Stress Baking: Alien

Put on your smallest pair of underwear........ it's time to make a lemon loaf!

I was around seven years old when my parents split up. My father moved into a very small “cottage”, or as the french call it- a re-finished one car garagé. I would stay with him in the garage-ttage on Sunday nights, and after we would fill our bellies with Kraft Mac & Cheese, he would put me to sleep on a cot behind a curtain while he settled in on the couch to stay up all night drinking brandy and watching Star Trek reruns. Growing up I was never a fan of science fiction movies, and I think it’s because Star Trek became inextricably intertwined with the dissolution of my family- nbd. So yada, yada, yada…..I went to therapy for a few decades and now I can better appreciate sci-fi.

The first sci-fi film that I took a real chance on was Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic, Alien. After nearly twenty years of being “afraid of space”, I thought it was time to face my fears by watching the most frightening depiction of it, and against all odds it disarmed my aversion to the expanses of the galaxy. While space may still not be my favorite place, watching Alien in my early twenties helped me unpack some deep seeded trauma and open myself up to what the final frontier had to offer. This movie came out the same year as SONY released the Walkman, and yet every time I watch it I am in awe of how timeless it feels. Aside from a fringy hairdo or two, Alien not only holds up, but feels like it could have been made this year. The jaw-dropping practical effects makes the esthetic quality of Alien truly evergreen, and the messaging is sadly more relevant now than it was forty-six years ago when it was released.

The air on The Nostromo (the commercial spacecraft where our story takes place) is murky from random bursts of steam and clouds of low hanging smoke. This is a well used effect in creating a sense of claustrophobia and dread, but also in making the scenery almost interchangeable with a factory in Pittsburg or Detroit. The crew is made up of ordinary folks doing ordinary jobs on a well worn ship. The crew aren’t adventurers, they are workers who become unknowingly entangled in a suicide mission well beyond their pay grade by the powers that be, simply known as The Company. This may be a work of science fiction, but it is at its core a tale of the horrors bestowed upon working class Americans by the ruling class, and that is where the true terror stems from. Beyond the masterful special effects and top notch puppetry, the significance of a movie that pairs national treasures Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto together as BFF’s who are perpetually griping about their below average salaries cannot be overstated.