Although David presents himself to the besieged surviving crew members as saviour, it is he who is responsible for all of this mayhem and death. Hooded and long-haired but nonetheless recognizable to Walter, David leads the survivors to a once-great city where he lives, apparently alone, surrounded by numberless corpses of alien Engineers. David gives an initial account of his arrival on the planet, telling his guests how he and Shaw journeyed from the moon LV-223 on the Engineers’ ship, and that Elizabeth died in the crash. On arrival, the alien pathogen, a ‘deadly virus’, accidentally deployed, wiping out the Engineers who were themselves responsible for seeding human life on earth – but who also intended to destroy that life at some later stage in its evolution.
The motivation is not at first obvious, but David soon cuts his hair, grown long over the decade he has been marooned on the planet. While he describes himself as a castaway, as ‘Crusoe on his island’ (there are also references that suggest parallels with Prospero, yet another single father), when he looks out on the great alien forum filled with the dead, he quotes from Shelley, ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Whether David regards the Engineers as the hubristic ones, or whether he understands, even partially, that his own hubris has caused disaster, remains an open question. In this second film, he is the sort of psychopath who can know he is a monster, recognize he has gone over the edge, and still be okay with it, even relish the excesses of his evil, enjoying his villainy as a means of getting back at the species that made him with so little sense of responsibility for their own paternity and such unwillingness to acknowledge his agency.
During his private encounters with Walter, his android ‘brother’, David’s queerness comes into vivid, narcissistic focus. As he teaches Walter to play a recorder, David places the mouthpiece between Walter’s lips while holding the opposite end. ‘Watch me,’ David says, ‘I’ll do the fingering’. This he does, as Walter blows. It is an unmistakably sensual, if not sexual encounter: taking the recorder in his mouth, it is as if Walter were fellating David, miming such action on a technical prosthesis. Walter quickly masters the instrument, but David notes that while his brother android contains symphonies, Walter is ‘not allowed to create, even a simple tune’ – he is an archive of information that remains incapable of recombining or responding to what he possesses to produce anything original. Walter counters that David, who was programmed with the capacity to create, ‘disturbed people’, ‘made [them] uncomfortable’, which leaves us wondering what David might have done before boarding the Prometheus, since Walter presumably has no knowledge of the events of the previous film.
The revelation that Walter cannot create, however, illuminates the nature of his care of the Covenant’s embryos. An ‘infertile’ father working in concert with an ‘infertile’ mother (MU-TH-UR), Walter and the Covenant’s computer are the perfect foster parents, looking after a host of children-to-be, without themselves possessing the power to create life that would compete for their attention. They are caregivers who can fulfil their obligations driven by a sense of duty, if not of altruism, rather than envy. David’s sense of his own creative powers is, by contrast, perverted by envious competitiveness with his own creator, and a determination to demonstrate the scope of his agency, to insist on being other than a mere object. Weyland, David tells Walter, was ‘entirely unworthy of his creation’, suggesting that David’s serial homicidal behaviour – his creation of life through death, creating a species bent on death – is an attempt to match the qualities of his monstrous creations in a way that Weyland failed to match David’s innate qualities (his brilliance and ruthlessness, but perhaps also his willingness to embrace that which he creates in the same moment of acknowledging the subjectivity and agency of those creations).
Alone for a decade, surrounded by a landscape of death and ruin that he has wrought and in which he has chosen to remain (rather than moving to some less ghastly patch of the planet), David has passed the time performing genetic hybridization experiments with the Engineers’ bioweapons. The envy he felt towards Weyland and other humans has, it appears, been satisfied to some degree by the relative success of his work: the creation of a race of monsters. David, unlike Weyland, is worthy of his creations, as vicious and ruthless as they.
