ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Aliens On Screen

Episode Date: February 25, 2024

Last time on ACFM, the gang explored the impact of UFOs on politics, from deep-state conspiracies to the Posadists. But to really understand how aliens influence our thought – and what our belief in E.T. says about ourselves – we have to go to the movies. In this Microdose, Keir, Jem and Nadia sweep through a […]

This is Acid Man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by my very good friends, Kea Milburn. Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And on today's microdose, we are talking about aliens on screen. So, Keir, this was your suggestion.

Tell us why we're talking about this today. Well, the real reason is I just enjoy these lots of sorts of episodes where I get an excuse to watch lots of TV and films. But as we said on a main episode we did on UFOs, that aliens and UFOs have been this persistent theme in fiction, and particularly in like films and movies. And so with all of these things, a bit like when we talked about horror films

and horror fiction, etc., it's kind of interesting to sort of talk about them. I think we're going to talk about films in chronological order to some degree today, to think about what the aliens are representing, really, what role they play in people's imaginaries to some degree. How do they interrelate with the anxieties, concerns of their time?

That sort of analysis of what's going on with aliens, I think, is interesting, me and we could talk about aliens in written fiction, and perhaps we will touch on that, but you know what you've got to put a limit around this. So I think aliens in films is a good way to do it. So yeah, that's why I think we're doing this episode. That's great. Okay. Before we get into this episode, we should mention that you can go even weirder and leftier by subscribing to our newsletter, which we now will be sending out after every new trip, so no more than once a month with bonus content and updates from the ACFM crew. To sign up, go to Novara.com Media

forward slash ACFM newsletter. And for more music and less chat, follow the ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify. Just search for ACFM. Also, please do leave us five-star reviews on whatever platform you listen on. They do a great help to push us up the algorithm of podcast success. And to support us to keep bringing you even more from the ACFM Cosmos, please support our hosts Navarra Media for as little as one pound a month by going to navara.media forward slash support. And with that, let's get into it. Aliens on screen, Kier, what are we starting with?

I think we should start with aliens not on screen. We should start with War of the Worlds, I think. And so with War of the Worlds, we'd probably be talking about H.G. Wells novel from 1898. Perhaps we'd be talking about Orson Wells' radio play of War of the Worlds from 1938, which caused a big

shock and scandal. And then there's been a couple of films, one in 1953, and one in 2005, Starned Tom Cruise, if you've, if you've, if you've, if you've, to have seen that. Yet across an immense ethereal Gulf,

mines that are to our minds, as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects, vast, cool and unsympathetic. Regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. So I don't know if you lot are familiar with any or all of those cultural items. Literally have no idea. This is not my genre, as we know.

We'll get to a few that are contemporary that I've heard of, but please go on. Well, I've read War of the World's The Book, And of course, I'm familiar with the classic, the album. Oh, yes, I missed that the most important cultural artifact. There's like a concept album, a musical version of it. It's a very hugely popular album. It was really, you know, he sold loads of copies. Sort of prog rock album by Jeff Wayne.

Jeff Wayne. In keeping of a tradition that seemed to have developed it, I think you should give us a couple of choruses of. The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, they said, but still they come. Super. Just to say, before you guys get into that one, what would be really great to be able to put together this thesis that Keir introduced

of like what do aliens represent and, you know, aliens from beyond and aliens from within, what would be great is that if you could describe to our listeners and also to me, who's not aware of many of these films, what the aliens look like or what the aliens are represented like on the screen, that would be very helpful. Well, the aliens in the War of the Worlds are not described, are they?

They're not seen. Interesting. So the way we encounter the aliens in the story is that these sorts of, I suppose, they're shells or something like that, which are fired from Mars, land, and then these big tripod devices get out of them or they have these heat rays and gases,

poisoned gas and these sorts of things. But I think right at the end... Oh, yeah, they have the horrible tentacles, do you? Yeah, one of them crawls, a dying alien crawls out of one of these things. And so, like, the story is, you know, that these Martians come down, they've got this fantastically advanced technology and machinery and weapons, etc. many of them like, you know, sort of on the, like they deploy this poison gas, et cetera, which is on the horizon for World War I, et cetera, these sorts of things.

It comes down just outside London, I think, isn't it? Where did it come down? I can't remember. Somewhere in the home county. Somewhere in the home county. Of course it does. Anyway, the heart of empire. So Wells is right in this, you know, at the peak of the British Empire, 1898, etc.

And that, like, you know, the British army gathers and, like, fires its cannon. and has no effect at all. In the end, the only thing that brings down the Martians are the diseases, basically, the bacteria, the most primitive form of life that they have no resistance to. It is explicitly a novel about the fear of, or the colonial guilt, you put it that way, basically.

The basic thesis of the whole book is, what if someone came, who was more technologically advanced on us and treated us the way that we treat the, Colonials, as H.G. Wells puts it. And you can even see that, like, the dying of disease, etc. That's exactly how imperialists brought down in Africa. You know, it was malaria who was wiping out these children of the home counties who'd go off to go and make their fortune there. So just to be clear, it's like the threat here is if there was another external extraterrestrial

being who did to us what we did to people on earth, rather than what if people on earth that we colonised came back at us because that was going to be, I'm trying to test out a thesis that I have here. Yeah, well, I think that there's also a time when there's paranoia about invasion from Germany and these sorts of things. What if the Germans invaded?

But like H.G. Wells is absolutely, he's absolutely clear, you know. In fact, he talks about it as the Tasmanians, you know, what if somebody did to us, what we did to the Tasmanians? You know, a war of extermination that cleared the whole island wiped out the population of 50 years etc what if they did that to us so there's that and then very famously austin well stages a radio play where he a radio play of war of the world

sort of transported to california isn't it i think and um people who missed the announcement that it's a radio play like listening and think it's the news basically and there's this huge mass panic all at least that's the that's the story that's given also wells becomes very famous because of this radio playing. He's forced to apologize for it, etc. And all these sorts of things. Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance

music to bring you a special bulletin from the intercontinental radio news. At 20 minutes before 8th Central Time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope

indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving toward the earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pearson of the Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell's observation and describes the phenomenon as, quote, like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun, unquote. And then the first film of War of the Worlds is set is from 1953, and that also is moved to the US. And it's the same story, apart from in the US, the Americans, they use an atom bomb, an A-bomb on the aliens, and that also has no effect.

So they're sort of updating the inadequacy of current technology in the face of a technologically superior alien species. Right, so as far as you guys know, is this the first depiction on screen of like, Jeremy was saying, like tentacled type aliens, like that sort of vision of one alien is? I don't know. The tentacle description comes from the book,

comes from the end of the book. But it's a feature of the book and of the film versions that the alien, the actual appearance of the aliens is mysterious, like at least until right at the end, that you just see the mechanical vehicles that they inhabit

these, you know, strange or moving mechanical tripods that just have these sort of, you know, spherical or sort of egg-shaped pods on top. And it's only at the end you see that. So, but I think that description of the alien as tentacled, I'm sure Wells' description of the tentacled alien in the book

is the first time that a description of an alien is given. And of course, it's massively influential. It influences later descriptions of horrific aliens. It influences Lovecraft's description of the elder god Cthuru. It's still being riffed on in the depictions of the aliens in the Simpsons. So it's very influential. But, I don't know that someone didn't make a silent film or something that had imaginary aliens with tentacles before the first film version of War of the Worlds, but they didn't die now. I mean, the only other thing to say about the novel is that the novel contains a sort of element of like terraforming, we'd call it now, where this red weed is being grown on Earth, which is sort of changing the atmosphere, so the atmosphere is being changed so it could better suit the Martians, basically. That's not in the 1953 film, but it is in the 2005 film. The next film I want to talk about is actually from 1951,

so it comes before the first film we talked about then, which is the day the earth stood still, which is a, I think it's a really interesting film. It's one of the, well, one of the rare films from this period anyway, which has perhaps a liberal, not quite a leftist, but certainly a liberal sort of sensibility. Just after that, you're getting into the real paranoia films, such as evasion of the body snatches, we'll talk about a bit later.

The aliens are actually potentially beneficial, basically. It's an example of what you might call the zoo hypothesis. So that's like one way in which you try to answer this thing of Fermi's paradox, which Jeremy's convinced is a false paradox, which is this idea. If there's so many stars and so many planets out there, aliens must exist, So why have they not contacted us? Why can we not detect them anywhere? Because they can't.

Because you can't. It's simple. It's simple. Unfortunately, that is not great for fiction, etc. And so one of the answers might be, which is portrayed in this film, is that it's a zoo hypothesis. People are, aliens are aware of us, but they're not contacting us. And they've sort of protected us from interference by other species, etc. and they'll only contact us once we cross a certain threshold of...

Of grooviness. We're not cool enough for the aliens, no. Or when we pose an existential threat to ourselves. Yeah, yeah, go on, Jim. Well, I'd say that's the thesis of this film, isn't it? That they contact us because they have to. Otherwise, we're going to pose a threat either to ourselves or other species. Yeah, so this is like a post-nuclear energy nuclear bomb film.

from 1951, so just six years after the first atomic bombs in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, et cetera. And so basically what happens is this flying classic flying saucer-looking flying saucer comes and lands in America, Washington, I think. An alien who looks very much like a human being gets out called Clartu, and it's accompanied by a robot, this very big robot called Gort. It comes out at the source. It's surrounded by soldiers, one of whom mistakenly fires and injures Clartu. And he's basically there in order to demand that the world leaders gathered so he can speak to them and give them a message, which is basically, we've worked out that you've discovered atomic energy.

