
We see the crew and their first action is also to wake up. They have been in an artificial (!) ‘sleep’ and now they emerge. The ‘freezerinos’ open like a flower. There are seven ‘petals’, forming a seven-pointed star. This may refer us to the Jewel in the Lotus, the six petals and central syllable, but also to the alchemical symbol that connected with the seven planets. The ‘freezerinos’ also bear an inverted triangle motif, which may have any number of meanings, most obviously the element of water in alchemy, along with the Morse Code for the letter ‘N’ (Nostromo?) but it may also be interpreted as the sigil of a first degree initiate into an occult school. Whatever it is, it seems hard to read as a scientific emblem.
The first of the crew fated to die, Kane, awakes first, and removes electrodes from the sides of his head. It is hard, too, to see these as assisting in any way with the hibernation process. Perhaps they are for monitoring purposes. Perhaps. Kane’s first words are to tell the crew that he feels dead. In the ‘freezerinos’ room, and in the dining room, we have interlocking two and four pointed stars on the walls, reminiscent of alchemical representations of the four elements or of air and earth. These tessellations also recall the occult symbols of Madam Blavatsky and of Freemasonry. None of these things seem at home in a scientific context. Should not someone question why their living space is decorated with such esoteric sigils? No-one does.
The garbled ‘distress’ signal is eerie and unintelligiable. It is strange the way in which the away-team merrily saunter off into the storm with so little preliminary discusion as to what they are to do. They should surely be inclined to question the evidence of their eyes at the shocking sight of the alien spaceship and, later, the horrific vision of the space-jockey, dead at its controls. Then there are the eggs and the face-hugger. The crux of the film - the moral dilemma in the stand-off between Ripley and Dallas over the airlock - is a powerful point at which realisation of the bizarre nature of the situation is almost confronted directly.
Needless to say, the ‘chest-burster’ scene is horrific but it is also preposterous. Can any of this really be happening... asks no-one. But perhaps they should. The alien creature grows to enormous size in a very short space of time. How? Shouldn’t someone ask? It seems able to appear and disappear at will. How clever it is, and yet it is a new-born. Nothing in its very strange, human-made environment confuses it. The shocking and ghastly appearance of the creature is also like something from a nightmare.
Then we come to the amazing revelation that ‘Ash is a goddamned robot!’ How can that be? It is absurd. He passed for human and not one thing he did or said betrayed his artificial nature, and yet, just like the Tench in A Maze of Death, he was a machine all the time. Nobody questions how they were so easily fooled. But shouldn’t they?
Then Ripley opens the hatch to reveal the master control panels. And the labels invite delivery into a transcendent realm at the touch of a button. How could it ever be possible that an interstellar spaceship would have keyboards like these? There is no ambiguity about them. They combine the occultism of Madam Blavatsky with direct yogic, Buddhist and psychedelic references. They are beyond any joke. If we had dismissed all these other ‘wake-points’, this one cannot be waved away. Right before Ripley’s eyes is as clear a sign-post as she could ever wish to see pointing to the fact that none of this is real. Press the button and awake.
I believe that Ellen Ripley is more than just a survivor. She is the dreamer who wakes. The bizarre nature of the buttons does not surprise or phase her. She presses away and takes control of the dream. In this way, I would see her earlier insubordinate actions as a part of this very process. Ripley certainly exceeds her authority, as noted, and assumes the role of captain when she has no legal justification in doing so. We could read this as mutiny or sedition, and if this were a real situation, she should expect one or other of these accusations for certain at her court martial. However, if this is really a dream, Ripley is beginning to exercise her power over the fantasy. She is testing her ability to seize control over the illusion, to achieve lucidity within it.
By the time she opts to destroy the ship, she elevates herself to full consciousness. When she seems to lose heart and tries to reverse the process, she finds that once you have engaged the lucid mind there is no turning back. Armed with this power, Ripley is able to fight the ‘Form Destroyer’ and defeat it.
When Ash tells her that the creature cannot be killed, even were the sight of his severed head sitting on a table talking not enough of a ‘wake-point’ in itself, the statement that they cannot kill the creature should be another. How can a living thing be immortal like this? Perhaps because this is not really an alien monster, but something much closer to the ‘Form Destroyer’ of Dick’s novel: a universal force of decay and entropy, the shadow in all of us, even death itself. Thus it may be that it cannot be killed, but it can be driven out and removed from us.
