Founding Violence in the Future: A Mnemonic Reading of Ridley Scott’s Alien

Abstract

Founding Violence in the Future: A Mnemonic Reading of Ridley Scott’s Alien Travis Hay I believe that the representation of alien existence, that is to say, of the imagination of radical otherness, can be seen to have passed through several distinct stages on its way to the contemporary period (where the alien and the other has once again reverted to magic and to dragons). —Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (140) In this article, I offer a settler colonial reading of Sir Ridley Scott’s Alien films: Alien (1979), Prometheus (2012), and Alien: Covenant (2017). My purpose is to underscore the historical dimensions within Alien’s depiction of the future and to demonstrate that the film series is far more exercised with historicity than with futurity. Specifically, I argue that Scott’s metaphors, themes, and plots were intentionally evocative of the horrors of British imperial expansion within North America and function as a kind of mnemonic device that remember the violence of the settler colonial past. More broadly, I offer this analysis because, like many other scholars, I view the science fiction and horror genres, between which we can locate Alien, as remarkably provocative and productive. Such non-realist depictions of monsters, zombies, ghosts, alien invasions, or the human colonization of outer space contain archives of historical feeling that can be accessed through what Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd called a “mnemonic reading” praxis. In The Transit of Empire, Byrd explains that a mnemonic reading seeks to “connect the violences and genocides of colonization to cultural productions […] in order to disrupt the elisions of multicultural liberal democracy that seek to rationalize the originary historical traumas that birthed settler colonialism through inclusion” (xii-xiii). In reading Scott’s film series mnemonically as a larger story invested with settler colonial genocide and preoccupied with foreclosures of human futurity, I add to a considerable body of scholarly literature on Alien that has [End Page 188] shaped my reading of the series as well as my approach to the horror and science fiction genres as cathected with coloniality. For readers unfamiliar with Alien, it will suffice to describe it here as a popular series of films, graphic novels, comic books, video games, and other cultural productions that stage violent and horrific conflicts between human beings and a particular species of “Alien” that wreaks havoc upon the crews of spaceships attempting to explore, settle, or mine a futuristic galactic frontier. The titular “Alien,” whose fully-developed form is called the Xenomorph, is monstrous and has acidic blood. It also has a second set of jaws that protrude from a tongue-like appendage extending from the monster’s mouth, though this is not its most grotesque or defining feature. The Xenomorph is able to use human bodies for its own sexual reproduction cycle and attacks its hosts with a gestational implant that later bursts from the chest of the victim in what has become a signature body horror sequence in any Alien cultural production. In addition to the fact that Alien films have women as protagonists, this recurring body horror motif wherein human beings are fatally impregnated by the Xenomorph has made the series particularly interesting to feminist scholars, who (at least in my view) have generated the most productive conversations on the franchise since the first film debuted in 1979 (Bell-Mettreau; Creed; Jeffords; Rushing; Torry; Vaughn). In many such readings, Alien is a science fiction and horror fusion that contained several complex themes associated with motherhood as well as many gendered horror movie tropes, such as “the final girl,” which Carol J. Cleaver theorized in Men, Women, and Chainsaws as the heroine who survives the violent ordeal and is able to kill the villain of a horror film; some examples include Jamie Lee Curtis’s character in Halloween or Betsy Palmer’s character in Friday the 13th. In my reading, Alien’s body horror and staging of reproductive violence on the galactic frontier remains remarkably gendered; however, I read Alien mnemonically to demonstrate that this gendered dimension intersects with what is, after all, a fundamentally colonial metaphor wherein the futuristic galactic frontier is haunted by the horror of what was done to Indigenous peoples...