Soon you'll be powering your spaceships with atomic energy and then you'll be a threat to other species. So therefore, you need to stop the course you're on, join with us in a peaceful universal existence, etc. The problem is the world is split between two blocks, the Soviet Union and the free world are led by America. And so they won't gather together. They're both suspicious of each other. So as an example of his power, Clartu gets got to stop the earth, to stop all electricity working everywhere on Earth. Apart from, I think, planes don't crash. Perhaps hospitals are still allowed to function of these sorts of things, basically.

That's the idea is that they've come down to sort of prevent mankind going on a wall. like existence. There's a sort of subplot where Clartu escapes and lives amongst humans in disguise for a while. He gets to be friends with this woman and he says, if I get injured or die, you've got to go to Gort and say these words, Clartu, Barada, Niktu, otherwise he'll destroy the world, basically. Obviously, the soldiers kill him, right? And she managed to get to Gort and says Khlahtun Barada, Niktu, which seems to mean, don't blow up the world, I've died,

go and get me, and revive me and bring me back to life, which is what God does, and then God is resurrected. He's basically a Christ-like figure, isn't he, basically? He's come back to save mankind, he dies and gets resurrected to deliver his good news, basically. The latter part of that is incredibly rude in Arabic, so I'll leave that for Arabic speakers to enjoy that. It's incredibly famous line.

actually clout. Okay, well, I'm sure a lot of Arabic speakers are laughing at that one. It's a very low-budget film. It's like, it's only a science fiction film, really, in terms of its plot. And there's a few really simple effects and some quite cool electronic sound. But it's one of those films that, like, it almost could have been done as a stage play. Yeah. But it is also very high concept, really interesting.

If anything should happen to me, you must go to Gorton. You must say these words. Clatu, Barada, Nicto. Please repeat that. Platu, Barada, Nicto. I mean, the controversy around it at the time was that it didn't just say the Americans were the good guys. The Americans and the Soviets were both on the wrong path, and they had to be brought together by the aliens who were beneficial.

We should say, are we doing themes here, or are we doing epic spoilers, as Keir usually likes to do? Fuck, we should definitely do spoiler a bit. Because we're about to spoil every single alien film ever for everyone. I've just given away the complete plot. The whole of the day the air stood still. We need to have a spoiler claxon and spoiler alien-sounding claxon. We're not going to be trying very hard to avoid spoilers. So consider yourselves warned.

All right, let's move on. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Well, this is a classic piece of Cold War paranoia. Invasion of the Body Snatch is also a film that really doesn't revolve around any sort of effects. So its science fictionness is baked into the plot rather than it having any sort of whiz-bang, pseudo-futurist imagery and the idea is basically there's an alien invasion that takes the form of aliens being able to either take over people's bodies or create or kidnap people and create precise copies of them let me give it a properly good spoiling so this is that there's two

versions one of the 1956 version we're talking about this one in 1978 as well with donald severn And like the story here is like there are alien spores fall to earth and they grow into like pods and they can sort of like clone people in the pods. You get pod people. So if somebody's sleeping near to one of these pods that it takes on its form and then eventually it takes on its memories and these sorts of characteristics,

everything apart from it doesn't have emotions basically and eventually comes to replace this person. And so the pod people are sort of like really rationalist. They don't have any emotions. they're all blank etc and they're in some sort of conspiracy where they want to spread pod people all around the world that's the sort of conceit of the film basically yeah it's the idea of a stealth invasion which is really scary is the idea of an invasion that doesn't take the form of a full frontal military assault like the martians but is somehow step by step

person by person replacing the actually existing population with a completely different one in ways which is sort of difficult to detect and difficult to stop. And you never know whether somebody you're talking to is actually one of them or allied with them or if they are actually going to be on your side. Is that just a metaphor for immigration? Well, no, it's supposed to be a metaphor for communism, for the idea that the communists were gradually taking over the state and society. But I think it is also, I think it is. It's the other. It's the other. isn't it, some form of the other? It is the other and it does express a kind of affect of paranoia

in a really mechanically brilliant way, I think, that plot device. And I think paranoia isn't limited just to the experience of the Cold War on either side, to some extent, it's built into modern experience. It is really scary, actually. I think the only version I've seen, to be honest, is neither of those. It was a TV miniseries version from the 80s, I think, or the 70s. but it's really scary. It's a very scary plot device, I think.

Like the 1978 version, it can be read a little bit more like what happens when community turns against an individual. These couple of people are trying to escape. They're being chased. They're trying to pretend that they are pod people, et cetera, and all this sort of stuff. And like the famous scene in the 1978 version is when Donald Sevalon, who's been one of the people who, with a woman,

have been trying to escape from these people, turns and makes this sound, which is the sound of the aliens make when they detect a non-alien. The 1956 version is like, people sort of read it either as a critique of communism, the idea that, you know, basically people get taken over by like this, this rationalist, collectivist sort of order, etc. and, you know, the people that you thought you knew, all of a sudden they're acting very differently.

They've been... They're dialectical materialists. You can read it that way, and other people read it as a critique of McCarthyism, basically, the sort of Cold War witch hens, which had just ended a couple of years before that. And, like, you know, so that sort of like totalitarianism, the conformism that's brought about by that.

It's hard to know which one's which, but partly because the director Don Siegel claims to be a liberal, although he also went on. to make Dirty Harry, which is one of the most outrageously anti-countercultural and reactionary films of the 1970s. Yeah, but I think it is, I think it is just sort of liberal. It's liberal paranoia, which can be directed fairly at either side of the Cold War at that moment in history. Anti-totalitarianism, defence of the individual sort of idea, perhaps. Yeah. It's interesting to think that plot trope also gets used in vampire movies. That's the plot of like Salem's lot, for example.

the vampires gradually take over, like each member of this community and absorb them. It's the slow creep, isn't it? That's a different kind of horror. Yeah, exactly. And it is pretty much incidental that they're extraterrestrial.

I mean, the fact of their extraterrestrial, extraterrestriality. The testicle, what? Sorry. The testicle, what? The fact of them being extraterrestrial. Testicles. It's interesting to think about this.

To what extent is it completely interdential? to these plots. And that is one in which it is completely interdental. They could just be some genetically created freaks. They could just be weird people. I mean, there's also this thing about cults, isn't there? I always think people refer to invasion of the body snatchers when they talk about the experience of cult dynamics and people becoming members of cults and cults spreading their power like Scientology or something. It's an interesting question actually. With a lot of these, it's like one reading of this is you're trying to account for sort of like social, perhaps psychological phenomena, by saying it's something which

is an alien, comes from the outside, doesn't emerge from their body politic naturally. Do you know what I mean? I suppose that's why it would be an alien rather than something else. I'm not sure. Famously with the 1956 film as well, the original film just ended with this one guy escaping from the village, standing on the highway with like trucks with pod people on them going all over the planet Earth, shouting. looking straight at the camera going, you're next, you're next. And that was too bleak an ending. So the studio insisted on putting an ending where one of the trucks crashes

and it's all done in retrospect, basically, and everything's fine in the end. The conspiracy's being worked out. And that is that thing of the paranoid person is the one who actually, even though we think he's suffering from all of the characteristics of paranoid schizophrenia, he's the one who actually knows what's going on and is revealed, which is a bit of a trope in right-wing culture, I think. But perhaps we'll return to that.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's 1956-1978's Invasion of the Body Snatches. I now wanted to talk about a set of films which run from, in fact, films and TV series, which run from 1955 up to 1971, featuring the character Bernard Quatermas, which is a character invented by Nigel Neal, who's a real central figure in the weirdness of British TV in the post-war period, it depends on the 1970s, perhaps into the 1980s, basically.

And I wanted to talk about them all together, because they fit into a sort of cycle, if you know, where the aliens change quite substantially for all of this, what they're representing, how we relate to them, etc. The series is this, Quatermass Experiment, 1955, Quatermass 2, 1957, Quatermass in the pit, 1967. Quatermass sometimes called the Quatermass conclusion from 1979. all of them are TV series, mostly on the BBC,

which then Hammer, the film production company Hammer then takes and makes a film version of. However, I reviewed you. I've ever watched any of these? Of course not. No, I'm ashamed to say. I've been aware of Quatermas since I was a little kid, and I've never got around to watching any of them.

So they're a big gap in my education. Yeah, I have to say, I'm not ashamed. I'm just not into it. Well, shame or not, that was exactly the news I was looking for. Settle back everyone for a 40-minute, Milburn Monologue. Does it come with a jingle? Can we make Jeremy sing something alongside it, is my question. I wish I could think of her.

I wish they'd done a Quatomis album in the mid-1970s, but the last they didn't. No. Basically, the Quatermas experiment, it's a TV series. I think that's in 1955. It might be a couple of years earlier, actually. And basically, it sort of invents sci-fi on TV, basically. It's on the BBC. It's only one channel.

