2

"Go on, tell them," says Jacko to Sean. 

"Tell them what? I'll tell them nothing. They're not people like us, they're just a bunch of sardines."

The fish people in the water below do not like this.

"You heard me," jeers Sean, "Cold-blooded fishes. You haven't got a drop of good red blood in your body."

They don't like that either.  They've been surgically altered by the regime of Professor Zaroff, an old Nazi scientist who was employed by the Western powers before he disappeared (it's implicit) and who is now running the underwater city of Atlantis (the Nazis were obsessed with Atlantis).  He has forcibly turned an army of his workers into fish, complete with gills and fins and big round eyes, so that they can do the underwater jobs.  (They just don't make mad scientists like Zaroff any more.)

"A flatfish from Galway would have more guts in them than that bunch!" Sean continues.  Oh yeah, I forgot to say... Sean's Irish, hence his "gift of the gab" (sigh).

The fish people start throwing things at him.

"All right, all right, all right," laughs Sean, "Oh, calm down and listen. Listen, will you?"

The fish people decide to hear him out.  Presumably because he's like them: a man captured and exploited by Zaroff's regime.  He hasn't been surgically mutilated, but he's been put to work in the Atlantean mines.  (By now there should be no need for me to reiterate the connection between surgery and capital, the way the evisceration and infibulation of the human body expresses anxieties about life in capitalism, about how wage labour cuts into your bodily autonomy and your life and your physical freedom, dissecting your time and... oh look, I'm reiterating.)

"Look, you supply all the food for Atlantis, right?" asks Sean rhetorically, "It can't be stored, right? It goes rotten in a couple of hours. That's why Zaroff has you working like slaves night and day, right? Well, has it never occurred to your little fish brains to stop that supply of food? Feed yourselves but starve Atlantis, eh? What do you think would happen then? Well now is your chance. Will you do it, or will you stay fish slaves for the rest of your lives? You're men, aren't you? Well, start the blockade right now!"

Again, this is workplace agitation.  The jokes at the fish people's expense are clearly rhetoric.  Sean whips them up.  But the power is theirs.

I won't attempt to describe what comes next.  The fish people's underwater strike is indescribable.  And that's good.  It must be seen to be believed... and by that I don't mean 'believed' in the sense of believing that there were actually fish people who actually swam around in Atlantis.  I mean 'believed' in the sense of believing that it ever actually got made and broadcast.  To us, now, it looks like a transmission from another planet.  Again, that's good.  The planet we live on now is pretty boring compared this one.

It's a relic of a lost time, when the spectacle could still express material relations of struggle, and express them materially.  These days, there is no struggle, no contestation... or rather, the struggle has been effectively muffled and edited out of the mainstream media continuum, mirroring the way it has been materially suppressed.  These days, you beat the baddies by monologuing about how wonderful you are while the orchestral music goes insane, CGI roars at you, a pretty (white) child cries and the audience cries too (cry damn you, cry!).  Back when 'The Underwater Menace' was made, it was possible for slaves to beat the baddies with collective action, with agitation and unionisation and strikes and blockades, by the class struggle, by the revolt of the oppressed... and it was expressed (in the middle of a kids' tea-time adventure show!) as a weird and wonderful ballet, overlaid with sine waves and defamiliarising dots of electronic sound from the Radiophonic Workshop.  It was expressed as something that broke the boundaries of the everyday, both in narrative terms of workers disrupting the quotidian routine of exploitation, and in aesthetic terms as an explosion of the genuinely, unashamedly, discomfortingly strange and unfamiliar.  The gothic and the surreal and the just plain silly, self-consciously bizarre yet steeped in real history and work and politics, joining the picket line alongside the militant and the collective and the pissed-off.  That really is how its supposed to be.  That really is, ultimately, what is supposed to make Doctor Who good (when it is good) and more than just another cult franchise: its ability to express the struggle in terms of the strange.

Yes, you could see the strings holding the fish people up as they 'swam'.  Yes, you could see they were just actors in silly suits and masks.  Yes, you could see that the bubbles were a light show.  But that in itself was part of a connection to the materially real, to actual history, to the spontaneity of human action... ultimately, to labour, and thus to the essence of humanity.  Now, everything is far more 'convincing' while simultaneously being far more obviously false.  The fish people are evidently not fish people, but they evidently are solid, material, alive.  They are there.  In the plastic, flat, dead, synthetic world of CGI, everything looks more 'real' while also being evidently phantasmic, unreal, unpresent, immaterial.  The gleaming commodity has completely pushed the human hand out of view.

Just as the imperfect, weird, wonderful, material, human reality of the underwater strike ballet (d'ya see what I did there?) is a perfect representation of the imperfect, weird, wonderful, material, human reality of the collective resistance to power that it depicts, so is the smooth and depthless world of CGI a perfect representation of a world slumping into eternal neoliberal lassitude.  It is the visual expression of the glossy, shiny, expensive patina of capitalist realism and neoliberal hegemony.  It is a pretty picture that pretends, apparently with a straight face and an expectation of being believed, to be reality.

Give me the irony, the materiality and the anger of the 'hand-made' anytime.

When Titans Clash

Spoiler Warning


Prometheus tries to evoke the aesthetics of Alien in a way that is borderline obsessive. Even down to making sure there are cream-coloured leathery/cushiony pads on the spaceship corridor walls. Still greater attention is paid to replicating H.R. Giger's design concepts for the derelict alien ship, cockpit and pilot from the original film. The really weird thing is that, even as Prometheus deliberately and slavishly tries to evoke and/or copy the aesthetics of Alien, it completely overlays them with an entirely different, clashing aesthetic sense.

