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Tim Blackmore on Alien
67 Plays2 years ago
Mark and Joe have an engrossing conversation with Tim Blackmore about the film Alien, especially the origin and nature of the visual elements in that film, and how the thinking behind those elements has informed wider society since.
Find out more about this episode at https://re-creative.ca/alien/ (don't forget the hyphen!)
Re-Creative is a co-production of Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with Mark A. Rayner.
Contact us at: joemahoney@donovanstreetpress.com
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Transcript
Fears of Transportation
00:00:09
Speaker
Hey, Mark. Joe, how are you? I have a question for you. That's, that comes as a huge surprise. What form of transportation terrifies you the most? Form of transportation terrifies me the most. Do any forms of transportation terrify me? I like roller coasters. Oh, okay. Well then. Yeah. Cars should terrify me. Yeah, statistically. But they don't. And I like airplanes.
Tim Blackmore on Hot Air Balloons
00:00:35
Speaker
I'm going to have to go with a barrel over the Niagara Falls.
00:00:38
Speaker
That's that's pretty terrifying. Okay, good job. And you see, we didn't talk about the weather. No, not yet. Anyway, but yeah, no, the most terrifying conveyance for you. I think a hot air balloon. Hmm. That just sounds like a bad idea to have you ever been in one. I have never been in one. It looks really cool. But yeah, statistically, it doesn't look so good.
00:00:59
Speaker
Well, we're going to have to do a podcast from a hot air balloon then one day. Just see my voice pitched an octave higher the whole time in terror. Yeah, exactly. Now, should we pose this question to our guest? Yes, to our guest.
Spacecraft Fears and Astronauts
00:01:12
Speaker
I think so. Tim Blackmore, welcome. Hello, hello. What terrifies you in terms of transportation? Well,
00:01:19
Speaker
spacecraft that's why i had this as a question yeah yeah i was thinking that would be a good answer yeah anything in space yeah space is pretty hostile do you guys think astronauts are terrified when they first go up in one of those things not from what i understand i mean my my understanding is that basically their heart rates are up
00:01:41
Speaker
Some of them, some, not at all. I mean, some have a resting heart rate on the launch pad and during launch. It's like that seat of the right stuff where they have to wake up. It's Gus Grissom, right? They have to wake him up because he's asleep right before the launch. Yeah. You have to wake him up. Yeah. I had heard, and I hope that no astronauts are listening to this or we may never be able to get an astronaut on the podcast, but I had heard that one of the decisions, at least early on,
00:02:09
Speaker
when they were choosing astronauts was that they want someone who's good mechanically and smart, but with not too much imagination.
00:02:20
Speaker
I think if you're going to be a test pilot in general, you better believe in your own skills. I mean, you better have a really core sense that you can overcome the problems you're going to face. And so there's a great deal of solid, when you do meet pilots, they seem like very
00:02:42
Speaker
calm dudes or people. I've only ever met one. I met Chris Hadfield at the CBC. He just come out of the elevator and he looked lost. And I was going to I was coming up to him to say, you know, can I help you? Is there someplace you and I was going to make some silly joke about being lost in space. And fortunately, someone got to him in time before I could do that. Too bad.
00:03:06
Speaker
But speaking of loss, listeners may be lost now wondering who the heck it is that we are talking to. I mean, we know that it's Tim Blackmore. Yeah. But what do we know about him? Even he doesn't know. Well, this is the point where we ask you to introduce yourself,
Introduction to Tim Blackmore
00:03:20
Speaker
Tim. Oh, I see. Okay. On this podcast. We don't do it for you. Oh, excellent. Wonderful. I've been I've been trying to do this my whole life.
00:03:27
Speaker
Hi, I'm a professor in the School of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. That's one of the things I do. Longtime professor, no time listener.
00:03:42
Speaker
Um, I was a graphic designer a long, long time ago when it was in my early twenties, I guess, and late teens. And at the time we did everything by hand. There were really no computers. This was before the Mac or before the Apple. And I love graphics and, but in the end I got out of that world and I decided as I did exit that world, that it was time to go to art school at least a little bit.
00:04:09
Speaker
And so I started going to art school at night while I was doing other things. That was good. And I was always been interested in science fiction. I love science fiction really of all kinds, but mostly reading. But at the time in the 70s when I was a teen and in the 80s, all science fiction film was just bad. I mean... Wait, sorry. Which decade are we talking about? In the last century, about 50 or 60 years ago. So the 1970s, in the late 70s and the early 80s.
00:04:37
Speaker
Okay, we're gonna have to come back to that. Keep going. Okay.
Critique of Sci-Fi Films
00:04:40
Speaker
The thing about science fiction film is that it was just terrible and it looked terrible and it was written terribly and it had terrible people in it. And you just sort of knew when you went to see a science fiction film that it was just going to be awful. And there were about three or four maybe well made science fiction films that look beautiful and were well written and had been directed well and they didn't look like
00:05:05
Speaker
Because people always when you said at the time, you know, I read science fiction, they were like, Oh, like 1984, you'd be like, but no. And how about Brave New World is like, Oh, geez, okay. Yeah, sure. Fine. Like, let me get out of here. Like, you know, let me off this bus. So I don't have to have this discussion yet again.
00:05:20
Speaker
about what science fiction is. And because at the time, it really was like when you met another science fiction reader, you were meeting somebody from a club. So that was sort of part of the attraction, I guess of it. But anyway, so films like 2001. Yeah, that's the first thing I thought of. Yeah, which was made in 1968. Well, it was finished in 68. But they started in 66.
Art School and Industrial Design Journey
00:05:44
Speaker
Because it still looks great. It still looks beautiful. And it still is. Douglas Trumbull, who was the director of photography and also the technical, essentially, guy, became one of the technical wizards of Hollywood in the 80s.
00:06:00
Speaker
So it was very unusual to see well done science fiction film. How did I get on to this? I was okay, so I was interested in that. And so when I went to art school, I was doing a lot of drawings of spacecraft and other things like that when we weren't doing other stuff that we were supposed to do.
00:06:18
Speaker
And eventually, after I'd been at art school over the course of a series of years, going at night, so very slowly, but really having a chance to do the courses, put time into the courses. One of the courses I took was with an Estonian industrial designer named Velo Hubel. And Velo was this wonderful, just tremendous human being. He was this bear of a man. And he had these crazy stories about he'd been picked up
00:06:46
Speaker
trying to escape Estonia, because they were trying to get away from, well, they're trying to get away from the Russians. And then the Nazis. It's like, because first they were flooded by one and then by the other. So he was picked up at the mouth of the harbor, leaving Estonia and picked up by the Nazis by the Wolfpack. And they put him to work in the Berlin rail yards, servicing locomotives. And so at night, during the day, they were guarded by Nazis because they had to keep the trains running literally.
00:07:14
Speaker
And at night, the Allies would come over and bomb them, and they'd run off into the field so they didn't get killed by Allied bombs, and then the Nazis would go around them up and bring them back to the rail yards in the day. So I met Velo, and he was just a wonderful storyteller. And he was a very fluid, extremely intelligent designer. And my interest at the time in animation and industrial design specifically,
00:07:43
Speaker
really sort of came to the fore. And I began to think seriously about leaving the university, which is where I'd been doing another degree, and going to art school to do industrial design and getting a job in film designing. So this is sort of where that's my part of my other life. That's kind of enough.
