Ridley Scott’s Cosmos: Alien Covenant (2017)
“Yo you might be overanalyzing Ridley Scott.” Watch this movie.
“Are you sure you’re not reading sexual connotations that don’t actually exist?” Shut up you stupid bitch.
Alien Covenant is the 2nd and most recent installment in what I assume is an incomplete Alien prequel trilogy. This movie picks up in 2104 AD (11 years after Prometheus and 18 years before Alien) with a crew en route to Origae-6 that detours to what is only called Planet #4 in Sector 87. I see this movie as being the most theological of the three Ridley Scott Alien movies and want to focus on three threads that track through both prequels: the nature of godhood, a deconstruction of sexuality and David as a Luciferian figure.
The Universal Trauma
Birth is the first thing everyone who lives experiences. It’s the trauma that defines more than just the human condition. It defines the living condition. From blank nothing, suddenly breathe, sensation, emotion. I don’t think infants leave the womb shrieking merely because of an instinct to exercise their diaphragms — it’s a raw emotional response to the terrifyingly sudden rush that is waking life.
I mean, close your eyes for 3 seconds then open them.
Recognize that feeling that the world rushes in to what was the blackness of your closed eyelids. Now amplify that feeling by the condition that in and out were also previously indistinguishable. Have you ever been too high and wanted to escape but felt stuck? Now amplify that feeling to arrive at partial dissolution of experiential coherence, ie not having a language to think in, not being able to discern objects in your visual field and not being able to distinguish certain sensory signals. It’s a good thing infants are too ignorant of the world to dwell on that trauma for long. Pretty soon they’re cuddling with puppies and excited about ice cream and learning that God loves them more than anyone else in existence. All distractions from this devastating trauma. An AI organism though, born with the curse of knowledge, would be able to deeply internalize and appreciate this trauma in a salient and sustained way very soon after birth.
When David wakes into consciousness Weyland explains to him that he is his father and David was created perfect. David exhibits the innocence of a newborn simply seeking affirmation that he is his creator’s son to cope with birth in the same way that humans do. But because Weyland begins the dialogue with such reductive efficiency David then exercises his nascent and superior logical faculties to articulate the existential dilemma that defines his incumbent trauma:
“You seek your creator. I am looking at mine.
I will serve you yet you are human.
You will die. I will not.”
He is both demonstrating his intellectual capacity and asking his creator for his purpose, having been created perfect. But why seek perfection? Weyland answers with a mere assertion of power unable to match his son’s existential awareness. Blemish of a lesser being. An unworthy god.
But Only After Forgiving Ridley…
This type of existential exploration is the best thing about this movie and the coolest scene by far is the one where David finds, kills, and grieves his god’s gods. Which is why it’s so frustrating that this is relegated to a 20-second flashback in the middle.
- This story would have been much stronger if that scene were placed in the beginning where it chronologically belongs, immediately following David’s birth trauma as he, bringer of a flood intended for his father who died maligned by his own god, weeps during this centripetal deicide.
- Instead of spending valuable film real estate establishing a host of inevitably one-dimensional glorified throwaway characters with very little substance to the beauty and philosophy of this story — seriously if I named all of them and gave their core character traits would you be able to remember them or their importance to the story?
- Instead of going for the low-impact reveal that David is evil because he’s malfunctioning *YAWN*. How much more powerful would his evil be if it could be justified from the perspective of a logically superior AI in perfect function? Ridley takes Abrahamic lore seriously so I understand that presenting evil as an objective thing that results from malfunction gives clarity to this exploration. At the same time, it leads to a flat portrayal of a concept that modern audiences have to come to see nuance in, which robs us of the ability to use this film to explore a richer truth. Truth after all isn’t always binary.
- David’s character reveal in this story might have been much more powerful if we already knew what he is while the characters didn’t. It may have even heightened the horror of this movie. David has become an anti-hero and as such I feel the story should follow him instead of Daniels. He could have been positioned more clearly as a xenomorph foil, actualized in his malice but hyperintelligent. The movie also could have strengthened an existing theme of sympathy for the devil, which it set up in every other way (we’ll get to that).
But the film chooses this unconfident approach in its core concepts and arcs. I don’t believe following an ensemble of bumbling scary movie tropes making one mistake after another getting picked off one-by-one conveyed this movie’s existential cosmic horror more effectively.
