Note: I started working on this piece prior to Disney and Bob Iger’s capitulation to the American fascist regime (or at least, their most recent one). I am no longer a Disney+ subscriber.
One of the joys of Noah Hawley et. al.’s Alien: Earth, which concluded its first season this week, has been watching it acquaint its audience in real time with how frequently weird, to the point of disturbing, J.M. Barrie’s Peter & Wendy actually was.
It’s been decades since I studied the text in any detail, but I remember the moment of disjunct well: the high-spirited fairy tale about the scamp who didn’t want to grow up, which has been mined for cartoons and Robin Williams movies and theme park merchandise, is in fact an unsettlingly vivid read on childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and the annihilating transitions between them.
Among other reasons, this is why P.J. Hogan’s 2003 screen adaptation is the best it’s been done (so far): it sticks the icky pubescence right back into Barrie’s story, wrangling the awkward lusts and contradictory destructiveness of the evolution of the sexual self with refreshing alacrity for a film that is still 100% aimed at a family audience. If you found my words there troubling, you’re not ready for the source novel, which does all this and more, up to and including a scene that can absolutely be read as describing Wendy’s first orgasm.
Alien: Earth concerns a different Wendy, and the frothy soup of its creation — hybridizing a more straight-ahead legacy sequel to the Alien franchise with a bracing take on adolescence, autonomy and selfhood, c/o its own “hybrid” characters — may have put some audiences off. (In fact, pretty much every television critic I follow has turned against the show, either immediately, or over the course of its run.) That’s fine. Watching adult actors play “kid” isn’t for everyone; and the Trojan Horsing of the Peter Pan of it all into something that was expected to be a space bug horror movie (and occasionally is) could seem like a stretch of the value proposition.
I’ve spent some time with Alien over the years, though, and if there’s one thing that has only become more glaringly true across the more recent, less interesting entries: I love it when this franchise is handed to a minder who unreservedly does their own thing. And whatever else you can level against Alien: Earth‘s creative project, which only became clearer and clearer as it went along, what is irrefutable is simply that: it is its own thing.
Wendy, for those who haven’t watched the show, is a new type of character in the Alien legendarium: she is a “hybrid,” a human consciousness that has been dumped into an android body (the same types of bodies still used for full-on androids, like Ian Holm’s Ash from Ridley Scott’s original Alien, or Timothy Olyphant’s Kirsh in Alien: Earth).
There’s a critical constraint upon hybrids in this story: the people who have developed this technology (one of the five megacorporations that as of the 22nd century, quite literally, rule the Earth; governments no longer exist) cannot make the hybrid process work with adult minds. Only child minds are plastic enough to undergo the procedure. Since no right-thinking parent on the planet would volunteer young Jimmy to be sucked into a robot body, Prodigy Corporation has targeted dying children to undergo the process, thereby “saving” their lives.
This constraint creates one of the most formidable bits of meta-narrative tension I’ve seen in a science fiction project in quite a long time. On the one hand, yes, it can be a bit twee to see the cast of Lost Boys — twentysomething actors playing the six children who have undergone the transition into synth bodies, thereby gaining a new lease on life, along with extraordinary new physical abilities — moping or whining or basically “acting like kids.” But the conversation that this story choice allows the show to have with its audience is, quite often, extraordinary.
An example: in episode 6, “The Fly,” one of the Lost Boys gets his face melted off by an alien fly. Like the Brundlefly, the critter spits his digestive enzymes out of his body and then sops up the gooey remains of whatever he hit. Unlike the Brundlefly, the head of the fly in Alien: Earth looks like a bulging nutsack with a languid uncircumcised dick sticking out of it. (The ways in which the production designers of this series have honoured H.R. Giger’s genital-sexual design aesthetic is frequently inspired.)
Now, if a 10-year-old dying boy had his face melted off by an alien fly on national television, it would simply be too gruesome to be countenanced. Heck, even an adult having his face melted off in such a fashion would have hit a gore level that Alien: Earth — which has its fair share of spectacular gore, mind you — probably wouldn’t be able to touch.
No fuss, no muss on Alien: Earth, though. The “kids” are played by adults — which doubtless allows the production to circumvent any manner of child labour laws — and the hybrids’ blood flows android-white like it did in the good old days. So: what we get in “The Fly” is a spectacular horror movie kill, which features exactly zero children being maimed and zero blood being shown, except (in both cases) representationally. And, as an audience, one’s mind goes nuts thinking about it, even as Prodigy Corporation’s asshole CEO — a Muskerberg edgelord called Boy Kavalier — reads from Peter & Wendy over the soundtrack. Which passage? The one about how Peter occasionally saw fit to kill the Lost Boys, of course, whenever they looked like they might be on the verge of growing up. Remember when I said how disturbing that book actually was?
Back to Wendy. Played by Sydney Chandler with wide-open facial expressions and a growing apprehension behind the eyes, Wendy is the first human being to become a hybrid, which makes her the older sister to the other five Lost Boys. It works out pretty well at first. She can make superhuman leaps off the cliffs of Thailand, and turns a paper-cutter into a sword to carry into battle. She 1-v-1s a Xenomorph early in the going, ripping its head off! Not bad, this new body.
As should be terrifying to anyone working with any form of artificial intelligence right now, Wendy also does the most obvious thing in the world when it comes to A.I.: she rapidly exceeds her own programming. She learns how to control any computerized information with an interface, almost immediately; she learns how to speak Xenomorph, as soon as she’s met one. She uses the latter ability to train the Xenomorph and, without a moment’s hesitation, unleashes it on the human soldiers sent to rein her in once she finally clocks the fact that Prodigy Corp sucks, and tries to leave their island.
