For context: in the final episode of the I saw what you did
podcast, the two movies chosen were Alien and Faster Pussycat, Kill,
Kill! Danielle did Alien, and if you know the movie, it is a rich text.
Danielle didn't know what a warrant officer was (Ripley's rank) saying
"she was in charge of warrants" and also generally wasn't too clear on
the merchant ship structure going on in the Nostromo. After checking the
wiki (because I wasn't sure, myself, and it turns out what a warrant
officer is can be described as "variable" throughout history) I wrote
in. Danielle also didn't mention any of the meta-narrative stuff, which I
think is very important in Alien, as it is an important part as to how
the movie works, but that's a rich text for you.
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So
I just listened to the final episode (who will I send unusable emails
to now?!? [...] Probably Millie's future podcast.) So while I could
potentially have a lot to say to y'all about Alien, or your
lovely podcast which I will dearly miss, I'm instead just gonna focus on
one small aspect that Danielle was not entirely clear on? It's a petty
note to go out on, but welp.
So, one aspect of Alien's narrative is that it plays a hard meta-narrative game. I think the people who made Alien were initially inspired by Star Wars, most particularly its brilliant production design. Much as Star Wars works hard to create an 'old Future' aesthetic, Alien
aims hard, especially in its first act, to establish a hard nosed,
working class realism to space. It has an old crew (I think Tom Skerritt
was 50 at the time) who early in the film speak in the overlapping
audio montage of 1970s films. Time and money are constant topics, with
Parker especially having some sort of grievance as to how the voyage
shares are being split. You can even see it in the descent to the planet:
the decent starts with Dallas saying "the money's safe" [IE the giant
ore refinery the Nostromo is towing is parked in a safe orbit]
and ends with a damage assessment that takes way too long to do, and has
Parker eventually reporting heavily that some of this is going to
require drydock time to fix - the implication being that this somehow
impacts the crew's pay. At appropriate times there are squealing sounds
in the foley work, which is the sound you get when air is leaking
through a seal of some sort - All of this, of course, is to put us in
the crew's POV, so we can put ourselves in their shoes when John Hurt's
chest explodes and they discover they are not in a realistic scifi film,
they are in a space nightmare. The other major meta-narrative leg in
this footstool of horror is the cast: Sigorney Weaver was arguably the
LEAST famous of the otherwise quite distinguished cast, and as the
rational one, [and Danielle can correct me here, my knowledge of horror
movies isn't great] is coded by genre convention to be the first to die.
The script of course gets flipped, with the first one to die is the
most famous actor, John Hurt, who the movie starts with as aside from
the ship, he's the first cast member we see. I could go on, but boats
are callin'----
So the Nostromo has
a command structure like a merchant ship. Dallas is the Captain, and
Kane is his executive officer [in the parlance, the XO.] In ships
currently, the Captain is in charge of the overall running of the ship,
while the XO is his right hand man, typically attending to all the
details, especially any sort of problems with the crew. In Alien for
writing reasons the XO jobs have been given to Ellen Ripley, warrant
officer. You can see that in the early scene where the engineers are
sandbagging a job, possibly just to annoy Ripley, and a bit later, when
she is up in Ash's face for breaking quarantine and her express orders
as officer of the deck. (If this was not Alien, I imagine this would be a career ending mistake for Ash once Nostromo returned to port.)
What
a warrant officer is varies between military services and nations; in
Alien Ripley seems to be the junior command officer, beneath Dallas and
Kane in rank but superior to everybody else. That makes sense, since the
rest of the cast has very clear jobs and titles. This also makes sense
for training: if the space merchant marine is anything like the
terrestrial one, Kane can do the Captain's job and hoped to be a captain
himself someday; Ripley is presumably also hoping to follow this career
path. Parker is the head of engineering, with Brett (Harry Dean
Stanton) under him. Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) is the pilot, and Ash
of course (Ian Holm) is the Science officer. This rank also fits Ripley
in that I think Weaver was the youngest cast member - I'm not sure how
old she was, but I believe she was in her late '20s.
Boats. In conclusion:
Anyway, Alien is one of those movies that I watched within the last two years, having possibly not seen it as an adult, because there was a vast
amount of detail in it that I never noticed or appreciated before,
ending with Ripley trying to disassociate herself by singing the old
showtune "Lucky Star" before blowing a motherfucking alien out of an
airlock.
-Neb
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This email is not only smug, but extraordinarily condescending.
No thanks,
Danielle
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