From Alien to The Matrix: Reading Science Fiction Film

209 Pages·2005·2.28 MB·English

by  Roz Kaveney

From Alien to The Matrix
‘I really enjoyed From Alien to The Matrix, it seemed like an incredibly necessary
book – arming the geeks with tools to read films for the DVD generation – and
possibly regeneration. Clear, simple text, in which an understanding of slash
fiction is as important to the text as an encyclopaedic knowledge of a hundred
years of written SF and what movies mean.’
Neil Gaiman
‘Roz Kaveney is the ideal guide to the contemporary SF landscape. She knows
how to look at movies; she knows which movies to look at, and she has both an
unerring eye for what is significant about everything she looks at and a prose
style more than equal to the task of conveying sometimes complex ideas with
clarity and wit. Her analyses of major franchises like The Terminator, The Matrix
and (particularly) the Alien cycle are exemplary in their piercing perceptiveness,
but From Alien to The Matrix brings the same acuity of vision to less obvious
but equally vital movies like Small Soldiers, Strange Days and Galaxy Quest.’
Charles Shaar-Murray
‘From Alien to The Matrix is a terrific book. The author successfully redresses
the unbalanced nature of popular culture and genre criticism in the field of
science fiction. She overturns the theory (still widely held) that it is a debased
genre and unworthy of serious critical study, while not wholly subscribing to the
postmodern reaction that all popular culture is worthy of attention because it
is “popular”. Well-chosen examples of genre films and associated aspects allow
her to explore in considerable depth the text as well as the effects of the work on
other genres. Above all, the author avoids the academic aridity of similar works
by a combination of persuasive prose, massive erudition and unashamed passion.
She actually likes this stuff and is unafraid to say so. She is also discerning
enough to tell good genre work from bad – which is not as easy as many
commentators think.’
Neil Norman
From
Alien
to
The Matrix
Reading Science Fiction Film
Roz Kaveney
Published in 2005 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © Roz Kaveney, 2005
The right of Roz Kaveney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by
her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof,
may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 1 85043 805 6 Hardback
EAN 978 1 85043 805 2 Hardback
ISBN 1 85043 806 4 Paperback
EAN 978 1 85043 806 9 Paperback
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress catalog card: available
Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Steve Tribe, Andover
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1. Waking into Dream: Competence Cascades,
Thick Texts and the Universalization of the Geek Aesthetic 1
2. Director as Parodist: Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers 9
3. Comedy 1: Galaxy Quest 21
4. The Decline and Fall of the Alien Invasion 37
5. Comedy 2: Small Soldiers and the Joke of the Robot 53
6. Who Are You? Cognitive Dissonance and Lots of Really Big Guns 63
7. The Mirrored Gaze: James Cameron’s and Kathryn Bigelow’s
Strange Days 83
8. Creation as Product: The Paradox of Franchises 109
A Franchise Case Study: Alien and its Sequels
Alien 131
Aliens 149
Alien3 175
Alien Resurrection 189
Index of Films 205
Index 207
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to all the friends with whom I watched and discussed these
films. Adi Tantimedh has been a constant sounding board for ideas and a
source of useful insights, as have Tanja Kinkel, Oliver Morton, Nancy Hynes,
Charles Shaar Murray, Anna Chen and Neil Norman. Kim Newman and John
Clute are responsible both in person and through their invaluable reference
books for many facts that are correct here and for none that I got wrong. Nick
Lowe acted as one of my main sounding boards for the theoretical positions
sketched briefly in the introduction.
As always, my thanks to Paule.
1. Waking into Dream
Competence Cascades, Thick Texts and the
Universalization of the Geek Aesthetic
‘Waking into Dream’ was always the working title for this collection of writings
on science fiction film; like many working titles, it has served as a useful seed
around which my ideas have crystallized in the two years I have taken to work
on the book. I knew, when I started, that a part of my emphasis would be
the way that certain works of art, among them science fiction films, have the
capacity to act as triggers for the creative and critical imagination.
As I worked on the films I ended up selecting – there are many other
important films I have not written about in this volume, and omission is not
to be taken as a covert critical judgement – I found myself thinking about
film-making, and particularly scriptwriting, as a process; this is not a book
about creative constraints in SF film-making, but it is a book which at least
occasionally considers them. Similarly, it is not a book about how changes in
viewing technology have affected our sense of what the authentic version of a
film is – but this too is a subject that gets at least passing consideration.
What that title has come to mean for me is this. We watch these films in
order to enjoy them, but also to think about them afterwards, and come back
to watching them with an enjoyment deepened and made more complex by
that thought. This means, in turn, that the pleasures of the best of these films
are not merely those of surprise and exhilaration, but are also that different
exhilaration which comes from going around the track a second time and a
2 From Alien to The Matrix
third. One of the factors which helped determine the selection of films under
discussion here is that many of them date from a period recent enough that
it was known to those involved that they would be viewed repeatedly both in