00:08:03
Speaker
But it's also fair to say that design features pretty heavily in your research too. Like you're a professor and your research is really about design as much as anything else. Yeah, that's true. I am interested in technology and the way technology is designed and I'm also interested in
Research on WWII Military Patches
00:08:23
Speaker
two-dimensional design, what we would call two-dimensional design, which means posters and flags and things like that. And I did actually, Mark's right, I did just write a book about the design of military patches during World War II and sort of what had happened, basically the ascendancy of the swastika and what had been the German design program, if there was such a thing. And it turned out there was, there really was a
00:08:49
Speaker
very focused German design program. And I was interested specifically in, well, who ran it? And who were the geniuses, basically, of this program? And there were real geniuses. And some of them, like the guy who designed the Volkswagen logo, you know, he's paid 100 marks for that, 100 extra marks.
00:09:09
Speaker
That was it. That was his gift of posterity. And he got to live, I guess. So that was one of your books, but you've written other books
Teaching War and Propaganda
00:09:16
Speaker
too, right? That's right. I wrote a book about military technology called War X. That's a book where I could see that my students, I teach a couple of courses on war and the way war is represented.
00:09:30
Speaker
The way we make propaganda and the kind of propaganda I'm thinking of isn't your sort of typical, it doesn't look like a World War II poster. It would look like it's going to look like a TikTok video or it's going to be something that you really don't understand as being propaganda. It's going to be something like
00:09:47
Speaker
I don't know, a first person shooter game or something like that, which is completely pretty much hides itself under the guise of being entertainment or some easily consumable sort of product that has chocolate covered all over it. And you know, it's all sweet and bad for you. But you don't know, you know, it's bad for you, but you don't know just how bad it's for you. So like things like
00:10:10
Speaker
the most overt propaganda, apart from Maverick, okay, the second Top Gun film, but is probably at the moment the, well, the Reacher series and movies have been, that's the kind of propaganda I'm thinking of, and also the Jack Ryan stuff.
00:10:27
Speaker
which has continued to sort of via this ongoing thread. Also the Star Wars, the ongoing Star Wars universe, the Mandalorian, that's anything that has Grogu in it that watch out, you know, watch your watch your wall because somebody's coming for you. And that's the stuff I'm that I want to focus on propaganda. People are like, oh, you must mean this. I'm like, yeah, sure. You know, if somebody takes out a page and puts a flag on a page, yeah, OK.
00:10:51
Speaker
You know, that's obvious. It's the stuff that you don't see coming. The insidious propaganda. That's the best propaganda. Yeah. It's the real propaganda, the stuff that you don't actually know. Exactly. It's unneeded analysis right now of the sound, for instance, that we're putting out. They find out that there are like three tones that are going into their brain that will reprogram and that kind of thing.
00:11:13
Speaker
Well, of course, this podcast is nothing but propaganda, but I'm not sure what it's propaganda for. We're still working on that. But I just want to, okay, so I want to sum up. You're a professor, you're interested in design and in science fiction, and you've written a couple of books, and you're interested in the design that came out of the Nazis, you're interested in war, and is there anything that you would add to that that you are?
Art as a Creative Outlet
00:11:43
Speaker
No, that's pretty good, I think. Let me put- He's also an artist. I got to jump in with the story because one of the ways that Tim manages to get through long committee meetings, and I don't think I'm going to say anything that's going to get us fired, is that he has a sketchbook.
00:12:02
Speaker
And it's a delight whenever we're in person and I see that Tim is in the meeting, I'm like, I try to sit close as I can so I can actually see what's happening in the sketchbook as the insanity ensues. Okay, Mark, you've got to get your hands on some of this and you got to put it up in the website so that people can see. Maybe he can scan us a couple pieces. Yeah, I forgot. Oh, thanks, Mark. That's so fun.
00:12:27
Speaker
It's so inspirational that I included it in my last book. There's a scene that actually is, Jim, if you have, you probably read the book. I've never read it yet. Yeah. Yeah. There's a scene, you're in the scene, so is Romain. You'll recognize both of you. Yeah. I have to go back and reread it now, but now I'll say that like looking at you and we don't have a video component to this, to this podcast. We've decided that it's strictly audio for the time being, but I see a picture.
00:12:52
Speaker
Oh, yes. Yeah. Well, yeah, some video stuff will be on the website, but I see that you are in a den of some kind and what's that?
Exploration of Books and Collections
00:13:02
Speaker
Okay. You're in multiple dens. The one that I can see is full of books. You've got tons of books and interesting objects sitting on the shelves and some posters and whatnot. Can you tell me what is behind you there? What books, what objects?
00:13:18
Speaker
Yeah, fair enough. Behind me are some books which are sort of your standard. It's a shelf away from the other reference shelves. So I have a bookcase, one of these six foot tall bookcases, which is just reference books. But one of the shelves behind me is sort of the, if there was an emergency theory fire and you needed to put something out, you would grab one of these books. So there's a couple of theory encyclopedias and some cultural studies, encyclopedias and books about
00:13:47
Speaker
how to use language and things like that so sort of really basic like a dictionary of philosophy and a dictionary of cultural studies those sorts of the kinds of things that you just you're going to need quickly and you can't step it's two steps away from it get to the other book so that's one of them
00:14:03
Speaker
The other shelves are full of what we used to call techno-cultural studies, which would be things like what makes us descriptions of what makes us cyborg or books about what on cyborgs and on robots and AI and on the cultures that go to produce those things. So how say an industrial, a late industrial culture like the one we're living in,
00:14:25
Speaker
What is a dream? Basically, what are the dreams of a culture like this? And, you know, what did America dream in the 90s as the web essentially was just beginning to layer on top of the internet? And what
War, Human-Machine Integration, and Cultural Dreams
00:14:38
Speaker
were the internet dreams if there were any? And because there were some, and what were the physical dreams about? And I was really interested in that. I still am, actually, because of my interest in war studies.
00:14:47
Speaker
One of the things that I'm focused on a lot is the way that war forces the body to join with machinery in ways which may be seriously unpleasant and damaging for the psyche, but are necessary if you're going to survive.
00:15:03
Speaker
So that's a lot of what you're seeing behind me is sort of the theory, the sort of books of theory about sort of how the body and technology are fused, what happens, what the culture is that produces some of those fusions and so on. The other side of the room is mostly
00:15:24
Speaker
of DVDs, I think, and Blu-rays and discs of various different kinds. And it's a little tiny piece of the collection, a lot of which has been, I sort of shipped a
00:15:34
Speaker
off to one of my other caves that I dwell in. And so it's basically the sort of best of hits of like great European film that, you know, everybody has to see and that you just have to have because there's such amazing pieces of art and you just like, so I have things like very, at the very bottom of that collection would be, say, Zed by Costa Garberos.
00:15:56
Speaker
And if you don't know Costa Garver, such I'm sure you do, but, you know, he's a Greek director who was in the 60s and 70s made really important films about sort of the way that people give up their freedoms without even really being asked to. And so that we we continue to have the belief that when people come for us, it's going to look like the Nazis, but it's not. It's going to be air miles, basically. That's kind of what you're looking at. And then right behind me is
00:16:26
Speaker
a square, a tin sign with some images on it by Ron Cobb. And I love this piece of design. It was one of the most important pieces of design that I looked at when I was a sort of budding visualizer, which is what they used to call the kind of thing that I did, where you would sort of, you would be asked to visualize, say,
00:16:49
Speaker
uh, spacecraft and, uh, or wheels for spacecraft or, or, and in this case, this piece of design by Ron Cobb is, uh, for me, I understood when I saw it, it just was like, it was like a jolt of recognition in my sort of. What's it called? Did you say the name?
