David Thomson’s Bizarre Alien Resurrection

I don’t really have any expertise or special insight when it comes to film criticism, but my understanding is that David Thomson is probably the most esteemed mainstream film critic in the world. Any time people are compared to Pauline Kael they must be getting somewhere, and he’s long past that.

He is probably best known for his Biographical Dictionary of Film, through which a literally encyclopaedic knowledge of the medium is filtered through his idiosyncratic interpretation of it. It’s a project where the entire history of film is conjoined to his own personal and inimitable appreciation. At times it can be a compelling read - Stanley Kubrick comes out of it incredibly badly; Sharon Stone is contrasted with Frances Farmer because of the way that photos were lying across Thomson’s desk when he came to write her entry, and so on. My dad, also a huge cinephile, first put me onto Thomson’s writings when I was about seventeen and Thomson had written a pretty sober and sour takedown of Independence Day that was in one of the broadsheets. It read as a fairly routine critique of the new breed of turbo-blockbuster bullshit, contrasting the shallowness of the total farce concocted by Emmerich with the rather more worthy movies of Thomson’s youth like Red River (when films worked by offering a dramatic situation as a distillation of character and plot). A familiar lament for a nobler, less calculating, more austere era, the review told the story of Thomson taking his young son to see the film and closing with something like the words, ‘he doesn’t understand why he has to cheer his father up on the way home from the latest blockbuster.’ I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea. Every so often my dad will give me one of Thomson’s books for a birthday or Christmas, but I’ve never really done more than leaf through them (I’m safe from him finding out because he doesn’t have the internet, which, hilariously, he sees no benefit to having. So he won’t be reading this).

So how does this fit into a blog on the Alien series of movies?

In 1998 Thomson wrote a book on the Alien films that followed on the heels of Alien: Resurrection called The Alien Quartet as part of a pocket movie guide series. It is very a strange book and one which, quite frankly, has an unusual amount of shortcomings. For the Alien series aficionado it makes for a fairly tortured read: it is cursorily researched; it is maddeningly superficial for anyone with anything more than a rudimentary knowledge of the films; it is, in common with much of Thomson’s metier, oddly flippant with some strange points of focus and superficial musings. Easily its most striking quality is its dogged, repetitious, and yet painstakingly forensic recapitulation of the plots of the films. Why anyone thought a book that simply gave very detailed synopses of the films would appeal to anyone, with barely any exploratory commentary to accompany them at all, is truly baffling. It is literally a case of Thomson watching the films and writing down what he sees, with the occasional banal observation (an example: Ian Holm is English. Appended footnote: Hollywood films favour English villains). I don’t know what could account for this. Perhaps Thomson was tired, or pressed for time, and just phoned it in. Perhaps the format of the Pocket Movie Guide was weirdly inflexible, and they all read like this.

Nonetheless the book does contain some passably interesting material, particularly towards the end. As I’ve said, each of the chapters is little more than a blow-by-blow description of the plot of each of the films, unleavened by anything resembling critique or useful insight. However, the fourth chapter departs from this so-far familiar course and instead narrates two films – the Alien: Resurrection that was actually made, and the Alien: Resurrection that Thomson both wishes and proposes had been made.

In effect, the world’s greatest film critic effectively wrote a treatment for Alien 4. It doesn’t sound quite as good a thing when you realise that it is out of pure whimsy. But it remains a fact.

Here’s how Thomson sets out his vision for the fourth instalment:

Suppose, instead of what we have, that we are on a vast, streamlined spaceship – something with design pretensions, with pizazz, with décor by Travis Banton or Fernandino Scarfiotti, not one of those clunky, turreted dinosaurs with the air of an old blacking factory. As this ship (let’s call it the Narcissus) surges through space, we are in a magnificent enormous room – somewhere between a boudoir and a salon – with high windows, as large as movie screens, through which we can see the aqua infinity of space.

