Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, touching on psychosexual horror, Alien, Bender’s drunk uncle, and Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance.
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Hey guys! Michael Fass-“Bender”
Get it? Eh? Eh?
We should expect a Legend of Korra discussion (with Perich) after the finale, right?
I certainly hope so!
John, you hearing this?
Seconded.
Why wait? That’s what forums are for, right?
Speaking as someone on the autism spectrum, I thought your joke was pretty funny. I sometimes have to tell people, “I’m just an idiot, not an asshole.” (And if I were offended, yes, I would unsubscribe without saying anything, rather than with a big ugly tirade.)
At first I’ve misheard what Pete said and I took it as a joke: One is assholish android, the other has autism spectrum; knowing the difference can save your life.
But then I catch up and felt pretty bad about myself.
First of all, I have to confess to having a big goofy grin on my face when heard that today’s line up was Fenzel, Lee, and Wrather on Prometheus.
Second, in spite of how much I kind of like Fenzel’s conclusion that Vickers is an android, I don’t really think it stands up to scrutiny. Now, I know the movie never let actual science get in the way of a good visual (or bad plot point) so this is not perfect evidence to the contrary but she is seen desperately putting on a space suit before she ejects from the ship. If she was an android, this obvious would be unnecessary and just from the film’s position, if she is an android it would look way “cooler” for Charlize Theron’s character to run around on the surface without a spacesuit than with one and fits in with its MO of big, clunky plot revelations.
Third, as for her earlier confrontation with David, I think the more obvious reading is that David is subservient to her because she has been physically/mentally/(sexually?) abusing him as a dominant sibling. Even if he is physically stronger than her, it would be irrelevant if he feels completely emasculated by her presence. Furthermore, even if she was an android, there is no reason to assume she would be physically stronger than him and, thus, what we see is submission by David, either through programing or a lifetime of abuse. Even her sexual encounter with Stringer could be explained through this lens as she only goes along with it after he reminds her that should could use it as tool to prove her superiority to David as he can’t act on his own desires (Shaw) except through the use of a surrogate (black goo). It also I think helps to explain his just general nastiness to Shaw and he pridefully explains what happened to her as the alien fetus is proof of his virility.
Fourth, and I confess this is a bit of a nit-picky point but Shaw’s boyfriend getting drunk and depressed was so completely ridiculous. The guy just proved a theory so amazingly improbable that Dr. Zarkov would call him a loon at the crack pot scientist convention and he is disappointed? To the movie’s credit, few characters have so deserved their eventual fate.
Fifth and my own conclusion about the movie, I thought it could have been a good movie if they took out nearly everything that happened to do with it being a part of the Alien franchise (with maybe a nod to the Alien abortion scene as an effective if not particularly palatable). Any time they were not paying service to the past, I was finding it fairly enjoyable but then it do something “Alien” and I lost interest.
I agree with nearly everything you’ve said here.
With regards to the 5th point, I have heard it stated elsewhere that this film drives right up to the edge of being a legitimate alien prequel, but then turns back at the last second. I think a standalone film about a trip to space where they find some angry human progenitors and a bunch of nasty biological weapons might have been interesting. But Prometheus without reference to the Xenomorph franchise just doesn’t have enough steam to justify the budget or the summer blockbuster hype. If they had tried to make this movie without referencing Alien, I’m sure the studios would have tried to shoehorn it in, making matters even worse.
My favorite case of self-surgery:
http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/serge/rogozov-1964.pdf
I agree re: Vickers as android. I don’t think you even need to posit any ingrained subservience. There’s any number of reasons he might be willing to allow her to push him around in that instance. If she was human, he certainly wouldn’t have calculated that he was in any real danger at that moment. Why would he fight back?
If she were an android she wouldn’t need to be in a hypersleep chamber and could have been preparing herself like David did. Awakening from hypersleep, would an android really need to do pushups?
She wouldn’t need a space suit. Would Weyland Industries really spend the extra tens or hundres of millions of dollars to manufacture realistic sexual organs such that they could fool humans?
As for pushing David around, wouldn’t his programming include not hurting Weyland’s ‘daughter?’
That said, Scott likes ambiguity in his films and we saw that in the first several versions of Blade Runner, as apparently Scott wanted to hint more strongly that Decker was a replicant and the studio fought him on it. Vickers and David do show a close sibling-like relationship, and neither is as touchy-feely or quirky as any of the other characters.
Ultimately, I think that the screenplay created backstory possibilities and openings for future movie premises, and these took precedence over character, plot and dialogue in this film. So much potential, so wasted.
What if she was an android and didn’t know it? If so, they didn’t play that idea well at all.
I’ve been catching up on Battlestar Galactica for the past couple weeks, so this subject is kinda on my mind.
The android-but-doesn’t-know-it doesn’t necessarily add anything to the story … and Scott did it already with one (or two!) characters in BLADE RUNNER already.
One thing I’m surprised wasn’t mentioned on the podcast is that this story takes place on LV-232. Whereas Alien and Aliens took place on LV-426. So it’s not really a prequel. More like a reboot. And yes, there is supposed to be a sequel.