00:17:08
Speaker
Yeah, the guy's name is Ron Cobb, C-O-B-B. And he's an American, was an American designer. And the piece of art? It's a piece of art. Yeah, it's a piece of art from Alien, in fact. Okay. And now we're getting to the meat. That's right. That's your party piece. You want to talk about Alien? Yeah. That's it. Yeah. I love that film. Man, like the things you've already brought up, Mark, this is going to be a three hour podcast. I know. I did warn you.
00:17:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, so many fascinating directions that we could go in.
00:17:39
Speaker
You know, it's funny because I recently watched Alien before we knew you're going to be on the podcast. And I did have the thought during the middle of it, because I know it's HR Geiger who designed the, you know, the Xenomorph stuff, but the rest of the design is great. Yes. Yeah. Like it's not just the Xenomorph that's amazing. And I had the thought, I wonder what Tim thinks about this movie way before we decided to have you come on the podcast. So we're going to find out. Why, why Alien?
Cultural Shifts and Corporations in 'Alien'
00:18:06
Speaker
Why did you want to talk to us about Alien?
00:18:08
Speaker
I think this film sits at a boundary marker, produces or is a boundary marker between two different ways of looking at the world. One of them is the end of the sixties, what I think of as sort of the, which something which began in sort of the late sixties in which you see well into the middle of the seventies, where you begin to see really serious questioning of
00:18:34
Speaker
corporate life, for want of a better phrase, I guess. In other words, do we trust corporations to behave in our best interests as citizens, I suppose? And when I was growing up in the 60s, that is when I was a kid in the 60s, the answer to that was yes, pretty much. Corporations were considered to be crucial to the economy and big corporations especially.
00:19:01
Speaker
the big three were still actually running in Detroit. And Detroit was the city, it was like, it's interesting, it was sort of one of those industrial spots that you had to have, like everybody pointed to Detroit as being sort of the future of America.
00:19:19
Speaker
And it's so interesting to look at that and say, 30 years later, it was all gone. There's a beautiful picture of that in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive, which is that picture of Detroit. And it's interesting because the female vampire, Tilda Swinton, oh, man, she's so great, says, oh, this will bloom again. There's water here. It's just one of those marvelous lines. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's true.
00:19:48
Speaker
So I think that there's this sense that I grew up with and the people that my basically children my age grew up with that you could trust corporate America because it had brought the world through World War Two. It was safe. Basically, this was a safe way to live. And at the same time, as I guess people like my mother and father were reading things like Rachel Carson, Silent Spring,
00:20:15
Speaker
And they were beginning to talk about phosphates in the water and they were saying, well, wait a second, you know, we're what's happening to the heavy metals and what's happening to this. We've got this these pickling agents were using and steel plants. And what about that? And the space race was on and I was a huge space junkie when I was a kid.
00:20:32
Speaker
But later on, she always said, why are we going into space when we have so many problems on the Earth? And this was a huge argument between these different kinds of understanding of what was the future going to be. So I think in 1979, which is when Alien comes out, we'd reached the point where in science fiction, it was understood that basically you were no longer safe in a world of corporations.
00:20:59
Speaker
And that had been underlined by things like rollerball. And it was to some extent, to some extent comes out in Star Wars, but much more comes out in what I would call THX 1138, or what in the film was called Thx 1138, which was George Lucas studio, most sort of student film that he made at the Art Center in California, right.
00:21:24
Speaker
And that was really a sort of counter-cultural set piece. I mean, when I was growing up, everybody wanted to see DHX 1138 on Friday night and, you know, get blasted. And then it was taken over by Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I didn't find it interesting, but you could sing. So... The rush to hedonism had started. That's right, exactly. Yeah, that's it.
00:21:50
Speaker
So I think that 79, we understood at that point, I think partly because of, say, books like John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider, which was 75, that there was something going on here which was bad news. And part of it had to do with being connected. And that's what Shockwave Rider is so good about. It's one of the early cyberpunk novels.
00:22:10
Speaker
And I think it actually is, in many ways, a more important book than Neuromancer. Okay, I'm going to get heat for that, but whatever. And so I think that by the time we get to 79, you can see that there's a huge part of the population which says you cannot trust a corporation to do anything except throw you under the bus, so to speak, because it will serve its own interests. And if those interests have up until now,
00:22:38
Speaker
been parallel with what human interests are, reconsider that because corporations themselves are now alive. And this was one of the suggestions that John Kenneth Galbraith has in his New Industrial Estate, which is a very famous book that now is in, I think, five editions. But in the third edition, he basically says,
00:22:57
Speaker
The corporation is the new form of life on the planet. And I remember when I read that, it lit up for me. I was like, oh yes, this is very true. And it wasn't at the time that easy to see it because most of us probably didn't interact with major corporations the way we do now. I wasn't making a daily deal, let's say, with Apple or whatever, signing. I didn't sign end-user license agreements on a daily basis, but now I do.
00:23:24
Speaker
I wasn't asked to sign contract law, sort of debate contract law issues, but now we are. And I don't have the training for it. Nobody even reads those. Well, exactly. Yeah. And it's also, it's before Reagan, right? Reagan gets elected backing back before that. It's after the Powell memo. So it's after that conspiracy started, but very few people understood what that meant.
00:23:53
Speaker
that there was actually a conspiracy to subvert American capitalism. And you're right, because in the 50s, the 40s, the 60s, American capitalism, the CEO of a corporation would just, if you said, do you have any duty to the public at large? They would say, well, of course I do. I mean, of course. Now, that would be like, no, I can't do that, or I'm not giving perfect shareholder value, which is my only job.
00:24:23
Speaker
You know it anticipates all that so you know when you're talking about the change to how corporations started to operate. Another movie popped into my head and i just i just want to run this past you to think if i'm totally off base in this networked oh yeah.
00:24:40
Speaker
Absolutely. Because that movie, I don't know when that was made. 1976. Paddy Chefsky, I think, is the writer of that movie. Yeah. And it's a fabulous, it's still got in my mind, one of the best speeches ever, Ned Beatty. You have meddled with the forces of nature. That's right. And I was like, I watched that recently. I was like, oh my god, this is predicting what's going to happen, not only to American media or North American media, but corporations writ large.
00:25:10
Speaker
Well, and also it really was transcendently perceptive in a way that of understanding that we won the Albert Finney character, you know, I want you to go to your balcony and say, I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore. And people did. And it was I remember seeing it in the film and thinking, well, this is just nuts. Like nobody would do this. And then, well, you know, cut to 40 years later, and that's what everybody's been doing. Yeah.
00:25:33
Speaker
Now, the movie I was thinking about and I want to touch on something you said early on about there not being any good or many good science fiction movies in the 70s.
Corporate Dystopia in Films
00:25:44
Speaker
The movie that I immediately thought of was Silent Running and you'd mentioned Douglas Trumbull as well who directed that and which touches on the same theme as Alien really. I think the corporations and the planet Earth are basically deforesting the planet and protecting the last remaining trees.
