The Ginger Child

by Patrick Flanery

  Now, reading Ngai, I can see both films casting him as an envying subject, as effete in multiple ways, a figure whose envy of his human creators – an envy marbled with psychopathic disdain – renders him histrionic and hysterical. Like my own envy, David’s is focused on reproduction.

  From its first explosion in 1979, the Alien franchise has been preoccupied with reproduction and creation, but these energies come into a new queer focus in the most recent reboots. At the beginning of Prometheus, a muscular, white-skinned, humanoid alien (whom we will later recognize as an ‘Engineer’) disrobes and ingests a murky, viscous fluid that quickly begins to unravel his DNA, tearing his body apart to seed the planet with different forms of what the film goes on to elaborate as highly engineered life. This is a typical narrative of titanic man-as-creator, but in this case the creator’s biological legacy requires total destruction of the self. The beginning of Alien: Covenant offers a parallel moment of creation, in which the ageing Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) tests the abilities of his newly minted android, David 8, who names himself after turning his gaze to rest on Michelangelo’s David, curiously displayed in Weyland’s minimalist home, the floor rising above the statue’s feet, the ceiling falling to obscure its head, so that our gaze is focused on the reproductive core of that sublime and very homoerotic Renaissance body. This gaze is echoed in Weyland’s own, moments later, when the camera shows us what he sees as he watches David pouring the tea: the midsection and groin of the android who lacks the ability, perhaps also the hardware, to reproduce biologically, but whom we later discover has been programmed with the capacity to create.20

  If David wishes to see himself as a godlike specimen of total perfection, like Michelangelo’s statue, Weyland views his android as an exquisite and artful creation, and one that instantly irritates: David reminds his master-maker that, unlike Weyland himself, he will never grow old and die. Retrospectively, this sequence makes sense of David’s temperament and behaviour in Prometheus, in which his personality manifests first as camply eccentric, only to become murderously creepy over the course of the film.

  While the human crew hibernates during the voyage of the Prometheus to the moon LV-223, David entertains himself, accessing the dreams of scientist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace). Shaw’s research has led her to what she interprets as both a map and an invitation from aliens whom she calls Engineers, hypothesizing that they are the creators of human life. Alone for the two-year voyage, David cycles and plays basketball, learns ancient human languages, eats and drinks as if human, and watches David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, remodelling his accent on Peter O’Toole’s and dyeing his hair blonde to match. Although we might have suspicions, in the beginning, we cannot be certain that David is definitely other than human. It is only when a hologram of Weyland introduces David to the crew of the Prometheus that we understand definitively what he is. Weyland notes that while David will never grow old and die, he is ‘unable to appreciate’ such ‘remarkable gifts’ because he lacks a soul.

  On arrival at their destination, we discover that white-blonde Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), the ship’s chief authority and daughter of Peter Weyland, is in some sense David’s sister and seems later to regard him as rival for her father’s affections. Understood in this way, dyeing his hair renders David sibling in appearance even as he remains servant, or at least subordinate, in station.

  For the queer audience, particularly the queer white male viewer, such aestheticized self-transformation also marks David as queer and invites our identification with him, even as his carefully articulated carriage, modelled on gay Olympian Greg Louganis’s ‘funny walk and economy of movement’ (Fassbender has revealed), might be read as a performance comparable to many gay men’s policing of their own physicality, masculinizing bodily affect in a fragile and usually unsuccessful masquerade attempting assimilation into straight society (often for purposes of protection or self-preservation).21

