Affirming Humanity in
‘Alien: Resurrection’
This is perhaps
going to point out the obvious but it's worth noting and I may be wrong
in assuming you have noticed what appears obvious to me. The last film
of the 'Aliens' series proper is an interesting examination of
humanity's self-ambivalence. Or rather it is an examination of people's
judgement about humanity who are themselves only partly human. At no
point do the humans involved in this deadly game with an inexorable
enemy seem to question their own value as individual humans or, when
the future of human life on Earth seems threatened, the obvious need to
prevent catastrophe by preventing the arrival of the aliens at Earth.
The situation is different for the quasi-human characters who lack the
human instinctual need for survival, Ripley has had hers interfered
with by being quasi-Alien and Winona Ryder's android character is a
strange mix of determinist computer programming and autonomous sentient
consciousness that is half human half new life form.
The outcome for
the android called 'Call' is a passionate need to defend humanity
which could either be due to programming by humans or a 'heartfelt'
decision. Its own 'people' have suffered at human hands having been
almost totally destroyed in a cull intended to remove the threat they
posed to humanity in being a slave race with a comprehension of human
morality and an ability to make moral judgements, including the
judgement that they are equal to humanity and should be treated as
such. Interestingly, unlike other rebel android tales, in Call's case
instead of deciding it is actually superior to humanity it has decided
it cares about humanity despite our cruelty towards its kind.
But why make the
judgement in favour of humanity instead of the aliens? Perhaps because
it feels human enough to wish to protect what is a part of it and sees
the elimination of human life by the alien as intolerable. Ripley is
more equivocal. Although more human than Call, her alien DNA leads her
to question the value of humanity in a way the android doesn't or has
perhaps long since answered. Her empathy with the aliens allows her to
pass a cynic's eye over human life and in the early part of the film
she seems uncaring of the probable fate of the humans onboard the space
ship as the aliens escape confinement. Ignoring her recent encounters
with some of the worst types of person: the savagely militaristic, and
the barbaric and callously self-interested mercenaries, she seems to
appreciate the value of the aliens regardless of humanity's failings.
Even with humanity at its best, for Ripley they may not be worth
protecting from the incredible other life form which she now admires.
Her attitude
changes though as she considers her future whilst one of the aliens is
busy in the slowish process of head-butting a steel door down to get to
her. At first she is unmoved but she then perhaps realises that she is
more human than alien and even if accepted amongst the aliens she will
always be alone - or she may have realised they will not accept her and
kill her too. So her final decision in favour of humanity may not
ultimately have been the result of an affirmation of humanity as much
as the survival instinct making her realise that the humans are her
only hope.
In the final
scenes the viewer is directed to feel ambivalence about humanity. The
hybrid human-alien that the alien queen gives birth to, although
lacking
as much human DNA as Ripley, is in some senses more human than Ripley
in
that it has features of human behaviour that Ripley as a 'good human'
doesn't manifest - namely maliciousness and cruelty, which as
Schopenhauer observed make us and our simian cousins unique amongst the
creatures of
the Earth. The human-alien confounds Rousseau's thesis of natural
human goodness by simply killing its alien mother because it’s not the
right mother. Then, seeing the cocooned scientist being used as a
hatchery it kills him solely for the sake of doing so even though the
action is harmful to the race - something the communitarian aliens
would never contemplate. Notably, at the close of the film it tortures
Call a bit by probing into its wound and tries to entrap Call by acting
sad to make it feel sorry for it; this is the cruelty and deception of
a human child.
Humanity is
ultimately saved from the aliens by the actions of an android and a
partially alien human both of whom have consciously decided to save a
species that through it's own stupidity and insidiousness has come
close to destroying itself. The questions provoked by the film are is a
comparatively ineffective predatory species worth saving from another
more successful predator species which doesn't have art or love but is
free of malice and cruelty? It also asks would the judgement be in
humanity's favour if humanity lived up to its best potential instead of
dominating other forms of life and even members of its own species?
Eric Clancy
©
For/Against