00:26:03
Speaker
That's right. Yeah, and it's I mean, that's a fascinating movie because the way that the Bruce Dern character the lone character basically handles himself is not unlike the way you what you see in things like I think it was Twilight slash cleaning the film with Bert Lancaster where he's in a missile silo.
00:26:23
Speaker
there are sort of some of these anti war films and Silent Running really takes part of that or takes part in that discussion, I think really properly. And he recruits, as you remember, Huey Dewey and Louie, the sort of R2-D2 or R2-D2s were very cute little characters. And as I remember, when I saw the film, when the first time I saw the film, I must have been, I don't know, 12 or something like that.
00:26:46
Speaker
And I was truly gutted when there's a there's some kind of solar storm and Huey, one of the these are little walking televisions basically with arms. And they're cute. And one of them is blown away in the silver star and you just just the two legs are left.
00:27:03
Speaker
I was standing on this spacecraft. And I remember I was like, I was so upset. And my sister was like, well, just go away, you know? Oh, yeah. Yes. So it's a very human picture, I think, of that Bruce Dern is allowed to, in the same way that James Cahn is in Rollerball, allowed to be a hero, allowed to some extent to be a populist hero without it being poisoned, essentially. And what he does, ultimately, as you know, as you remember, is save the forests. Yes.
00:27:31
Speaker
because he has ordered to destroy them and he saves them instead and he's training the three little robots to take care of the forest. Yeah, although to what extent he's really saved them by putting them into deep space, it remains to be seen. It's true.
00:27:48
Speaker
But back to Alien. So you're saying one of the things you wanted to talk about was really the design of the movie, and what specifically about the design are the things that you still look back and go, wow, that's still…
Ron Cobb's Influence on 'Alien' Design
00:28:04
Speaker
Well, I mean, I'm going to work my way back to Ron Cobb because I think Cobb is the partly sung now hero. His heroism in the design world is sort of known, I think, inside it, but not very much known outside of it, partly because he was a quiet guy. And I think a lot of designers are. They're not really
00:28:28
Speaker
They do tend to be good with images and not necessarily good with words. But I think Cobb was one of these people who was good with both. And I think he was a bright guy. And there was a lot going on inside his head. He had gone to Vietnam as a foot soldier and come back early. I think it was 62 or three. So it was like early, early, early in Vietnam. And I don't think he saw any action. I hope he didn't.
00:28:52
Speaker
It's suggested that maybe, it looks as though to me, he probably went through some kind of depression when he came back. That's not really a surprise.
00:29:03
Speaker
So the centerpiece of so much of the design for Alien is built on two earlier films, which basically bombed one way or another. One of them literally bombed and one of them never got made. And the one that never got made is, of course, the Hodorowsky's Dune, the first version of Dune that there was going to be.
00:29:26
Speaker
Can I jump in there for a second? If you haven't watched the documentary about that movie, you I mean, the listeners, you really do have to watch it. It's it makes you long for a thing that never existed so much. Absolutely. Well, and especially it makes you long for the book that they made. Yes. Yeah.
00:29:44
Speaker
Oh, of which there are some, I think five copies yet there's a handful of copies. They probably cost, you know, you'd have to be owner of a CEO of a big corporation to buy one probably. So that and that film is just called my memory is just called Hodorovsky's Doom. I think so. Yeah. Yeah.
00:30:01
Speaker
So if you don't know how to spell it, neither do I. It's J-O-D-O-R-O-S-K-Y, something like that. If you want me to go check, I will go check on the XO brain, but otherwise, yeah. It starts with a J and there's an O next after it. That's it. That'll get you there. They just call him Hodo because nobody knows how to spell his name.
00:30:22
Speaker
He was famous for making these counterculture films like Holy Mountain and El Topo, which were these sort of crazy visionary acid trip films that people used to actually go and drop acid to and then go and see again. And so he came out with that and he was approached by Daniel Bannon.
00:30:39
Speaker
eventually. And Dan O'Bannon is the other unsung hero of this story. And it's a very sad story because he was such a bright guy and he never really got a chance to direct. I think if O'Bannon had a chance to direct, I think we would have seen some truly intriguing Brazil-like films that had the kind of intelligence that Terry Gilliam was able to bring to film, but had a whole different sensibility. Didn't have the sort of overlay of British sensibility, which Gilliam had picked up by working for Python.
00:31:10
Speaker
And so on. So O'Bannon is one of these people. And O'Bannon was really smart about visuals. And he also was an artist. I mean, they all drew and wrote and did everything pretty much. And he recruited people like Chris Foss. And so there's this fascinating thing where it's about getting the right people. And Horosky picked up O'Bannon. O'Bannon called on Foss. Chris Foss was a famous
00:31:38
Speaker
And this is going to sound bizarre. But but for those, for those of us in the science fiction world, it's like we adore book covers because the book covers are so often these really visionary pieces of art about a place you want to go visit or you don't. But it may be this sort of like those early paintings of the covers of Dune were astonishing. There were beautiful, evocative images of this desert planet and the Fremen and the blue eyes and
00:32:03
Speaker
Wow, and that was, there were no images otherwise. I mean, the rest of it was in black and white. So here we're in full color paintings, sort of your images of your imagination coming to life. So Chris Foss was a British book cover artist, and he did these astonishing, strange book covers. And he was using, he was an early user of the airbrush.
00:32:25
Speaker
And at the time, to use an airbrush, you pretty much had to learn to produce a steady stream of air through your lungs, basically because you actually physically blew into a little tube, which went into the pipe, basically, that makes the spray. Now, of course, very quickly, they began to produce compressors that you could use. So it produced these very slick paintings that had no brushstrokes.
00:32:52
Speaker
And this is something which is going to mark Foss's art, and it was going to produce these quite otherworldly images, which appeared to be in some ways textureless and surface less. It's very, very interesting. And it's one of the first things that computer imaging will be able to reproduce when we get to 3D computer graphics in, say, the mid 80s. It'll start to look like airbrush, because the first thing you can do is phong shading. So Chris, he's going to pull on Chris Foss, and he's going on go and get, as Mark says, Giger, HR Giger, who is the Swiss surrealist,
00:33:22
Speaker
who has or had in his head a series of broken pieces of glass that were made of black sort of radioactive misogynist horrific sort of images which just kind of kept slashing out of his brain and he just kept painting them and painting them.
00:33:42
Speaker
And they were gynophobic and technophobic, and they were images of cities and guns full of unborn children. And oh my God, it was just sort of incredible what he called biomechanics. And this concept of biomechanics is something which we in the world of interested in cyborgs, which I was and am, would often point at Giger and say, this is the guy. This is the guy who imagined basically our worst nightmares.
00:34:11
Speaker
So it was O'Bannon who brought those people together and it was O'Bannon who knew Cobb. So he knew Cobb because he himself finally directed, wrote and directed a film, which was a flop called Dark Star. I should say it was a bomb. It's a funny little movie. And Cobb actually did a drawing if I once bought the video of this, even though I couldn't play the video anymore, because it had the Cobb cover art on it. I've never seen it before. Didn't Carpenter work on that?