BBC One is the only channel in the UK. It certainly events sort of like sci-fi horror sort of series. It's like a limited series of like six episodes or something like that. So not quite a Doctor Whoop sort of thing. And like the basic formula for all of the Quatermass series and films is that there's some sort of alien incursion into the earth which threatens to destroy the earth and then Quatermas who was a scientist, Bernard

Quatermas, formed some sort of team together and they defeat the aliens like the original one is about a rocket ship goes into the earth can carry three astronauts, it returns there's only one astronaut on the ship left and he's in shock he can't talk about it

but he seems okay apart from that and then we sort of like we discover it in fact he seems to be infected with some sort of alien presence which means he can absorb other people and other things. He seems to have absorbed the other two astronauts. The only thing that's left are like spacesuits. He's in hospital.

He bumps into a cactus and infamously like starts to absorb the cactus. His hand turns into a cactus sort of shape, which is a bit that I'd seen and was like horrified with when I was a kid. And he's gradually turning into an alien plant. He escaped from the hospital and he's got to track him down. Quatomass realizes that he's going to turn into an alien and release spores and destroy the earth. And eventually he's tracked down to Westminster Abbey,

where just a couple of years before the queen had been coronated, so everybody knew what Westminster Abbey looked like inside. And by this time, he's transformed into this, like, shapeless mass with, like, actually, I think he's got tentacle-like things going on and be like big bulbous spores, and he's part animal, part plant, etc., etc. Quater mass electrocutes him and kills him sort of thing. And so there you've got, like, the aliens are out in space, basically. You can't escape it.

Maggie, look. Nothing can destroy it. It's coming for you from space to wipe all living things from the face of the earth. Beware of the creeping unknown. Then a couple of years later, you have Quatermas, 2, which is sort of set around a large chemical plant out in the countryside somewhere. And this is a sort of invasion of the body snatches type thing. Meteorites are landing around this chemical site.

When they land, they release this gas, which sort of like infects people, takes them over, mind controls them, mind-controlled aliens have started to infiltrate the government or these sorts of things, basically, and they're trying to terraform the Earth so that these aliens can exist in it, etc. It gets interesting, though, this Quatermass series, so that's like the aliens are on Earth, basically. They've landed on Earth.

The interesting one is like Quatermas in the Pit, which is from, the film is from 1967. and that is one where Nigel Neal, sorts of obsessions, he has these obsessions with stuff, keeps going over these tropes, et cetera, et cetera. In the crater mass in the pit, basically some workers are extending Hobbs End tube station, which becomes important later on. They find this odd-looking skull.

It's dated to five million years ago. They then come across this cylinder, metal cylinder, which I think is a bomb from the Second World War. But when they get inside, they find some sort of alien spaceship, and there's a similar odd-looking skull in there, so they think that this ship must be five million years old, et cetera, et cetera. Quater Mass and his associates start doing some sort of like

MR James type investigating the archives, and they discover that there's been like the repeated hauntings around Hobbs End going back years and years and years and years. And this is a famous story, because I know all this story, even though I haven't seen it. So it's called Hobbsend and Hobb is an old word for the devil, etc. And so like this is part of like this,

one of the things that Nigelene is really interested in is this idea of trying to think about paranormal activity through sort of scientific explanations or pseudoscientific, we'd say, perhaps. And so one of the other famous films that he's associated with is the stone tapes. And that's this idea that like traumatic experiences can be sort of recorded in stone, basically, And then when we see ghosts there, the replaying of these traumatic experiences, etc. So the stone tapes, as in recording tape, tape recorders, etc. And so it's a bit like that.

He rehearses this idea first in Quatermas in the pit. But as the story goes on, they basically work out that the aliens had come from Mars, basically. Mars had been dying. They come from Mars and they'd try to preserve their species as best as they can by altering the sort of humanoid who were in existence then by increasing their brain power, et cetera, and like trying to produce us,

not in their own image, but like to reflect themselves, etc. And so it's got this famous line that we are the Martians, basically. We are the Martians now. First of all, its Martians are out in space, then they're landing on Earth. Now we are the Martians,

if you go back far enough. In fact, we still carry these inheritances from them. They then work out that Mars had been destroyed in like racial purges where and these huge battles emerged because the aliens were trying to purge any sort of mutations out of the hive, etc. And that's what destroyed the Martians.

And that's one of the things that they've passed on to us. And in fact, there's a big outbreak of purging mutations that happens in Hobbs End where everyone starts attacking each other, etc. And then eventually Quatermass sort of saves the day. Once again, it's this sort of like, what's going on is you're trying to account for things such as like the Second World War,

which has just gone on the Nazis, etc, you know. People often talk about them as like atavistic urges and all these sorts of stuff, but it's this idea that you want to try to account for social and psychological phenomena as though there is the influence of like alien influences or perhaps alien influences buried, buried in our deep past, basically.

Then finally, on my monologue, there's a very strange TV series, which is also a film called Quatermask conclusion, the film's called. We call it that from 19. And it's a very, very strange from, I think I've talked about it in one of the shows before, actually. It's this, Nigelina's an old man at this point in 1979. And it's his looking at the counterculture, basically, from the outside or the changes that are taking place through youth culture.

The story is the country has sort of broken down because there's been an crisis. The cities are dominated by gangs, one of which is called the Blue Brigades, who are fighting the barters. So that's Bart of Meinhoff Group and Red Brigade, sort of. And so the cities are in chaos. All around the countryside, these groups of like sido hippies called the planet people are wandering around singing, lay, lay, lay, and like weaving these pendulums, etc., etc. And they want to go to a different planet. They think they're going to be transported to a different planet because this one's being destroyed, etc. It's just really weird sort of like setup where old people are still rational, but young people have just been caught up in their passion.

basically. It's a great line where one of the planet people says to Quatermas, the scientist, stop trying to know things, which is a fantastic line. Eventually Quatermas works out that this upsurge of like irrationality and violence amongst the young is like this is something that's happened over and over again in human history, but with like very, very long periods between them. What happens is that some alien force is making young people irrational, making them want to gather together in large numbers in, like, pop concerts, etc. Eventually, people gather around stone circles. They wanted to film it at Stonehenge, didn't get the permission,

but they gather around Stone Circles. It's like this is like a premonition of like the Stonehenge-Free festivals is going to happen, going to grow into such a huge thing, you know, a few years later, etc. Young people gather in these stone circles and then this beam of light comes down and like harvests them basically for some reason. And in fact, the stone circles have been built by our ancestors there's perhaps as some sort of memorial, perhaps there's some sort of warning

about this harvesting events that have happened in the past, basically. And so one reading of the whole of that and the Quatermas and the pit, etc., this one in particular, is this idea of social psychological phenomena. They're represented as being the result of some sort of alien force.

One way you could read that is, this is just an old man who's looking at this process of change that's happened in the 1970s and doesn't understand it. A bit like invasion of the body snatches and some people have been overwhelmed by things. Do you know what I mean? The other reason of that is when you have

big events or when you have like psychological crises, they can be experienced by something as though we're being overwhelmed by something much bigger than ourselves. That's how people talk about events you know, in a badduian or perhaps even a Delersian sense of like this process of change which is much bigger than us and all this sort of stuff. Yeah, so there's something really interesting

there about like, you know, is this just a reactionary sort of trope or can you read it in a different way in which you're trying to understand these sorts of things which are influencing our agency and our intentions, etc., in a way that can look like it's somebody being grasped by alien forces from the outside, and can even feel like that from sort of like the inside. And then there's this really, really interesting other trope, which is around knowledge about the young of rejected knowledge.

They've rejected knowledge, they just want to trust their instincts. Bernard Kuitabas is a science. He's trying to understand what's going on with this. People are getting caught up by this sort of like bigger than individual, super individual agencies. He wants to understand it through science, which, of course, is like adhering to that. In some ways, an impersonal super individual methodology, you know, the scientific knowledge, etc. There's something there, basically, which also feeds into the cosmic right,

this sort of suspicion that science has been corrupted by big farmer and all these sorts of things. Okay, monologue over. My main point is this. You should take the time to watch Quatermass in the pit and the Quatermas conclusion. You can catch the ever two, if you will. but I think they're interesting, and Nigel Leal's really interesting. Are you available for hire to do these monologue spoilers at people's parties, Kea? Not only am I available for hire, I will pay someone for the privilege.

It's the ancient art of storytelling. No, it's fantastic. I love it. Okay, 1960 sees the first of the first of the first of the first. filming of the John Wyndham books, I think. John Wyndham is a British science fiction writer who wrote two well-known sort of sci-fi horror classics, The Midwitch Cuckoo's and the Day of the Triffids. And there are films made of both of those in quite a short succession in the early 60s.

So in 1960s, Village of the Damned, is based on the Midwitch Cuckoos. The Midwitch Cuckoos, what happens in the story is that, the children in an idyllic English rural village are taken over by some sort of alien presences which do just sort of occupy their bodies. I mean it is a sort of possession narrative really. Everybody in a village falls unconscious for a while and then they wake up after like an hour or something and then nine months later, all the women, but basically all the women are then suddenly pregnant and nine months later everybody gives birth to babies and they all have blonde hair.

I think that's anything that links them. Blonde hair and quite emotionalist persona. That'll be a male scriptwriter then, as with a lot of these alien films. Carry on. I'd have to believe John Wyndham was male. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there are some good bits actually in that

about suspicions around infidelity and all that sort of stuff, which you could imagine. All of these kids have got blonde hair. They look freaky. Once again, it's one of these like low-budget things. If you just have like, the aliens are actually looked like humans, well, that's going to save you a bit of money on the old special effects, etc.