Ripley opens the panel on the shuttle and there is no monkey business about the labels on these buttons. They are all real gases, and serious pesticides at that. The monster is expelled from the dream, the fear is overcome. Although it tries to cling on, Ripley shoots it with a harpoon. What could possibly be the purpose of stocking such a weapon on a shuttle craft that is little more than an escape pod? Do not let this detain us. It is there because Ripley needs it, and she is the maker of the illusion now.
When the monster is speared, the harpoon line reaches back into the shuttle from its belly in a grotesque parody of birth. The line is the umbilicus, the creature is being ‘born’ into space, into night, into the realm of the shadow... forced out of the ‘womb’ of the ship in which it has grown. Ripley has destroyed the false Mother and is now the true Jungian mother. The film ends with Ripley, the dreamer who has awoken, returning to sleep but to a new dream and a new consciousness.
Once again, spoilers aplenty!
All the interpretations I have listed above are in accord with the idea that what we see in the film is supposed to be real. If this were a clear story of a hapless crew who encounter a monster and die trying to defeat it, then I contend that all of these images and symbols in the film point to the underlying political, legal and emotional framework that informs their judgements and their mistakes.
However, we can look at it as a film about transcendent reality, in which several ‘wake-points’ are embedded, at any of which the characters could question the nature of the events surrounding them. These are points where they could become aware of the unreality of their situation and emerge into a higher consciousness, understanding that the world around them is not real. This need not mean escaping the illusion itself, but achieving lucidity within it, and thus the opportunity to gain control over the ‘dream’. I believe there are clear pointers in the film itself that we should see it that way and first among them is the close comparison that can be made between this film and a story in which the characters are within an illusory world and are presented with many such occasions to stop and question the solidity of their universe.
There are a good number of plot-similarities between the film Alien and Philip K Dick’s 1970 novel, A Maze of Death. In the Dick novel, an ill-matched group of colonists arrive on a small planetoid, Delmak-O, but soon find themselves threatened by a demon-like monster that lives there. It is called the ‘Form Destroyer’ and it kills them one by one.
Although it is not quite so close a match that it could be said that Alien is actually an adaptation of A Maze of Death, there are, nevertheless, a great many very clear parallels between the two narratives. One of the colonists in A Maze of Death, Betty Jo Berm, talks of “unusual life forms beyond the perimeter of the colony.” In order to investigate, they would have to “go deeper, farther and farther away from the colony.” There is nothing else for them to do because they are waiting to “receive ... instructions from the satellite.” Their purpose on the planetoid is supposed to be explained by a radio transmission from a satellite, but the message is garbled and accidentally erased. Likewise, the crew of the Nostromo receive a distorted and incomprehensible ‘message’ that could explain why they are on their planetoid. The colonists “have one vast fear, and that is this: there is no purpose to us being here, and we’ll never be able to leave.” All of them came in a small shuttle that could land but not take off again. In, Alien, the Nostromo very nearly does not take off again, so badly damaged is it when it lands.
In Dick’s novel, colonist Ben Tallchief is the first to die. “Cold wind licked at them and they shivered; they drew together against the hostile presence of Delmak-O...” Tallchief’s body is brought into the colonists’ living quarters and placed “up on the high, metal-topped table” ready for Dr. Babble to do his autopsy, just as Kane’s (still-living) body is delivered to the medical section and placed on a table by ‘Dr’ Ash.
In the film, Alien, there is a strange crashed vessel on the planetoid. In the novel, on Delmak-O, there is this mysterious ‘Building’ which may contain some clue as to the monster’s true nature. The colonists learn that “there’re things out there that we don’t understand. There is a ... big gray building - really big - with turrets, windows, I would guess about eight floors high.” Vaguely like a description of the alien craft, but it may be worth noting here that in Dan O’Bannon’s original script for Alien, there was not only an abandoned spaceship on the planetoid, but also there was a big, grey building. This was a large pyramid: ‘a crumbling, ancient edifice, made of eroded grey stones, windowless, tapering toward the top... As they draw near, it becomes clear that the pyramid is roughly 50 feet tall.’
