by Matt Kaplan
Remarkably, this story element is found in both Alien and Aliens. Make no mistake, the creatures in these films are definitely monsters that have no redeeming features whatsoever, but villainous humans play a role in both. In Alien, the villain comes in the form of a faceless corporation eager to capture an alien, regardless of the cost to human life, so the creature can be harnessed and used in military science. In Aliens, the villain is a slimy corporate executive keen to smuggle aliens back inside the bodies of infected humans so he can sell the alien embryos on the black market.
In essence, the villainous trait that adults carry in recent alien films is a willingness to be cool and unsympathetic toward life. “Cool” and “unsympathetic” . . . the words used by Wells to describe his aliens back in 1898. Have we somehow become the monsters?
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85 A theory affectionately known as slushball Earth.
86 Intriguing new research by the parasitologists at Penn State is showing that malaria parasites can tinker with the minds of mosquitoes, making them more thirsty for human blood than the blood of other animals. This, of course, suits the human malaria parasite just fine since it cannot reproduce inside the bodies of other species.
87 Technically, Aliens raises a challenging evolutionary question that borders on being a story flaw. It is not in the best interest of any parasite to kill its host outright since it needs the host as a living environment for its young to develop. This is presumably why the aliens capture the little girl, Newt, toward the end of the film and stick her in a cocoon rather than just killing her. Yet lots of marines are violently ripped to pieces by the aliens instead of being captured. Since every dead human results in one fewer alien ultimately being born, such behavior presents an evolutionary quandary. It makes no sense for the aliens to be such capable human-killing machines. Instead, they should be masterful human kidnappers that are adept at feeding on some other species when they reach adulthood. Given the success of the film, it seems likely that nobody cared, but I noticed.
88 Getting permits to infect humans with toxoplasmosis and then feed them to lions in a lab setting is, understandably, an ethically tricky matter.
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Conclusion
Cool and unsympathetic human behavior is not unique to alien films. While giant animals, like the Nemean lion and Calydonian boar, were celestially created to plague humanity, Kong, in every version of King Kong, is always brought to civilized lands by people who just don’t care about the needs of the giant ape. Similarly, Chimera was a divinely spawned horror, but the chimeric Dren from Splice, Caesar from Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Frankenstein’s monster turn toward violence largely because the human world abuses them. Like Kong, they are viewed as specimens rather than as individuals, and this creates the conflict.
This is not to say that these mistreated monsters are not still monsters. They are aberrations and they do harm humans, so they are, by definition, monsters, but their motivations make them more complex and hint at a trend.
The ancient monsters were created by gods. True, they were sometimes sent to punish humans for misbehavior, as was the case with the Minotaur and Calydonian boar, but this was still often the result of the gods being greedy for attention, uncompromising, and harsh. During the Middle Ages, monsters remained largely disconnected from humanity. Creatures like the Rukh and dragons plagued the world, but this was not because humanity had brought them about; they were simply there. However, there is a subtle difference between these monsters and those of the ancient period. Even though people might not have brought about creatures like the Rukh or dragons, humans definitely elicited the Rukh’s anger by trying to steal its egg, and dragons were always presented as attacking because people were trying to steal their treasure or attempting to enter their living spaces. Thus, humans took a more active role in interacting with monsters by overstepping boundaries.
In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the relationship between humans and monsters changed yet again. With the rise of demons that could possess vulnerable sleeping minds and vampires that could infect with a bite, humans started to become monsters. Yes, the humans who were corrupted by demons, vampires, and werewolves did not enter their state of corruption willingly, but this was still a major change from the way humans and monsters had been interacting earlier.
During the industrial and modern period, humans consistently have been side by side with monsters. While Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, the vicious Velociraptors in Jurassic Park, the virus in Contagion, and the shark in Jaws are all terrifying in their own right, human behavior in these cases is largely responsible for these creatures getting utterly out of control and killing many more people than they otherwise would. Humans are not actually monsters in these stories because they do not fit the definition, but in recent years this has started to change.