cinemas and through home-entertainment media – the rise of first the VHS
tape and then the DVD has meant that it is now possible for most of us to
know films more intensely than has been the case at any previous date.
These are not only science fiction films, they are films whose production
and consumption has been crucially affected by the growth of technology. The
Internet has meant that it is sometimes possible to choose to know a film’s
script in considerable detail before seeing it. The presence on many DVDs
of a commentary track means that it is possible for any viewer to listen to a
canonical version of the director’s, and sometimes the principal actors’ and
technicians’, intentions and sense of their own failures and successes. (Some
of the most remarkable examples of this have taken place outside SF film – the
DVD of Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge (2001), for example, enables the viewer
to re-edit certain elaborate musical sequences like the tango performed to Sting’s
‘Roxanne’ by including all the camera angles from which they were shot.)
This period, the last quarter of the twentieth century, has been one in which
the technologies of science fiction, horror and fantasy film-making underwent
serious changes. Other film genres were affected by these technological shifts,
but far less crucially – David Fincher uses radical make-up and modelling
work in Seven (1997), serious CGI in Fight Club (2000), but this is unusual.
Much of this has been due to what I call competence cascades, that is to say,
the process whereby a rare set of professional skills is admired and imitated
by an amateur following and the professional and amateur worlds influence
each other in a process of continuous feedback and change of roles until the
professional skills are far more advanced and far less rare.
To take but one example: there have always been professional make-up
artists fascinated by the grotesque and monstrous. The actor Lon Chaney
built an entire film career from designing monster make-ups for himself and
playing roles in those get-ups; other make-up artists produced, for example, the
elaborate make-up worn by Boris Karloff in Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein
(1931). Various of those make-ups – the Frankenstein monster or Lon
Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera (1925), for example – became clichés both
through movie spin-offery and through the growth of a fan culture dedicated
to appreciating, and duplicating, them.
The magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland ran from 1958 to 1984 and
included regular features in which amateur make-up artists showed their
work, and occasional competitions to pick the best of such amateur make-
up jobs – the prizes often including a chance to meet the winner’s heroes,
Waking into Dream 3
the professional monster make-up people; the magazine Fangoria, which
started in 1979, included photo features of how make-ups were achieved. The
costuming strand of science fiction and horror fan conventions contributed
to the creation of a body of expertise; the artwork of science fiction magazines
and comic books helped create a visual vocabulary from which make-up artists
could derive ideas for new creatures.
It is not necessarily the case that most, or even many, make-up artists
working in this field were ever active in the fandom, but the anecdotal evidence
is that some at least of the current professionals in the field grew up fascinated
by both actual films and the make-ups crucial to them and by the associated
material. What the fandom will have helped do was validate the career choice
at all pre-professional stages. What is clear is that, where once these skills were
rare, now they are common enough that, during his filming of The Lord of
the Rings (2001–2003), Peter Jackson could run something like an industrial
production line of people producing monster make-ups in large quantities
for each day’s shooting. It is also clear that ever more elaborate make-ups are
becoming easier to do – the technology has improved – and even marginally
less unendurable for the actors who have to work with them.
Similarly, the development of computer graphics as a way of creating special
effects that would previously, if possible at all, have involved fiddly stop-
motion work with detailed models has been a process in which the distinction
between talented amateur, semi-professional out-worker and highly paid
professional has often been blurred. A fascination with ‘how did they do that?’
is always likely to become ‘I could do that better.’ The television space opera
series Babylon 5 was made possible by the availability of ambitious young
Californian semi-professionals who regarded its massive set piece battles
as a showcase for their talents; the same is true of some of the young New
Zealanders who worked on The Lord of the Rings. The more people there are
around who have a new skill, the more that skill will spread and be defined.
Among such skills, in a way, is the ability to negotiate the complicated
Big Dumb Narrative Object of the corpus of SF and fantasy genre writing,
picking and choosing narrative tropes and developed ideas and making from
them something that either is new, or appears to be with enough verisimilitude
to count as such. (I created the term ‘Big Dumb Object’ to describe plots,
common in the 1970s, in which the protagonists found a location so vast and
complex that the entire book was taken up with their traversing it. Typical
examples of this are Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama and Larry Niven’s Ringworld,
both of which demanded whole series devoted to their exploration – more
recent examples like Ian Macdonald’s Chaga have actually been referred to
textually as Big Dumb Objects, which is flattering. Nick Lowe has usefully