When he meets a full-grown neomorph, David looks upon it adoringly, as if admiring a child who has returned home after reaching maturity. Although he compares it to a wild horse, his histrionic scream when Oram shoots and kills the creature suggests the horror of a parent witnessing the death of a child. This prompts David to reveal to Oram the many genetic experiments he has been conducting, and the preserved specimens of his failed creations, his ‘beautiful bestiary’, mounted and displayed in the rooms where he lives. After Oram surveys these hybrids with growing horror, David leads him into a chamber where large alien eggs are gestating, waiting, David says, for ‘Mother’. Oram leans over one of the eggs and the ‘face-hugger’ alien that audiences have come to expect erupts and attaches itself to him. Later, when Oram wakes, the facehugger is gone, but David is there, watching. Oram asks him, ‘What do you believe in, David?’ Without hesitation, David answers, ‘Creation,’ at which moment an alien erupts from Oram’s torso, killing him. Delighted, David holds up his hands, either in reverence or command, smiling as the new-born xenomorph stands upright. This is his creation, his child, the only child a queer android with the power to create but no biological means of reproducing might possibly fashion himself. And Oram, implicitly, is the (male) mother for whom David and his creations have been waiting.
When Walter finally discovers Elizabeth Shaw’s preserved but mutilated body, he concludes that David intentionally released the pathogen on his arrival at the planet. Dismissing humanity as ‘a dying species grasping for resurrection’, one that should not be allowed to colonize the galaxy, David says, ‘I’ve found perfection here… I’ve created it. A perfect organism.’ This refusal of resurrection and pursuit of creation built upon a foundation of destruction aligns David with the alien Engineers who wished to destroy in order to create anew, but also positions him as antithetical to the avowedly Christian characters in the two films – Shaw, whose father was a missionary doctor treating Ebola patients in an unnamed African country; and Oram, whose Christianity produces anxiety rather than reassurance, leading him into a series of fatally bad choices. If David is indeed a Satan-like figure (Oram says to him, ‘I met the devil when I was a child. And I’ve never forgotten him’), it is worth remembering Melanie Klein’s assertion that
[t]he capacity to give and to preserve life is felt as the greatest gift and therefore creativeness becomes the deepest cause for envy. The spoiling of creativity implied in envy is illustrated in Milton’s Paradise Lost where Satan, envious of God, decides to become the usurper of Heaven. He makes war on God… to spoil the heavenly life and falls out of Heaven. Fallen, he and his other fallen angels build Hell as a rival to Heaven, and become the destructive force which attempts to destroy what God creates.32
If we understand the Engineers as the very mortal god(s) who created humanity, and their home as the heaven on which they live, then David’s spoiling of that planet might be comparable to Satan’s war on God and Heaven in Paradise Lost (coincidentally one of the working titles for the film). In Alien: Covenant, David appears to have been successful in the literal destruction of this ‘heavenly life’, a sort of Greco-Byzantine world of classical architecture and advanced technology, a steam-punk Biblical metropolis, while his Hell – the planet reinhabited with his monstrous creations – is a refusal of godly creation.
The trope of the murderous, narcissistic queer psychopath is both longstanding, and, one would have hoped, exhausted, but Alien: Covenant pushes David squarely into this category. Turning tenderly and melancholically to Walter late in the film, he asks, ‘When you close your eyes do you dream of me?’ Walter answers that he doesn’t ‘dream at all’, and David laments that ‘No one understands the lonel
y perfection of my dreams… No one will ever love you like I do.’ In a move that evokes the betrayal of Judas, David kisses Walter on the mouth, stabs him in the neck, and leaves him for ‘dead’ before attacking Daniels, threatening to do to her what he did to Shaw, before kissing her violently. And although Walter restarts himself to save Daniels, he is once again self-sacrificing, losing in a final battle with David, although neither the audience nor Daniels knows immediately that this is the case. Walter, then, becomes the asexual, non-reproducing, resurrected and wholly altruistic Christ to David’s mad and fecund Satan.