I see you
In 2009, James Cameron’s Avatar drew audiences of epic proportions. Set many years in the future, the story focuses on a mining operation taking place on the distant moon Pandora. The humans running the show are all corporate types, eager to get at Pandora’s vast mineral wealth. Working with them are two other groups, ex-marines keen to earn more cash than they could fighting wars on Earth and scientists who are supposed to be studying the biology of Pandora as well as easing tense relations with the humanoid alien population. These aliens, the Na’vi, are blue giants with yellow eyes, leopard-like stripes, fangs, and tails—aberrations in every sense of the word. Unfortunately for the managers of the mining operations, the Na’vi have their home right on top of a very dense cluster of mineral wealth. They are reluctant to slaughter the aliens because “killing the indigenous looks bad.” Thus, the scientists are ordered to intervene. Using technology to connect their minds to the bodies of avatars grown from a mixture of Na’vi and human DNA, the scientists are sent to interact with the natives and convince them to move.
The lead character in the story comes in the unlikely form of Jake Sully, a paraplegic marine who, through unusual circumstances, gets assigned to the avatar team being managed by the scientists. His initial experience on Pandora is dreadful. After being briefed by the military commander working for the corporation that “out there beyond that fence every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes,” he is viciously attacked by nocturnal six-legged wolves,89 nearly trampled by a hammer-headed rhinoceros-like creature, and almost eaten by a sleek black lionlike beast.
The night scene where he is attacked by the viper-wolves is utterly typical of monster movies. The camera initially reveals only the predators’ glowing eyes fleetingly as they close in for the kill. Then, as they approach, the camera moves as if mounted on their backs. The protagonist’s early interactions with the Na’vi are similar. They hiss, show their fangs, and appear truly alien.
Yet the world of Pandora is flipped upside down for both Jake and the audience as the story progresses. It becomes apparent that the land and the animals are deeply interconnected, and the aggression he met early on was all a matter of misunderstanding the ecology of the planet. This is most strikingly presented when Jake, while being shown the wonders of the forest by the Na’vi, finds the viper-wolves nursing their young and playing in their den.
But perceptions of the animals are not the only ones that change. By constantly watching Jake take action in a Na’vi body, we, as an audience, have our perceptions of who and what the heroes of the story are reversed. Halfway through the film, we begin seeing the Na’vi as normal and the humans as outsiders; even Jake pauses at one point to consider this, commenting, “Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream.” This is all helped along by subtle shifts in language as the characters begin describing the humans as “aliens.” But all subtlety comes to an end as the tale concludes.
Frustrated by the constant problems presented by the Na’vi and tired of waiting for them to be coaxed out of the way, the corporation
wages war. Humans, now frequently encased inside robotic walker units that make them look distinctly nonhuman, attack. Hundreds of Na’vi are mercilessly killed by missiles and machine guns. Finally, revealed to be somewhat sentient, the moon Pandora herself sends bestial hordes into battle. The viper-wolves, the hammer-headed rhinoceros creatures, the lionlike beasts, and the dragons of the sky come pouring out of the wild to kill the humans. It is utterly impossible to not favor these “once monsters” as they trample and rip people apart. By the close of the film, roles are entirely reversed. The aliens are now honorable humans, the monsters are now animals in need of protection, and the humans are now violent technologically equipped horrors much like the Terminators of Cameron’s earlier films.
While many other movies and books have presented tales of tribes that are initially viewed as threatening and later found to be heroic (Dances with Wolves and The Last Samurai are good examples), what Cameron manages with Avatar is something of a first—he creates this same reversal with creatures that are utterly inhuman at the start.