00:34:37
Speaker
Yes, yes, good for you. Almost nobody knows this little film. And the O'Bannon is, I think, the pilot. But the main issue is that the ship is a planet killer, or a sun killer, and they drop bombs in the sun. Is that right, Mark? Do you remember? Yeah, I think that's right. I can check that if you want. The whole mission is to convince the ship to drop a bomb into a sun so it'll blow up a galaxy because they've been decided they've got a clear
00:35:06
Speaker
Clearly galaxy, but the ship is depressed and because the ship is depressed. It won't drop its bomb Yes, and so the they're yeah, they're destroying rogue planets. That's what's going on. Yeah
00:35:17
Speaker
That's it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So, so the pilot spends most of the time talking to the bomb and giving it therapy. And at the very end of the film, of course, the ship is probably is finally happy and it's like, okay, great. And it releases. So this is wonderful. So there's this one set, basically, which is the interior of the dark star, which is the ship.
00:35:37
Speaker
And the set was designed by Ron Cobb. And so this is how O'Bannon, who was going to wind up trying to direct Darkstar and starred in it, got to know Ron Cobb. So then Dune failed. They never made it. And Darkstar was released and bombed. No pun intended. Well, actually, there was a pun intended.
00:35:55
Speaker
And so what we get then is O'Bannon being hired by Ridley Scott and really by Ron Schusett to come in and sort of be an art director sort of to launch what will become Alien, period.
00:36:12
Speaker
And he says, well, we've got to talk to my friend Ron Cobb. And so they go over to Cobb's studio in New York, and Cobb is busy painting exteriors of, say, the planet, which we never see. And they're just gorgeous paintings. There was an early book published by Weldon Woolley, which was an Australian, as you can imagine, Australian publisher.
00:36:33
Speaker
And Cobb at this point had become a real sort of counter-cultural hero in the early 70s, basically, because he was doing editorial cartoon every week. And these were bleak, incredibly anti-corporate pro-ecology editorial cartoons. One of them that I remember, I still give it to my students to see, to my workhorse students to see,
00:36:57
Speaker
It's a little kid who's clutching his stomach, which is bleeding profusely. And he's opened the box, which is this fighting leatherneck puts you in the action, and there's this action toy. And the toy has stabbed the kid with his bayonet and is going off looking for the next victim. And they all look like that. And he was just turning these things out. I mean, there's a sort of brilliance, there's a genius there.
00:37:23
Speaker
And so, O'Bannon was like, hey, Ron, you know, we need you to come and design for this movie. He's like, okay, fine, it's a dead movie. I mean, and so he goes and joins the team that is going to put together what will become Alien.
00:37:36
Speaker
And so now we come to Ron Cobb. And one of the things that they did was they said, we want to have a working environment. And Cobb, somewhere along the way, we now know a bit more than we used to, somewhere along the way, Cobb picked up essentially the basics of industrial drafting. And so he actually could make things. And so when he rendered things, he rendered them as if they were going to be used in an environment. And so what is behind me is what he called semiotic standard.
00:38:04
Speaker
And at the time, semiotics was really detroit. This was the nouvelle vogue, this is the avant-garde of the avant-garde. It wasn't almost not even happening yet. The people who were writing about semiotics were basically French theorists who were talking about how we make reality. Because basically, semiotics are usually, well, anything can be a semiotic system.
00:38:32
Speaker
So, for instance, the example that I will always use for my youngest students is traffic lights or basically the traffic narrative, basically the discourse of traffic control, which means you have to learn a book and you have to learn what signs mean and red always means stop and green always means go, those kinds of things. So there's a whole language.
00:38:52
Speaker
Yellow means go faster. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Let's just out there for a second. Okay. What does semiotics mean briefly? Right. It's a discussion of the science of science. So how do we use science to make meaning with each other? And these signs might be language.
00:39:12
Speaker
Spoken language, they might be written language. It might be color. It might be fashion. It might be cars. All of these are languages, basically. So it's Cobb who brings this to the making of Alien, and how does he do so?
00:39:26
Speaker
That's right. And so what he does is he uses he creates a basic semiotic language for a starship. You can see this coming out of 2001. Because there are scenes in 2001 where Heywood Floyd say goes into the it's always gets a laugh in the theater.
00:39:44
Speaker
Uh, when he goes into the anti-grav into the, into the toilet and he has to, it says, you know, how to go to the bathroom in space, which they actually wrote, but it's in English. It's just in English and it's all language. It's not pictures because realistically who would be going to space? We don't know. Could be Russian, Chinese could be Japanese could be, we don't know. Right. So why do we assume it's English? Why do we assume they're going to be able to read? How about if it's all has to be done in pictures? Okay. Let's hope the Ikea people don't do that.
00:40:12
Speaker
right on, especially with those dumb little Allen keys, they get you they're all wrong size. So but that's the same idea. Actually, it's a really good example of a non linguistic semiotic system. Because semiotics any sign it just semion in Greek is sign. So it just means any science of signs or any sign system which is recognizable. So for instance, fashion is one of those systems.
00:40:38
Speaker
where we understand that if you're in a three-piece suit, you mean one kind of thing. And then if you're, if it's the weekend and you're in a short sleeve shirt and or a t-shirt and shorts, you mean another kind of thing. So these are all different systems of dress or of understanding essentially each other and what we're doing, that kind of thing. So Cobb brings this to Starcraft.
00:41:01
Speaker
And you start to see them. So now when you go and look at the film, you'll see his semiotic patches all over the place. And they'll say, you know, one of them will be on their famous ones on the bulkhead door, you'll see a ladder sort of image going up to between the decks. And it indicates, you know, here's a light, this is a gangway, a ladder way. You'll see ones for biotics like hazardous dangers to biotics specimens, like mother has them like mother. Yeah.
00:41:31
Speaker
Yeah, has a huge that's right. Yeah. Well, and mother, the computer, basically, the how type sort of extension, because she really is a great extension of how is has her own nest, essentially, and speaks her own language. So he so he brings this to this film, it doesn't this semiotic system doesn't exist in the real world yet. That's right. That's right. It's his vision of the future. That's it. And now of course, it's everywhere.
00:41:59
Speaker
That's exactly right. And if you look at probably the most clear example that many of us will have experienced is wayfinding in airports, which is incredibly complex and requires you really have to be an expert in understanding how people look and where they look for help and how they interpret signs.
Semiotics in Everyday Life
00:42:19
Speaker
And if you see a sign ahead of you, up above you,
00:42:23
Speaker
And you're trying to indicate to go forward. What does that mean? How do you how do you indicate that? Do you put an arrow in perspective pointing forward? Do you put an arrow straight up? You know, what do you what do you do? How do you indicate somebody, you know, go left when you see this, you know, I'm looking for a bathroom, which looks like this and so on. So these kinds of like, we have all experienced these kinds of both good and bad way.
00:42:47
Speaker
Yeah, good way finding. I often, well, for a long time, there was terrible way finding one of the hospitals in London. And they used to post people at different corners of the hospital while they were it was under construction. And they you'd sort of wander past and they're like, Are you looking? What are you looking for? You're like, I'm looking for the radiology department. They say, Oh, we'll come with us. And they will take you because there was no way to find it. I'm laughing because I, this is something that's a big problem in web design, obviously.
00:43:14
Speaker
Right. Cause there's no, there's no standard really at this point when it comes to how we interpret icons or semiotics. And so I always use the example of going, I'm hiking with my brother in Italy. We're looking at this. We actually spent a few minutes looking at this sign and I'll, I'll, what I will do is I'll draw a picture of what I think we saw. And basically it was this weird shaped flame. This is what it looked like. It looked like a weird shaped flame over top of.