The Delmak-O colonist, Morley, wonders if this building is inhabited but no-one had gone too close to it, it was too “forbidding.” Each of the surviving colonists sees a different sign over the door of their building as they approach it. When the Form Destroyer attacks early on, like the alien creature in the film, it appears to them in a much smaller guise. We are told that it has come from the Building. “It’s a sort of offspring, I suppose,” Susie says. “Anyhow it’s exactly like the Building but smaller... It’s alive...” Susie feels protective towards the tiny building. “Don’t hurt it,” she says to them. “...It’s harmless.” Remember what Ash says when the smaller version of the alien appears: “Don’t touch it!” Susie is also wrong in saying that it is harmless.
“Do you think we should arm ourselves?” one of the colonists asks, “If there’s someone after us to kill all of us...” The Nostromo’s crew certainly think they need weapons.
As Ripley suggests the surviving crew-members do, the colonists “vote by a show of hands” although this is a vote for a leader, not to decide who will be next to die, although the language Ripley employs echos that of colonist Wade Frazer in the Dick novel. “Is that satisfactory to everyone?” he asks and, as in Alien, there is a note of dissent: “There was a sardonic undertone to his voice, and Seth Morley did not like it.”
Colonist Susie Smart tells them that, “Jung believed that our attitudes toward our actual mothers and fathers are because they embody certain male and female archetypes...” she says, pointing out that he held that there was “the great bad earthfather and the good earth-father and the destroying earthfather, and so forth...” In this sense, it is even more telling that the Nostromo’s computer is called Mother.
“Where are you, mighty Form Destroyer, you decayer of life? Come and fight with me!” calls Tony, eager to engage with it, as is Captain Dallas when he is searching in the ducts. When we do see it, the Form Destroyer does have a lot in common with the alien creature:
“A bent shape which crept blindly, as if accustomed to the darkness within the Earth. It looked up at him with filmed-over gray eyes; he saw and understood the shirt of dust which clung to it ... dust trickled silently down its bent body and drifted into the air. And it left a fine trail of dust as it moved... It was badly decayed. Yellowed, wrinkled skin covered its brittle bones. Its cheeks were sunken and it had no teeth.”
Well, the alien creature in the film has teeth, right enough, and it leaves slime instead of dust but in most other ways, they would seem close cousins indeed.
The colonists are able to receive some guidance from a creature they call ‘the Tench’, but when they question it as to the nature of their world, it ‘dies’ and in doing so reveals that it was really a computer all along. When they ask the Tench for information about their own ship, it bursts. Dick tells us that the colonists “stood for a time, not speaking, gazing at the ruin that had been the tench. Gelatin everywhere ... a circle of it, on all sides of the central remains... Seth Morley... could distinguish electronic components under the gelatin, exposed by the tench’s explosion, the hidden core - and electronic computer - lay visible. Wiring, transistors, printed circuits, tape storage drums, Thurston gate-response crystals, basic irmadium valves by the thousand, lying scattered everywhere on the ground like minute Chinese firecrackers...”
What a fine description this would be of the disassembled Ash, too. Dr Babble asks if anyone knew it was not organic, but they had not known, just as the crew of the Nostromo had no inkling that Ash was not human.
In the end, we find that the planetoid was a hallucination, produced by the computer, the ‘Tench’. The ‘colonists’ are members of the crew of a starship, trapped in orbit. They indulge in this role-playing, virtual reality game to distract themselves from their fate and to prevent insanity. They discover, however, that each time they play, they fall victim to their own inner emotional conflicts, which are externalised by the ‘Form Destroyer’. This being a Philip K Dick novel, there is a strong hint to us that even this outside ‘reality’ may also be another illusion, in which the ‘Form Destroyer’ lurks too.
When they are ‘awake’ again, colonist Mary accuses Russell of wanting to “try to take over the ship ... take it away from Captain Belsnor.” But Russell denies this. “All I’m interested in is keeping the peace. That’s why I was sent here; that’s what I intend to do. Whether anyone else wants me to or not.” How very like the sort of answer Ripley would give.
In their despair, one of them fantasises about breaking out of the spaceship. “I could open vents here and there,” he thinks. “Our atmosphere would be gone. Sucked out into the void. And then, more or less painlessly, we could all die. In one single, brief instant.” A foreshadowing of Ripley’s defeat of her monster at the end of the film, perhaps?
