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Dreaming
of Darkness: Allusions in the Alien Movies - Part IV
Josef
Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski -- A Bit About the Man
There
are two distinguishing facts about Joseph Conrad that most
often are exemplified in his work: first, that he didn’t
learn English until he was 21; and second, that he loved
the ocean and sailing.
Conrad was born in Russian Poland in 1856 to a Polish revolutionary
father who, through his efforts to liberate Poland, destined
his family to exile. In 1862 and 1869, Conrad’s father
and mother died, respectively. The young, emotional boy
was sent to live with his uncle and, after learning seamanship,
he smuggled arms to the forces of a claimant to the Spanish
throne in 1877 and ’78.
After losing his money and becoming involved in a disastrous
love affair, he shot himself in the chest. But, under the
care of his uncle Tadeusz, he recovered and shipped out
on a British vessel that very same year.
In 1886, he became a British subject and a captain, which
spurred on a career of sailing to Asia, South America, and
South Africa. Later, Conrad married an Englishwoman and
became the head of a family, but even this did not settle
him down; he remained tense, ill-tempered, and ardent. He
was always in a bad way with money, spent an agonizing amount
of time laboring at his desk, and never received recognition
until very late in his life.
Finally, when appreciation did come his way in the form
of an offer of knighthood, Conrad promptly refused it.
Joseph
Conrad -- Philosophies and Style
The important thing about the aforementioned distinguishing
facts about Conrad comes twofold: firstly, that, because
he learned English as a second language, he learned how
to exploit it in new and interesting ways native-speakers
would never have thought of, which allowed him to richly
describe the second thing that we should note: that most
of his novels focus on exotic locales and seafaring adventures.
Joseph Conrad himself best sums up his predominant philosophy
on what a writer wants to accomplish: “He [the writer]
speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense
of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity,
and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship
with all creation….”
Read over the last part of that quote one more time, which
says, “to the latent feeling of fellowship with all
creation….” That is what, oftentimes, Conrad indefatigably
focuses on.
Many writers of his time attempted to find a foundation
for defining our common humanity and for creating a bond
that might bring people together. They all fell drastically
short of their goal when compared to Conrad, who found this
“bond” in the code of the sea; which connected
officers and their men in a network of duties to one another,
to their passengers, and to their ship.
He
went further than this, though. He applied this bond to
to humanity as a whole; not just to ships and the sea. The
code of conduct he discovered in seafaring was applied to
the pressures of Western civilization in his era. Conrad
exposes our social and psychological weaknesses, forcing
us to face them head on and urging us to learn from his
characters’ flaws so that we do not repeat their mistakes.
To inspire us to improve ourselves, and our institutions
and society, Conrad uses his primary underlying theme: the
way our dreams and aspirations work to either join us with,
or to cut us off from, the rest of humanity. To Conrad,
the worst possible mistake that could be made by a man was
for him to lose his humanity -- the one thing that connects
every person on this Earth no matter who they are or where
they’re from. This is just like how officers, their
men, and their ships are connected by the common sense of
duty Conrad adopted and followed so fervently as a sailor.
Conrad portrays characters who are either utterly destroyed,
sometimes even turned completely mad with vice, or sustained
by their dreams and fantasies. Keep in mind, though, that
Conrad considered his psychological and social thoughts
to be subordinate to a basic concern with, as he put it,
“the truth, manifold and one” about people and
the world we inhabit and shape.
I’ll admit, sometimes his novels are depressing; not
uplifting. But that is because, when you are trying to urge
people to correct the very flaws annihilating them, you
cannot present a perfect, happy, faultless world. Above
all, Conrad wants us to strive towards our dreams and act
according to them; but he warns that we must take care that
our actions reach out to include our fellow men, lest we
lose our common humanity.
Conjecturing
about Conrad and the Alien -- Dreams
Okay,
hopefully, with what I said under “Philosophies and
Style,” and with the list of allusions I provided earlier
in this article, you are starting to see some serious, concrete
connections between Conrad’s philosophical criticisms
and the Alien films. These connections come across most
notably in the first and third films; Alien Resurrection
seems to have ignored the tradition of providing allusions
to Joseph Conrad’s literature altogether (which is
yet another reason why I loathe the movie, at least as an
Alien film).
Anyway,
let’s take a look at the associations with Alien.
In his novel, Nostromo, Conrad exposes the primary
underlying weakness of commercial interests -- greed. Greed.
I hope this word rings a bell, because Alien is overflowing
with it. The very reason that the crew of the Nostromo investigated
the Derelict spacecraft was because they received orders
from Weyland-Yutani (their huge, multinational, corporate
employers) to do so.
In Nostromo, the main character pilots a saling ship
hauling ore out of a tumultuous South American country;
in Alien, the ship Nostromo is a commercial towing
vehicle that shuttles iron-ore from distant planets to Earth.
Conrad’s book shows how detrimental materialism is
and exposes the gluttony associated with an obsession with
“progress.”
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In
Nostromo, Conrad wanted to paint, in shocking detail,
the sinister effects of greed and exploitation. After rebel
forces in a South American country threaten that nation’s
silver mines, a brave captain steps in and offers to bury
the nation’s silver reserves to guarantee its safety.
Conrad uses the violence of revolution to portray his cynical
vision on the tragic and atrocious essence of unrestrained
human nature.
It is this very human nature that seals, in the movie, the
crews’ fate. The company wanted the alien creature
for its bio-weapons division and they were willing to sacrifice
everyone on board that ship for it; “all other priorities
rescinded.”
Why? Why were they willing to do this and why did they want
the xenomorph?
To exploit the alien for profit and progress; because they
were greedy; because they allowed their gluttony to detach
them from their common humanity with those aboard the ship
who they had condemned to die. We see that the company executives
allowed themselves to be deluded into thinking that they
could avoid taking care that the actions they made included
their employees; that dis-including them in the name of
profit was acceptable.
They followed their dreams, just like Conrad urged, but
they missed the part where they would lose their humanity
if their decisions excluded their fellow man.
Here
are three more, much more minor examples of allusions to
keep note of. Nostromo is pronounced "nostro-uomo,”
and in French, this is taken as "notre homme,”
which means “our man” in English. This carries
connotations of our fellow man, which ties in well with
Alien for the reasons stated in the last paragraph. Interesting,
hmm?
Also, a derelict was in a Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s
Folly, only this derelict was not a ship, but a man. The
basic story depicted a derelict (which means dilapidated)
Dutchman, who traded on the jungle rivers of Borneo Site.
This was an intense seafaring story of the paranormal, which,
I think, fits in quite well with Alien.
I’m much tempted to compare the derelict Dutchman from
Almayer’s Folly to Ash, the synthetic human who, as
Ripley found out the hard way, was quite dilapidated.
Lastly, an often-cited quote of Conrad’s, "We
live, as we dream -- alone,” appears above the title
of the movie in the final script for Alien.
To
be continued...
By ::GenoDice::
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