But it is incredibly eerie film, actually. They're psychic, and they can talk to each other. They seem to have some sort of hive mind and they have, like, psychic abilities where they can, like, control other people and cause things to happen, etc. It's sort of an interesting film as in, like, basically they're just sort of trying to

protect themselves, and eventually they're killed by somebody that they trust who smuggles a bomb. into their house. And in order to not have his mind be read, he has to think about a brick wall and there's these lines where they're going, John, why are you thinking about a brick wall? Are you trying to hide something from us? My good God, you've got a bomb and he blows them all up. Seems very unfair, really, because they're just trying to protect themselves and stop themselves being destroyed by the adults. Once again, this is sort of like a bit of a generational

tension. That seems to be the thing that's animating this film is generational tension and that the fear that what about if your children reject you and become independent of you and... Well, also they're much more powerful. I mean, it is like a sort of parable for the next generation being much more at home in a completely differently mediated and technologised environment.

It's really like that, I think, is that the children, yeah, the children have all these psychic powers and this ability to communicate with each other telepathically into exercise forms of mind control over people. So it is like the fear of a generation that's had so many advantages and is so much more at home in a radically transformed world that they appear to be alien species and to have superpowers.

I mean, that's really, they do have superpowers, basically. It's an interesting attempt to rethink like what would an alien invasion look like. It's interesting. It's happening. He's writing it just at. at the same time as invasion of the body snatches. He writes the book, I think, in the year the body snatchers comes out. It's published in 57.

And it's partly just trying to think through in a speculative sense. Well, if they're a truly alien types of being, and maybe they're not even going to have physical bodies in the way we imagine them, or maybe they're going to implant themselves in human embryos, or maybe they're going to mind melds with humans in some way, and that's the form that the invasion is going to take. so it's partly playing around with these tropes both of invasion fear but also asking the question as to what would alienness really be like and I think that is a consistent theme for the rest of the rest of the films and programs we're going to be looking at some of the more interesting ones anyway it's really trying to get to grips with this idea of the alien the alien you know as an adjective meaning the thing that is very other that's very different than the human has different kinds of motivations and is quite inscrime

But of course, one of the assumptions underlying invasion of the body snatchers and the midwitch cuckoos is that one of the definitive features of humanness is complete individuality, is separation from other members of your species. Because what all of these scary, terrifying aliens have in common is some kind of telepathy, some kind of ability to act perfectly collectively. That's what the pod people do. That's what the midwidge cuckoo children do. So I would say it is very much a product of this mid-20th century liberal reaction to the rise of socialism, social democracy, fascism, authoritarian conservatism. It all provokes this kind of liberal panic. And it's the thing that defines the alien always is the alien is not a proper individual like a human is. I'd say, in fact, I will mention a film.

I thought I was going to skip over it. But the 1958 American film, sci-fi horror film, The Blob, which is really just a kind of schlocky teen, you know, fright feature. But it has this kind of very memorable image that the alien creature that comes from outer space on an asteroid or something and end up eating loads of people in some American town before it's eventually captured by the military and frozen in ice. It is just literally, it is just a blob.

It's just a giant mass of matter. where it starts off as a little blob of slime that then sort of when it makes contact with one person's body or an animal's body it can consume it and then it gets bigger each time. It's absolutely this fear of being absorbed in the mass, of being completely absorbed by the undifferentiated mass, which you can sort of, it definitely has been

theorised in psychoanalytic terms, is representing the kind of patriarchal terror of the maternal womb, absorbing you, reabsorbing you, depriving you of your individuality, but clearly it's also, it's also political, it's also a political allegory to do the fear of absorption into the collective mass and the loss of your pristine individual selfhood. And I guess what's so interesting in some ways about, again, I know the novel, The Midwitch Cuckoo is actually, and I never sat down and watched the film, Village of the Dam, I've seen just seen parodies of it. But what is really

interesting about it is it does sort of ask the question whether it's intentioned or not, well is it really bad? Is it worse? Wouldn't you rather be one of these telepathic super kids than have to be a boring old human? There's nothing you can do to stop us. Leave us alone.

So we're going to skip over two things we could have talked about. The great 60s science fiction shows Doctor Who and Star Trek. because they are, I think they are doing something very different, which is depicting aliens, but depicting them really as humans for a very different kind of narrative purpose.

And instead, the next thing we are going to talk about is I would say it is the classic film of all time, really, which tries to meditate upon what it might mean for humans to encounter an intelligence which is completely non-human, which is completely other, completely alien. And that is the classic Tarkovsky film, Solaris. Kier, I think you should try to summarize Solaris. I fail to rewatch Solaris.

Let me see if I can recreate the story. I mean, the basic story is this, is that like this scientist is sent out to join a spaceship which is orbiting around this sort of planet, which seems to be, the planet just seems to be like one whole big sea or something. something like that. And he's sent out there because the people, the people on the spaceship, the scientists who are already there who are supposed to be studying this planet, are having

these really weird experiences, basically. And he goes out there. Basically, the thing I can remember is that he starts to see visitations from his dead wife. And that's what people are experiencing. They're experiencing people from their memories, people who have gone, re-emerging in like real physical shape, basically, not just like a fantasy. etc. Now you recount the scenes you remember, Jim. Well, a lot of it is just it's these sort of, it's these

scenes where the characters are encountering ghosts from their past and gradually it's hypothesized in the film but what's going on is that somehow the planet itself is a sort of alien entity or some kind of alien

entity on the planet is somehow reconstructing these characters, these specters from their own memories. But why it's doing that is never explained. The implication seems to be that Solaris, the planet, stroke entity, is attempting to communicate somehow through this borrowing of images from the memories, from the brainwaves of the characters and projecting them to them. But it's never really explained. The mood becomes increasingly dark as the film goes on and then it finishes on this very ambiguous note. It's not really clear whether

the initial character is back at home or whether he's just experiencing some permanent hallucination of being back at home that's been created by Solaris. So it's very mysterious. It is a work of experimental cinema as well as a work of science fiction. So what the interpretations you can give to that is that like what the planet is trying to do is to give people what they think they might want, I, once again, to re-encounter people who they've lost, etc. You might give that interpretation because Tarkovsky's ever really famous film, Stalker, in which there's this zone basically in which alien visitations have happened and alien artifacts are there and you have these people who go into the zone, etc. And right in the middle of the

zone is this space which will give you whatever you desire. And so the interpretation of that is that, like, when the scientist re-encounters his wife, first of all, he thinks it's glorious, but then, like, you know, it becomes horrific. I think he ends up killing his wife and then she appears the next day. So it's that thing of, like, you know, people have interpreted it in that way, in that, like, you know, actually fulfilling your desires could be a horrific thing, basically. You know, you don't actually want that. What you want is the desire of the, you know, you want the affect of desire rather than the

fulfillment of your desires. That sounds like a Jezeckian point, that. Interesting. I just put that little warning in there. Yeah, well, either way, it's a really fascinating piece of cinema. It is widely regarded. It's always on those lists of the 100 best films ever made in Israel. It's a very haunting piece of cinema.

Yeah, unfortunately, I spent all my time watching the Quatermas films rather than the Greatest Cinema, sci-file film. All right, so next film we're going to talk about is 1977 Close Encounters for Third Kind Stephen Spielberg's

first of two really very optimistic alien contact films I mean both close encounters of a third kind and then EET

five years later are films about the idea that the aliens in flying sources are basically benevolent or at least

meaning us no harm and any contact we might have with them would be a nice thing. I mean, Clayton County, it comes from some terminology, which comes out of euphology, according to which the first kind of encounter

is just a UFO sighting, and the second kind, I can't remember what it is, and the third kind is that you actually meet aliens. Fourth kind is you're abducted and prone. But the actual encounter with the aliens only happens right at the end of the film, when

the flying saucer, which lands somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico, opens up and you see... And you get the jingle. You get the jingle. Which, if anyone who grows up in the 80s, you know, that's a big, big thing. Sing the jingle, Nadia.

You know, I've been trying to remember it for the last five minutes. I haven't got it in my head. I haven't got the first note. That's right. Da, da, da, da, da, da. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. So the idea is that aliens are making contact with random people all over America by sending that tune into their heads

or sending them images of this extinct volcano somewhere in the American Southwest, I think, or maybe the Rockies, where they're going to land and sort of compelling them to congregate there to meet the aliens when they do land. And at some point, I think the military of the security state also starts to understand what's happening, so they're there to meet them.

But there isn't like a confrontation. The film ends with the central character of the film being really happy and his family being quite relieved that it turned out he wasn't just going mad. Sculpting Volcanoes in his mashed potatoes in the famous. Yeah, that's right, yeah. So that's Closing Counter the Third Kind and very much part of this little wave of very optimistic kind of post-countercultural visions of aliens which are also hugely popular.

I mean, Clayton Council is a big film, sort of comes out at the same time as Star Wars. I mean, now everybody remembers Star Wars more because that franchise became such a big deal. But basically, that was the moment when the sci-fi block, the sci-fi blockbuster movie, suddenly became a phenomenon in Hollywood,

where for years and years, like the big movies in Hollywood, had been these fairly realistic, you know, like crime dramas or romantic comedies and things like this. So in terms of cinema history, it's quite an important moment. But yet, just two years later,

1979, you get Alien. You get the first strong female lead, I believe, in this sort of film. Yes, you do, yeah, yeah, no. Sigoni Weaver's absolutely incredible, in Alien and in the Aliens, which is from 19802, I think I can't remember the sequel. After that, you can just forget about it.