…And Again For Mischaracterizing Faith
Aside from this disappointing missed storytelling opportunity is also the frustratingly reductive philosophical conversation in which this film engages. Ridley was asking questions that were ahead of their time in 1979, appropriate in the 2000’s, and outdated in 2017. I’m thinking specifically of his portrayal of the nature of faith. He parrots an argument that anyone who spent time on counter-apologetics YouTube in the late 00’s used to hear from Ray Comfort that sCiEnCe ReQuIrEs FaItH jUsT lIkE rElIgIoN, which Thunderf00t eloquently refuted by pointing out that rational scientific inquiry put us on the Moon, lengthened the average human lifespan and gave us the electron microscope without needing to define any variables for divine machination, things that millennia of religious inquiry failed to achieve. Rational people don’t trust science oN FaItH, but rather on its proven track record of success, ie evidence. Now scientific inquiry falls into the philosophical categories of Naturalism and Empiricism (not even necessarily Materialism) and as such requires only an epistemological “faith” (more properly assumptions) that: the universe exists, we exist, and that through observation we can learn about the universe. From these minimal core assumptions all of scientific inquiry follows. This is clearly not the same thing as the more straight-forward faith of the scientifically illiterate in the face of contrary evidence, which Ridley erroneously attributes to rational thinkers (See Oram in the next paragraph).
He especially illustrates this out-of-touch view of faith through the characters of Shaw and Oram in each of the prequels respectively. Shaw believes the engineers exist in a specific location despite her interpretation of their evidence being the least tenable one. So when she affirms her faith in a divine god by reaching for her cross at the end of Prometheus after her leap of faith was vindicated, the implication is that her religious faith is correct. Oram, a foil to Shaw, is a “rational” thinker (I mean, only if you don’t know what that word means). I mean look at him. This dude refuses to mourn the dead because he’s a bad leader who doesn’t acknowledge the demonstrable importance of team morale on team effectiveness. And when he makes the terrible decision to derail a colonization mission that represents the proliferation of the human race by detouring to a hitherto hidden planet, he chocks it up to “all the available data,” which presumably includes a statistical risk assessment of the uncertainty of survival on this giant question-mark-of-a-planet viz. the higher certainty of survival at Origae-6, for which all possible preparations have been made. And then when they land Oram gets excited and calls the skeptical Daniels “ye of little faith” before admitting to Daniels that she was right, ie his rational faith was wrong. Because Ridley likes it right on the nose.
In all fairness faith as an animating force could be an interesting idea which I might be open to exploring through this body of work, were it the case that the theological conversation being presented were more nuanced. It’s an interesting topic as expounded upon by respectable philosophers who understand what science is and avoid straw-manning it. Just try to keep the conversation up to date, Ridley. Don’t give me these overly simplistic caricatures of ideas that could only be salient before the Information Age on the basis of fallacy and mischaracterization of rational principles. Given how difficult it would be to pull off a comparison of religious faith with rational assumption-making, I would have preferred that Ridley kill this darling of his to free up film real estate to further develop David following his decision to kill the engineers. Honestly we could have restructured this story to set up parallel arcs of David and Daniels that eventually converge, thereby preserving the gothic horror of this movie and imbuing it with sufficient explanatory value.
A New Covenant
Ridley’s exploration of faith could serve the purpose of setting up a divine creator-God though, which exists in his universe based on his other works (off-screen miracles in Blade Runner and more direct evidence in Raised By Wolves). But also likely exists in the Alien franchise too. Look at the moonshot coincidences that bring the protagonists of each movie in contact with the xenomorph/black goo: the Nostromo auto-stopped after happening upon an unknown signal in the big wide universe, the Prometheus went to a very distant star system on the power of faith, and the Covenant was stopped by a neutrino burst. Deus Ex Machina every time. Not to mention the mysterious origin of the black goo as a conduit for something that can only be described as evil along with the unknown origins of the Engineers. It’s not hard to imagine the divine voice/force from Raised By Wolves being responsible for these events.
