It Lives in the Language: Craft and "Aliens"
I was wondering what to write about this week when I happened to read what seems to me a rather facile essay on Ernest Hemingway. Read it if you're interested in him, or don't; I mention it because it seems to me to makes the all-too-common move of sniffing in dismissal at what ought to be unavoidably discussed, and then going on to gesticulate grandly but obscurely about things both quibbling and obvious, mistaking obfuscation for insight.
In this case – and forgive me if 20th Century literature doesn't light your fires, but as some of you know I've spent some time on this long strange trip writing fiction and so have an affinity for the stuff – the essayist brings up the idea that what's central to Hemingway's mythos, appeal, and the many debates about him is his devotion to "craft"; she then writes that off in order to pursue what she sees as less obvious topics. These include his sentimentality about romantic relationships and inability to write women well, as well as the question of whether the detached emotional stance of his prose weathers well in today's age, which demands political engagement.
One is tempted to respond with a sigh and a "So what else is new?" Hemingway is indeed terrible with women on the page (the few possible exceptions being the moments when his strange gentle awe of the actual women in his life comes out, as in several of the passages in A Moveable Feast and the semi-autobiographical section of Islands in the Stream, when he is forced to depict rather than romanticize). And the detachment of his prose is, yes, detachment. It is an approach, an attempt to wrestle with something in himself or his vision of the world or his beliefs about art, that is fundamentally internal, meaning that it is about his experience of living, and the struggles therein. Which is to say that, yes, it is an apolitical mode of writing, and also to say that, like commenting on his inability with women, noting a disjunction between his artistic approach and "the political" is to achieve little more than observation in the guise of commentary.
But to try to work through Hemingway's approach to the craft of writing – what that entails, and the worth it might have to us – is to engage him at his strongest point. And why not do this? Avoiding strengths and harping on weaknesses seems to me at best a method of trying to score easy points.
All of which made me think, in turn, of James Cameron.
I have a longstanding fondness for his Aliens, from 1986, which goes all the way back to the first time I saw it when I was young and it seemed to me to be just about the greatest movie in the whole world. It was cheeky, scary, full of great action sequences, and featured monsters that were almost perfectly imagined: terrifying, tough, and yet still capable of being defeated…but only by one of the great screen badasses of all time.
Looking back now, it seems that what drew me to the film in the first place, and continues to make it enjoyable, is exactly that thing lies at the center of Cameron's highest accomplishments as a director: his extraordinary skill at directing action-adventure sequences, and general mastery of big-budget action filmmaking. If this technical ability is akin to prose writing in the novel, then Cameron should be seen, I think, as someone whose artistic essence resides in his mastery of craft.
(Parenthetically, I should note that I don't think an overall comparison of Ernest Hemingway and James Cameron, in terms of the magnitude of their accomplishment, achieves much. They are too different in too many ways, and that comparison would, frankly, be radically dismissive of the accomplishments of one of them. But it seems to me that out of surprising points of connection come interesting ideas, which retain their interest precisely to the degree that neither too much nor too little is made of them.)
Like Hemingway, Cameron is easy to attack on his weak points. When he moves into trying to depict romantic or familial relationships he falls easily into the sentimental, and his attempts to focus on thematically-oriented material are nearly always ponderous and overinsistent. But when it comes time to send a bunch of space-Marines out onto a terrifying planet to face off with a horde of smarter-than-you-think aliens, and then to create scene after scene that not only makes you care about these characters but also thrills you with their exploits? There, he shines.
Aliens is centered on the continuing story of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who first appeared in Ridley Scott's Alien, from 1979. There, she was an officer on a freighter that picked up a horrific alien lifeform from a planet; it proceeded to grow, famously, from an embryo implanted in a human stomach to a murderous, armored creature with acid for blood. After the alien killed all of Ripley's crewmates, she managed to defeat it by blowing it out an airlock, and then settled into an escape pod for her long journey home.
Aliens opens with Ripley's pod being discovered 57 years later. She's been in stasis – an induced sleep which makes long distance space travel possible – and so has not aged, but most everyone she knew on earth has died (including, in the somewhat regrettable director's cut, her daughter.) Importantly, the planet on which her crew discovered the alien, called LV-426, has been safely colonized. This fact makes her corporate superiors suspicious about her tale of the aliens on that planet…until the colonists suddenly drop out of contact.