00:43:44
Speaker
what looked like a spoon. And then there was a tree in the background. And the flame was maybe an egg. Like that was my first take on it was like, does this mean I'm not allowed to egg race in the forest? Yeah, that's obviously not what they mean by this is like, and it took this like probably 30 seconds, 40 seconds, maybe a minute. Oh, it's a flame. It's like no fire in the forest. That's what that's supposed to be.
00:44:12
Speaker
But it was just such a bad representation of fire. But that's the problem. That's the difficulty of coming up with a good system like that is findings. And so when you get a convention, then everyone like, yes, we've got a convention. Thank God we all know what this means.
00:44:31
Speaker
Right. That's right. And which is interesting, you know, every time it's as always, I'm interested in stuff that we don't pay attention to. So when I turn the car on in the morning, as one of my students say, you know, when you turn on the car in the morning, I say, you know, that's like, that's magic, because the technology is working, he says, it's magic if it turns on.
00:44:50
Speaker
Okay, right. Fair enough. Somebody suffering with an old car. But one of the things that happens is that there's a there's a full panoply of semionics on your dashboard that lights up briefly for just a second, as all of them light up and all the lights test themselves basically.
00:45:07
Speaker
And then they go dark, except for the engine temperature, the fuel gauge, sort of the basic stuff that just shows you green drive is on, whatever, those few things. But then when something goes wrong, it's like, oh, here's an oil can. And we're like, oh, I'm out of oil. It's like, how did you learn that was an oil can? Somewhere along the way, the culture taught you this is the semiotic for an oil can. This little drawing means oil can. This little drawing means battery.
00:45:36
Speaker
and someone in the seventies would not have have known yeah. That's right because we really didn't discuss this and because industrial design was something which was pretty much hidden from the public i mean not not because. Designers were hiding but because the public was like just sell me a thing i just want the new.
00:45:55
Speaker
washer, I want the new television set. And things were also I should also say, they didn't have computers in them. And so they were simpler. Okay, so the corporations in the universe of alien
00:46:09
Speaker
are possibly evil. We think they're evil. That certainly becomes clear, I think, in the second movie. But at least they got the semiotics correct. That's right. I mean, the thing about these, it's true, you're right about this, that what's interesting about the images of these things is that the corporations appear to be efficient at what they're doing.
00:46:30
Speaker
Now, what comes up, as you say, in the second film and in third film, to a lesser extent, because the third and fourth films are more discussions about personal freedom, I think, than the other things, but more religion and predestination, freedom, sort of typical
00:46:46
Speaker
Science fiction. Mm hmm. Fodder but but I think these first two films do as you say indicate that Weyland-Yutani that the the corporation that is sort of behind it turns out all this is not our friend that's for sure, but they also are prepared to consider things as wastage basically, they don't want to lose anything and they tell Ripley off because she's as they say to her, you know that I cheat they blow up her very expensive star freighter as she says
00:47:16
Speaker
an M class Darth Vader. So that's true. But at the same time, Burke in the second film sends the colonists directly to the ship to be infected by the aliens. And it's all too efficient. The aliens are more efficient than a corporation. And so then it's a fight between basically the corporation, one big bug basically versus the nest of bugs.
00:47:40
Speaker
And that's the discussion which you see coming up in Aliens, which really comes to its conclusion in the fourth film in Alien Resurrection. But you're right that the, I think that there's a more complex picture that arrives out of the corporate discussion than there is in Alien, the first film. In Alien, the first film, it's like corporation bad, don't trust basically, which comes out of the 70s. And now here's something else.
00:48:05
Speaker
because I know you're very interested in the question of war, from the point of view of we should stop this habit of war.
'Alien' as Propaganda
00:48:14
Speaker
But now in a situation in the universe of alien, we have an alien intelligence that is fighting us and we have no choice but to go to war with them.
00:48:24
Speaker
This is the thing that makes aliens, which is why I've written fairly extensively about aliens, into a really great piece of propaganda. Because there is no doubt about the fact that you must go to war with these creatures, and in the same way that you must go to war with, say, the Empire in Star Wars. You must, because they will turn Aunt Beru into a smoking skeleton and, you know, destroy your
00:48:48
Speaker
livelihood on Tatooine and so on and, you know, kill your ewoks on end or the usual, you know. In other words, the things you kill your friends, you know, destroy the redwood forests and things like that. So yeah, but I think that that picture is it is now more subtle and more complex than it is in the early days when we're still pretty much still sort of hitting the pipe of the end of the Vietnam War.
00:49:14
Speaker
And that's why I think Alien really has more in common with, say, Apocalypse Now than it does with Aliens or the other Alien movies. And now to tie back to your earlier comments about propaganda.
00:49:28
Speaker
You haven't really attributed any morality to the question of propaganda yet in this conversation. But you're suggesting that there is propaganda happening in the movie Alien. You're not saying necessarily whether it's good or bad. Where would you land on that?
00:49:47
Speaker
Well, propaganda, it's kind of like saying, you know, as a hammer good or bad, I mean, propaganda is a tool and every, if you, when you get to a certain size, when communication between say groups or social groups gets to a certain size,
00:50:06
Speaker
you are going to use propaganda, whether you like it or not. You may call it something else, but you are going to start selling messages and you are going to start needing to sell people on a story which they may not know about or be interested in, but you are going to have to convince them that this is a way to go and you're going to have to ask them to sacrifice, to give up things that they would otherwise want to have.
00:50:28
Speaker
And so to do that, they have to be massaged into a position where they agree, they genuinely agree to give these things up in exchange for what you're handing them. So I don't think of propaganda as being good or bad. Propaganda bad, basically sort of that, to sort of paraphrase George Orwell for a moment, I think really comes out of World War II, because we're used to Goebbels
00:50:55
Speaker
because Goebbels was such a good propagandist. And we're like, oh, propaganda is always Nazi. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Propaganda is a method of communication in the same way that, or it's a mode, I guess, of communication in the same way that advertising is, or PR, or me writing a blog post. And there's, I mean, to use an example of, you know, positive propaganda, maybe the advertising campaigns against smoking,
00:51:22
Speaker
or against drinking and driving. Those would be examples of, I think, fairly positive propaganda, but there's still propaganda. Yeah. I mean, you're asking people to give up a physical pleasure. And in fact, I mean, in the case of smoking, something in which their body has gotten a picture with it. Yeah. So it's going to be a hard, it's a hard ask. Back to the question of propaganda and alien, was Ridley Scott aware that he was making propaganda? Was he conscious of that?
00:51:51
Speaker
Well, Scott's a very bright guy.
Ridley Scott's Message-Driven Films
00:51:54
Speaker
And there's no doubt about it that every single film he makes is a message film. I mean, he puts a message in front and center and then he sews them. There really isn't a frame of the film that happens.
00:52:10
Speaker
Scott makes mistakes. I mean, he's made massive mistakes. Probably the biggest was the thing with Tim Curry, right? As the devil. Legend. Legend. Legend. That was Tim Curry? I think it was Tim Curry. Yeah, you're right. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. Eight hours to put the prosthetics on. Oh, my God. Can you imagine how long that was? He's wonderful. He's tremendous. He's the best thing in the film. Yeah.