Being our heroine, Wendy is the one who realizes first that, immortality and superpowers or whatever else, she’s been handed a raw deal: her “self” is just an algorithm dropped into a mechanism that mean-spirited grown-ups own and control. She’s being used, like everyone and everything on Prodigy Island is being used, and there isn’t even an ideological logic to the using: she simply serving at the whim of a boy pirate pretending to be a man. And that the boy pirate’s rules, his “system,” a system which now — again — rules the earth, is just as arbitrary and meaningless as any other sort of evolution.
(It’s pretty amusing, given all that, that Hawley has coyly distanced himself from Prometheus and Covenant, insisting that Alien: Earth takes place on a different narrative line. Wendy and David would get up to some fantastic conversations; and both projects’ musings about monsters creating monsters — and what is a monster anyway — are in lock-step.)
Of all the Lost Boy characters, Wendy is both our heroine and the only one who is even given a fighting chance at one of the key premises of “growing up”: the fact that it takes time. The most dangerous thing Prodigy Corporation has done is faintly outlined by the scientist characters in the early episodes: they’ve taken incomplete human psyches and dropped them into complete bodies. Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis), who plays one of the scientists, seems to have had a plan for this. They’ve dropped the hormone (read: emotion) levels in the algorithms, and she’s going to nurture the kids through that maturation process in a series of fireside chats so that they don’t go, well, titty-kaka. Spoiler: this is an Alien show. She doesn’t get the chance.
Alien: Earth does really well with its presentation of non-child child bodies in extremis. It expertly depicts the scary unpredictability of pubescence, physically; the way limbs grow akimbo and muscles develop surprisingly; the way the alienness can be coming from inside the house, when you’re learning how to operate the new machinery of (in our case) secondary sexual characteristics or (in their case) athletic ability that wouldn’t be out of place on any given member of the Avengers.
In some of the kids, this comes off as a kind of surprised revulsion — in Nibs, particularly — as her sudden womanhood contorts her very sense of self (a sense, we learn, that is already partially damaged; she “has trauma in her past,” we are told) and sends her clinging to her stuffies in a regressive insistence upon her own childishness that only makes it more bracing when Nibs starts, uh, ripping soldiers’ jaws off. Contrary to the gruesomeness, I found this all surprisingly touching, as I thought about my own sense of how puberty arrives no matter what, equally for children who are entirely ready for it (or so they think) and for other children who are horrified by all the growths and spurtings as any heroine in a body horror movie should be.
(There is a third experience of puberty that the series doesn’t explore, but is present in the language anyway: the one where the arrival of secondary sexual characteristics is the onset of a process which, if allowed to proceed “naturally,” will work at such odds with the child’s sense of self that they will become among the most at-risk for self-harm on our planet. The process of uploading the kids’ souls into the hybrid bodies is called their “transition,” but largely, Alien: Earth steers clear of overt queer readings of any of its child characters. Or at least, it has so far.)
Instead, the series works with the other dimension of its own scenario, which is the cost of the rapid (physical) maturation upon the kids’ minds. They are not ready, in nearly every case, for any element of what their bodies’ makers make them do. (That one Lost Boy, melted by the fly, above? He got into that predicament because he forgot that one-way doors only open one way.) One Lost Boy goes stark raving mad; another is quite eerily groomed, psychologically tortured, and then exploited by a hostile adult agent from outside Prodigy Corp’s island. Most of the Lost Boys hit the breakwater of Alien: Earth‘s analogous puberty and bounce clean off it, insane, dead, broken, or all three.
We’re left with an island of monsters, which one can argue Neverland was all along. Alien species (most of which are new to the canon, including the adorable Eyeball Jockey, and the prehensile praying mantis, the Flora-Fauna) are running riot. Enemy agents (Weyland-Yutani’s corpos) are stalking the jungle paths, looking for a fight. The “adults” who have shamelessly exploited the “kids” throughout the season are trussed up and cowed, and the “kids” have finally realized what their evolving psyches have hidden from them till now: they are something beautifully, terrifyingly, utterly new. And with new things come new rules.
Amusingly, in the midst of all this, we also have the Xenomorphs — the trusty old aliens of the eponymous Alien franchise — going through their own rapid-maturation cycles, the same one that has been depicted ad nauseum since Scott’s original film. Having been robbed of all utility as an agent of fright in the 45 years since that movie, the Xenomorphs are here rendered “cute,” and it’s… great? Arena rock, as Hawley intended. When near-teenager Wendy is hooting and whistling in Xenomorphese to a pup Xenomorph and, through some bonkers form of Nurture, has figured out how to make it her own murderous attack dog, we have firmly repudiated the fragile arrogance of the human race. Hawley has dug down through the subsurface structures to arrive at something that has been integral to the Alien stories from the start: humanity ain’t shit, against the larger, more magnificent realities of the eternity beyond our understanding. Scream all you want, in space.
Last looks
I’m off to Japan next week, but I’ve got a few posts scheduled to go out to keep you all company. In the meantime:
Safecrackers, version 3, is done! (Ish.) This is my current spec screenplay. It’s going to be heading out to some new readers, but if you’re interested and are willing to put in the time and provide notes, you’re welcome to read it too. Message me.
I’m giving some thought to the future of my YouTube channel now that my collecting is winding precipitously down. In the meantime, I did some gassin’ about the recent, tempestuous Haslab.
And I reviewed Criterion’s 4K upgrade of Kurosawa’s High and Low, over on Screen Anarchy. Enjoy!