Take the corny and melodramatic relationship
between Elizabeth (Noomi Rapace) and her lover, Charlie, which moves too fast
to allow any viewer identification, an apparently determined genre mark, underscored
by the terse, boring dialogue, and stiff acting. And then there’s the whole gang
of stock characters: the macho black commander, the grungey crew who just want
to get paid, and the female ice queen bitch (the elderly Charlize Theron!), who
despises the younger, sexier protagonist.
The protagonist (Rapace) is another
Ridley Scott-designed dud, whose Buffy the Vampire Slayer kick-ass feminism (I
can perform my own C-section and look hot all the way thru) is as clawing and
routine as the film’s Freudian subtext: the quest for the mythical fatherland,
mysteriously coded and impossible to find, wherein a large patriarchal head
spews venomous goo, protected by vaginal aliens, encased in a large womb/turd
looking spaceshit.
As many critics have noted, the
only character that seems to escape Scott’s robotic puppeteering is the robot
(Michael Fassbender); but even this irony is overstated and underwhelming.
Still, Promotheus is compelling, never mind the actors, the script, and the
sophomoric philosophical ponderings (who/what created man?).What makes the film
is the cinematographic emphasis on the relations between the actors and the
space they inhabit, over and above the typical emphasis on the interpersonal
drama of Hollywood film epitomized by the ”shot-countershot” formula.
Particularly when viewed in IMAX,
the wan shot-countershot repartee between the actors makes a stark contrast
with the largeness of the spaces they inhabit—not merely the space of the
spaceship (or the greenscreen that lies beneath) but also the space of the
movie theater and, more important, the existential void of outer space. The
drama becomes not he said / she said, alien
score 1 / human score 2 but are
they watching the space or is the space watching them?, are they watching us or are we watching
them? Scott does a marvelous job of setting
this up in the film’s first shot of the protagonist (Rapace) brushing off the black dust of the cave
wall and peering out at us. The more she dusts, the more of her face we see,
the more we feel we are being watched. Other scenes have the actors surrounded
by dark empty space (in the cave, magnified by the IMAX screen), in which, they
fear they are being watched (by the audience?).
Scott’s earlier film Alien (1979) had none of this existential darkness but
rather followed the classic structure of shot-counter shot. For instance, when
Ash (Ian Holm) and Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) fight we are given no
three-dimensional invitation to their shared space, but instead watch a scene
that has the same formal complexity of a soap opera: We see Ash speak and then
we see Ripley speak, and so on and so forth.
Although Alien’s tagline “in space, no one can hear you scream”
makes you imagine a cinematic horror vacui, the film does little to foster any sort of existential dread. The
spaceship is so full of camaraderie, funny bit-characters, and soap opera
intrigue that there is no time to feel the danger of the void outside the ship.
At the start, the crew emerges from
their claustrophobic pods with a dancerly integrity. And just as the orchestral
music begins to lull you in, we are interrupted by a frightening crash. But the
crashes and interruptions only add to the overall coherence of the melody: just
as the “unexpected” alien invasions are what concretize the film’s genre. They
are the clues that tell you: this is a horror sci-fi film. And the coherence of
the genre allows us to be distracted from any major fears of what lies inside
and/or what lies within. Our alienating fears are contained, managed, and
treated by the film’s reconcilability as a coherent genre film (an alien film: sci-fi and horror).
The fight scenes between aliens and
humans also serve to remedy the fear the void might bring. We are distracted by
the game of it all (Alien arrives a year
after the popular arcade game Space Invaders). This game-frame (who will win?) then takes
precedence over the ontological mystery that the tagline implies. And like with
any computer game, the characters interact firmly behind a third wall, in a
virtual space, so you can involve yourself without having to truly enter into
the horror of their environment.