  This queering of David is intrinsic to how Prometheus and Alien: Covenant frame him as envious – if we understand the envying subject as effete in the sense of being effeminate. It also helps to establish a trope in both films of single fathers who are either ambiguously oriented or more obviously queer. Peter Weyland is a single man with a daughter, but there is no reference to a mother, no sense of whether Meredith Vickers is Weyland’s biological daughter or whether she might be adopted. The aesthetics of Weyland’s home in Alien: Covenant, with Michelangelo’s statue as its centrepiece and an ostentatious Carlo Bugatti chair as his personal throne, certainly suggest the operations of a queer sensibility. In Prometheus, the ship’s red-haired geologist, Fifield (Sean Harris), has a collection of PUPS (Parameter Uplink Spectagraphs); when releasing them to map the interior of a vast pyramidal dome on LV-223, he howls as if a dog to its puppies so that, like Weyland, he is legible as a single man with technological ‘children’ – although of a far less complex type than David. Fifield is so butch as to be actually quite camp, and when he and fellow crew member Millburn (Rafe Spall) discover they must spend the night alone in the pyramid (the rest of the crew having returned to the ship), Captain Janek (Idris Elba) playfully cautions them ‘not to bugger each other’. Fifield has been antagonistic towards Millburn, so there is no suggestion of real affection between them and this has always struck me as typical of the homophobic banter that so often operates among straight men. But because Elba does not deliver the line with derision, it is possible to hear it as suggesting that either or both Fifield and Millburn might be queer, and indeed neither expresses romantic or sexual interest in women in the way Janek does. And yet, homophobic the comment remains.

  It is David, however, who is the queer father to end them all, although the full spectrum of his association with fatherhood is not wholly evident until the second film. In Prometheus, he is obsessed with life and reproduction, but also with fatherhood itself: he first appears to us watching hibernating Elizabeth Shaw’s dreams of her widowed missionary father (Patrick Wilson). Shaw, the mission’s ‘true believer’ and driving force, bent on finding the alien Engineers she chooses to believe are humanity’s creators, is consistently identified not with life, but with death.

  In the crew’s first survey of the pyramid that they later discover contains an alien ship, it is David who locates organic material in a room containing a monolithic stone carving of a humanoid head. He secretly takes a cylindrical container that sweats an organic substance while Shaw is focused on retrieving the decapitated head of a long-dead alien Engineer. On their return to the Prometheus, Shaw risks her own death when the bag containing this head falls from the rover and she runs into a storm to retrieve it (running towards death). It is David who saves her (running towards life), rendering him at once lifesaver (and, in the second film, life-creator), but also destroyer of lives for his own ends. Even his acts of killing are in the service of creating and playing with life, however perverse and monstrous his creations ultimately become.

  In Prometheus, envy as such is not necessarily evident in David, but it is possible to look backward from the vantage of Alien: Covenant and see how his actions in the first film are motivated by a sense of envy for the acts of creation he sees humans undertaking. Programmed with the capacity to create, in Prometheus his creative capacities are first turned inward, creating himself by remaking his appearance, accent, and affect to match an internal understanding of who he is or wishes to be, and then outwardly, in relation to his tentative experiments with the alien biomatter he discovers. Such self-refashioning speaks powerfully to queer viewers who often share a feeling of having had parents who attempt to raise them in their own image: an image that, in the process of maturing sexually and psychologically, is increasingly at odds with the queer subject’s sense of self. Whoever David might have been at the moment of his creation (we see this version of him only at the beginning of the second film, auburn-haired and mechanically crisp in his affect, but not as obviously camp as he later becomes) is no longer who he feels himself to
be by the time he has spent two years alone, educating and entertaining himself on board the Prometheus.

  As well as envy, David is also marked by other ugly feelings and specifically by disappointment. When he asks scientist Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) – who has previously likened David to Pinocchio, mocking him as ‘not a real boy’ – why humans made him, Holloway answers ‘’cause we could’. David pauses. ‘Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you, to hear the same thing from your creator?’ he asks, before surreptitiously introducing a drop of the alien biomatter into Holloway’s drink.

  How different it might have been if Holloway had said ‘We made you because we wanted to exceed our own mortality’, or ‘We made you because we wanted to feel like gods’, or ‘We made you because we wanted to create something greater than ourselves, something beautiful’. Such responses might also function as explanations for why someone, real people out in the world today rather than characters in a fiction, would ever choose to reproduce. Too often, however, the truth of the situation is that creation and reproduction happen for the ugly reason that Holloway asserts: we make because we can.

  Unless, that is, we cannot.