The thing that bothered me as I was leaving the theater was – why would they want to kill us? Have we been bad children?
Could easily be a prequel. The alien that killed the Engineer in ALIEN did so in a relatively small ship/pod, while this latest movie took place earlier, in a large vessel, in a nearby system.
Why would they kill us? Mmn, perhaps they’ve done this before: bio-seeded planets with their own DNA, creating inferior creatures based on themselves that they have no regard for, with the intention of going into stasis and harvesting raw materials (upturned by us) and extinguishing us like pouring alcohol into a petri dish. It’s possible that this plan (or something like it) was upturned by the predation by the xenomorph.
Something about that is very unsettling.
Ridley said on Kermode and Mayo that there would be two more films before they got to LV-426.
I looked into it a bit, and there are a couple of more reasons to believe Vickers is either an android or some other sort of cybernetic being created by Weyland as a precursor to David.
She doesn’t go into shock and vomit when she comes out of cryo-statis, she does push-ups. So she’s either super-tough or enhanced in some way.
She also has a medical pod in her own quarters that only works on men. I understand it is primarily there to treat Weyland, but it seems odd that it _can’t_ treat her — especially since she says she is ready to use the quarters for two years if necessary.
Reflecting on it, it seemed obvious to me she was an android, but I suppose it’s possible it is meant as deliberately ambiguous — that maybe she is different from David but still artificial in some way.
Perhaps she is Weylands biological daughter but with cybernetic enhancements or some kind of engineering.
At any rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes up in future movies.
My guess is that she’s just tough as nails. The fact that Weyland considers David like his own son may suggest that Weyland has never been happy about not having a biological son. Lazy writing suggests that the daughter of a man who is disappointed that he never had a son will overcompensate, so I suspect she has gone above and beyond normal human behavior in order to earn her father’s love and respect.
That’s the weird thing about Ridley Scott sci-fi characters – you don’t know if they’re human unless it is stated outright.
Also – I think Charlize Theron is maybe one of the greatest actresses in the world, because she is really good at looking like she’s not one of the most attractive people on the planet.
I think really the best you can say about it is that it’s deliberately ambiguous. No doubt they wanted to leave themselves wide-latitude for sequalization.
The problem with overthinking this film is that it’s so poorly written and the gaps are so wide, that its less a text to be analyzed than a choose-your-own-adventure exercise for the audience. Most of the writing of this script will be done by its viewers.
For example, initially I saw the male-only medical device as an absurd contrivance to raise the stakes within the scene. Although it can be argued that it was meant solely for Weyland. So you could take it as foreshadowing. However, it remains absurd that a future robotic space surgeon couldn’t just as easily carry programming for female surgical procedures. But then again you could take it as some commentary on abortion: how a fetuses are reconceptualized as a malignant growths by the medical establishment or some such, and then argue that this thematic content is more important than plot consistency. And on, and on.
So how much should we work to make this make sense?
If anything Prometheus poses some interesting hermeneutic problems for overthinkers. Is the overthinking required to make it a coherent narrative qualitatively the same as the overthinking involved in, say, “The Logistics of the Hunger Games?
If Vickers is an android, she’s of a much higher order than David. And Ash and Bishop, for that matter. Her emotional range is much more natural. Plus, the narrative doesn’t provide a reason to include a second android — David followed his orders adequately. Vickers, if she was an android, acted within the expectations of a human in that role.
Anything is possible with a script this shitty though.
I love Charlize Theron and I’m fond of Noomi Rapace. I think the two actresses should have switched roles.
I assumed she was human and her push-up scene and intimidation of David were signifiers of her will/history etc.
I interpreted the abortion plot line as absolutely pro-choice. Shaw was disconsolate re: her inability to conceive, reflecting the pro-choice assertion that being pro-choice does not mean one is anti-child. Then after Shaw is impregnated with the alien David represents the anti-abortion patriarchy that is superficially sympathetic but obviously not having in mind the best interests of Shaw/women who tries to prevent her from aborting the alien. Despite the attempt Shaw of course still has to find a way and is forced to subject herself to a terrifying risky procedure by a medical device (industry) that does not even consider her gender serviceable.
I’ve been trying to dissect why I cannot (will not) watch some movies/shows with rape elements like Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Game of Thrones because they bother me so much, yet others, like Prometheus, do not bother me at all.
“I interpreted the abortion plot line as absolutely pro-choice.”
That was the theme of Alien3, although its protagonist wasn’t ironically Christian.
Ah I see. I’ll have to marathon the other Alien movies…for some reason I’ve only seen the 4th one. Not sure how that happened.
You’ll be disappointed, unfortunately. It was David Fincher’s first outing, and it was a turgid mess.
By the way, William Gibson (progenitor of 80s cyberpunk, and the guy who coined the term ‘cyberspace’) was hired to write a draft for Alien 2 that was never used, but it’s really interesting and involves a human space station where they isolated and were trying to weaponize a captured alien’s DNA, resulting in alien variants of all sorts of plants and animals. Of course, mayhem ensues. You can find the script with the proper amount of googling.