In
Daimonic Reality, Patrick Harpur argues
that aliens do unto us what we do unto littler beings: when we
torture/probe/investigate/belittle our animals and minorities; aliens do the
same to us and we become the pets and freaks. This horrifying prospect requires
a defensive reversal of the alien’s violence (do unto the alien what the alien
does unto us) and this is precisely what we do by embedding the alien into a
predictable genre narrative.
In 1984, five years after Alien, Scott directed a commercial for Apple Computer’s
first Macintosh personal computer, in which blue-grey zombies follow the
commands of a leader speaking on a large screen. But the dreary dystopia is
broken up by a young sexy blonde woman who runs in with a large
freedom-wielding hammer, bringing forth a new technology that would ensure that
1984 was nothing like George Orwell’s 1984. Instead of having a country ruled by all-seeing bureaucrats, we would
be ruled by the neoliberal free self, each with his own personal computer.
Ironically, the freedom ushered in
by the sexy blonde runner looks an awful lot like the dystopia she supposedly
demolished. As the most liked YouTube comment on the commercial reads, “isn't
it ironic that nowadays those mindless sheep are the apple fans?/ and they'd be
watching Steve Jobs on that big screen talking about future products, while
they're all in awe thinking ‘this man is a true visionary’/ Nowadays, there is
no one to throw the hammer.” Indeed, the “ipod industrial complex” has taken
over.
Can there be a Macintoshian cinema
that takes into account this era’s conflicts: its simultaneous fear and desire
for Steve Job’s whitewashed utopia of Apple products? Scott makes a good go at
it by precisely mirroring Mac’s rhythm of output: invent a novel, eerie,
uncanny, weird, futuristic product then let things quiet down as people get
used to the product, then startle them with an even more bizarre product that
outdoes the earlier ones. Likewise, in Prometheus: the twists come at just the right time, with just the right punch, to
produce an enjoyable shock.
Scott’s products and Apple’s
products are marvelously complex and full of alienating aliens; yet both come
off as slick, with a Zen-like simplicity and perfection. And it is this
perfection that takes the shock out of the shocks: turning an erratic
disturbing multimedia invention into a streamlined, whitewashed toy. Everything
in Mac is remixed so that it shares the same common denominator, the same
software, the same neoliberal emphasis on self-expression (affirmative
queerness), the same file type played off the same media players. And the
Macintoshian film is remixed to create a monolithic shockless effect on its
audience. And like a smooth Six Flags roller coaster ride, the effect is oddly
impotent.
Linda Williams theorizes that
conventional genres have a certain rhythmic formula: the surprise comes too
soon in horror, too late in melodrama, and right on time in porn. In Prometheus, the surprises of melodrama and horror are collapsed
into the non-surprise of porn, since the frighteningly early surprises and the
tragically late surprises become so predictable thatthey begin to arrive on
time. And we are left with products (be they iPads or movies) that faintly try
to signify melodrama and horror but are so stripped of surprise that they
follow the straight tempo one finds in any standard-issue porn movie.
When all media content can be
remixed on your laptop to fit the monolithic queeronormative hipster DIY vision
of the iPod-industrial complex, a certain static deadness comes to our cultural
products, as in the pastiche films of Todd Haynes and Guy Maddin, the pastiche
pop music of Lady Gaga, the pastiche video-art of Ryan Trecartin, the hipster
comedy of Lena Dunham, and the FaceBook-dictated activism of Occupy Wall Street,
all of which, and in interesting ways, are self-consciously ambivalent about
the problem.
The signification of outer space in Prometheus could well be a continuation of this dystopian trend
of monolithic monotony: out in the void lies the new Macinvention, the latest
Promethean point, from which we can commodify our existence into a World Wide Identity.
Ultimately, the void might give way
to a sexy blonde runner with a freedom-wielding hammer that will shatter the
iPod-Industrial Complex into bits. But it is more likely that the runner is
neither progressively Marxist nor complacently Macintoshian but rather, indeed,
self-consciously ambivalent about her political relationship to the fashions of
capitalism.
Note:
Linda Williams’ theory, originally published in Film
Quarterly can be read online here.