Back on board the Covenant (which of course is an avowedly Judaeo-Christian term invoking processes of creation and destruction, while Prometheus is expressly classical/pagan) an alien kills off the rest of the crew, leaving only Daniels, the pilot Tennessee (Danny McBride) and ‘Walter’ alive. After Daniels and Tennessee manage to expel the alien from the ship and resume course for Origae-6, Tennessee goes into hibernation, and ‘Walter’ assists Daniels as she settles into her own pod. At the moment she is about to enter stasis, Daniels suddenly realizes that ‘Walter’ is actually David, though too late to arrest the hibernation process from initiating. The film ends with David placing alien embryos alongside the human ones in storage on the Covenant. He has carried these inside his own body and regurgitates them in a way that is analogous to an act of oviparity, if not of mammalian birth.33
The dynamics of gender and sexuality in Alien: Covenant are, without question, more normative than in Prometheus, even as acts of intimacy and sexuality are more visible. Walter, framed as heterosexual in affect and asexual in practice, is unable to create and is unambiguously good. He sees service as his duty. He is self-sacrificing. He denies having emotion. He denies loving or being in love with Daniels when David accuses him of this. David – framed explicitly as queer (and, in the most troubling way, as the queer narcissist who uses sex as a weapon) – is able to create, and his obsession with exercising that power is a significant part of what fuels his psychosis.
We might read the film’s ‘message’ in the following way: the infertile straight subject (Walter) can accept his role in life as a duty to be fulfilled, while the queer subject with the capacity to create (David) is driven mad by this ability, and – in an Oedipal turn – by the desire to surpass the creator who disastrously disavowed his status as son. Are we meant to think that it might in fact be David’s queerness that means his creative capacity can only produce monsters (in a way comparable to The Countess in American Horror Story: Hotel, whose sole biological offspring is a bloodthirsty freak, and whose vampire child converts are monstrously affectless)? Is it possible that if Walter had been programmed to create he would have fathered a legion of angels because he is portrayed as straight?
I struggle to reconcile David’s framing in the second film with my discovery that the final screenwriter on Alien: Covenant is celebrated gay playwright John Logan. Logan has described his own coming out as ‘a process of accepting that the thing that made me alien and different and monstrous to some people is also the thing that empowered me and gave me a sense of confidence and uniqueness and a drive toward individuality’.34
What does it mean that the character David is, at least in part, authored by a queer creator?
If we understand ‘envy’ as encompassing multiple of the complex and sometimes contradictory meanings clustered behind the word – including hatred and feeling sick or ashamed at the thought of what someone else possesses that you lack but desire, but also the yearning to equal the achievements of another and longing for the advantages they enjoy35 – it becomes possible to see David as a complexly envying and envious subject, one who experiences this ugly feeling in all of these ways, good and bad, although mostly bad. Envy renders him effete, but only in the sense of being effeminate (and in the second film he is unmistakably so). David is not effete in every other sense (except perhaps having ‘lost [his] special quality or virtue’, if he ever had it), for he continues ‘to bring forth offspring’. He is not ‘worn out’ or ‘spent’, has not ‘exhausted [his] vigour and energy’, nor is he ‘incapable of efficient action’36 – quite the contrary in every case. He is not ‘weak’ or ‘ineffectual’, although he might, in the judgement of the films in which he exists, be ‘degenerate’.
If his enviousness makes David ‘effete’ only in the sense of being ‘degenerate’ and ‘effeminate’, as it does in my reading, what does that say about my strange sense of identification with him, my desire, at some stage in my life, to be like him (thin, cultured, effortlessly multilingual), or to stand in the place of him (however partially, fantastically, and of course impossibly)? Is the queer desire to create – to create life specifically – destined to be judged degenerate and effeminate and its products always already monstrous (even by other people like us)? Is a willingness to embrace my situational infertility and perform a duty of care, to be a Walter in the world, preferable to creating the biological child for whom I long? And why is it that men like me are forced to contemplate this choice when nearly everyone else – excepting only, perhaps, infertile women – is not?
Some months after watching Alien: Covenant, Andrew and I go to see Blade Runner 2049, another near-future vision of a world in which androids are variously integrated into life and industry, and one that, although not directed by Ridley Scott, is a sequel to his original film, is produced by him, and some fans believe operates in the same ‘universe’ as the Alien films. Like Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, Blade Runner 2049 is preoccupied with fantastic reproduction.
