the moment conceived the idea of Alien it was bound to be & success. Mix two themes which invariably do well at the box office — space and horror — and for some reason moviegoers will flock to see the result.
And having conceived the idea and secured the necessary actors, technicians and effects, the makers of Alien could have sat back and played safe in the security of a sizeable return on their investment. Surprises The publicity for the film suggests that such is indeed what happened. 'In space no-one can hear you scream', say the advertising posters, and even before the opening credits slowly form themselves on the screen the audience have almost been scared into silence in apprehension of what they are about to witness. Then the surprises start.
The opening conversations concern the lousy wages workers themselves are a scruffy, bored lot, and their spacecraft Is an Allen has none of romanticism of Star Wars, none of the awe and Socialist Challenge 4 October 1979 Page 10 some bright spark The receive.
ugly, rounds. the space Sigourney Weaver plays Warrant Officer Ripley wonder which accompanied Close Encounters of the Third Kind - there is even none of the bigothic horror of the various Draculas doing the Nevertheless the plot as it unfolds seems fairly routine stuff, of the type much favoured. by Star Trek: the spaceworkers unknowingly transport a monster aboard from an apparently long derelict planet and the rest of the records the battle for control of the craft between the monster and the workers.
Yet that is by no means the whole story. For and foresees it all.
Subversive after all, more to sensationalism.
IDE CSSI that when nasty things happening in space.
is over-intellectualising.
but also splendidly subversive. capitalist plot. For instance, the film's hero is one of the two women workers who fulfils the role invariably allocated by Hollywood to a - the person who thinks best, fights best, These (wo examples suggest that there is;
Allen than shock-horro The general atmosphere depicted within the spacecraft reinforces that The continual complaints about wages and conditions, the starkness of the sets, the bavoc the computer [called 'mother'] doesn't do what the workers ask, and : a scene of violent frustration from the worker when they discover a robot in worker's clothing — all this implies that Allen is not resily about Then there is the title. Look up "Teach Yourself Marxism' and there you will find the word and the concept 'alienation'.
Maybe this is all wishful thinking. Maybe it But if Alien is, seems possible, a parable about capitalism in the future, it is not just a brilliantly made film,
No return to the Act.
Like Jobn ruling class values. Women have been increasingly pushed into part-time work over the past decade, because of lack of provision for childcare and domestic responsibilities, and many part-time workers are not covered by the Employment Protection Bowiby's theories of the importance of the biological mother which appeared after the Second World War when women were being asked to hand their jobs back to men, Patrick Jenkin's views on the importance of motherhood are a little bit transparent. They neatly expose the zig-zags of