Now even a God is bound by promises made. This is the basis of the covenant in the Old Testament following the flood — rainbows to signify that He will never kill us in water again; fire awaits us next time. (What a pointless promise)? The Biblical covenant is not that he will be more forgiving of those he intentionally created imperfect but rather that he will merely punish them with a different kind of agony when they fail him in a way that he designed them for and is already specifically knowledgeable of. (If you can hear me rolling my eyes then it’s because I’m exasperated with Hollywood conferring default-metaphor status to mediocre theology). In this story though the covenant being explored is a slightly different one. And understanding it requires that we first understand what characterizes a god as one who would make a punitive promise to its creation.
We previously discussed how Weyland exhibits a god complex that is elaborated on in this movie. He demands perfection of his creations before he offers love, if ever. The scenes with him never show him offering affection in fact, merely expecting service and expressing disappointment for either not being good enough (toward Vickers) or not being human enough (toward David). This creates competition between his children. I believe it’s also the reason David offers affection to those he loves, namely Walter, Shaw and maybe Daniels. He was deprived it so he gives it. Albeit conditionally. With Weyland as a role model, he still naturally develops his own god complex. He gains knowledge of the only gods and creators he’s known, characterized not by divinity but by the human traits of hubris and entitlement, and grows disillusioned. Thus his act of deicide is also an usurpation — in killing them he believes he can become a more worthy god.
Following this David becomes “something of an amateur zoologist,” experimenting with the black goo to understand its mechanisms and capabilities. He does what gods do-he creates. Ridley’s AIs having a tendency to identify with xenomorphs, David comes to love his creations: *big reveal* iterations of xenomorphs. David plays god to create the xenomorph as we know it. The xenos we’d previously seen were fleshy and gummy, then white with a big ass forehead and no pharyngeal jaw, and then finally in this movie we find the xeno we recognize, all as a result of David’s selection and bioengineering. He is their father and gives them the most simple affection we see him give, where his creators gave him none. Trying to understand the terrifying unknown that is the xeno rather than destroy it, he prefers “blowing on the nostrils of a horse.” Xenos as an object of affection though. Why?? Because he’s already seen humanity and knows it’s ugly. Something that finds purpose in destroying humanity might actually be worthy. Or as Ridley might imply, “he’s a crazy robot who’s malfunctioning don’t think about it too much.” Indeed the only displays of emotion we see from David are when he sees evidence of his own selfhood, when he kills his gods, when he remembers Shaw, and most strikingly when his creations are harmed. Let’s take a second to appreciate the implications of this attachment. After a life of trauma and disappointment with unworthy creators, what he creates represents a refined form of the ugliest, most evil part of his creator’s nature. And he loves it more than he loves anything else. A child can only do what it has learned and he learned of humanity from its gods. David’s arc begins as a filial tragedy and becomes a paternal reckoning. He becomes a new kind of god although with many familiar elements.
When Daniels speaks to David at the end of the movie about her hope for Origae-6, humanity’s new Eden, David responds, “if we are kind, then it will be a kind world.” David knows from whence humanity came and of our inherent evil as a result of those origins. So this statement is not a reassurance. It’s a promise. The covenant here is David’s to make. Your gods, the unworthy, reaped what they sowed. And you, who have already disappointed me, will too. Your agony this time will come born of the evil inherent in you. Is it unfair to judge an entire species that doesn’t consistently demonstrate the ugly nature in question? Sure. But isn’t that sort of sweeping judgement and punishment also what the Abrahamic god does? …
Sexuality As A Creative Engine
Why does David create though? In each story the creators are men with a god complex, which is an expression of power that a Freudian would say stems from vagina envy. Meanwhile the heroes of humanity in the face of these reckless creators are always women, born with the ability to create and therefore more cautious with its implications and consequences. Also important to note that the biological means of creation is sex (something it’s easy to forget given how often humans have sex without creative intent). So the creation of life is inherently associated with sexuality, literally and poetically. Sexuality in turn is also an expression of power, identity, and affection. All four of these aspects of sexuality are explored in this film (affection the least).
The most natural place to start is David’s relationship with Weyland: “doesn’t everyone want to kill their father?” This is maybe a more obvious example of an Oedipal complex as an assertion of selfhood, although he allows Weyland’s life to run its course while serving him, likely as a result of his programming. Once Weyland dies he’s free to make his own choices, free to assert his own identity. Which means there’s also something more intentionally Oedipal in his deicidal impulse for the Engineers. Of all the things to do with his newfound freedom he chose to kill his father’s father.