“He placed his hand on the emergency release-lock of a nearby hatch vent.” He does nothing, because in this moment it is “as if time had stopped. And everything around him looked twodimensional.” This is the point where the ‘real’ outside reality is at its most unreal.
The Dick story ends with the ‘colonists’ waking from their dream vision to find themselves back on their spaceship, reassuming their identities as crew-members. Although Delmak-O was an illusion, so much of what they experienced there was real to them and based on subconscious desires that they brought with them to it.
The plots of A Maze of Death and Alien are remarkably similar in many ways, although it is hard to say for certain whether the book directly influenced the film. It is likely that it was one of a range of science-fiction models and archetypes O’Bannon and Shusett were juggling in their minds while writing their original script, although probably near the top of the list. However, there is a most important difference between the two stories. The conclusion of the Dick novel is that the ‘reality’ it has presented is revealed to be an illusion or dreamscape. At first sight, the film appears not to suggest this. At least, so it would seem. That is, until one looks closely at the control panel of the Nostromo and digests the fact that buttons are labelled ‘Pranic Lift’, ‘Agaric Fly’, ‘Trip’, ‘Shakti Excess’, ‘Yoni’, ‘Lingha’, ‘Aum’, ‘Padme’ and ‘Hum’. These would be beyond absurd on any realistic piece of astronautical equipment. The film has, up to this point, been fairly short on jokes. What, then, if this is meant to be serious? It would connect the film and the Philip K Dick novel much more closely.
The experience of the colonists on Delmak-O is a hallucination but one which telegraphs its falseness to them in a series of ‘wake’ points. They encounter events of such strangeness that these begin to alert them to the possibility that their world is not real. In the same way that a lucid dreamer may be able to recognise indicators that what they are seeing cannot be part of the ‘real’ world but instead an opportunity to become aware that they are dreaming, the colonists are faced with strange and peculiar things that are so surprising that they make them question the reality they are seeing.
The first of these is surely the existence of this mysterious ‘Building’ on this small world, for which there is no plausible explanation. Next, the idea that the Building has tiny little ‘off-spring’ which are just like it, but alive. This is so peculiar that it ought to raise the question at once as to whether this is real at all. The fact that everyone sees something different when they approach the Building is another very curious thing, which, if questioned would undermine the illusion. Then there is strange nature of the ‘Form Destroyer’ itself, apparently native to the planetoid but like nothing that could ever have originated there. The way in which the ‘Tench’ is then revealed to be a computer instead of a living being is another shocking moment which has all the hallmarks of a dream. In fact, it is then revealed that it is a dream, or, more accurately, a virtual world created by the spaceship’s own computer. The ‘game’ is over only when the sole survivor, Seth Morley, crashes and ‘dies’ too. The everyone ‘wakes’ to the ‘reality’ of their ship, the Persus 9.
In Alien, there are a number of very similar ‘wake-points’ - things so strange that they should encourage someone to ask: ‘Is this real?’
The film begins with everybody on board fast asleep. We then see a series of awakenings. The computer systems ‘wake’ up and reflect their light onto fake heads (helmets) while air currents blow empty coats, making them seem ‘alive’. We have a display of false animation... ‘life’ that is not real.
We see the crew and their first action is also to wake up. They have been in an artificial (!) ‘sleep’ and now they emerge. The ‘freezerinos’ open like a flower. There are seven ‘petals’, forming a seven-pointed star. This may refer us to the Jewel in the Lotus, the six petals and central syllable, but also to the alchemical symbol that connected with the seven planets. The ‘freezerinos’ also bear an inverted triangle motif, which may have any number of meanings, most obviously the element of water in alchemy, along with the Morse Code for the letter ‘N’ (Nostromo?) but it may also be interpreted as the sigil of a first degree initiate into an occult school. Whatever it is, it seems hard to read as a scientific emblem.
The first of the crew fated to die, Kane, awakes first, and removes electrodes from the sides of his head. It is hard, too, to see these as assisting in any way with the hibernation process. Perhaps they are for monitoring purposes. Perhaps. Kane’s first words are to tell the crew that he feels dead. In the ‘freezerinos’ room, and in the dining room, we have interlocking two and four pointed stars on the walls, reminiscent of alchemical representations of the four elements or of air and earth. These tessellations also recall the occult symbols of Madam Blavatsky and of Freemasonry. None of these things seem at home in a scientific context. Should not someone question why their living space is decorated with such esoteric sigils? No-one does.