To investigate, Ripley joins an expedition of marines headed for LV-426. This is a lovingly-created unit right out of a vintage World War Two or Vietnam film, complete with a cigar-chomping hard-case sergeant (Al Matthews), an inexperienced second Lieutenant (William Hope) a world-weary corporal (Michael Biehn), and bantering privates (including Bill Paxton). Also along on the expedition are an android named Bishop (Lance Henriksen) and a smarmy corporate hack named Burke (Paul Reiser).
This group arrives on LV-426, finding at first only signs that every colonist has disappeared, after they were apparently attacked by something. They then find a little girl nicknamed Newt (Carrie Henn), who's been hiding from the aliens for several weeks.
At this point, the film has built a great deal of tension in intelligent ways. We're attached to our group of marines, there are hints of discord, particularly centered around what the corporate representative Burke is up to, and the as-yet unseen monsters have been built up as fearsome in our minds.
The closing two acts of the film fulfill the promise of this setup beautifully. The monsters appear and wipe out many of the marines in a wonderfully staged fight sequence; the survivors realize they're also likely to be dispatched before long. They barricade themselves in a building and devise a plan to recall a shuttle from their main spaceship (in orbit overhead), and then try to fight off a second assault of the monsters in order to make it to this shuttle. There are twists and turns, betrayals and brief surges of friendship; Ripley and the young girl Newt develop a tender relationship, but then Newt is captured by the aliens just as Ripley and the two other survivors have a chance to escape.
In the famous third act of the film, Ripley arms herself and journeys into the heart of the aliens' lair to rescue Newt. There, she confronts the huge female alien that lays the eggs which perpetuate the whole monstrous species. Ripley escapes with Newt, but the queen alien sneaks aboard their shuttle when it flies back up to the main spaceship. Ripley dons a huge, armored, body-shaped forklift to battle the queen, eventually blowing it out the airlock in a reprise of the ending of the first film.
It's all smashingly entertaining, but what exactly makes it so good? How can we begin to talk about the successful elements of Cameron’s craft?
I have a lot of thoughts about this; today, I'll only throw a couple at you. The first is the writing. Cameron's script does a number of things enormously well; one of the most important is that it makes its characters memorable while still maintaining them as believable human beings. This quality comes in large part from the dialogue writing, and also arises from his skill at directing a certain kind of scene.
Some of success in the script is of the Hollywood executive-note kind: Ripley is motivated at the beginning to join forces with the marines because she comes to believe that it's the only way she can get past the traumas she experienced in the first movie. Which is to say that she has a clear psychological driver (this trauma and the attempt to move past it); when added to the physical/survival challenges presented by the aliens, we get a character who can, by the end of the film, overcome both her interior and exterior obstacles through the same act (defeating the aliens and killing the queen). This move from traumatized to victorious allows the tale to engage in the hallowed "character change" or "hero's journey" that we out here in this sunlight-ridden, palm-strewn paradise are always being told constitutes what storytelling really is.
As you may be able to tell from my tone, I find this kind of writing analysis falls into a category of necessary (if you want to shop scripts) but uninformative; while it reveals the writing's professional gloss, it doesn't really enlighten us about how it's working or why. Cameron's construction of dialogue-driven scenes, on the other hand, I find fascinating.
As an example, take the sequence when Ripley is asked to describe her earlier experiences with the alien to the surly space marines. She begins almost hesitantly, unsure of herself; this is both, we sense, because of the difficulty of revisiting the memory and because she's aware of the soldiers' belief that she's no more than a wimpy civilian who had an encounter with some pathetic little E.T.-like alien that will be easy, and boring, to exterminate.
She tells the story of what happened on her first ship (in Alien) when a crewmember came back on board from LV-426 with some kind of lifeform clamped onto his face; even if we haven't seen the first movie, what she's describing sounds like it might be worth listening to.
The soldiers, though, do exactly what Ripley has suspected they might: crack jokes and spout bravado. "Is this going to be a standup fight," asks Hudson (Paxton), the resident wiseass, "or another bug hunt?" In the same vein, the tough heavy-machine-gunner Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) notes that they can dispense with the stupid details because "I only need to know one thing: where they are." Importantly, the one note of discord to all this comes from Corporal Hicks, who seems to be genuinely interested in getting the facts about the aliens. In the face of the disdain of the others, though, Ripley doesn't roll over but instead ends up by giving them a dire warning: "Just one of those things managed to wipe out my entire crew in less than twenty-four hours. And if the colonists have found that ship, there's no telling how many have been exposed [ie. how many aliens there may be]. Do you get it?!"