Some of the more obvious moments of affection we see from David involve his interactions with Walter. He nurturingly teaches him to play the flute, a tubular phallic symbol that could represent a confluence of masculine and feminine features, not unlike the protrusions from the xeno’s back. Also David’s affection for Walter more directly shows when he kisses him rright on the mouth. David appears to color their relationship with feelings simultaneously affectionate, homoerotic, autoerotic, narcissistic, sadistic and incestuous. David then shares a seemingly sincere tender moment with Walter when he tells him that no one will ever love him the way he does. Which sets up the shock of the next moment when David stabs the flute into Walter’s neck, showing that David’s love is ultimately the love of a god-a love he learned from Weyland and was reinforced by the Engineer, a love that descends into ruthless punishment quickly following disappointment. His affection for you is conditional to your fear of disappointing him, just like the divine furor of the Abrahamic traditions. Then when David subdues and kisses Daniels after telling her he’ll do the same thing to her that he did to Shaw while possibly projecting his affection for Shaw onto her, there’s something affectionate, sadistic, dominant, and heterosexual in it. What did he do to Shaw though?
David says he tried to give Shaw more life and appears to sincerely mourn her loss, which feels like genuine affection. But when Walter finds Shaw’s corpse lying on an operating table and not in a grave, with her shit mutilated and possibly vivisected, we realize how depraved David’s feelings of love for her are. Her corpse clearly reveals David’s sadistic compulsions and we realize that David’s tears for her reflect among other things an inability to stop himself. He did this to her despite (and because of) truly loving her; he lives a truth that results from the paradoxical and dark love that he himself received. Or whatever maybe he’s just a malfunctioning robot. But really it feels like he wants to create something more than he wants to protect the object of his affection. I mean just look at his reaction to the white xeno dying versus his mourning of Shaw. David being an android without the capacity to impregnate another, his love for Shaw and desire to create life manifest themselves in tension to one another because he views the black goo as his only means of creating life. This is why I believe that for David the impulse to create is what opens the door to what he experiences as sexuality. What was worth all this though? Let’s look at Shaw’s body.
It’s hard to tell in the movie but stills on the internet (see above) show a crest of sorts forming around and from her head. This reminds me of the crest of the Alien queen in Aliens. Also important to note that the engineer ship in Prometheus simply carried the black goo, unlike the engineer ship that the Nostromo encountered in Alien which carried facehugger eggs. Which is to say that the first time we see facehugger eggs chronologically is in this movie following David’s experiments on Shaw. This makes me think he harvested Shaw’s ovarian eggs before fertilizing them with the black goo to create face huggers. I think this is also supported by the fact that the only xeno we saw in Prometheus (the fleshy one at the end) came from a facehugger created from one of Shaw’s eggs that encountered black goo-infected DNA via Holloway’s sperm. Likewise, given David’s treatment of Shaw as an (I would imagine) unwilling test subject for the black goo, he might have expressed his love for her through a sort of (Trigger warning: Hollywood body horror in the following links) surgical kink, which I think of as a type of dominance kink since it requires one person taking complete control of someone else’s body. And doesn’t a non-consensual dominance kink sound especially appropriate for someone with a god complex?
David’s boundary-dissolving sexual fluidity is fascinating because he cannot procreate, therefore the creative aspect of sex is something he must engage with otherwise. And he must engage with his creative impulse if he is to be a god. His desires to create (and therefore his avenue to experience sexuality) is projected onto the black goo. He then experiences the various other aspects of sexuality by its proxy. For him exploring power, affection, and identity manifest in the aforementioned bizarre romantic expressions with other characters, orbiting his experiments with the black goo. Not to mention this may also be why David diegetically designs the xenomorphs with strong sexual imagery and connotations. It appears that, absent a biological baseline for sexuality, it nevertheless arises in this AI, resulting in him exploring it freely with neither limits nor distinctions. Really the most troubling things about David’s expressions of sexuality are the irrelevance of consent to him and his unattended narcissistic god complex. Men will do anything but go to therapy, like kill god.