They lose their way in terms of the series. But if you want an antidote to E.T. and Close Encounters of a third kind, then the alien or xenomorph in aliens is your answer to that, basically. It's just this utterly pitiless, perfect, killing, fighting machine, basically. You know, it starts off the nostromo, this sort of like this really grubby, dirty sort of spaceship, which is hauling something from somewhere. It gets a distress signal and goes to a land on this planet. A couple of people get off and start searching around, and they come across this alien spaceship. In this alien spaceship, there's a whole series of these sort of like egg-like pods, etc.

One of them goes and has a look at the pod, which is exactly what you would do. And a alien facehugger jumps out and burns through his space helmet and grips onto his face, basically. And then they take him back to the ship. Eventually, they tried to cut the spacehagger off, but blood seems to be made of acid or something like that. But eventually, the facehagger sort of dies and falls off.

Everyone thinks it's fine. John Hurt, who's had that facehagger on his face, he sort of, oh, that's terrible, are really a horrible experience, but now I'm really hungry. Let's go and have dinner. They all gather around and they start having food. And then all of a sudden, John Hurt has the world's worst case of heartburn. And an alien burst through his chest in one of the most famous scenes from cinematic history.

That alien then scuttles off, grows and starts killing all of the crew of the ship. That's the basic story. Yeah. There's been countless psychoanalytic cinema theory interpretations that the alien is the real, like the repressed real bursting forth from the body. It's the untamable, unsimbalizable reality of the horrific physical body. It's like the blob. It's the horrific, terrifying, maternal feminine, threatening to reabsorb the male ego. It's all these things. Not unconvincing any of those analyses, I'd have to say. Or is that like the horror of childbirth? Yes. He inflicted on the man or something like that. It definitely is all those things, I think, to some extent. And it's also really important in the history of cinema

just in terms of basic liberal feminist talking points that indeed Sigourney Weaver playing Ripley, the tough, you know, gun-toting action hero is the human lead of the film and the main antagonist, finally, of the xenomorph. I mean, it's a really well-made film. one of those films I would say at least from

my sort of professional point of view it's more interesting for all the critical commentary it's generated for the film itself which you sort of does what you expect it to do especially once you know what it's going to do. Yeah it does what you expect it to do now I think it was quite different in 1979 but well yeah

it's a really it's really interesting phenomenon the other thing to say about that though is that there's another thing that's going along with it which is paranoia about corporations But also the plot, it is, it's an early, I mean the general Misen, the general setup of the film, like Blade Runner, is it an early example of a kind of cyberpunk set up in cinema, in that you're in a universe where apparently the only politically powerful entities now are these interplanetary corporations. The actual plot, the actual backstory to the thing is this corporation has found this alien entity that anybody could tell you is just really, really dangerous. and you should just keep humans away from.

But they're hoping to try to find a way to make it control over and use it as a military technology, to use it as a weapon that they can sell. And the implication in all the aliens films is that really, none of these people would be getting their stomachs burst open or their faces eaten by the aliens if it weren't for the fact that the corporation is clearly not following correct health and safety procedures.

No, it's more than that, actually. So in the first film, so the corporation is Wayland Utani. And in the first one, there's an android called Ash. People don't know he's an android because he looks very, very human. And he's been programmed to go and get somebody infected with one of the eggs and bring it back to Earth. And then in the sequel aliens, there's this character, Carter Burke, who once again is trying to get people to go back to this planet, which has now got settlers on it, etc. and hundreds of aliens all over the place and a big queen alien, etc. In order to bring back one of these things so that they can use it for weapons research and that sort of stuff.

And it's sort of interesting in that sort of, once again in that, like what does the alien? What does the alien represent? One way you could think about capital in its abstract form is as like something like, which is a bit like an inhuman force, you know what I mean? Which infects people. It infects people's motivations such as Carter Burke. All of a sudden he starts to behave like this pitted. agent, devoid of compassion, et cetera, purposely trying to get a young child infected with this

egg, do you know what I mean? You could sort of see capital as like this inhuman force, which parasites on humans and makes them act according to its own motivations, which is its motivation is to grow, etc. So perhaps it's capital, which is the alien. It is an alien which doesn't come from outside, of course, though. It is basically an abstract, you can isolate it as an abstract dynamic of people's motivations, but of course, those motivations come from human beings, unfortunately. Next up we've got The Thing,

junk Carpenter's film from 1982. Never watched The Thing. I've never even clear what it's about. Let me just do a one-minter on it then, yeah. So basically, it's Invasion of the Body Snatches, but set in an Arctic base of complete, isolation. And the film starts with like these Swedish people in a helicopter, chasing a dog and try to shoot a dog from a helicopter. The dog arrives at this Arctic base. The Swedish people

like land the helicopter, try to shoot the dog. The people are on the base. The Americans on the base tried to stop them shooting the dog. If you can understand Swedish, the Swedes just tell you the whole plot of the film straight away. That there dog is an alien. It can shape shift and it's going to destroy you all. They don't believe it and they end up killing the Swede. And then the alien basically, this alien can sort of affect people and then recreate them basically. It's got amazing practical effects in which people's, at one point somebody's trying to give somebody electric shock on their, on their heart. What do they call those machines? Defibrillator or something. And it goes to give it defibrillator to this person and this whole chest opens up into a mouth

which then bites the man's hands off. It's utterly amazing. And then the head of this person who's just done that separates, turns into like a spider type, sprouts legs and the effects are amazing, and it's worth it just for that. Because it's separated, there's no getting out, there's no outside to it, it's just a group of people.

None of them know which one is an alien. And so the paranoia and the mistrust of anybody around you is just absolutely heightened. And there's a key scene where Kurt Russell is McCready, he's the sort of protagonist. He gathers everyone. together and he takes a blood sample from everybody. He knows that the alien

hates heat. So he heats up a bit of wire so it's red hot and he sticks the wire in the blood sample of everybody. That's the test to see if you're an alien or not. And when he reaches the alien, the blood jumps out of the petri dish. The person whose blood it was turned into this alien

and starts attacking somebody else and eating them, etc. It's an amazing film for that, basically. It just boils down that whole paranoid, who is an alien. Are the aliens one of us, et cetera? Are you an alien, et cetera? It boils it down perfectly and it ends up with the whole base destroyed. It's in the Arctic. So if you're a human, you're going to die at this point. McCready and another guy, Charles, was played by Keith David as really this great black actor who was in They Live later on. The film just ends with them to

not knowing which one is an alien. They're both aliens, if none of them are aliens, etc. Nothing's resolved. And it's probable that, like, you know, the human's going to die. The alien is going to freeze until somebody else comes to find out what's gone on and then it will affect the air when everyone will die. Quite a nihilistic film in that sense. And in that way, quite dissimilar to ET, which we've already mentioned, which comes out at the same time and is a massive hit. The thing was an absolute box office failure in 1982 is now a cult classic. Oh, no, Nadia, this, you must, I was going to say, you must have seen E.T, the extraterrestrial. I mean, I have seen E.T. I'm not sure what there is to say about it analytically, really, other than, like, it's just a really nice film.

It again fits in with that, you know, small cadre of, like you were saying, with close encounters, this idea that the extraterrestrial can be a friend or benevolent. And you can have these kind of very cute and wonderful scenes where, like, the children, you know, meet the alien and it's all very cute. And I just love it as a film, you know, and I don't know what else to say about it. I would say a couple of things. One thing is the cute alien puppet trope, which ET really maximizes as a plot device, is basically established by Sesame Street.

and the Muppets in the 70s, which draws on quite heavily. So the idea of the cute big-eyed alien. Well, we haven't said actually anything about the kind of visual iconography of aliens apart from the tentacles aliens. E.T. is an example, but it's already quite a developed trope by this point of presenting aliens as super smooth skin with really big eyes and maybe these kind of domed heads, which is sometimes explained in some films or TV shows as what you expect,

humans revolve into when they look even less like guerrillas or chimpanzees and humans do so the brain keeps growing their head keeps getting bigger the eyes keep getting bigger relative to the rest of the face that all the hair comes off the the body of course reputedly there's a drawing of an entity that alister crowley claimed to have contacted psychically in the early 20th century which also looks very like that very spooky but 80 is doing that but even E.T. of course, also, just in terms of cultural and cinematic history, it is E.T. and the huge success of it that establishes Stephen Spielberg as the filmmaker, the filmmaker of American liberal humanism during this period. The thing about E.T. is, although he's an alien, he's not at all alien. He manages to learn human language. relatively easily he manages to communicate with a 12 year old boy and together they manage to contact ETI's friends and family

and they come and collect him having been stranded on earth momentarily in their flying saucer so he's really although he has psychic powers and advanced technology and looks a bit different he's not he's not very alien at all and this is a sort of extension of Spielberg's general liberal humanist ideology which at times can serve as an interesting corrective to the savagery of Reaganite and post-Reganite neoliberal America and at times can just collapse

into a cloying and anti-political sentimentality. The film does both of those things at the same time in quite an initiative way, I think. But also aesthetically, like you were mentioning, like it's a different kind of cute. So he's like in the Yoda kind of grouping of like a wider face. You've still got these big eyes, but it's kind of wrinkly and wrinkly.

lot, you know, wide face rather than long. So it introduces a different form of alien, which is not, like you said, the cone head type and also not the incredibly scary, like, you know, the alien in 1979. Well, psychologically, it looks like a baby. I mean, it's the whole, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, they both look like babies, both Yoda and, which is partly why baby Yoda ends up being this kind of hilarious visual tautology, because Yoda already looks like a baby.