Of note here is how many things are happening simultaneously. The next act of the film is being foreshadowed: the marines will eventually land on LV-426, underestimate the aliens, and be defeated out as a result. At the same time the character attributes on display here will be traced forward. Hudson's wiseassery will devolve into a panic that pushes him to the edge of incompetence before he reins it in; Vasquez's bravado will carry her through to her death scene with Lieutenant Gorman, in which it will be tempered by human connection; and Hicks' steadiness will be paid off when he ends up being the ranking military officer after the debacle of the first firefight.
They will also learn to look to Ripley as a leader; her refusal to back down from their scorn in this scene is an exact reflection of her later refusal to back down from the alien menace, which will earn her their respect. The scene works to build our sense of her character, that is, just as it does to build the characters of the marines. Beyond this, it makes them all likable. The marines' quips are funny, and yet we also get the sense that their lack of seriousness about the threat will get them in trouble; this makes us concerned for them. Ripley's tough-mindedness works in the same way: we feel her being slighted, which makes us feel sympathetic to her.
All of this sounds straightforward and perhaps even easy to do. But perhaps the simplest way to remind yourself that this isn't the case is to ask yourself how many of these scenes you've seen, in movies of varying degree of similarity to Aliens, and how frequently they work this well. How often does the whole cast of characters come alive like this? How often do you get a sense of what's coming, and feel at the same time the titillation of fear and the eagerness to watch it unfold?
This investment in the characters, and the forward momentum of the plot in character terms, is purely a result of Cameron's skill at constructing this kind of scene, here and elsewhere (in the sequence where they eat breakfast after coming out of hypersleep, for example, or the sequences where they first search the abandoned colony).
The second aspect of the film that comes to mind for me is Cameron's unparalleled facility at staging settings and then developing action sequences in them. One sees evidence of this in his other work – the flooding-the-ship sequences in The Abyss and Titanic, the final battle in the factory in The Terminator, the chase sequences in Terminator II – but for my money the best expression of his ability in this regard is in Aliens.
Put simply, he is wonderfully talented at creating believable spaces (with the help here of artists and designers like Ron Cobb, Peter Lamont, Crispian Sallis, and others) and then using them to elevate the battles that take place in them.
First off, the film is a masterclass in set construction. Every interior – from the Sulaco (the marines' main ship), to the drop ships and the armored battle-wagon the marines drive around in, to the various locations in the colony on LV-426 – is almost perfectly convincing. A good deal of this comes from it simply being well imagined. The military interiors feel like military interiors, functional, rugged, and carrying technology that is at once suitably advanced and still prone to dysfunctionality. Similarly, the interiors of the colony feel like actual places, from the brief shots of the living quarters, to the labs holding two specimens of face-hugger the colonists managed to capture, to the command center where Ripley and the marines make their eventual last stand.
This feeling of believability is essential to sci-fi and action movies, difficult to put into words, and akin to magic when it is pulled off. The events in these films are so often stretched beyond the credible that we live on the edge of seeing the whole as ridiculous; if the setting rings false, the film is at threat of collapsing completely, like a souffle left two minutes too long in the oven.
But what is it that makes us believe? At risk of simplification, I'll point out two elements that Cameron masters here. One is the minutia of light and texture and specific detail, and the second is how intelligently he maximizes the film's visuals.
The lighting of the set is extraordinary (Adrien Biddle served as director of photography, and Jack Thetford as primary gaffer). The next time you watch the film, notice how well-lit many of the most tense scenes are, while still giving the impression of taking place in eerie, dangling-light half-darkness. We can see clearly what's happening, but have the strong impression that the characters are working their way through a scarily-dim, atmospheric space. Watch even more closely, and you'll start to realize how this is accomplished: tube lights placed out of sight in the colony interiors, the soldiers' shoulder-mounted flashlights combining with spotlights placed at the end of tunnels in the alien hive beneath the colony, the white and blue floodlights that backlight the scene where Ripley confronts the alien queen.