Here, again, Ripley exists as a clone, number 8, except in this iteration she is recumbent in a gigantic canopied bed, ‘like Sleeping Beauty… a fresh-sewn scar between her breasts’. She is watched by Bishop, ‘the great inventor, master of the ship’ who is captivated by the woman he has reclaimed from death. A nurse assures Bishop that the Ripley clone bears ‘no trace of memory, of her past, her personality’. Except, that is, in a codicil so contrived it could have come straight from a fairytale, Ripley should catch sight of herself. Not to worry, says the Nurse, they’ve taken all the mirrors out of the room. 

To the strains of Sinatra singing ‘I’ve got you under my skin’, Thomson’s envisioning then treats us to a topless Ripley eating figs while Bishop parades around in attire resembling an ‘Existentialist adventurer in the Peterman catalogue’ (I am not making this up). Then, watched by a nurse and a lab-technician through a monitor, Ripley and Bishop embark on the latest part of the torrid sexual marathon that has apparently been taking place for the last ten million light years, with Thomson elaborating on the hybridity and multifariousness of the newly cloned Ripley. She is inexpert, learning, and part uninitiated child, yet at the same time is a mother, sexually mature, and also, of course, part alien/beast: certainly not a purestrain human. There is then a dissolve to a nest of aliens on the ship that also watch the lovemaking between Ripley and Bishop. Presently, Ripley the ‘space nymph, a sexual performer capable of breaking her own records at every outing’ succeeds in fucking Bishop into a state of exhaustion, and wanders to the windows to look at the stars. Here she sees her reflection (it is not clear why this wasn’t thought of when the mirrors were being removed). Something like a memory is stirred, and when she returns to the fatigued Bishop, he seems to resemble the ‘disconnected’ android on the garbage tip form the previous film. Saying his name startles Bishop from his sleep:

               

       ‘Where do I come from?’ Ripley asks Bishop. She is not so fond now. ‘What am I?’

       ‘You’re a woman,’ he says. ‘A prize among woman.’

       What do women do?’

       Bishop smiles, in a world-weary way: ‘Whatever they want to do.'

       Now she roars at him – there should be flashing teeth and more force in the sound than is entirely        human: ‘But what do they do.

       'Do?’ Bishop is rattled by the signs of the beast in her. ‘Women carry children to birth. That is            the tradition.’

       ‘Children?’

       ‘So the human race can go on.’

       ‘What are children?’

       ‘They are the very young, the very small ones.’

Thoroughly confused by the fact she is menstruating, the Ripley clone collects a smudge of her acid-blood on her hand and holds it up to Bishop. Demanding they reproduce, a horrified Bishop helplessly submits as Ripley ‘smears her own blood on her face like war-paint’ and forces herself upon him. Bishop expires, but, as Thomson says, ‘there’s no fitter way for a connoisseur cocksman to go.’ Inkeeping with the fairy-tale narrative logic, Ripley finds a key in Bishop’s pocket and explores the ship, whereupon she encounters the original Bishop android in his customary state of disrepair that we recognise from Alien 3. When Ripley reveals that she has dispatched Bishop, the android responds: ‘Good. I never could. I was programmed to see him as my father’ (there is an echo of this in the Weyland/David relationship in Prometheus). Bishop directs Ripley towards screens which display where the clutch of aliens is being held, which ‘roar their greetings’.

At this point either time or space constraints prevent Thomson from elaborating on his alternate version of the film, and he cashes out: ‘as events aspire to a climax, I am more than willing to have my Ripley fall in line with the one in Alien Resurrection.’ Thomson sets the tracks of his story in line with the halfway point of Jeunet’s film and merges them together. In closing, he proffers a single alteration: instead of giving birth to the Newborn of Alien Resurrection, the queen instead uses her human/alien hybrid womb to produce a ‘crop-haired, wild-eyed, naked and slimy’ Winona Ryder. The film closes on the Ripley clone in Death Valley teaching her ‘pristine grandchild’ to stand erect.