So, like, I mean, that is the basis for the whole, you know, Japanese, Kawai aesthetic, for example. Kawaii. Kawai is the psychological truism that humans are sort of evolutionarily programmed to find small creatures with big eyes appealing because they look like babies. We want to protect them and nurture them and we trust them. And then what's so incredibly appealing, especially to children about Yoda and E.T. is that they are cute like that, and they are good, but they are also psychically superpowered.

so what's not to like? I've got a baby Yoda right next to me right now. I'm in an animator's office, so I've got Star Trek and Star Wars baby everything at the moment. I do. I mean, baby Yoda is a fantastic, fantastic contemporary fictional creation. Grogu to give it is. Yes, Grogu.

Ead phone home. There's this science fiction mini-sense. series. There was shown in the States, and I think it was also shown in the UK, came out in 1983 initially, and it's called V, and it is an alien invasion story. And the distinctive trope is that the aliens who come to Earth, the V is for visitors, who initially are claiming to be friendly, and they want to help us and give us new technology. And actually, they want to take over the world an ETAs, and they are actually reptilian humanoid, but they have the capacity to disguise themselves, to look like humans. And I don't know if the conspiracy

theory paranoid trope of actually there being a race of reptilian beings that are able to disguise themselves as humans and occupy positions of authority in the World Bank, the WTO, in the American federal government. I don't know if that predates that show in any way or if that is where it actually comes from. It may predate it, but it definitely was, it was only like became a famous thing or something people knew about way after that, I think, in the early 90s.

Yeah, so it has, so it's kind of extraordinary. And it is one of those things that I have spoken to people in my life who claimed to have realized through their DMT experiences is that the reptilians really are real. And the thing I couldn't quite get past was you realise that's a thing from like a cheap mini-series from the early 80s. Like what?

How can you take it seriously when it's, when it's, that's it's visual origin point. But there you go. That is the impact that it has had on the global cultural imaginary. Talking about reptilian aliens, you can describe themselves, disguised themselves as humans. Let's talk about 1987's They Live, once again, by John Carpenter.

One of my favourite films, actually, even though the film is actually not a particularly great film. Well, it's crudely made, but it's conceptually and politically very ambitious. So John Carpenter made it as his anti-Raganite film, basically. It's anti-Ragan film. And let's just cut to the main part of it. What happens is this guy, Nader, nothing, nobody. arrives as a drifter, arrives in town, he sees there's camps of homeless people that get cleared

by these like riot cops, etc. He sees some people going into a church and running off, etc. He goes in the church and he finds a big box of sunglasses. They look like nice sunglasses, he says. He puts them on. Every time he puts these sunglasses on, whenever he looks at an advert, that advert changes from, you know, advertising a holiday to saying, obey or something like that consume right he looks at um he gets at a dollar bill he looks at that with his sunglasses it says this is your god um and he realizes that in fact all of this stuff around him is sending him subliminal messages to just let's have to obey to be passive etc to treat money as your god and all that sort of stuff he looks somewhere else with these sunglasses

when he takes the sunglasses off it's just a normal sort of yuppie guy when he puts them on it's a reptilian alien. They're like anti-ideology sunglasses as Gisje who puts it in his commentary on it. The other famous, famous scene is that like Nade is played by a very famous American wrestler called Roddy Piper. That's the one. Roddy Piper.

And he ends up having this eight-minute fight with Keith David, who was also in the thing, trying to make him put on the glasses. He says, put these glasses on. He says, no, I'm not putting the glasses on them. They have this incredible sort of. of like worldwide wrestling sort of like where he's trying to force

the sunglasses on him, he finally forces him on and he looks around and says, my God, I can see all these signs saying, you know, Bay and all that sort of stuff. I like, Jezec interprets that as like, you know, basically seeing through ideology, that is the painful bit.

Does Jezee think that's what the film's about? That's a controversial take. To Lucia ideology is incredibly painful. That's my Jezeque impression. And so basically what's going on in this is that like the richer aliens, not all of the rich are.

Some of them are humans who are in cahoots of the aliens in order to keep the good American working man down. Some of the police are aliens, etc. Some of them are just dupes or these sorts of things. Luckily, ideology is not built into a very structures of our lives. Luckily, ideology has been beamed from a big aerial from top of a building. So all you need to do to ferment revolution, is to go in there with guns blazing, blow up that aerial, and ideology will cease. And if that's not a prescription for 21st Century Revolution, I don't know what is.

I mean, it's an extraordinary film. It's extraordinary that it got made and released at that time. It's part of this late 80s American radical moment that I'm increasingly interested in. I talked about this when we had the folk, I did the folk music episode, and I was reminded of it because of everybody getting excited by Tracy Chapman appearing on the Grammys this week. There is this moment of American culture around the time of that final Jesse Jackson bid for the Democratic nomination where really, I mean explicitly revolutionary content is kind of bursting out into mainstream culture. I would say as a kind of

final echo of the radicalism of the 70s before it gets completely suppressed in around 92, 93. But it's really, it's funny that it's not really, it's not something people think, but nobody thinks, say, yeah, in America in the late 80s, it was like there was this moment of radicalism, but it was, it was like despite Lee Malcolm X film being a big hit around 1990 and stuff. And it's sort of nobody remembers it now. Everybody remembers

fucking grunge. All right. All right. Let's talk about the X-Files. Okay, the X-Files, well, a TV series, an iconic now TV series, which sort of combines and now were very well-established alien invasion narrative with conspiracy theory and the growing sense of paranoia generated by people's relationship to the federal government in the States and the security services.

It's what underlies the kind of meta-narrative of the X-Files is this idea that there's this grand plot, according to which key figures in government have been in contact with an alien race for years. The aliens are planning to basically invade Earth to create some sort of new race of hybrid human aliens to enslave the rest of humanity, and they are convinced that absolutely nothing can be done about it. So they are colluding with them because they are convinced that the aliens are ultimately unstoppable, unbeatable. I mean, there's all this other stuff in the X-Files as well, like ghosts and other paranormal stuff. But that becomes the meta-plot, and it becomes the plot of the X-Farms movie when it finally gets released later in the 90s. And I think it is an interesting now to think about that. As a sort of parable, actually, for the complete capitulation of the emotional of the amazing, American political class in the face of the end of the Cold War, like the final defeat of

the New Deal, the sense under Clinton that there was never going to be any going back to a meaningfully progressive and reformist agenda for American liberalism. These members of the political elite who, even though they don't like the aliens really, they have, they believe them to be totally undefeatable and are therefore colluding with them to enslave the rest of humanity. It's a pretty good allegory for the Clinton, you know, what the Clinton administration is doing at that moment in history. And has a great jingle. Yeah.

Something like that. That's probably out of tune. Purely with a TV critic hat on, it was a very disappointing successor to Twin Peaks because that was sort of how it was positioned initially in the TV marketplace. It was the new weird TV show. after the perceived success of David Lynch's Twin Peaks show. And like Twin Peaks, it mixed up elements of the supernatural and horror with science fiction and with sort of conspiracy narratives.

But it just, it does it in so much less kind of weird a way than Lynch. And in a way, I always felt like the fact that it wasn't clear what kind of big meta plot they were going to settle on in the end. In the end, like it was the most boring one. It was like the most predictable, the most prosaic, the most boring thing. Oh, aliens are coming to eat us and enslave us.

It's just war of the worlds, basically. Whereas David, it's twin peaks, it's like, oh, well, the FBI have, like, figured out there are actually other dimensions with evil spirits in them, and they're engaged in some weird kind of combat with them, or are they, are some of them in line with the evils, in league with the evil spirits? It's so much weirder and more imaginative. I sort of felt like the X-Files was really. It was really disappointing when that was what they landed on,

finally, as their conclusive metaphor. I mean, the other film that you could put alongside that is like Men in Black. So Men in Black is sort of like a comedy film and a series of films in which aliens are living. amongst us, mostly in New York, they're mostly benign and like disguised as humans, some thinly disguised as humans. It's one of the jokes, you know, people as New York are so weird, you can't tell, you know, aliens can fit in quite nicely, et cetera. Every now and then there's a, there's some evil aliens who are out to do bad and there's a secret society called the men in black who are out just to sort it out, basically. And of course, the men in black, it comes out

of UFO conspiracism from the 1950s onwards, I think. It's this idea that when there's, if there's an alien abduction, like men in black, presumably the FBI turn up and, you know, do things that just erase your memory, which is one of the thing the men in black film does. They won't let you remember. That's the funny line, yeah. They won't let you remember. That's a fantastic line of the musicals episode, isn't it? The sort of image I'm trying to make is that like this is sort of like a relatively benign form of conspiracism, which takes a darker turn after 2001 with 9-11 and then it becomes incredibly dark. by the time you get to the 2000 and tens, etc. From that point of view, the X-Files' like 1998 movie does sort of prefigure that very dark turn in conspiracy theory.

Yeah, I think that's right. The thing between Peaks is they are, the FBI are basically benign. Like they are doing this secret shit, like this, you know, involving like black magic and stuff. But basically they're on the side of good. Whereas in the X-Files movie, they are, yeah, they're not. the X-Files movie, the, the deep state is colluding with the aliens to enslave humanity.