  Shortly after this scene with David, Holloway, alone with Shaw, his professional and romantic partner, concludes from their discovery of the alien Engineer’s remains that ‘there is nothing special about the creation of life’. Tearfully, Shaw replies, ‘I can’t create life.’ Infertile, she can, at most, be a host for other life. When she and Holloway subsequently have sex, he unwittingly infects her with the alien material David dropped in his drink, seeding her with a parasitic new life. In this way, the film undermines ‘natural’ acts of reproduction, either in favour of technical ones (the creation of mechanical Pinocchio ‘children’, the adoption of machines as offspring), or through the suggestion of an absent or infertile biological mother. In Alien: Covenant, reproduction occurs chiefly through the promise of in vitro fertilization or the artificial creation of monstrous hybrid species, while the single scene of sexual intercourse (between a man and a woman) culminates with a xenomorph alien – queer David’s own queer creation – killing them both. Both films explicitly or implicitly coincide with Christmas; Captain Janek puts up a tree on the Prometheus after coming out of hibernation, while Alien: Covenant is set in December and begins with David correctly identifying Piero della Francesca’s The Nativity, which hangs in Weyland’s home. The preoccupation with fantastic birth, or with reproduction in the absence of one or more biological parents, is thus an essential theme of the two films’ combined narrative.22

  With the exception of Shaw acting as host for alien life, in the world of Prometheus, women are framed as the handmaidens of death and men (more often) the consorts of life and creation. Like Shaw, Meredith Vickers is aligned with death: on arrival at LV-223 she wants confirmation that all the alien Engineers are dead. Later, she is the first one prepared to kill to save the ship, greeting the expedition team with a flamethrower and dispatching Holloway, who is in the process of physically transforming as a result of the alien pathogen and who sacrifices himself to end his own suffering, but also to save everyone else (just as Janek and the surviving crew ultimately sacrifice themselves to save all life on Earth). David is always searching for life, discovering terraforming materials on the alien ship, as well as a hibernating Engineer. He listens to the alien’s respiration and heartbeat. He is attentive to life, its processes and signs, even when these are ugly, or when their awakening or application might result in the death of others, or even in his own destruction.

  In the aftermath of Holloway’s death, Shaw is sedated and later wakes to find David standing over her. When he tells her she is three months pregnant, she insists this is impossible (we recall her infertility), but David reveals it is ‘not exactly a traditional foetus’. Although at first Shaw asks to see a scan, David suggests this would be a bad idea and she soon pivots, insisting she ‘want[s] it out’, subsequently fighting her way to Vickers’s quarters where she programmes a MedPod to remove a foreign body from her abdomen. (The machine is calibrated for male bodies and does not understand performing a caesarean.) As Shaw’s abdomen bulges while the machine sterilizes and anaesthetizes her skin for the incision, we can imagine how a ‘birth’ marked by an explosive tearing through walls of muscle and connective tissue would destroy a female body as readily as a male one. After a forceps device descends to remove the alien, a white cephalopod-like ‘trilobite’ that squirms and thrashes as the afterbirth falls away, Elizabeth scrambles to escape, setting the MedPod to decontaminate. This attempted ‘abortion’ of the only child she will ever have (though in fact the creature survives) is necessary for her own survival, but also reinforces the film’s orientation of her towards processes of death.

  In the other Alien and Alien vs Predator franchise films, there are cases of women acting as hosts and succumbing to ‘chestburster’ alien births (Ripley in Alien 3, for instance), but what has undoubtedly been so disturbing and mesmerizing for audiences (straight male audiences in particular, I suspect) is the suggestion of what reproduction would do to the biologically male body: it would require an eruption, a physiological wrecking that could only ever result in death. Prometheus, however, illustrates the threat or effect of such alien births on both male and female bodies in a way that emphasises the messiness and danger of ‘natural’ reproduction (reproduction, however parasitic, that occurs at the site of, within the tissue of, the body) while implicitly privileging the hygienic creation of technological offspring – exemplified by David. Peter Weyland can be mother-father to someone who is ‘not a real boy’ and still live what appears to be an astonishingly long life – at least until the head of that Pinocchio child is used by the revived Engineer to bludgeon Weyland to death.23