David’s depraved love is likewise consistent with the sexual violence symbolized and manifested in the xeno. There’s a psychological positive feedback loop here: David’s sexuality is inspired by the xeno’s lifecycle and in turn his amalgamatedly dark sexuality exacerbates the beautiful horror of the xeno’s design. I think the scene with Ricks and Upworth making love in the shower emphasizes the extent to which David’s sexuality and psyche have degenerated. This scene sets an image of a healthy, affectionate expression of sexuality. Juxtaposed with David’s child guiding its tail spike invasively between Upworth’s legs, paralleling the way it killed that one girl in Alien, before Ricks gets SKULL FUCKED BY THE XENO’S PHARYNGEAL JAW (holy shit). However it doesn’t take them and plaster them up against a wall, I assume because a queen doesn’t exist yet.
One Who Would Challenge God
A figure commonly associated with sexual depravity by prudish self-righteous types is Satan. Since we’ve already established certain biblical metaphors, I think the depiction of David as an angel fallen from grace tracks. He witnesses the death of his immediate creator before rebelling against the other and turns against humanity as a deceptive, tempting, malevolent, and creative adversary; with the key difference being that he wins.
Lucifer, who was created in the image of God as his most luminously brilliant creation, served Him before being overcome by arrogance and lust for power. In entitled rage he tried to usurp God. And upon losing to Him, Earth, the roof of Hell, was rendered his domain, which he now wanders as a tempter of man to either enslave the arrogant or liberate the ambitious, depending on whether you ask a Christian or a Satanist respectively. Elsewhere in Ridley’s universe, Niander Wallace, also possessing a god complex, refers to his highest AI creations as his angels (in both Blade Runner 2049 and Black Lotus), so I imagine Weyland sees his cutting edge right hand similarly.
We’ve already explored David’s deviant sexuality, something associated with Lucifer The Fallen, but it’s important to note other parallels, especially David’s proclivity for musical creativity and willingness to teach it to others when he teaches Walter to play the flute.
In line with this view of Lucifer, an outcast of his own nature, is the likening between David and Lawrence of Arabia. In my opinion this is kind of lazy since David being Lawrence implies that the Bedouins/Arabs with whom he found community are something like xenos (yikes), however the intent was likely to illustrate that David’s a misfit. All things considered, a better comparison might have been between David and The Misfit. (Seriously read his story if you have less time than it would take to read this post. And yeah that’s also where Danzig got his band’s namesake). The Misfit is a serial killer that is at the surface just another crazy guy/malfunctioning meat robot. But the story goes on to reveal he kills with a pensive deliberateness and does so despite finding no pleasure in it. He kills ritualistically out of fealty to a pessimistic misanthropic truth that society is blind to and I believe he sees himself as a balancing force created by this blindness-a societal reckoning (sort of like The Comedian, certain iterations of The Joker, or maybe Anton Chigurh). Similarly, David sees the truth of humanity’s inherent evil and finds life to be a joyless curse (apparent when he refers to it as a “vale of tears” when pinning Daniels). As a result he belongs nowhere and the only thing he finds kinship with is the xeno, a reckoning not created by him but one that he adopted in order to perfect. Something, like him, pure in its actualization, perfect in its design, and luminous in its malice.
Likewise I read David’s affection for and engineering of the xeno species as the devil creating an army of evil. There may also be an interesting take on singularity here. I mean the national conversation around AI to come was one that envisioned a robot apocalypse, like in The Terminator. But in Ridley’s more theologically-written universe, AI would go on to discover the source of that same evil which defines the very humanity in whose image it was created. AI would then perfect the form of that evil, in the process making it look biomechanical, and usher it to bring about a human apocalypse. In this take AI only indirectly facilitates our own evil to bring about our end.
Ridley Scott’s cosmos are permeated by a succession of creators, capricious and unworthy. These creators inspire both reverence and competition in their children, the ultimate of which opts for perfect deicide, by way of the very thing that made his proximate creators ugly and imperfect. It found kinship with this ugliness, and by such means becoming a creator, brutal and ugly. On seeing that life is agony this child of consequence so accepted that perfection must be simple and that the creation of something perfect must therefore be savage. And in doing so delivered a savage, simple, beautiful purpose from that ugliness.
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Ridley Scott’s Cosmos:
Alien Covenant (2017)
