Isolation
[CW: Discussion of sexual violence]
The first time that the Alien kills you is the best time that the Alien kills you. For me, it was in Medical. I’d been playing for a few hours since the Alien first showed up; I’d watched it slaughter a group of people who had been hunting me, cowering and filled with guilt. I searched their bodies for things that might help mine retain its integrity in the face of Sevastapol’s physical and moral disintegration.
I had died a few times since then: mundane, videogame deaths as my health bar was choked and beaten out of me in measurable, predictable gouts by rogue synthetics. (The synthetics are jealous allies of the Alien, their almost-life is the only life that can be lived in harmony with it.) And then I got to Medical, the first area of the game where it’s just you and the Alien, all training wheels removed. The hunt was on, and it took at least an hour. There were plenty of close calls but, each time I ducked out of the way, edging along from room to room, from hiding place to hiding place. I leaned back in a locker as the Alien’s head glitched through the door, it’s breath in my face as it still didn’t see me. I saw its legs pace around a table I was under before it ran off to parts unknown. I checked the motion tracker obsessively, never moving faster than a crawl.
At last, in a room I thought was safe I pulled out the Security Access Tuner to unlock a door that would give me a safer route out. The noise and the time it took to complete the access was all that the Alien needed. It pounced and the screen turned black. It was a perfect horror movie death: the character who thinks that they have more time than they do, who thinks that they’ve outsmarted the attacker but who has been outsmarted in turn. Even the cinematography was perfect: as the camera was focused on the screen of the Access Tuner I could only hear the approach of the Alien. Desperately hammering B to back out of the menu, when at last I had control of the camera once again I could only just catch a glimpse of its form as it bounded around the door before the death animation cut seamlessly and irrevocably in.
Isolation wears its cinematic pedigree proudly, from the 20th Century Fox fanfare that announces the game to the film grain slider in the video settings options menu. But unlike a game character a film character can only die once. That first death is the only one that it as it is meant to be. It is the only one which defines Amanda Ripley’s role in the film that is Alien Isolation. After that, the game that is Alien Isolation can at last begin.
The Alien is bored. It is a house cat. A polar bear in a zoo. It paces, unsure of itself and as trapped as everyone else on the station. I love my cat because she thinks I am another, albeit weird and malformed, cat; we are on a level in her mind. I would not want to be one of the mice she brings in to toy with, that she ropes me into hunting with her, clearly having the time of her life because she got the weird giant cat to join in the chase, because she’s teaching me how to be a better cat. I’ve got very good at catching mice by now, over my many years of suburban cat ownership. I’ve got good at taking the living ones outside, and at killing the ones which won’t survive, their guts hanging in strings outside of their bodies, as quickly as I can. Playing Isolation has given me a much better understanding of what it is to be one of those mice, to hide for hours under a dresser, knowing that death waits patiently for you outside. Despite all of this, I still love my cat. We still love polar bears, enough to keep them in zoos, even as we know that they play with seal cubs before they kill them, that they cannibalise their young. I think that, if we could convince it that we were on a level with it, we would love the Alien too.
The death urge is strange in Isolation. Ripley is not a hero. She does not want to die, her life is measured in other metrics. I am sure that there is a way of playing the game that involves gunning down other survivors, dashing from cover to cover, exposing your body to their bullets, choosing a hill for your last stand and continuing anyway because you can never be free of the violence, but that is not how I have played. I don’t think I’ve fired a single shot at another human.
So far I have killed three people: one with a wrench because he had a gun in my face and I had nowhere to run to and two with a Molotov that was in my hands already and there was no time to switch to a different device to create a distraction. I threw it and I ran for a transport car they were blocking my entrance to. I have never felt more guilty in a game. I stunned one fellow with a stun baton too, maybe he’ll survive. I have brought the Alien down on many, either by my mere presence or by an accident when I was trying to distract them and keep us all alive. Sometime on purpose. So it goes.
These are not villains. They are not enemies of a cause which would define my life if I were to die fighting them for it. If I were to die on its behalf. Ripley is not a hero, but there is still a form of the hero’s death urge in the game, seeking the Alien in order to make a meaningful end. It is only the deaths by the Alien that count.
I, Ripley, am playing a game with the Alien. It is like the games that I, Amsel, play with my cat. I do not fear the Alien any more as it has already killed me, so now it is just a game for the sake of a game, for the sake of something to do. When I’m safe, when I know that the Alien cannot find me, or will not look for me where I am, I love to just watch it. I love what it looks like, the way it walks, the inscrutability of its purpose, the sheer alien-ness of its being, so thoroughly different to the heavy metallic angles of the station architecture. I love it even as I other it.