00:52:35
Speaker
But so I think that Scott has occasionally bombed. But even then, I think that there's a practice in Scott's filmmaking which is so down to the absolute nitty gritty brass tacks every single frame I think is examined. And the only reason I think now he'll just go back and remake it. Because he can, because he's powerful enough. As a friend of mine calls him King Ridley.
00:53:04
Speaker
But at the time, they didn't have that. I mean, he made Alien for $4.2 million, which was relatively okay money at the time, but it wasn't a lot. Not especially for a space film, basically. So they really made the thing on our shoestring. It was his second film, wasn't it? It was. Yeah, the duelist was his first film. Yeah. They had less money for Aliens, right? Or like, relatively less.
00:53:28
Speaker
Relatively. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that was Cameron. Yeah. And it's worth mentioning too, that he came with regard to the question of propaganda. He came from the world of advertising. That's right. Both of them did. Both he and Tony, his brothers came from advertising. And so I think, I think Scott is extremely good at manipulating the message. And that was, it's the same thing. You'll remember the, the Mac.
00:53:54
Speaker
add, you know, 1984 won't be 1984 and has the hammer thrower. Right. And, uh, that ad, you know, won every single award there possibly could have been. And I think it's a damn good job that people like Scott aren't making ads all the time because we would just be doing whatever they, they're so beautiful. I get to be watching ads. That's the whole other question is whether or not we, how effective these ads are. Yeah. What was the message then?
'Alien' and Working-Class Themes
00:54:21
Speaker
What was the propaganda in alien?
00:54:24
Speaker
Well, okay, the optimistic part of me would like to say that Ridley Scott understood essentially what it was like to grow up as a laborer or as a laborer's son in England.
00:54:39
Speaker
in a depressed country, because England was, as you know, broken, basically by World War Two, although, quote unquote, won the war, they really lost the peace. And the depression, the subsequent depression, which engulfed Britain, really carried on for the next kind of 20 years. I mean, by the 60s, they were starting to come out of it. Mark knows more about this the night because he was traveling, I think. Well, we lived, we live there. It's even in 74.
00:55:04
Speaker
my family lived there and like the rotating strikes and stuff were still going on. And I think, you know, the text of, I mean, just the text of the movie supports you. Like really the first thing you hear out of the two guys, like, you know, Dean Stockton and the other guys, like, hey, can we talk about our contracts? Because we've discovered we're not getting paid enough. And that's a theme, right? That just keeps coming up again and again and again. That's right.
00:55:33
Speaker
And Ripley, who is sort of the young flight officer who has risen above her, arguably has risen above her station because she is bright. And it turns out that Ripley is able to do pretty much everything, which is great. I mean, she's an amazing character. And Segrini Weaver really
00:55:51
Speaker
I think that role made her, and I think she made it, and I think that's the best thing she's ever done. That role has been so splendid. So I think fundamentally, it's a working-class person's film, and I think that Veronica Cartwright, Yvette Cotto, and Harry Dean Staunton are, in many ways, the suckers. You know, these are the victims who are thrown, basically,
00:56:18
Speaker
into the company's business to do the company's bidding because they have no choices. There is this or die, basically. They will otherwise not be given air to breathe is sort of the implication. And as opposed to, say, John Hurt, who of course dies first, and that has to happen,
00:56:37
Speaker
because he is a believer. He seems to be a sort of a quintessential Brit in many ways, you know, that he believes the system will work for him. It worked during World War II, it still is working. Whereas Yefed Kodo and Harry Dean Staunton are so clearly American.
00:56:55
Speaker
And I think that is there is a discussion of race there. I mean, I think that the effect. Yeah. Partly because he's such an astonishing actor and he's so compelling and his few, few lines that he has are so remarkably charismatic. I mean, the force that comes in and he is the one who says to Ripley, you know, I have heard enough and I am asking you to shut it down. And that's the core. That's really the push is that I think is that here's and I it I don't think it's I don't think it's an accident that it comes from the effect. You know, the
00:57:25
Speaker
the American black man basically who has also portrayed black workers in Detroit, specifically in that Richard Pryor film Blue Collar, where there's this sense of these guys basically just getting
00:57:40
Speaker
just getting screwed over all the time. And so I don't think it's a mistake that he has the line that basically says, stop the company. The company is talking through Ash, and Ash is asking for our deaths, and I have heard enough. And so I think that's really the message, if you will, or the moral of the story. Which was written by Dan O'Bannon. That's right. A white guy.
00:58:05
Speaker
and an american not not a not a brit that's right and so i think that scott brings over this working-class sensibility of grit and there you see this in the earlier scott films that is you see it in i mean there's a discussion well when you take on the dualists you take on a piece of conrad when you take on a conrad text which i think he goes on talking about conrad through alien and it shows up again in aliens right because it's
00:58:31
Speaker
the name of the ship is Nostromo, the ship in Aliens is Sulaco. All of these come from the Conrad novel Nostromo, which is about basically a guy who is sort of the company's man in this
00:58:46
Speaker
fictional town in South America where he's kind of used as an enforcer to bring silver out of a mine by abusing the local the local labor force and ultimately Nostromo steals the load of silver.
00:59:03
Speaker
so that he can become a free man. And of course, it goes the way all things go in Conrad, you know, super bad. Everybody dies. It never works out. Yeah, yeah, you know, and the and typically the story is narrated by somebody who is of the class who knows how to read and write and essentially narrate the story and like Marlow basically says he was one of us in some way.
00:59:29
Speaker
but they must perish. And I think that's what we're looking at. I mean, I think this is fundamentally, that's why I would connect Alien with Heart of Darkness and with Apocalypse Now. And I think this is the moral, if you're looking, is that you can really only trust the person beside you
00:59:45
Speaker
And even then, the person beside you may be a killer robot that's been planted on you by the company. So at that point, you're like, what what else is going to happen when Ash sort of explodes, you know, when he's taken apart by a fat coder who knocks literally knocks his head off as you remember, with fire extinguisher. First time I cheered in the movie. Yeah, boy, it's a little tiny bit of release because everything has been so such shocking up until that point.
01:00:10
Speaker
I can't, I'd tell you how many killer robots have been forced to work beside at the CBC. So true.
01:00:19
Speaker
Now, did you like the, I assume you liked the movie. I liked the movie. The first time I saw the movie, I was so horror stricken by it. I genuinely did not, I had not read about, I read that it was science fiction and that people said it was good science fiction. I was like, we're going to see it. So I dragged my father who was a science fiction, love science fiction film. I was like, hey, it was the middle of the summer.
01:00:43
Speaker
was super hot. I'm like, let's get out of the heat. Let's go to this film. And my poor sister who loves science fiction, but hates horror. Yeah. And we went to the first splatter movie in history. It was like, oh my god. So when John Hurt explodes like that,
01:00:59
Speaker
I think that she probably didn't sleep for the next two or three months. And I- Probably is still traumatized. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I still owe her many, many, many for that. But I think that my first experience was I was genuinely horrified. I mean, I was genuinely revolted by the idea. And I remember my chest actually hurting
01:01:24
Speaker
It was a real horror film reaction. It was a real, really visceral. And to the extent that I was afraid of the movie, I loved it. But I was at the same time that I was afraid of it. And for years, I finally went to see it because I was working with a cognitive behavioral therapist. And he said, OK, what else are you afraid of? I'm like, well, I'm afraid of aliens. He's like, go see it.