The garbled ‘distress’ signal is eerie and unintelligiable. It is strange the way in which the away-team merrily saunter off into the storm with so little preliminary discusion as to what they are to do. They should surely be inclined to question the evidence of their eyes at the shocking sight of the alien spaceship and, later, the horrific vision of the space-jockey, dead at its controls. Then there are the eggs and the face-hugger. The crux of the film - the moral dilemma in the stand-off between Ripley and Dallas over the airlock - is a powerful point at which realisation of the bizarre nature of the situation is almost confronted directly.
Needless to say, the ‘chest-burster’ scene is horrific but it is also preposterous. Can any of this really be happening... asks no-one. But perhaps they should. The alien creature grows to enormous size in a very short space of time. How? Shouldn’t someone ask? It seems able to appear and disappear at will. How clever it is, and yet it is a new-born. Nothing in its very strange, human-made environment confuses it. The shocking and ghastly appearance of the creature is also like something from a nightmare.
Then we come to the amazing revelation that ‘Ash is a goddamned robot!’ How can that be? It is absurd. He passed for human and not one thing he did or said betrayed his artificial nature, and yet, just like the Tench in A Maze of Death, he was a machine all the time. Nobody questions how they were so easily fooled. But shouldn’t they?
Then Ripley opens the hatch to reveal the master control panels. And the labels invite delivery into a transcendent realm at the touch of a button. How could it ever be possible that an interstellar spaceship would have keyboards like these? There is no ambiguity about them. They combine the occultism of Madam Blavatsky with direct yogic, Buddhist and psychedelic references. They are beyond any joke. If we had dismissed all these other ‘wake-points’, this one cannot be waved away. Right before Ripley’s eyes is as clear a sign-post as she could ever wish to see pointing to the fact that none of this is real. Press the button and awake.
I believe that Ellen Ripley is more than just a survivor. She is the dreamer who wakes. The bizarre nature of the buttons does not surprise or phase her. She presses away and takes control of the dream. In this way, I would see her earlier insubordinate actions as a part of this very process. Ripley certainly exceeds her authority, as noted, and assumes the role of captain when she has no legal justification in doing so. We could read this as mutiny or sedition, and if this were a real situation, she should expect one or other of these accusations for certain at her court martial. However, if this is really a dream, Ripley is beginning to exercise her power over the fantasy. She is testing her ability to seize control over the illusion, to achieve lucidity within it.
By the time she opts to destroy the ship, she elevates herself to full consciousness. When she seems to lose heart and tries to reverse the process, she finds that once you have engaged the lucid mind there is no turning back. Armed with this power, Ripley is able to fight the ‘Form Destroyer’ and defeat it.
When Ash tells her that the creature cannot be killed, even were the sight of his severed head sitting on a table talking not enough of a ‘wake-point’ in itself, the statement that they cannot kill the creature should be another. How can a living thing be immortal like this? Perhaps because this is not really an alien monster, but something much closer to the ‘Form Destroyer’ of Dick’s novel: a universal force of decay and entropy, the shadow in all of us, even death itself. Thus it may be that it cannot be killed, but it can be driven out and removed from us.
Ripley opens the panel on the shuttle and there is no monkey business about the labels on these buttons. They are all real gases, and serious pesticides at that. The monster is expelled from the dream, the fear is overcome. Although it tries to cling on, Ripley shoots it with a harpoon. What could possibly be the purpose of stocking such a weapon on a shuttle craft that is little more than an escape pod? Do not let this detain us. It is there because Ripley needs it, and she is the maker of the illusion now.
When the monster is speared, the harpoon line reaches back into the shuttle from its belly in a grotesque parody of birth. The line is the umbilicus, the creature is being ‘born’ into space, into night, into the realm of the shadow... forced out of the ‘womb’ of the ship in which it has grown. Ripley has destroyed the false Mother and is now the true Jungian mother. The film ends with Ripley, the dreamer who has awoken, returning to sleep but to a new dream and a new consciousness.