But it's the specific textures Cameron gives to this lighting scheme, and the way he uses it to drive tension, that give the film its added force. When the marines first enter the abandoned colony, for example, it's raining. Because there has been a battle between the colonists and the aliens, there are numerous holes in the shell of the colony, so the water drips down through the interiors the marines are exploring. This means that the sets don't just feel believable in how they are designed or lit; they also gain another kind of three-dimensionality as the marines navigate drips and sprays of water. When we encounter a rain-soaked, half-eaten doughnut in an abandoned living quarters, it serves both a plot function (telling us that the colonists departed in haste, mid-meal, increasing our anxiety about what happened to them) and a setting function, drawing us into a fully-imagined world.
Cameron plays a similarly wonderful game through his use of in-story visual layers to create tension. When the marines first venture into the colony and then eventually descend into the alien hive, where many of them will die, their progress is remotely monitored by Ripley and Gorman via the cameras they carry on their helmets.
This allows the film to tighten the screws on us in two ways. First, these cameras don't always give a perfect image, both because they're occasionally prone to dysfunction and because of interference in the transmission back to the monitors Ripley and Gorman are watching. This means that menacing visuals – of the rain leaking through the damaged colony, or of the firefight in the hive – can be made more menacing by visual distortion: static, graininess, etc.
Because the trope is that these cameras are helmet-mounted, Cameron is also able to utilize the same kind of frenetic motion that the found-footage movies so popular decade ago used to their advantage. We get the sense that we're the person carrying this camera, which in turn helps instill us with the sense both that the action is really happening and that we're in the middle of it. And then, Cameron pulls a bit of movie-making magic: he cuts from a grainy image purportedly taken by one of these helmet-mounted cameras directly into a crisp, in-scene shot of the same image. The feeling of this is one of being pushed suddenly from a less-than clear nightmare into a fully realized one. Almost paradoxically, this move from found-footage style into more regular cinematic style heightens the feeling of reality, making it seem as if we've somehow entered the scene that was previously only being shown to us by a camera.
More subtly, this use of cameras-in-the-film builds tension by allowing us to directly share the anxiety of Ripley and Gorman as they watch the marines' terror from a distance. To signal that one of the marines has been killed, Cameron simply has their camera feed go dark. Rather than see them be killed, that is, we are given to understand that something terrible has happened, as their camera is no longer functioning. Not only is this lack of knowledge is deeply unsettling – we're forced to imagine their fate rather than actually getting to see it – but, like Ripley and Gorman, we're incapacitated by our distance from the action, unable to even be present as these characters we've grown emotionally attached to are killed.
An enormous part of the effect of this is due to the editing, of course (the film was cut by Ray Lovejoy), but at base this visual effectiveness is due to Cameron's skill. He manages to build a kind of dance: Ripley and Gorman watch the action on sputtering live-feeds, and we share their anxiety; the film cuts to the live feeds themselves, and we feel the shaky, distorted, in-the-moment, frenetic stimulation of found footage images; the film cuts to in-scene shots and it's like we've been catapulted into the action. And then, once these registers have been established, the movie can play them like an instrument, moving us in whatever direction it chooses.
It's his facility with the many technical details like this that form the heart of Cameron’s craft as a filmmaker.
At the opening, I suggested that the drawbacks of Ernest Hemingway's style are clear enough to be uninteresting in themselves. His obsession with craft was in some sense an obsession with capturing a precise tone of devastating personal (and perhaps masculine) emotional remove, and that came with costs. But to state that his successes should be ignored and that only his failures are significant is to miss one of the most essential facts about art, which is that it lives in the inextricable tension of the attempt. Complexity and struggle and the costs of triumph are what art is.
What this suggests about Cameron’s greater successes and failures is a topic for a much longer essay. As a start, though, I'd note that I think that, like Hemingway, he is in some sense a prisoner of his own skill. Which is to say that (here and elsewhere in his work) his attempts at touching on "thematic" material run counter to what he puts on screen, or at least exist in tension with it.
His mastery is that of a sensory, and almost tactile, submersion in events. His primary talent is propulsive; it relies on building relentless sequences in which there is no room for thought or breath; it’s both marked and undergirded by a distinct lack of emotional (as opposed to technical) subtlety. Does this mastery of the minutia of exhilaration threaten to become its own end, overriding all else in his films? Does it become in some sense the primary thing they communicate? Perhaps.
But maybe that’s all just another way of saying that if you want someone to put your butt in the seat and blow your eyes through the back of your head with some badass action sequences, Cameron’s your man and Aliens is your movie.
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