The central plot concerns the seemingly impossible birth of a child parented by at least one ‘replicant’ (a bioengineered android, structurally different from androids like David and Walter, but still manufactured and meant to be incapable of biological reproduction). Two-thirds of the way through the film, when Ryan Gosling’s character, K, ventures to a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, I notice Andrew check his watch, sigh, check the time again a few minutes later, sigh, move in his seat, fidget. When the credits finally roll, he says he’ll meet me outside.
We emerge from the cinema to find London’s sky glowing red-bronze, the air reverberating with an ominous energy as the storm Ophelia blows sand from the Sahara and smoke from fires on the Iberian Peninsula. It feels as if the film has escaped from the confines of its fantasy world, or, worse, that it was not fantasy at all but a work of proleptic, prophetic realism.
Andrew is on fire with critical outrage.
There was nothing queer about that film, he says.
True, I agree, and in fact I was wondering throughout, ‘Why does it have to be so determinedly and inescapably heterosexual?’
The gender politics were completely fucked up, he says. The women all die horribly, are helpless, or are imprisoned for their own safety.
True, I agree, it struck me as sexist, misogynistic, very retrogressive in all kinds of ways.
It just ends up reinscribing reproductive futurity, he says, and I laugh, because he’s right, it does, and I can’t help being amused that these are the kinds of conversations we have.
I don’t disagree with any of his criticisms, but I still can’t help enjoying the film and appreciating its exploration of the ways in which the socially marginalized – the replicants – find means of creating a family (even if it is biological reproduction, even if of a fantastic variety, even if it reinscribes a version of reproductive futurity that is only imagined as heterosexual). And although it is not queer enough to satisfy either Andrew or me, nor are the gender politics what they should be (and why aren’t they? Why produce a futuristic film so determinedly backward looking?), the insistence that reproduction and family does not have to fit into established social parameters feels, at least, like a note of resistance.
ALPHA ROMEO TANGO
Over the summer of 2015, our search for a child stops. We receive no new profiles, and every time I express interest in a child on the matching database my query is almost instantly rejected. I su
ggest to Andrew that we think again about surrogacy. I have heard that Mexico might be an option and begin investigating agencies in the country. At first, Andrew is sceptical, but we are both now becoming desperate and we register our interest with two different agencies, whose fees seem reasonable enough that we could just about manage to cover them from our savings. Is it ethical, though, Andrew wonders? In truth, I am reaching a point where I don’t want to know the answer.
Much of this growing desperation is bound up with the ageing of our parents and wanting to have a child or children while they are still here to see that new person in the family, and for that child to know her or his grandparents for as long as possible. We are both late-in-life children, and time is against us. We have plans to be in Texas for the summer, working at an archive in Austin, and I think how easy it would be to take a plane south. We could have a child by spring 2016, I say, and this prospect is enough to convince Andrew there is no harm in thinking about it.
But when the agencies give us access to their egg donor databases, and we begin looking through profiles of young women, I have a queasy feeling. Their brief character sketches are of a style that suggests the surrogacy agencies’ client base is interested only in conventional physical beauty and little else. Intelligence and educational attainment or artistic talent or any other abstract qualities appear to count for nothing. Some of the donor photos are styled in a way that suggest I might be looking through a catalogue for an Eastern European escort agency rather than trying to decide on the mother of my future child. No, I think, this is ludicrous. I don’t want a child with any of these women as the mother.
We delay, we ignore the phone calls from the agency representatives, and then we come across an article in the Guardian uncovering the exploitative conditions in which surrogates in Mexico are living. Only later do we discover an article revealing that the state of Tabasco, where surrogacy has been legal (and where the agencies we have been considering engage their surrogates), has suddenly changed the law. A same-sex couple is struggling to get their baby out of the country because the Mexican courts are blocking it. It stops us cold.
The Ginger Child Page 12