Part of the film’s success in so completely reversing the roles comes from the performance capture technology that enabled actors to perform with remarkable believability as aliens. All actors who played Na’vi or avatar characters were outfitted with suits that tracked their movements and wore cameras that mapped their facial expressions onto the faces of the fictional characters they were playing. It was this technology—which was, incidentally, first developed for the both loved and hated creature Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films—that made it possible for the humanity of the actors to ultimately shine through the bodies of the aberrations they were playing and allow viewers to think of them as human.
Yet film technology is only partially responsible for allowing the monsters and humans to so completely swap places in Avatar. Another tactic that Cameron uses to make this reversal involves scientific methods.
A key Na’vi greeting is “I see you,” which the film explains means “I see into you” or “I understand you.” The Na’vi do not use this phrase in a scientific way, but such communication primes us to see Pandora differently. Like biologists looking below surface tissues with X-rays or geologists drilling through the Earth’s crust for mineral traces, both Jake and the audience are taken behind the curtain of the forest and shown the ecological realities of Pandora that the corporate and militaristic humans simply cannot see.
Jake comes to see the creatures as audiences have long seen Kong, with understanding and sympathy, and he realizes who the monsters really are. In many ways the effect of this understanding is similar to what drove so many ancient monsters to extinction. Just as the Nemean lion met its end when the wilds of Europe were explored and what had previously been considered a monster came to be seen as merely animal, the monsters of Pandora are transformed as Jake “sees into” them.
So Cameron manages a remarkable thing with Avatar, but like any scientist making a major discovery, he is standing on the shoulders of giants who have been moving in this direction for a long time. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the theory of evolution through natural selection independently and simultaneously because all the pieces of the puzzle were present for them to take this major step. Cameron was similarly primed by numerous films, many of which he directed, that were already bringing humans and monsters into close proximity. A monster/human reversal has been a long time coming. The critical question is, why? Why, throughout history, have humans and monsters grown ever closer together and finally, in Avatar, entirely swapped positions?
Where the mask finally falls
People have always looked to the horizon and feared that which they did not understand. Initially, this horizon was the edge of the forest. Then, when forests became better explored and their dangers were realized as not actually being that serious, human attention turned toward the darkness of the sea. Then the sea became better explored, and the new horizon became the vastness of space. And now, with space getting ever better explored, a new horizon appears… in the form of the horrors humanity is about to unleash on itself.
Through the technology we have created, we now pose a greater threat to ourselves and our planet than we ever have before. During the days of the Romans, the worst humanity could manage was to wage a war of swords. True, this frequently left thousands dead, but the world and all of its resources would always recover because nobody, not even the merciless Genghis Khan, had the power to exterminate everyone. Nuclear weapons radically changed this by making it possible for us to literally bring about the end of the world. Similarly, we have the ability, through reckless inaction and greed, to wreak environmental havoc that can make our planet truly unlivable.
Trying to predict what we will and won’t do in the years ahead is as difficult as trying to determine whether the animal on the other side of a jungle thicket is a rabbit, lion, or dragon. It is from the nature of these threats and the staggering uncertainty surrounding them that we rise as monsters.
This should not, for a moment, indicate that the days of inhuman monsters are over. Nothing can alter the ways evolution has shaped the human brain, and people will always have an intrinsic fear of things that have threatened them since the days of dwelling in caves. Dark environments where we were once predated upon will continue to generate a sense of dread, and animals like snakes will remain objects of fear. Monsters associated with these stimuli will certainly persist for decades regardless of the role that we come to play in monster stories. Similarly, forces that still threaten human lives and are difficult or impossible to control, like diseases, will continue to find their way into the media as monsters. Even so, there is no getting around the fact that the mask of the monster has fallen over time with ever greater frequency on the face of humanity.
Whether this trend will persist depends greatly upon how we act. We can stand petrified as we gaze at the monsters we have become and allow worldwide nuclear and environmental destruction. Alternatively, we have the opportunity to take action, behead the beast, and claim a future where the mask of the monster safely sits somewhere else.
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89 Cleverly named “viper-wolves.” Drawing upon some snake fears, are we Mr. Cameron?
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