Although Mulder and Skelia are FBI as well, aren't they? Well, they are, yeah, but they're sort of, they're sort of, they're sort of, they're constantly having to work against the machinations of the, I mean, the idea is that there's, there are these different factions within the FBI and within the security state, and there are still some good factions. Okay, so apart from the fact that, as you guys know, and listeners probably know by now, I'm not that into space and sci-fi stories and culture. Way more important for this episode was that I've been doing some research,

trying to disprove my thesis, that an interest in alien storytelling is overwhelmingly by Anglo-Americans or colonizer countries. So it could be South Africa or in Australia, New Zealand as well. I'm not just saying that, like Britain, US, etc., right? And it's not just an expression of the other coming to take over the Western world as some kind of retribution for colonialism. And that in 20th and 21st century, I think most of the global South is preoccupied with actual liberation from colonialism or kind of new military or economic war, as is being experienced now,

to be preoccupied by this metaphorical invader in their storytelling. So I'm trying to disprove this, right? because this is a theory I've got. So how does Global South cinema do aliens specifically, was my question. And right, so there might be many more, and listeners do let us know, you know, do tweet at us or whatever and tell us what those films are. But this brought me to one film, which I deliberately only watched half of last night, so as not to provide spoilers of Keir Milburn type.

And that is the host, the 2006 South Korean film directed by the fantastic Bung Jun Hu director of one of my favorite films of All Time Parasite. So if you liked Parasite, go watch his earlier film. It's very satiating for me to watch because from the get-go it's the American's fault, which you know, which makes a nice change in this genre. But basically, the basic plot line is that, you know, those careless Americans, American people, personnel who are responsible for these chemicals getting into South Korea's Han River. And then this creature emerges from the tainted waters, right? And then starts attacking local residents. And, you know, one of the main characters' daughters is abducted.

And then they try and save her. Apart from the fact that it's like the way the film is directed is amazing because Bung Jun Ho is such a fantastic director. And you can see how it relates to parasite later. So I'll be interested for you guys to watch. it if you haven't. What's great about it is it is an alien. Like it's an actual alien form in the kind of same alien aesthetic as like the 1979. So it's actually quite scary, but it's also quite a funny movie. But it's a really good film as a commentary on basically justice and

class as well. So I loved it because I felt like it was doing several things at the same time. I have not finished it so I don't know how the film ends but I thought it was a great film to watch let me tell you the end in that year I love that don't do it Kea no no no I won't

it is it's a great film though in that you basically don't know what sort of genre of film you're watching half the time it goes from like comedy to sort of like gritty gritty sort of like class commentary to alien film it's unclear if it is an alien

actually, isn't it? Because it's sort of like, isn't it like pollution? Yeah. So it's that story which you've got in, you know, like you've got various 1990s games has this kind of theme. It's kind of like that cross between alien and kind of radioactive monster comes out of the swamp kind of vibe. But it is very alien looking. So for anyone who would be aware of kind of Western culture, like bad alien, scary alien, this is very reminiscent of it. And it's kind of very scary. But as you said, the film is also quite funny, but there is a relative amount of gore in it, and, you know, loads of people dying. In that way, it's sort of a little bit similar to, like, the Kaiju films, which are, you know,

the Godzilla films from Japan in the 1950s and onwards, like Mothra and all these sorts of things, which were people have already interpreted them as a reaction to, like, Hiroshima, basically, and the destruction of a city. I think Godzilla, in the original one, is awoken, it's not an alien, an ancient beast which is awoken by nuclear explosions or something and he comes and destroys cities and all these sorts of things. It's a little bit similar to that in that sort of way. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing for me here is, again, that kind of global south angle of like what is the political message of the film?

And it's just interesting that straight off, it's like it's the American military, like they fucked up. If that's the theme, it's still with most of the other, you know, Anglo-American films, it's still, like, it's just very, very anglo-centric in that way. It's that there's even an agent yellow as a chemical that's used in there, which is obviously a reference to Agent Orange, which is used to defoliate Vietnam, which is in a Vietnam water. Could I talk about Cloverfield?

Because it's a very nice link, actually. Cloverfield from 2008, so like two years after the host, is in fact a, it's like a Kejjo film, which I think is produced in reaction to nine, 11. It's like a found footage format. So it presents itself as like found footage from a video that people were recording during, first of all, a party and then this sort of alien attack, basically. And it's definitely a post-9-11 film as it's set in Manhattan. It's got buildings collapsing. People ducking into shops to avoid this rolling cloud of debris and dust, etc., which is like one of the

famous clips from 9-11. But instead of, you know, a terrorist attack, this is this huge alien, basically. which is destroying Manhattan and all that sort of stuff. Really like a Godzilla analogy. And like basically, I think it is. It's serving the sort of same role of like, you know, working through the destruction of Hiroshima Nagasaki for Godzilla and like that, that kaiju genre. But with Cloverfield, it's working through 9-11 here.

A very good film, one we should definitely talk about, is District 9 from 2009, a South African film. Have I ever viewed you seen District 9? No, I should have done, but I haven't. In some ways, it's like aliens as refugees. And in fact, the film starts off with like a sort of found footage, documentary format sort of style, basically. So a documentary crew are following around this guy,

Wickers, who's like this sort of policeman, civil servant type. They follow him around on a day. And basically what the conceit of the film is that 10 years ago, I think it's 10 years, something like that, 10 years ago, after before this documentary is made, this huge alien ship suddenly arrives over Johannesburg and then just sits there and does nothing. And then eventually the South African government sort of goes up to it,

it cuts into the ship, and they discover like a million aliens in there all, like in a really bad way, really badly, Melmarish, seemingly unable to, like, help themselves, etc. The aliens are brought down to Earth and are like housed in this slum called District 9, which is all sort of, like, surrounded, etc. The weird thing is, they're obviously technologically advanced these aliens,

but the aliens that are around just seem utterly helpless, basically, unable to work the technology, or barely able to work it, you know, really listless, not really know what to do, et cetera, that sort of stuff. Perhaps it's something like this, that it's not clear, but, like, in interviews and, like, in the film, it seems to be that, like, perhaps what's happened is that, like, this is some sort of, these are, like, the drones or the, of the, the soldier sort of aliens and probably there was some sort of

leader alien who would give direction and that leader alien died and so perhaps the aliens just basically stopped doing anything, started to die and the ship sort of detected that and came to somewhere where it could get food, etc. These aliens are like

helpless sort of being very powerful beings but like helpless and like aimless and all that sort of stuff. There are lots of resentment builds up around the aliens because we have to look after these aliens and then it's decided that District 9 is going to be cleared of aliens and the aliens are going to be moved to a new camp outside of town. That is based on like an actual incidence during apartheid in 1966

where District 6, which is in Johannesburg, got declared. It was a white-only area and all Black South Africans were evicted to Cape Flats, which is like a sort of slum area and really horrendous ground, which is like one road in, one road out. that you can contain it sort of thing, that sort of thing. So it's absolutely a reference to apartheid, et cetera. The story of the film goes on that Wickers, this guy who's like the star of the documentary, he starts to like, you know, force the aliens out, they're just shooting aliens down,

killing them, et cetera, forcing them out, trying to get him to move. He gets sprayed by this sort of black material and starts to turn into an alien. And then two of the aliens seem to be different to the others. And they've been collecting up this black, oily substance. as some sort of fuel in order to return to the mothership in order to go back and bring help basically, something like that. The story sort of follows Wickers turning into an alien.

We're not really sure what's gone on with that, perhaps like all of the aliens, who are the drones, perhaps they were all sort of like, you know, they were all other species at one point had been turned into these alien drones. Perhaps it's like a slave society. They've been turned into these aliens by this black material. We don't know exactly what goes on with that sort of stuff.

It's really interesting, Phil, anyway, really well filmed, obvious sort of reference to working through of apartheid, but also working through of quite vicious anti-immigrant sentiment in contemporary South Africa, where Nigerians in particular are discriminated against, etc., and forced into like criminality and all these sorts of stuff. I'd recommend watching it. Right. And I've discovered that there is a film, apparently, called Sector Zero, or watch this trailer for it. It's a Nollywood film, i.e., for those of you who don't know listeners, Nigeria has a real massive film industry. And it's so it's a 2018 film from Nigeria called Sector Zero

that apparently has a very similar plot to District 9, but I can't find it anywhere to watch it. All I can find is the trailers. That's interesting, actually, because one of the controversial bits in it is that the film in District 9 features Nigeria criminal gangs who just behave like totally, and so they're not humans. Could be a response film.

Yeah, maybe it's a response, but if there are any listeners who have watched it, please let us know. Where there's a slam, there's crime. And District 9 was no exception. The TV show, The Expans, is worth mentioning. It's a really interesting sci-fi series.

I finished a year or two ago. It started around 2016. It's based on a series of books that were themselves originally based on a role-playing game game. I think it was some, yeah, some science fiction D20 game they were playing. And what's interesting about it from our point of view is the expanse is a really, in terms of stuff we talked about on the UFO episode, actually,

the expanse is a really clear example of someone trying to come up with an alien contact and eventually an interstellar travel themed science fiction concept, but without the idea that humans are going to invent faster than light travel. so mostly it takes place in an imagined future in which humans are colonising the solar system they're building like artificial colonies and maybe colonies around the moons of Jupiter or something but they're nowhere close to interstellar space

and there hasn't been any alien contact and then they do come into contact with what seems to be some ancient alien technology which takes on the form of what's referred to as the proto molecule which is some kind of nanotechnological substance, it appears to be able to somehow connect with the consciousness of humans. And there's a lot that's borrowed directly from Solaris, actually.

