The credits are rolling on Alien: Earth and all I can think about is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is one of history’s most enigmatic and misunderstood philosophers, one of Christianity’s greatest foils and explains exactly why the TV series, to my mind, fell flat.
Oh, how excited I was for Alien: Earth! It looked like someone had finally nailed the look and feel of Ridley Scott’s original Alien and paired it with a script by Noah Hawley (who wrote, among other things, the first series of Fargo, which I still think is one of the best series of TV ever made). I couldn’t wait.
But far from understanding what made the original Alien so terrifying, Alien: Earth manages to undermine the franchise’s key premise at almost every turn, resulting in something truly baffling. While Alien is a deeply nihilistic piece of art that draws on its nihilism for its thoroughgoing sense of dread and unease, Alien: Earth is too cute, too pleased with itself to be truly nihilistic. And therein it loses the power to shock that Alien wielded so effectively.
Let me explain what I mean. (Spoilers ahead for both Alien: Earth and Alien – although Alien came out in 1979 so if you haven’t seen it at this point, where have you been?)
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”
So declares ‘the mad man’ in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, giving rise to one of philosophy’s most quotable moments. Nietzsche isn’t talking about a literal ‘death of God’ (he didn’t think there even was a God to kill!). Instead, he’s talking about the death of belief in God.
But, for Nietzsche, society’s collective loss of belief in God is not a trivial thing. It’s not like realising Santa Claus isn’t real (sorry if anyone was still clinging to that!). No, belief in God gave society structure, purpose, and meaning. Without belief in God, society needs to start from the very beginning and give itself these things all over again. We cannot stop believing in God and imagine that the rest of our lives are untouched.
For all Nietzsche’s faults – which are numerous – he is clear about the implications of what we might now call ‘secularisation’, in a way that is seldom recognised. In this respect, I often wonder if Nietzsche is the only real atheist who ever lived.
There is no grand ‘why’ behind the world. No objective meaning or structure to it: we must instead impose our own, individual meaning onto our lives.
Alien is a deeply Nietzschean film. The xenomorph (that is, the eponymous alien) does not come with a ‘why’. It has no motives other than to kill; no grand plan. It’s not really a villain, in this sense: it just … is. It is the chaotic unstructured whirlwind of a universe without God distilled into a creature.
It is pure, nihilistic, Nietzschean nightmare fuel.
At the end of the film, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) doesn’t ‘defeat’ the xenomorph; she just sends it into space and escapes. She doesn’t ‘overcome’ this nihilistic creature, she just about manages to escape with her life. She does what Nietzsche encourages us all to do and lives despite meaningless chaos of the godless world around us.
This is not what happens in Alien: Earth, however. The most telling parallel between Alien and Alien: Earth is the role science and technology plays in both. In Alien, the mysterious Weyland-Yutani company wants to capture the xenomorph to use it as a bio-weapon. But the xenomorph resists such human categories and just does what it does: kill, indiscriminately.
In Alien: Earth, again the xenomorph is seen as a potential weapon, as a potential piece of technology. And … that’s exactly what it becomes. The main character in the show – Sydney Chandler’s Wendy – a little girl whose consciousness is put into the body of a robot (to cut a long, tedious story short), eventually learns the xenomorph’s language and even befriends the creature. By the end of the series, the two have effectively teamed up, with Wendy siccing (setting) the alien on her enemies.
She … ‘sics’ the xenomorph on people? Becomes its friend? Right …
The first time this happened I full-on laughed at the screen. This is so far removed from the utter nihilism of Alien. Here the xenomorph has agency, motivations, preferences, and even flipping friends! It is so deeply … unscary.
And that shouldn’t be a surprise. In Alien, Nietzsche’s godless anarchy is distilled into a creature of pure terror. In Alien: Earth, that creature is literally made someone’s pet. Alien continues to terrify because it shows us something of the full implications of what it is to be without God: a world of disorder, anarchy, and chaos. Alien: Earth domesticates that entirely and puts it on a leash. In so doing, lacks all of the potency of its muse.
In his recent book Dominion, Tom Holland (no, not that Tom Holland) reminds us of what Nietzsche said long ago: our values, ethics, and even our society structures, come from a shared and historic belief in God. Too often we want to have those values, ethics, and structures without the theologies that underwrite them.
Alien: Earth wants to have its cake and eat it in precisely this same way. It wants to tell a story about a marauding, indiscriminate predator … that can be tamed by a little girl. It fails to scare because it undermines the deeper, even more terrifying story underneath Alien: that without the structure afforded us by belief in a creator, there’s no God out there to hear us scream.