Or did I mean ‘turbid?’ Hm, maybe both.
Some interesting overthinking at The Atlantic, in the form of an obnoxious click-bait slideshow:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/print/2012/06/decoding-the-cultural-influences-in-prometheus-from-lovecraft-to-halo/258357/
The one thing that made me sad about this episode was no mention of the Tony Awards.
Cool Prometheus/Alien evolution graphic:
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5j5msabtV1qer9xbo1_500.jpg
Love it! Updated the comment to embed the image.
And yes, I agree with the image’s sentiment that the logic of the goo and the monsters and whatnot makes no sense. At all.
One more thing that was gnawing at me, and I finally realized: check out this screencap comparison I just made, taken from one of the Prometheus trailers and from the famous Apple commercial Ridley Scott made in 1984:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-EiVCAd_CmLA/T9kNvBqw4pI/AAAAAAAABIg/CLbYsnPs34I/s885/ridley.jpg
This guy should do recaps for MAD: http://m15m.livejournal.com/23209.html
This WOMAN!
And I cannot recommend her book enough. It’s absolutely hilarious.
awesome.
some good overthinking:
http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html
The différance is striking! Let’s see if this works:
Great podcast, as always, but one thing really bugged me in the discussion. That is, the constant references to the surgical procedure that Shaw undergoes as an “abortion”.
What Shaw asks the machine for (which it can’t deliver) is not an abortion, but rather a caesarean, and that’s a huge distinction, both as a character pointer, and in terms of the film’s symbology around birth. (A caesarean, also known as a C-section, is a surgical delivery – which you already knew, of course.)
While the machine can’t follow through on the exact procedure, of course, presumably this is also what she manually programs in, as the procedure we see is a C-section – incision into abdomen (and through womb wall), followed by removal of living hideous monstrosity.
As a character pointer, this is pretty obvious, of course. Liz Shaw is a Christian, and clearly of the ilk that considers abortion an unthinkable thing. Despite everything, therefore, it’s not something she’d even think to ask the machine for.
In terms of the birth symbology of the movie (and Alien), this is clearly all about natural childbirth versus surgical intervention. Despite C-sections being a fairly intense surgical procedure, they are often opted for voluntarily by women unwilling or unable to undergo natural childbirth – the final episode of the British TV show “Coupling” makes this point far more clearly and humourously than I could (and ties it into Alien, oddly enough), so I recommend that for any serious student of the topic.
There is, of course, one other important point to consider here. Namely, the fact that Shaw’s alien offspring ends up being her salvation at the end of the movie. To me, this is where the pro-choice agenda of the movie comes into the fore. Clearly, what we are being told is that no matter if your baby is a squid-like monstrosity, you can’t tell if it’s going to grow up to eat the alien that’s trying to kill you. If Shaw hadn’t chosen to have the squid delivered (her attempt to kill it afterwards notwithstanding), she would have sealed her fate.
To sum up then – not, in intention, practice or symbology, an abortion.
I see it as somewhere between a “birth” and an “abortion” by design — that is part of its horrror, that it breaks down the distinctions we have set up between these acts and just shows what a violent process the whole thing is, biologically much moreso than in our culture.
But I saw three reasons in particular to see it as an “abortion:”
1. Shaw changes her request for a “Caesarian” to a “removal of a foreign body from the abdomen.” This to me was when Shaw became okay with aborting the thing — originally her aversion to the idea of abortion informed the words she used, but the urgency of her own situation made her give that up — as it so often does for anti-choice women who face analogous real-world circumstances and still have abortions even if they can’t really talk about it.
2. When the procedure is over, Shaw enters the command to “decontaminate” the surgical pod, and the last thing we see is the pod closing and gas being pumped into the it, with the little squid thing is twitching around violently. Maybe I’m wrong, but I saw this as Shaw telling the pod to kill the thing. I suppose whether this is “abortion,” “partial-birth abortion,” or “infanticide” is a bit of an open question, but the openness of that question is consistent with how xenomorph biology tends to horrify us by breaking down the barriers we see between different kinds of biological and social distinctions around reproduction.
3. When Shaw comes back into the “lifeboat,” it seems as if she doesn’t expect for the little squid thing to still be in there. Of course, she is pretty thoroughly traumatized and in shock at this point, so her reactions aren’t going to be precise about anything, but I think the way this scene plays out reinforces the idea that she thought she killed the thing when she gave the command for the pod to decontaminate itself — thus killing rather than birthing the monster.
I was not as quick to call it strictly an “abortion” as Mark was, because I think it is meant to be deliberately ambiguous and disturbing, but I don’t find the description inaccurate or off-base — just maybe a bit imprecise leaning in one direction.
And similarly, I think the role of the squid guy saving shaw is really ambiguous — especially because the “impregnated” engineer does end up “birthing” the first recognizeable “Alien”-style xenomorph we see in the movie (and the franchise) – and I find it unlikely that this is a good thing for Shaw or for anyone else.