  Ultimately, the alien ‘child’ Shaw delivers in Prometheus grows to monstrous size, attacks the revived alien Engineer, and impregnates him – using a phallic ovipositor that penetrates his mouth – with an alien that bursts from his chest at the end of the first film. This second act of conception/implantation and birth (reviving the longstanding trope of men in the Alien franchise acting as hosts for alien reproduction) is in the first film the more radical, the queerer of the two, since it presents a male figure as the father who bears the child (assuming he is a mere host for the egg laid by the cephalopod mother), but who, in bearing the child, is also destroyed, echoing the death of the Engineer at the beginning of the film.

  What was it about David in Prometheus that so captivated me? What apart from my attraction to Michael Fassbender as he appears in this role? He is the only obviously queer figure in a film preoccupied in countless ways with processes of reproduction, and from the beginning he is the one mesmerized by the magic, possibility, and unpredictable risk of creation. He refuses his supposed soulless inhumanity to become a Nietzschean superman, beyond good and evil, above ordinary morality, like the Prometheus of myth determined to steal from those with power over him such skills or capacities as have been denied him. He is also, at various points in both films, comparable to Victor Frankenstein and to Frankenstein’s monster himself.24 In Prometheus, David offers a fantasy of queer selfhood: eternally youthful, beautiful, cultured and learned – because he has unlimited time to acquire all knowledge and skill. In Alien: Covenant he dissects the dead, creating monstrous new life on foundations, both literal and figurative, of death.

  Although he is meant only to understand human emotions and not to have them himself, David is capable of feeling: he experiences surprise, wonder, and aesthetic appreciation, as evidenced by his awe at the alien ship’s beautiful holographic navigation system. He is capable of ugly feelings, too: envy, disappointment, grief, the desire for vengeance. These affects rule David’s character in Alien: Covenant, and such ugly feelings – envy in particular – are used to mark him as effete. In combination, the two films frame that envy not only as unjustified, but as the symptom of his psychosis.

  ENVIE
/>   Iam still on the London commuter train, still reading Ngai, and conscious of two people near me: a pregnant woman who looks exhausted, and a very beautiful young gay man with platinum blonde hair talking animatedly on his pink smartphone to his mother. I think of the way in which gay men are so often constructed as ‘mama’s boys’, or, as Ngai notes in her discussion of envy as it is mobilized by Freud, as boys with a ‘maternal fixation’, one that produces – in Freud’s schema – homosexuality itself.

  I, too, have been a mama’s boy, described by classmates with exactly that phrase when I was growing up. And while I always resisted such a description because it was deployed with derision, I now find myself wondering whether the idea of the mama’s boy might be flipped in order to produce a ‘boy mama’, the maternal queer father whose ‘boyness’ would be a mark of the softness, the femininity, of his version of masculinity. In her marvellous essay ‘Anality: News from the Front’, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick posits a division of non-heterosexual men into two categories – Youth A and Youth B. Youth A ‘are the ones you might call gay but not queer’, who have ‘never found it strange to see themselves as male, nor to identify with the abilities and privileges enjoyed by other men’, and consequently ‘fooling around with categories’ is not something they seek out or in which they take pleasure. They tend as adults not to be ‘close with their mothers, nor accompany close women friends into adulthood’. Youth B, on the other hand, ‘would be unmistakably queer, though they might not be as sure of being gay’, they tend to ‘have been stigmatized by boys and men for as long as they can remember – sometimes for effeminate modes of speech or movement, other times for interests or attainments that are just eccentric’. And while neither ‘mostly believing [n]or declaring themselves to be women’, they nonetheless ‘find ways of spending time with women, whether their contemporaries or older, including their mothers and aunts’. Although Sedgwick acknowledges that part of this affinity is a structural necessity because ‘men or boys exclude them’, they have genuine ‘interest… in the women themselves’ and ‘in resources that women and girls can confer’. Unlike Youth A, members of Youth B find that ‘fooling with gender categories’ is a source of ‘lifelong, tonic, and challenging nurturance to [their] imagination’.25