01:01:45
Speaker
So, oh my God, you know, so off I went. And it was very interesting because I adored it, just as I remembered. It was just as good as I remembered. In fact, maybe even better. And it was so beautiful. I'd forgotten how gorgeous it is. And I'd remembered the scene in the hole where Brett comes into the hole, then the chains are hanging down. They're just underwater dripping.
01:02:06
Speaker
and drips on his hat and it's so tactile and it's so sensual and sensuous and he takes off his hat and they've all been so hot and sweaty and here's this water and you're just waiting for something, nothing happens. I was like, wow, even then I understood that this was a piece of filmmaking which we had never seen before. It looked, in many ways it reminded me of Taxi Driver because it had the same kind of intensity and luminous quality to it in its sort of horribleness.
01:02:35
Speaker
So yes, I became a fan of it. But in that whole time, I became a fan of the parts I could look at, which was the design. And so I was very interested in what had made this film work for me. And the storytelling, absolutely the acting, yes, the directing was beautiful.
01:02:52
Speaker
But in the end, what I kept coming back to was the design, the place felt real. And that was the set, they built the set such that when you got into the, to the ship, essentially, there was only one way out, you actually had to turn around and go all the way out. So at the point that they're sort of in part of the set, if they finished, they actually had to exit the set. And because they were using dry ice, as you know, there's less oxygen. And so they actually were like, they were
01:03:18
Speaker
They have to make sure they didn't pass. They were getting lightheaded from the dry ice. Oh, my God. So they were sort of buried in this labyrinth. And Cod, I took every chance. I remember there was no web. So we were reliant on things like crappy magazines like Starlog and Fantastic and Fantagor and things like that, which is awful. For these little tiny snippets of interviews with people,
01:03:46
Speaker
and you'd read like four or five lines by somebody. And that's all you knew about the movie because there was no, there was no fan base to talk to basically yet, unless you were in LA. So I began to read as much as I could outside about Cobb. And there wasn't much, but I then, then Wild and Wooly, this publisher, which I mentioned before, published a book called Color Vision.
01:04:09
Speaker
which is this 12 by 12 is the size of an album of an LP. What we would have called an LP, our record at the time. A lost art form. Yeah, exactly. And it's full of these pages of art.
01:04:25
Speaker
And I was so impressed by the art and by the clarity of the vision and by the density of the darkness in it that I was like, I want to do this. And so the book stayed on my drafting table where I painted and where I drew for years. And it became sort of, there were two books that I really used. One was
01:04:46
Speaker
this book by Ron Cobb, and the other one was color, sorry, the other one was Sentinel by Sid Meade. And Sid Meade, of course, was going to do the designs for Tron. And then much of the designs for Blade Runner. And there was sort of going to be, Meade was going to take over as being the designer of the century.
01:05:07
Speaker
Now, I didn't want to interrupt you before, but I found some trivia about this movie that I never knew before on Tumblr. They're talking about that scene where, you know, the alien bursts out of his chest. And I think the first response I got to it was a feminist kind of like, oh, that's the most horrific thing a man can imagine as another being coming out of you.
01:05:32
Speaker
And then someone farther down in the comments, someone had said, actually, no, Daniel Bannon had Crohn's disease. And he was actually describing what it felt like to have an attack of Crohn's disease.
01:05:47
Speaker
And that's what propelled that scene. Yeah. And I was like, Oh my God. And of course, then I checked it. It's true. It's, it's actually what actually killed him. Eventually. Yeah. But I think you're really right, Mark. I think there's a, I think there is a quality to when we say there's a visceral quality to a film. It's like, there's a good reason.
01:06:08
Speaker
Now, speaking of trivia, I would be remiss in discussing Alien, especially the design of Alien, without mentioning that my brother-in-law, Brian Wyville, actually is responsible for a little bit of the graphics in that movie. Oh, cool. Yeah, just a little bit. He did a bit which makes the status of the computer orbit logistics clear to the viewer. Right. Oh, no kidding. And I believe he's in the credits and you can clearly see his work. Yeah.
01:06:37
Speaker
those. And those are really early 3d images, right? I mean, those are early imaging, which you see some of you can see the sort of the it's interesting, if you look at the Star Wars movies between 77 and 82 or 83, I guess it is. And you can see that the rapid growth of computer modeling and imaging in that time,
01:06:56
Speaker
But that's fascinating wonderful. That's tremendous. We'll have to put a link up in the website to To his his work. Absolutely. Oh, yeah. So Yeah, no, unfortunately, we're gonna have to wrap things up but a fascinating Discussion completely a unique perspective fun on alien that I certainly hadn't thought of before any final thoughts then on the movie
01:07:18
Speaker
I think what Alien did was it pointed the way towards a world of design where things actually had to function and work instead of be a sort of imaginary, either utopian or dystopian. And so I think it's pointed us towards, if you're looking at an airlock now, the likelihood is it's one of Ron Cobb's airlocks. The drawers may close horizontally or they may close diagonally.
01:07:45
Speaker
But basically, there's a language to the way things work and things do work, that is, they are working environments. I think that's part of what makes the politics believable, is that
01:08:00
Speaker
they're not walking around on a set which looks like Star Trek because for me, Star Trek is every time I look at a Star Trek set, I think it's a fable. I know where I'm looking at a fable and I'm not really that interested because the fable is probably going to be pretty tedious and I'm going to get the point within 20 minutes and they're going to go on for another 20 minutes. So that's your opinion of Star Trek. OK, well, thanks for your time. We'll. Oh, it's so much for his credibility.
01:08:27
Speaker
I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry to be nurturing. That's okay. You're entitled to your opinion. It's kind of true though.
Corporate Power in 'Alien' as a Cautionary Tale
01:08:35
Speaker
But I think what it is, is it points the way to a complex future, which is workable, but also treacherous. And that's fascinating.
01:08:47
Speaker
Yeah, horrible too though. I mean, I just think the fact that a future and a lot of futures that we see imagined actually do imagine that corporate power does take over. That's the trajectory we're on. That's not necessarily the trajectory we have to live though. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.
01:09:08
Speaker
Amen. Thanks for being on our podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It was so much fun. I keep saying this to every guest, and I mean it with every guest. We'll have to have you on again, because there's so much more to talk about. For sure. Thank you. Thanks, guys.
01:09:39
Speaker
Joe, I'm really enjoying this. This has been fun, but I don't want to do this podcast anymore. You're talking about stopping the podcast. No, I'm just kidding. But I do want to take August off. I just had like a heart attack, Mark. I was just trying to get that rise out of you. So yeah, I think we should take August off. I think we should end of July and come back after Labor Day. I think that's a terrific idea. Why don't we do a special episode to finish the whole thing off? A very special episode? A very special episode, yes. And we're going to launch your book, right?
01:10:05
Speaker
Yes, we're going to launch my book Adventures in the Radio Trade with a special live edition of Recreative. That sounds perfect. So we'll do that on the 30th. Sunday the 30th will be a special live edition of Recreative, after which we'll take August off. And then we'll be back on... After Labor Day. After Labor Day. I'll take my white pants off at that point. Your white pants. Right? Because you're not supposed to wear white after Labor Day. Do I look like someone who pays any attention to that kind of... Do I look like someone who has white pants?