Look, why is this image so powerful?

There are, I think, a number of reasons.

Most importantly, it's because it is just explicable enough to make sense while also being inexplicable enough to unnerve.  We are plainly looking at a navigator or pilot in a cockpit.  We understand this.  We are also looking at something inhuman and estranged, something that evades any attempt on our part to relate to it directly.  The 'Space Jockey' (as it is sometimes called) is a pilot, evidently, but it is also a giant, a fossil, a mammoth, a skeleton, a statue, a cyborg, a petrified outgrowth of flesh embedded within a colossal machine.  We cannot separate the entity from the artifact.  The ribs of the creature flow outward into the cables of the chair.  The trunk of the face flows down into the workings of the mechanism.  We cannot disentangle organism from system, animal from engine.  They are fundamentally akin, interchangeable, interpenetrating, symbiotic.  This was always the intention: to suggest something that was inextricably both biological and technological.  The cockpit and the pilot are not discrete things but are conjoined to the point of identity.  They were one flesh, until the flesh peeled away.  It's entropic in both an organic and mechanical way simultaneously.  It's the ossified cadaver of a wrecked bio-machine.

It's also beautiful, but not in a straightforward way.  It's not pretty.  It's hideously, ominously, unnaturally, grotesquely beautiful.  It's beautiful in the same way as a scorpion, or the bleached skull of an ox lying in a parched gulch, or a pile of rusted flywheels that was once a graceful machine.  It has the troubling, terrible beauty of wreckage, of the predator, of the insectile, the dead, the decayed, the destroyed, the deadly.

And it's fucking scary.  It's a great big skull-faced monster in a huge black room made out of what looks like loads of bones.

Now, look at this:

This is pretty.  It's the cockpit from Alien... decorated with shimmering CGI lights and swirls and spirals and graphics and glowing planets. It's like someone stuck gold stars all over one of Goya's 'black paintings' or inserted some watercolour daffodils into a Max Ernst canvas. Well, why am I dancing around this? It's like putting pretty, computer-generated patterns all over a picture by H.R. Giger. The design and CGI rendering is perfectly nice in and of itself, but in this context it looks like a tawdry, clashing embellishment. It neutralises the uncanny effect of the setting. For all the familiarity that popular culture now has with Giger (thanks largely to Alien) his imagery remains fundamentally inscrutable. The image above plasters extremely familiar, almost routine imagery - CGI computery prettiness - over this fundamentally inscrutable image. It wouldn't be so bad if this were meant, in narrative terms, to be human technology inserted into the context of the alien ship, as with the floaty red probe things... but the display above is actually supposed to represent the technology and culture and design sense of the pilot-type aliens themselves.

This is more than just an aesthetic problem.  The technology of the beings that Shaw calls 'the Engineers' is recognisably similar to the technology of the humans as we see it in the film.  Suddenly, the mysterious and unknowable culture of the gigantic skeletal bio-mechanical thing from Alien is explained, demonstrated and shown to be easily understood in conventional futuristicky/SF terms.  The aliens have computers just like the humans.  They have holographic displays just like the humans.  They have navigation charts just like the humans.  They have cryo-beds just like the humans.  They have chairs around button-covered consoles... on which they leave their flutes!  They suddenly have doors that open and close (think about it - there's nothing like that in the derelict from the original film).  They have cargo bays.  The cockpit chair turns out to be just that - a chair in which a humanoid sits.  He didn't grow out of it.  He sat in it.  Wearing a spacesuit and a helmet.

This helmet thing is a big deal.  The skeletal face of the alien pilot, with its ossified veins, its cavernous eyes and its trunk-like snout... turns out to be a helmet, just like the head-like helmet of the aliens in Independence Day.  Like many crappy sci-fi films post-Alien, Independence Day tried to ape Giger's influential design concepts.  So ID4 had bio-mechanical stuff in it, but in a processed and banal form.  Now the Alien series reclaims its appropriated design concepts... and recycles the lazy, banal variants already used by inferior films.

And what is inside the helmet?  We get to see.  Not only is the pilot's eerie, inscrutable, alien face revealed to be a piece of perfectly explicable human-like technology, with its trunk a kind of hinged flap, but we see it removed, and beneath there is...  a guy.  An odd-looking guy, for sure, but a guy, nonetheless.

Moreover, these guys have comprehensible motives.  We may not be told why they created life on Earth and then decided to destroy it, but these aims are comprehensible in and of themselves.  The 'Engineers' can be communicated with, spoken to.  Their thought processes are apparently akin to those of humans.  It is no longer that The Company wishes to utilise the Xenomorphs (if we must call them that) as weapons... apparently they always were weapons, or outgrowths of weapons.  The Engineers created them as such, wittingly or unwittingly.  The Engineers are capable of military strategy then, along with fear, rage, the desire for revenge, and other such all-too familiar states of mind.

Again, there's nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but it is appended onto the imagery of the derelict craft and its silent, inscrutable, lonely occupant in Alien... and it represents a fundamental misprision of why those things are so interesting.  Put crudely, to explain the Space Jockey is to make it less mysterious (of course) and therefore less powerful.  It was always a Titan.  It's just that Alien allowed us to believe in the Titan by making it unknowable.  Prometheus makes the Titans less titanic by making them simply larger versions of us.