I am beginning to think that I am seeing something expressive in its tail, a latent and unthinking communication of its internal self. If you have any experience with animals you become aware of the tail as an important expressive tool. I watch, my eyes lingering on it, as the Alien’s tail trails past my hiding place, at least as long again as the Alien’s body itself. I want to reach out, stroke it and come to understand it. In Alien, the film, it is made no secret that the tail of the Alien is phallic in nature, and cruelly, invasively so. It is coiled, hidden until needed, its only purpose that of penetration of the body before abandonment. In Isolation, under my unhindered gaze the tail, in a move that becomes a synechdoche to my relation to the Alien itself, is allowed to become the thing in itself. It is allowed to be just a tail It is allowed to be the exceptional tail that it is. I cannot stress enough how beautiful the Alien is just to watch.
The alien still wants to kill you. Sometimes when it does so it feels like a cinematic moment, tense and pounding and deadly, others a mutual collapse into exhaustion, a shared rejection of the tiresome artifice of the hunt. But the moment of capture, the moment of death is an embrace. The Working Joes choke you and snap your neck, the humans shoot you and beat you but the Alien, with one very significant exception, grabs you and draws you into itself. It finds you and it keeps you. The only death that is at all bloody (that I have seen, and I have seen a lot of deaths) is the unseen one from behind, where the tail spears your midriff and a loving hand reaches round for an embrace.
I need to be very clear here that this next statement is absolutely personal, is only my own way of being and stems from my life and my experiences. But this is what it feels for me to be embraced from behind by a lover. Unseen contact makes me flinch. I hate that it does, but I cannot help that initial, arcing moment of shock when I am touched gently by the hand that loves me. And then, when I know I am safe, I can melt into the moment. That one death animation is a closer rendering of that feeling than I have ever seen before. That it is a familiar sight in the game, that it is a frequent fail state in a game of frequent fail states is a bittersweet irony, reminding me of my failure as a lover even as it shows that these failures can be overcome.
A game is a machine for playing in. In Isolation it is the Alien that gets to play. One way of understanding, or at least of looking at, modernism as an aesthetic movement is to foreground its obsession with form and structure. The job of the modernist artist is to build the edifice, the job of the consumer, the reader or the viewer, is to explore that edifice and to fill it with meaning. The artist may leave clues, little bits of themselves that point to where the affect should go, but overall it is the machinery itself that is of paramount importance; it must be just right so that it can process the input, the consumer, and output a changed version — one which contains the story, the experience, implied in the construct. There is something very modernist, as unfashionable in polite society as the techniques now are after the very modernist horror of the Great War, in procedural generation and emergent narrative. Maybe even in all games to an extent. They are polished machines for exploring and setting in motion, not didactic stories to be told.
(If the Alien in Alien is a sexual predator, an opportunity rapist for want of a better term, then the Alien in Isolation is a ‘nice guy’. It wants Ripley, does everything it can to be close to her, even when there is easier prey to be found elsewhere on the station. Every rebuttal, every restart means nothing to it. It doesn’t eat the bodies it kills, so it must be after another communion, a different form of contact. This is its reality, separate from the fantasy I have concocted between it and myself.)
The Alien is the ultimate othered body. Its flesh is untouchable, unyielding and hostile to the flesh of others. It cannot be known, cannot hope to be known. Its mind is a blank slate for us to impose our own hatreds upon. Does the sexual violence it enacts belong to itself or to our fears of the priapic savage? In the film Aliens, and in fact in most games featuring multiple Aliens, it is one of a horde. It allows for the excitement of Rorke’s Drift to be lived again and again but without the guilt. Without the worry that maybe these are a people not a horde; maybe this is their home. With the catharsis of noble defeat, of bodily cessation in ideological purity, replacing the complication of an ugly victory. You are shown the bodies of so many Aliens, in their full muscular glory, but only as fetishised objects to be destroyed.
The Alien in Isolation cannot be destroyed, but unlike the lurking horror of Alien it can be displayed. The monstrous is monstrous only because it is usually glimpsed. On revelation of its true form the monstrous must change the world or lose its power. The length and the nature of the story being told in Isolation is such that the player cannot help but become intimate with the Alien’s form. Cannot help but see it as it is, a lone, finite being, unable to be everywhere at once, unable to contain the meaning of anyone but itself. When you burn it it skitters away in fear before slinking sheepishly back into the room, like a cat when you’ve accidentally hit it with a toy during play. It is unbelievably sad.
Ellen Ripley has never been a mother to Amanda. This is clear from both of their actions in this game and what we know of Ellen’s in the films. Ellen Ripley has maternal instincts, but she eventually brings them to bear on the Aliens themselves; her downfall at the end of Alien 3 is that she does not want life without her child. She does not want to experience the violent separation and necessary reordering of the world that happens when the child becomes an adult and leaves the home. So she destroys them both in the alchemical cauldron and is rewarded with rebirth as a single spirit. She does not want to stop being the mother than she never was to Amanda.
Maybe this is why I, as Amanda, have fallen in love with the Alien. A spiteful seeking of all of the complicated forms of love that my (her) mother could never offer, and would have held back from my reach. An incestuous, jealous desire to remake the world as inhospitable to those who came before us, who gave us their being.
Our first loves are so often inappropriate.
Our first loves will destroy us and make us anew.