It apparently recreates the consciousness of people who've died or things like this. And eventually, as well, eventually later on in the series, they create effectively a sort of stargate through the activation of what appears to be some very ancient alien technology from an apparently lost alien technology which then allows them to explore another solar system through this interdimensional portal. So it's a really interesting show politically

because it's written from this quite explicitly leftist perspective and a lot of it has nothing to do with any of this alien stuff I'm talking about. A lot of it has to do with just imagining a kind of anti-colonial struggle on the part of these oppressed people who live far out in the solar system and constitute a sort of interplanetary working class. And there's a lot that's borrowed, actually,

from people like Kim Stanley Robinson. For example, there's an explicit nod to the idea of Mars having become a sort of socialist planet. So it's definitely of interest to ACFM listeners and pretty entertaining. It's also, it's sort of like it's hard sci-fi. So it's one of the few science fiction, space travel stories, which take sort of things like,

momentum and acceleration and these sorts of things very seriously, which is why, you know, you have to have a Deosax Machinae in order to introduce interstellar travel, etc, to expand beyond the solar system. But the only other interesting thing to say is that the aliens have gone. Yeah. This alien probe or whatever it was was launched, however many millions, billions years ago. Or perhaps it's been there for a while, I can't remember. But basically, you know, who knows where it got launched?

It's taking a long time to go there. And in the meantime, the aliens have disappeared. It seems to have been killed off by something else, which is mysterious. All that is left quite mysterious, and it seems to be the magical technology, which is sort of the plot, the repeatedly, indeed arbitrary plot device, the proto-monicule. It's basically like an imaginary mixture of like nanotechnology and AI. It's as if some sort of thing has been created that combines a quantum computing AI with a super-constructive nanotechnology.

So it's very much, I mean, it's completely, It's a classic sci-fi really. It's taking a lot of contemporary themes in speculative science and turning, weaving a story out of them. But also, to some extent, using that as dressing for what is basically a sort of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist political narrative. May I ask you something? Do you miss Earth? These endless blue skies. Free air everywhere. and open water all the way to the horizon. The arrival was a movie based on a short story by Ted Chiang. Ted Chang is a great contemporary American writer of speculative fiction. One of the best and one of those people who get who has been ripped off a bit by a number of other writers, I would say. It's called The Story of Your Life and it's published in 1998.

And it imagines an encounter between Earth scientists and, and an alien civilization. And it really deals with the question of how would they be able to communicate with each other? And the basic conceit of the story is in the process of learning to effectively speak, the alien language, the expert neuro-linguist, who is the main protagonist of the story, completely changes her own consciousness to the point where she's sort of able to perceive different dimensions and really oversimplifying hearing. And that is the theme.

what happens in the story is basically, despite being able to, to some extent, communicate with the aliens, they are simply never able to figure out why the aliens have come to our solar system, what it is they want, if anything, if they're just observing us for some scientific purpose, and then they leave, and then that's it. A bit like Solaris, a bit like what's going on slightly in the expanse, a bit like some of these other stories, it's an attempt to really confront in narrative terms, like, well, what would it mean to really encounter a completely non-human consciousness, what would happen? Well, so the film is slightly different, actually.

So there's a purpose for their arrival. The purpose is explained. And so basically, in the film, like, these 12 huge ships turn up and sort of hover all around the world, basically. And there are these sort of, like, octopus aliens there who you're separated from, because they're in a different gaseous atmosphere. And there's scientists, that's to work out what's going on. I think the first message that she's translated is something.

It contains a word which gets misinterpreted as weapon. And so lots of people get very suspicious that it's an invasion. And in fact, about that weapon also means tool. The tool that they're here to present is their language, which when you understand the language, it'll help you have a different perception of time. And so the scientist starts to have these sorts of, more than remembrances of like recurrences of her dead daughter, basically.

Oh, no, no. I think it's her daughter to come, that her daughter, she's going to have a daughter. she's going to have a daughter, and then the daughter's going to die. And she starts to live through this future events. Yes, that all happens in the story, that stuff. And so at the end, basically, what they come to understand is that in 3,000 years' time, these aliens will need the intervention of humankind.

So they've come here in order to give them this tool of this new language so that they can perceive time differently, and they'll be ready to help them in 3,000 years' time. In terms of the themes of the story, yeah, that's quite nice. That does sort of fit with the basic themes of the original. story. Yeah. But it is an interesting film because most of it is based around that problem of how

do you learn a language from which you know nothing. Okay, so what's the final film you want to talk about? I think we should talk about Nope, which is Jordan Peel's third film from 2022. Have you seen Nope? No, I haven't, no. Well, the answer to that is Nope. I think Nope is sort of like stands for Not of Planet Earth. I think that is.

I don't think I've made it. Anyway, so it's Jordan. Peel's third film, his first film is Get Out, which is loosely around race. His second film is us, which is loosely around class, I would say. And nope is something different. It seems to revolve around this idea of spectacles or the spectacle. The film starts with the first ever moving image, which is a horse being ridden by a black jockey. And Moibridge set up a whole series of cameras with like strings attached to them and when the horse rang past it, they triggered each camera. It's just the first moving image.

And then it comes with a, the next thing you see is like an opening epigraph from the Bible, which says, I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle. So that sort of sets it up. The story is based, this is full spoilers, obviously. The story is based mainly at this ranch, which is run by this black family. The father of this family dies very early on in the film. So it's mainly this O.J. and his sister M. And they train or wrangle horses.

So they train horses to appear in films, basically. That's the idea. It's a dying industry. They're being replaced by CGI, etc. They see what they think is a flying saucer in the sky, and this flying saucer seems to be abducting their horses. Eventually, they work out that it's not a flying saucer, which contains aliens.

What they think is a flying saucer is actually just the alien, and it's not abducting horses or humans to probe them. It's a predator, and it's just eating them. So their response when they work this out is that they want to try and film the alien in order to sell the footage to get the Oprah shot, they call it. They want to get the footage and then turn the alien into a spectacle, basically. It's a problem with that, which is that when the alien appears, all electrical currents don't stop working, so they try to film, it doesn't work, etc.

The other part of the story is the other person who's interacting with this alien is a character called Jupe, who runs a theme park close by and has been buying horses from the wrangling farm in order to feed the alien and then charge people to come sit around and look at the spectacle. So it's another spectacle thing. Jupe, when he was a child, was in a sitcom,

which ended because the chimpanzee, Gordy, who was also a star of the sitcom, basically went on a rampage and killed a lot of the crew. He didn't attack Duke, though, because Dup was hiding under a chimpan, under a table, and his eyes were covered by a tablecloth. So he wasn't looking into the eyes of Gordy,

so gaudy didn't, the chimpanzee didn't see him as a threat. And that becomes this important theme because OJ later on recognises that if you don't look at the alien, it won't attack you, basically. And so there's this thing set up where they're trying to turn, everyone's trying to look at this alien to turn it to a spectacle. But if you look at it, it'll kill you, basically. It's the sort of things.

It's all around like, who gets to be seen, on what basis do you get to be seen, etc., who gets to be not seen, what the conditions are being viewed, all that sort of stuff. there's a scene where somebody from TMZ, which is like a website where they show sort of like shocking images, etc., turns up on a motorbike, and the alien attacks him and he falls off his bike, etc.,

and he turns to OJ and say, why are you filming this? Film this quick, and then he gets killed, etc. So it's sort of that, wanting to film everything, etc. It's like the spectacle of a car crash, I think, is the way you would put it. It's not a sort of situationist idea of the spectacle from Gidea Bord's, like, society of the spectacle,

or it's not quite that. more that showing horrific images or showing unusual shocking things in order, probably to distract this basically, distract us from like the ongoing car crash of contemporary society. No, no, no, please, no, no, shit you out. No, shit out. Not before you take a picture. Do you take a picture first? It seems like the themes are pretty consistent, really.

It seems like really since those early, earliest instances like War of the World and the Day the Earth stood still, these are recurring. themes. Aliens might be angels or they might be monsters. Maybe what changes a little bit from sort of Tarkoski onwards is this insistent question. What would the truly alien be like? And would it be scary? Would it be wonderful? Would it be unknowable? What would its motivations be? I think there's also probably another sort of reading, which is there's something around agency there and about the forces that condition agency and whether we figure them as like alien forces etc there's something there with that

I think so like that could be a psychological forces or like big social historical force which I suppose is inevitable if we're watching these films and trying to think about how they fit into society and the concerns contemporaneous to them in the Quatermas thing where like he moves from aliens are out there to like we are the

aliens basically and our motivations are controlled by the aliens or produced by the aliens so there's a movement from the outside to the inside in that which you can sort of see perhaps in things even things such as Nope, where you're trying to think about, you know, what's causing our obsession with spectacle,

does it just act as an escapism, these sorts of things? Obviously, there's a certain irony in that because Nope was a big blockbuster film, of course. I'm sure it's a snowing irony. And, of course, all of these films are big spectacles, aren't they? Yeah, yeah. All right, thanks for listening, everyone.

We're going to beam up now. Keep watching the skies. Too far out.